Tag Archives: pictures

Sex for Science! Interlude: Snogging and such

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Sex for Science! Chapter 0
Sex for Science! Chapter 1
Sex for Science! Interlude
Sex for Science! Chapter 2
Sex for Science! Chapter 3
Sex for Science! Chapter 4

With the trip to MacWorld far behind and the seedy motel suite in Seattle still some distance ahead, I turned my focus to the notion of a brainwave-controlled sex toy with a singleminded determination that I set aside only temporarily when lapis-lazuli suggested that she might be able to make a trip up to Portland to visit me.

Okay, that last sentence is a lie. I don’t approach anything with singleminded determination; I usually have at least three things going on my mental plate at any one time, and even those can often be derailed by–oh, look, potato chips!

Ahem. Sorry, where was I?

Oh, yes. Singleminded determination. I focused a part of my attention on the notion that it might be possible to make a sex toy work by brainwaves, in a sort of “Hmm, I should look into this more!” kind of way. I exchanged a few emails with the person who knew someone I knew on Twitter, and we both sorta thought “Hey, maybe this idea has potential,” and that’s where it sat when lapis-lazuli said “Hey, I really liked meeting you in San Francisco; how ’bout if I come up for a visit?”

To which I said “Gee, that would be swell!” and off she went.

lapis-lazuli writes fiction. Sometimes, she writes sexually explicit fiction. She also has a wonderful sexy reading voice, so it came to pass that on a particularly interesting evening when she was up visiting, she started reading one of her published stories to me. Then she started doing…err, other things while I continued reading the story myself.

And it was good. Oh, yes, it was good. The story, too.

There came, however, a moment in the story in which one passing character made an offhand remark to another passing character, and for some reason, I thought of the lady who says “But I don’t like spam!” in the Monty Python Spam skit. And read the line out loud that way. I definitely think that she should do the same thing if she is ever called upon to read that particular story for an event of some sort, because who doesn’t like a MOnty Python reference embedded in their pr0n?

One of the many things I love about Portland is Science Pub, hosted frequently by the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, and more specifically by a friend of mine upon whom I’ve been harboring a mad crush for quite some time.

Science Pub is an awesome idea. Invite speakers on a wide range of science-related topics, get an audience of a few hundred into a bar, drink beer (or not, if you’re me–never could stand the stuff), and geek out. It’s hard to describe in mere words how much win and awesome it is.

As it turned out, the Science Pub while lapis-lazuli was in town was on the subject of music and brain development. And as it also turned out, lapis-lazuli‘s college background is in music theory and neurobiology. Put those things together, and it turned into quite an epic win.

Well, except for the bit where we left the pub and discovered that the car battery was dead. But, y’know, you have to break a few eggs if you want to make an omelette. Or, err, something.

The next day, there were pictures.

All this served to do two things: first, to distract me for a while from the fate that was still barreling toward me like a truck, in the form of a meeting with destiny in a seedy motel in the heart of Seattle’s industrial squalor, and second, to illustrate once against he dangers of meeting up with strange people on the Internet. You can never quite tell when they might bust out with a Monty Python voice while reading the porn you’ve just published in an anthology of erotica about casual encounters.

Fragments of Orlando

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From a spontaneous late-night drag-king photo shoot on the way back from watching Weird Science and going to Steak & Shake with some of the local Orlando poly peeps, yo.

More later, if you ask really nice.

The South’s first and only nuclear weapon

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On the way back from Frolicon, the three of us (joreth, emanix, and I) stopped in Cordele, Georgia, just outside Tifton ad home of the Titan-I missile I’ve stopped to admire before.

This time, the gate in the fence around it was open, ad I was able to get more up-close and…err, personal. I’ve never dry-humped a nuclear weapon before. I think I rather like it.

Fragments of the Future: Women, Men, Androids

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By 2145, symbols such as these were common in public areas, and were used to indicate restroom facilities for women and men, and recharging stations for androids. The origin of the universal symbol for ‘Android’ is shrouded in mystery.

Tandoori! For SCIENCE!

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The time for mad science is upon us! After a couple of weeks of herding cats, it is time to take the first step toward my plans for world domination through brainwave-controlled sex.

Tomorrow, we head off to Seattle, where we will spend the day hooking folks up to an EEG machine, getting them sexually aroused, and seeing if it results in a measurable, quantifiable change in observable brainwave patterns.

If the answer is “yes,” the next step will be to see whether or not a Neurosky EEG chip can be programmed to spot that change; and if the answer to that question is “yes,” then the next step after that is to see if it’s possible to make a vibrator that can be controlled by thought.

Well, kind of. A vibrator that responds to arousal state, more precisely, but close enough.

And then, world domination!

Though not the kind Steve Jobs approves of. During the process of trying to work out transporting the EEG machine from the place where it’s stored to the place where the mad science will be occurring, my iPhone made some…interesting word substitutions.

Facial Recognition Fail

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So yes, I use iPhoto to manage my sprawling library of digital images.

iPhoto has a facial recognition feature, which–it is claimed–can automatically recognize faces and build an internal database, so you can (for instance) tell it “Show me a picture of Mom” and it’ll pull up all the photos that have her in them.

I don’t use this feature, though it’s on by default, always searching for faces even though I don’t identify any or give it any names. And sometimes, it seems to have a very…Pablo Picasso sensibility when it comes to recognizing faces. If this is the state of the art, it’s hard to wonder why the TSA has yanked all the automatic facial recognition scanners from the airports it was trialling them in:

Link o’ the Day: HIV Visualization

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From the Russian company called Visual Science comes this absolutely stunning 3D visualization of the human immunodeficiency virus:

From the article on the Web site:

HIV virion is a roughly spherical particle with a diameter between 100 and 180 nm. Virion is surrounded by cell-derived lipid membrane containing surface proteins. Some of these proteins are products of viral genome (surface glycoprotein gp120/gp41) and others are captured from the host cell during viral budding (e.g. ICAM-1, HLA-DR1, CD55 and some others). The gp120/gp41 glycoprotein interacts with receptors on cell surface promoting fusion of virus and cell membranes. Other surface proteins found in HIV perform supporting functions. […]

The HIV genome is approximately 10000 nucleotides long and contains 9 genes, which encode 15 different proteins. The most important viral genes (open reading frames) are Gag, Pol and Env. Gag encodes the p55 protein, which is subsequently cut into structural proteins: MA, CA, NC and p6. Pol reading frame encodes integrase, protease, and reverse transcriptase. Env encodes the two subunits of the surface glycoprotein complex. Other genes (Tat, Rev, Vif, Vpr, Vpu and Nef) produce accessory proteins, which modulate host cell metabolism and facilitate different stages of HIV life cycle.

Click on the picture for a larger version and other visualizations showing different cross-sections of the virus.