Two Dishes But To One Table

SLA = super long acronym

If you are looking for the longest possible conversational acronym I might suggest IYKWIMAITTYD.  I found it while doing a computer programming assignment.  It gets 1000 hits when Googled.  At least one 20 year old friend knew it when I asked.     IYKWIMAITTYD = If you know what I mean and I think that you don't".

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ANSWERS & SUPPORTING DATA FOR THE cHICKEN POST ( supra)

1. Rats are closer to humans than to chickens.

2. Humans closest relative is the rat

3. Yeast's closest relative, by a longshot, is a chicken.

This is a truncated table because the width wouldnt fit here.

bear-grizz     0.00000  0.02040  0.08182  0.13667  0.15412  0.20881  0.32959 
bear-black     0.02040  0.00000  0.08574  0.13583  0.15641  0.21965  0.31937 
horse          0.08182  0.08574  0.00000  0.12904  0.15640  0.20816  0.30970 
rat            0.13667  0.13583  0.12904  0.00000  0.14091  0.21205  0.32122 
human          0.15412  0.15641  0.15640  0.14091  0.00000  0.21101  0.31792 
turtle         0.20881  0.21965  0.20816  0.21205  0.21101  0.00000  0.26500 
chicken        0.32959  0.31937  0.30970  0.32122  0.31792  0.26500  0.00000 
toadfish       0.23526  0.24705  0.23493  0.26955  0.25335  0.16148  0.25702 
zebrafish      0.24167  0.25086  0.24291  0.26667  0.23377  0.16788  0.26950 
guppy          0.23786  0.24131  0.22676  0.25503  0.22829  0.16827  0.24604 
barracuda      0.29088  0.29330  0.28204  0.31067  0.26472  0.22318  0.29594 
flounder       0.34327  0.33960  0.32738  0.33489  0.32312  0.24943  0.31906 
fruitfly       0.50075  0.49908  0.50801  0.47908  0.48856  0.44181  0.55949 
rickets        1.02298  1.02089  1.04164  0.98845  1.06936  1.04696  0.98937 
yeast          1.00944  1.02097  1.01792  1.06818  1.06367  1.03375  1.10490 
leafbacteria   2.57247  2.59022  2.63536  2.46193  2.67957  2.65434  2.64677 
bee_mitoch     3.97335  3.91426  3.82322  3.70631  4.14014  3.95915  3.50075 

To read the table, find your organism of interest, run sideways from that name.  When you hit a zero, you are in a column that shows all of the distances from your zero organism to the other organisms!

Statistics Without Tears

Woozy.
Not sure if I'm awake.
Did I really do sums in my head all night, dreaming of math output?

Maybe I'm entangled like that every night and simply shed the memory when I go through the Final Rinse at 4:45 AM.

For a half hour or more, I walk around feeling like all my thoughts are inside out.

12 Year Orbit

 Just now when I was going to bed, I switched off the light, turned back the covers and was trying to get into bed but was instead practically struck between the eyes by one of the six brightest objects in the sky.  I was really sleepy but the planet was really beckoning so I checked it out.

The big spot turned out to be Jupiter.  Three of its moons are showing tonight and, this is a first, I can see a couple of its bands.  They make Jupiter look like it has a big equals sign on it.

It was a good ten miutes of viewing on the Celestron telescope. Only thing is, now I'm wide awake. 

Judging the Characters on The Wire

I have watched 80% of The Wire, the HBO cops vs drug dealers show.  I can confirm its reputation: good screenwriting, seeming realism (how would I know).  They had year long themes, including a season where the public schools role in drug culture was implicated, a year where real estate developers were featured.  The Mayor's office and the Baltimore Sun are shown extensively too.  In the end, it hooks people because it is a great soap opera, made greater because it frequently kills off main characters.  Also, it answers a question you might have had: "why is selling drugs an appealing vocation?"

I think and talk about the show all the time now (maybe annoying to people around me).  The chart below is an attempt to exorcise some of my obsession.  It is a 2-D graph (click larger) of the characters.  First, are they good people, second, are they conventional company men or are they mavericks?

Epiphet Expressions *&%%$ =~ /.*dam.*/

If you are geek-enough to know Regular Expressions, imagine what a cool motivational tool it would be, to have computer science classes study the Wikipedia BADWORDS regex's!  Excellent motivation for the delinquent in the back row...
(FYI for nongeeks, a regex is a shorthand way to match words and terms during a search.  More here if you are curious.)