I just don't know you anymore, man

So in a bout of catching up on stuff I'm never caught up on, I got my hair cut, and had my eyes checked, in the interest of renewing my contacts prescription, and getting some new glasses. Old ones, they were getting a bit beat up.

Thing is, like I said, I'm never caught up on this stuff, really—and especially lately, between being busy at work, and the little guy, our now four-month-old, keepin' us busy at home. So my hair's been a bit shaggy on average the last little while, and I'd run out of contacts.

All good. It's done. I come home, scoop up the little guy, who is, as always, ever so happy when Daddy picks him up... he snuggles in happily...

And then, a minute later, when I let him lean back, and he gets a good look at my face, he gets this terribly shocked expression, starts to cry...

Yep. He's never seen me without glasses, and with hair so very short. So who is this guy, and what's he done with my daddy? He's very upset, 'til I talk some more, and he manages to convince himself it's me after all.

Apparently, this isn't so unusual, and you're not supposed to change your appearance too drastically, when they're this young. Oops.

My kinda woman

My generation, we came from very secular families, and we were absolutely wild. I remember when I was like ten or eleven we just locked the teacher of religion in the room, and we beat her. We beat her up. I mean, we were thirty kids, and we just wanted to kill her, because all the time she was talking about this veil thing. As soon as we could defy the veil in one way or another, we would do it... They asked the parents to the school, but that was so many of us. It was not just a question of one or two kids, so they couldn't do a lot...I have a problem with authority. I don't think nobody's above me, and I don't believe nobody's under me, and that's probably why I do the job that I do: because I just can't stand working for people who think they're better than me. It's just impossible. All my life I've had a problem with authority—any kind of authority. I had the same problem with the Catholic sisters in Vienna too, which were not very, very different from our 'guardians of the revolution'.

— Iranian graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi, on The Current, this morning

Deserving research

Hidalgo et al published, in revision last week, "The effect of social interactions in the primary life cycle of motion pictures". From their abstract:

We model the consumption life cycle of theater attendance for single movies by taking into account the size of the targeted group and the effect of social interactions. We contrast the model with empirical data from the film industry obtaining good agreement with the diverse types of behaviors empirically found in the data. The model grants a quantitative measure of the valorization of this cultural good based on the relative values of the coupling between agents who have watched the movie and the ones who have not.

— Hidalgo et al, 2005.

(Strikes proud '50s man-of-science-proudly-declaring-a-new-era pose) In other words, gentlemen, we can now tell, regardless of studio spin and hype, if a picture is, in fact, an execrable bomb, only getting press due to a marketing budget larger than the GNP of several mid-sized industrial democracies.

You listenin', Hollywood? We're onto you. Be afraid.

Physical limits

Crashed out over the laptop again yestereve. Which was bad. Got these edits I really want to do to a certain manuscript, just can not quite seem to get them done. Not enough hours in the day, or not enough steam left when I get to the hours in which I theoretically could do this, if, say, I were an AI or something, and didn't actually need a full REM cycle now and then.

This being human, needing to sleep thing, it's really a pain sometimes, y'know?