Danielrozenberg - Avocado Mash - Tumblr Blog

Dear video game designers who think it's totally legit to have a main story event that's tied to the real world calendar (e.g., a mission that you can only start on a Friday the 13th, or when it's a dark moon, or when the minutes and hours hands are synced) How about I ban you from using Netflix and online music services. You can still watch all the TV shows and listen to all the music you want. You'll just have to wait for some arbitrary point in time. Sometimes without even knowing exactly when. Doesn't sound so fun now, does it?

“You should put punctuation marks, such as commas and periods, before the closing parenthesis or quotation mark,” said my supervisor (Ivan.)

Being an American, he is unaware that this rule does not apply for the language in which I am writing my thesis (Canadian English). In Canadian English the rule states that one should put punctuation marks after these “closing marks”, not before!

“One of the few benefits of the fall of civilization as we know it,” he says, “is that there are private cellars with fine vintages everywhere one digs. It is not theft. It is archaeology.”

— From The Rise of Endymion (1997), by Dan Simmons

Maybe I should take more #selfies because I'm kinda hot and it'll get me more likes and followers

That other R2D2

Have you noticed how all droids in the Star Wars universe have a 4 letter/digit name? Seeing how they used standard English letters and decimal digits, this means that there are exactly 36^4 = 1,679,616 droid names. Droids are cheap and ubiquitous, given that impoverished farmers in the outbacks of the galaxy own half a dozen droids. Coruscant at its peak had a population of 1 trillion, meaning that there were definitely more than 1,679,616 droids in the galaxy far, far away, so droid names were not unique. The same droid name was used for multiple droids, perhaps thousands or even millions of droids.

This means that during the events of Star Wars episodes IV–VI there were other R2D2′s and C3PO’s in the galaxy that were constantly harassed by the authorities because they were unfortunate enough to share their name with the empire’s most wanted.

Somewhere out there is an R2D2 teacher-bot that gets arrested mid-class every couple of weeks by an overzealous stormtrooper. Somewhere else there is a C3PO decorated soldier-bot that got dishonourably discharged for crimes it never committed by a commanding officer that’s afraid of unwanted media attention.

The math of suing all homosexuals

Articles telling of a Nebraska woman suing all homosexuals in the world are making the rounds. While we all ridicule her for various (totally legit) reasons, I would like to add one more to the mix.

Let’s work out the math of suing all the homosexuals in the world. Of course, when someone gets sued, the courts must make an effort to have that person present and be able to defend themselves. We start by making some assumptions on the number. Assuming approximately 7.2 billion people currently alive in the world [1]. Assuming the lawsuit is targeting adults and teenagers only (15+) which are 74.22% of the world’s population [2] we are left with 5.3 billion people. There is little academic consensus regarding the prevalence of homosexuality in the population, but even with a very conservative estimate of 1%, we are left with 53 million people who are getting sued.

We would need to hear testimonies from all defendants. If we can cram one testimony every 5 minutes, for a full 8 hours court session a day, 250 working days a year, the courts can hear 24,000 testimonies a year, making the court case, at the very least, 2,208 years and 4 months long.

Meanwhile many people will be required to take long flights and stay at a hotel for their court session, which will boost gay tourism to Omaha (which houses the largest federal court in Nebraska,) easily making Omaha the new Gay Mecca. But this will come with a terrible environmental impact, as even with the world’s largest passenger airliner, the Airbus A380, which provides seating for 853 passengers in an all-economy class configuration (and we all know a lot of gays will refuse to fly economy), we’re talking about at least 62,134 flights to Eppley Airfield (which would have to be upgraded to accommodate international flights.) With an average of 75 grams per passenger per 100 km [3], and assuming an (again, conservative) average of 5,000 km long flights for 3,198.75 kg of CO₂ emitted per flight for a total of 198,751 tonnes of CO₂. For comparison, a person in the most polluting country in the world, China, produces about 4.55 tonnes of CO₂ per year [4] [5]. Our parade of gays will produce 266.67 tonnes of CO₂ per person. We have yet to prove whether the gays are responsible for the world's natural disasters, but if the courts hear this case they'll definitely be responsible for an environmental one.

Preference: your porn site search filters

Bigotry: your dating site search filters

Racism: when everyone’s search filters are the same

Rainbow Hair Project

— Last year I did this project with my friend Marcelo where I dyed my hair a different colour every month, for six months, to cover the entire spectrum of the pride flag.

