Hot computer

So my computer is hot. Really hot. 75 degrees Celsius hot, that's how hot it is.

Whew!

Swollen Paw

What looks like horrible eagle claws here are actually my hands. Okay, so the perspective is somewhat screwed up so that my fingers look longer than they really are. But what I'm actually trying to show is how my left hand is so much bigger than my right.



It was caused by a tiny little sting and a completely freak accident. I was doing laps at the pool in school, when my left palm brushed against something thin and hard (kind of like insect legs) when it entered the water. My first thought was, oh, that's another insect that fell into the water. A split second later, a piercing pain went right through my palm. Having been stung by sea urchins, jellyfish and stinging plankton before, I didn't think much of it and kept on swimming. But the pain got worse, not better, and by the time I thought the better of it, I could barely hang onto the ladder as I climbed out of the water.

Turned out that it was a paper wasp, about 3-4 centimeters long (I made the lifeguards fish it out so I could at least know what it was). I have been stung by bees and wasps before without any problem, so I decided to ignore it. Which was a bad mistake because the swelling got worse, not better -- it's been more than 24 hours and my left hand is so swollen that it's a little frozen at this point. I can't even see my knuckles on my left hand right now.

I went to the doctor this afternoon and to the hospital this evening. Both times they told me that it looked like a hypersensitivity reaction and not an infection. Let's hope they're right. I am just glad that I'm a human and not a caterpillar!

Loss of Control == Faith in God?

In a recent blog posting on the NYTimes.com site, the author posited a correlation between a tendency to see patterns where none existed, and the perceived level of control (or lack thereof). His hypothesis was that when people are feeling out of control, they tend to see patterns where there is none, which is why people who are working in dangerous professions such as deep-sea fishing tend to have more superstitions than people who work run-of-the-mill jobs.

(He has an experiment that you can try out on the blog as well. Try it. It's interesting.)

Among the comments on his blog posting was one in which the reader pointed out that people of low income, who, by nature, have less control over their finances, are more likely to be superstitious or do irrational things like buy lottery tickets, etc.

Which then made me think: people of low income and those who don't have much control over life's events also tend to believe in God more readily. What does that mean? To a statistician, it might mean that "seeing God's hand at work" is seeing patterns where there were none, and faith in God is simply superstition.

What do you think?

Lots and lots and lots of trees

I'm writing this from onboard a ship, cruising in Alaska. It's the second time that I have been on this cruise -- the last time was well over 15 years ago -- and it'll be interesting to see how the landscape has changed. I heard that the glaciers have retreated quite a bit since the last time I was here.

We flew into Vancouver two days ago and spent yesterday cruising the Inside Passage. Last time when I was here, we managed to catch a pod of killer whales as they hung about the side of the ship for a while, so it was a disappointment to not see any whales this time. The scenery was stunning, though -- miles and miles of evergreen trees lining both sides of the channel.

Today, we're landing at the port of Ketchikan and we're going to try and see some bears. Will try to post pictures of some bears upon my return -- that is, if we're lucky :-).

Cool GPS maps

This will be a quick post because I'm almost falling asleep... having bought a new GPS some time ago, I decided that this last week when I was out of town on a service trip, would be a good time to try it. Here's my first attempts:

Part of the travel route that we took, from Huangshi, Hubei (our destination), back to Wuhan, by bus; then from Wuhan to Hong Kong by plane; and finally, by airport express and taxi part of the way to my home.



In case you are interested in how planes circle over Hong Kong before they land, here's a zoomed-up view of the part over HK...



Finally, here's a geotagged album of a walkabout around Huangshi. I still haven't managed to find a way to superimpose the track of our stroll onto the map, but at least the pictures are there...



Will be back with more details later, when I have a chance to recover...

Oh, the stories they could tell...

I had an interesting experience yesterday with my cell phone. Shortly after noon, I realized that I did not have my cell phone with me. I wasn't alarmed at first; I often leave my cell phone in my office, but I started freaking out after I realized that it wasn't there, and wasn't in any of the places that I remembered going to, either. Considering that we're leaving on a service learning tour tomorrow, it would have been very inconvenient, to put it mildly, to lose the thing at this point.

I made a number of phone calls to my phone, to find that it was ringing, but nobody answered. That gave me some hope that the thing hadn't been stolen but was in fact sitting around somewhere still.

About 10 minutes later, I get a phone call from my mother, who told me that somebody had called home, asking if an iPhone had been lost. My parents arranged to meet the guy and hand over the phone -- bless his heart, the finder refused to take a reward, saying that it was his duty.

The interesting part is this: the finder said that he had picked up the phone in TST East. I hadn't been off campus all day. How could the thing have made it all the way over there? The only thing I can think of is that I dropped it somewhere on campus; somebody picked it up with the intention of stealing, but for some reason left it in TST East. But why that would happen is the question.

I wish that thing could talk and tell me where it'd been. For that matter, I wish I could put some sort of logging onto an inanimate object and leave it sitting around for somebody to pick up. I bet those things have interesting stories to tell.

New Toys

I feel almost guilty for posting this, because it seems so decadent. But since I have a feeling that I won't be able to help talking about them anyway...

I got two new toys this long weekend. The first is a GPS logger:

I have wanted something like this forever, since I do love traveling and taking photos, and my photos have kind of gotten out of control. The idea of being able to geotag them has tempted me for a long while, and when a colleague of mine told me about the Holux M-241 GPS logger, it seemed that it would fit my needs. Basically, I didn't need something with a fancy map display, but I needed coordinate logging plus something that would show the current GPS coordinates on the fly (i.e. it needs an LCD display).

The minus side is that it's got HORRIBLE Mac support, and the only way to get the GPS tracks onto the Mac is through using a piece of freeware that's got (and I quote) "an exceptionally ugly interface". Yeowch. Oh well, but it works for me.

The second toy is a cappuccino machine! I have owned several of these when I was living in the US, but then, being a poor graduate student, I could only afford the semi-auto ones that I gave up on using after a couple of tries :-(. When I was visiting Ivy about a month back, I got introduced to her coffee maker, and decided that I needed my own :-). I wasn't too convinced by the Nespresso system, though, and after much research, decided to get the Saeco Giro Talea, which is fully-automatic, does a fair bit of self-cleaning, and brews an amazing cup of coffee to boot.

I think I can say goodbye to Starbucks now.