I finally got my 7″ record of “A Glorious Dawn” today in the mail. If you haven’t seen the video, you must watch it now. It’s a wonderful song composed of auto-tuned voice clips of Carl Sagan speaking in Cosmos. It is a moving song I mus say. You can get the 7″ records from Third Man Records for $6 each including shipping if you’re in the US. “A Glorious Dawn” was created by John Boswell for The Symphony of Science a “musical project…designed to deliver scientific knowledge and philosophy in musical form.” Read the full post

Yesterday, my good friend sent me a Google Wave invite. Excited, I quickly checked my Gmail in anticipation for an invite e-mail. There was no such e-mail. Turns out once you get invited it takes awhile for Google to actually send and activate the Google Wave invite. Needless to say, I’m going crazy. I’ve been anticipating this for so long. Drooling over demo videos has been a recent pastime of mine. Where is my invite already!?

Currently, I am reading Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins. A long while ago I read it once, but I fail to recollect much of it.

Here is the passage the book’s title comes from:

Read the full post

Have you ever seen your pupil dilate and contract from up close? I highly recommend you try it. While very close to a mirror, shine a light into your eye and turn it off. Then turn it on again. Then turn it off. Observe your pupil expanding and contracting. Look at your eye muscles move. At times it can be unsettling, but it is worth it. I highly recommend it.

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe. Read the full post

I don’t know if this is my favorite picture ever, but, I always manage to enjoy it when I see it. The composition is just wonderful. The original was color but I can’t find it. The copy of this image was corrupted to the thumbnail preview is in color, but when actually viewing the file all I get is black and white. It’s still a lovely image though. It is by Talin Gharibian, an acquaintance of mine and currently an art student at UCLA.

From June 25 to June 28th I will be in Amherst, NY (next to Buffalo) attending the Center for Inquiry Student Leadership Conference. I’ve attended the last three confrences and they have all been a blast! For this year’s conference, I will be attending not as a student, but as a speaker! My talk’s title will be Optimal Online Outreach Opportunities (my amazing alliterative abilities are astounding). In my talk I will discuss the best ways to use the internet to gain group members and various methods to accomplish this. I hope it turns out well!

I just updated and upgraded the BASS site. The BASS site, like this site, runs on Wordpress. Wordpress is a joy to use. It is a great CMS for greating a student group website. The many plug-ins, themes, and user inerface make it the best blogging CMS out there. You can read a post on the BASS site detailing some of the technical aspects of the update process here

For the past year or so the only shoes I have bought were asics. Specifically, I’ve been buying asics Budokan. They are friggin’ amazing shoes. They look fantastic and feel great. Not to mention they’re really sexy too. I have three pairs. My first were the ones I bought are pictured here. I still have them after more than a year of wear. They look old and beat up, but they do their job.

And so I did.

I was walking up to the UCLA dorms and saw this girl and her backpack and it really did make me cheer up. I should have thanked her. Alas, I am a shy man.

A photo of me + Photoshop + some drawing skills = Me, Linearized.

While it looks simple, it actually takes some skill to know what lines to draw and where not to draw. You don’t want to outline all the features of the face but place the right lines in the right place to imply the contours and shadows.

…a fully charged iPod (or any other device as well). I freak out if my iPod isn’t charged enough. I must have my music and apps!

• Major depression affects approximately 15 million American adults or about 8% of the U.S. population
age 18 and older in a given year.
• Bipolar disorder (manic depression) affects approximately 6 million American adults or about 3%
of the population in a given year.
• Women experience depression about twice as often as men. Read the full post

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, brodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. if you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery-celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from-it’s where you take them to.”  - Jim Jarmusch

So true.

It has been almost a year since I graduated from UCLA. I’m still able to access my UCLA computing privileges! I can login at the computer labs, print things still, and I can still check out those beautiful MacBooks from the libraries whenever I want to. Thank you UCLA!

I saw the new Star Trek movie this past Saturday. My overall reaction to it is “Yay! That was fun!” A more detailed analysis follows:

• Entertainment: -A
• Story: -B
• Acting: +B
• Execution/Filming: -A
• Overall: B+

The story is really what prevented the film from being all it could have been. It was too basic, too generic, too simplistic. Where are the deep moral quandries of the old Star Trek I loved dearly!?

However, I did see the “hidden” R2-D2 though. That made me very happy.

Design is important to me. Good design makes everything better. Now, in making this site I have had to consider many things. Some are: category structure, layout, color scheme, linking scheme, user experience, object location…and much more. Read the full post

Bruin Alliance of Skeptics and Secularists is a freethought, skeptic, secularist, atheist, reason based student group at UCLA founded by me and a few grad students. It is almost 4 years old now this year. It is the only group of its kinda at UCLA among the 75+ religious student groups.

From moutzouris on  deviantART

Remember the Milk is an web based task and time management application. I use this daily. Its interface and functionality is wonderful! I can form lists of items to do then add extra information to those items such as tags, notes, time/day due, and more. Plus, there is a sleek iPhone app that syncs with the Remember the Milk site and allows me to access my to do list whenever and wherever! I am in love.

Bertrand Russell was one of the greatest minds ever produced in the 20th century. This quote of him has touched me deeply:

What I Have Lived For
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. Read the full post

“Flower or Something”

I really do not know what this is. It just looks…cool. It was originally a pencil drawing I scanned into the computer. One day, I accidentally applied a filter to it in Photoshop and I got this beautiful result.

This is me and me.