Author: sarah

Anonymous robot lover, misread quotes, sometimes we see what we want to see.

sarah

Rivest spent much of his time at Stanford’s cutting-edge artificial intelligence lab, helping with a fairly quixotic project involving an autonomous robot rover. The idea was to get the electronic beast to roam the parking lot with no human intervention, a typical overly optimistic task for AI workers in the 1960s.

Oh, rover. Rover. I see.

Reading Crypto, by Steven Levy, a history of public cryptography. Halfway thrilling, even though I know approximately how it ends. I’m trying to fill in the gaps, see if I can finally learn the pieces in a way I will remember. “Rivest” gave me an itch about the math for PGP, but I had to look up the name. RSA. Rivest is the R in RSA encryption.

Surprising inspirational aspect of the Chernobyl “Zone Of Alienation”

sarah

There has been an ongoing scientific debate about the extent that flora and fauna of the zone were affected by the radioactive contamination that followed the accident. No scientifically documented cases of mutant deformity in animals of the zone were reported other than partial albinism in swallows and insect mutations. There have been individual eyewitness reports of other animal mutations but no comprehensive statistical analysis has been completed to date. The cloud of heavily polluted dust left the Red Forest (Rudyi Lis)—a strand of highly-irradiated pine wood near the plant which was subsequently bulldozed.

There have been reports that wildlife has flourished due to significant reduction of human impact. For this reason, the zone is considered by some as a classic example of an involuntary park. Populations of traditional Polesian animals (like wolves, wild boar and Roe Deer), red deer, moose, and beaver have multiplied enormously and begun expanding outside the zone. The area also houses herds of European wisent and Przewalski’s Horses released there after the accident. Even extremely rare lynx have appeared, and there are reports of tracks from brown bears, an animal not seen in the area for several centuries. Special game warden units are organized to protect and control them.

— Wikipedia

i need a new username.

sarah1 Comment

This has been sitting as a draft since Jan 2009! This week I ran into more real life friends on Flickr and Twitter and it brought this all up again. Ugh, leftover old username. I think I’d been working around this problem by avoiding places where I had a username at all. Maybe that is the right solution anyway, to just use my real name everywhere. But, as drafted two years ago, something about having no nicknames makes me sad. And something about being renamed seems timely right now.

i’ve been “ookpik” online since 1997, when i took the name from a kids’ poem that i liked. it’s an inuit word for owl. it’s also the name of a kind of furry owl doll made for tourists. i thought that was ok for a long time, but now i think it’s too much appropriation and colonial weirdness. so i need a new username.

i’m posting about it here to ask for help. i have a common first name, a last name i don’t like, and no nicknames. ookpik was unusual enough as a name, and i’ve usually been early enough to register on sites i use, that i have no backup names at all.

something about having no nicknames make me sad.

So. Ideas?

A book I once stayed up all night reading.

sarah

“Hello?” she answers, and I pause. I hate her for the fact that I know she’ll hang up, but I hate her more because there is a chance she won’t.

“When I pluck my eyebrows, I’m becoming more of a woman.” I say, “When you stop plucking yours, you become less of a woman. When I fuck a man, or his boyfriend,” I say, “and my chest is shaved, and my eyebrows are plucked, and his expensive underwear is pulled aside so that his cock springs free into my mouth, what do you have? Is gender really just tits?”

“Who is this?” the woman says.

“And women who develop breast cancer, who have their tits cut off, who wear the same breast form fakes as I do when I’m all dressed up, are they less than women?” She hangs up and my anger is confused because I don’t know what I believe anymore myself. If that’s what gender is, just an illusion, then why don’t I fuck women?

— Lockpick Pornography by Joey Comeau

I remember that being the question that made me decide to keep reading.

Ghost slaves

sarah

If the energy provided by the fossil fuel to support the average inhabitant of the US had to be produced by human power, we would each have 120 slaves.

— cit. Weston Price, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, 2000, p.4.

I forget where I found the phrase “ghost slaves” to describe this idea, but it helped me get my head around some more radical criticisms of agriculture and civilization.