My friend Derek (derekdoodlebug) created this awesome pair of animated gifs to commemorate the project. Thanks Derek! :D

(higher quality versions here and here)

Privilege

Tumblr makes me think “What a cliché! Two able-bodied, cis-gendered, white, upper-middle-class men” when I’m looking at pics of my boyfriend and me.

Dammit Tumblr!

My love/hate relationship with Christmas

My hate towards Christmas begins annually around October when Starbucks replaces their standard white cups with their festive Christmas cups. The cups don’t explicitly celebrate Christmas, they celebrate the “winter holidays”, but in reality they use a red/green theme with drawings of snow flakes, evergreen conifers, and triangular hats with a pompom at the top. Of course, none of these is individually a Christmas thing, but no person with the slightest shred of critical thinking will doubt which holiday Starbucks really wants us to celebrate.

The white-orange traffic cone logo of VLC (a video player desktop application) dons a Santa hat throughout December. Some people complained on the support forum that they find the icon offensive. The lead developer at first defended his position saying that the Santa hat has nothing to do with Christmas (take a moment to let the irony of this statement sink in), completely dismissed the complaints as overly sensitive, and told people that if they don’t like it they can wait until the end of December or rewrite the app since it is open source. Later on they added a setting to disable “automatic icon changes”. The setting is hidden deep inside the advanced settings menu and is enabled by default. The developers assume that I want to celebrate Christmas, because they assume the only users that matter are Christians or have a Christian background.

Facebook added snow to the chat heads. Now I can’t chat with anyone without being reminded of Christmas. What if I don’t want to celebrate that holiday? What if I don’t live in the northern hemisphere, or a region where it snows at all?

Going outside is just as bad. Being surrounded constantly by Christmas trees and lights, hearing Christmas music being blasted from every speaker, reading the thinly veiled “holiday” greetings on shops, are all constant reminders that my religious beliefs (or lack thereof) are only secondary here. I’m being tolerated, not respected or celebrated.

People who celebrate Christmas always try to play down the Christian part of it (have you noticed the shared stem of those two words?) and insists that it’s a Canadian holiday (or American, or whichever country you’re from) — in effect this just ties Christianity to the entire country even more.

Of course, Christmas isn’t inherently bad. People celebrate it by being with their family and friends. They exchange gifts, they enjoy good food, they are having fun.

I celebrated Christmas this year with my boyfriend in Paris. Everything around me was pretty, the food was incredible, my boyfriend and his family were happy and I received more gifts than I could imagine. I was genuinely happy. How could I complain?

But still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’m celebrating someone else’s holiday.

Awesome inventions in Antwerp

I visited jocmeh, who recently moved to Antwerp, for one day. Belgians have the best ideas, among the ones I saw were: — A pedestrian tunnel to cross a wide river (with pretty, old school wooden escalators) — Belgian fries cooked in animal fat (each bite tasted like an artisanal burger) — Lindemans Kriek, cherry beer (a.k.a. the first beer I genuinely liked) — A cocktail called Coconut Woman (practically a drinkable cake) — A laundromat that doubles as a bar (so you can socialize while you do the laundry) — Pay for the bus with a text message (failed to work for Jochem and me, but he says it worked every time before that) — An escalator that goes up, then continues forward flat, then goes up again (so you can lazy while you lazy) Keep at it Belgium. You have my approval.

I use yellow sticky notes as bookmarks for the books that I read.

You should try it, it’s easier when your bookmark doesn’t accidentally fall when you open your book on the bus and lose your place in the book!

This one no longer sticks after being used in 4 books. The black dots are ink stains on the glue strip.

Isn’t this awesome? 😊

Fajwel and Regina Rozenberg

This is a short version of my paternal grandparents' life story.

My grandmother, Regina Rywka Bialska, was born in Radom, Poland in October 30th, 1906. My grandfather, Fajwel Rozenberg, was born in Iłża, Poland (a small town close to Radom) in May 1902 (exact day unknown, but possibly May 10th). They married in their early 20's.

The Nazis invaded Poland in September 1939. Despite the occupation, Polish citizens were still allowed freedom of movement and conducted relatively uninterrupted lives. The Nazis have yet to start rounding up Jews (Hitler's Final Solution would not be formulated until January 1942), but Hitler's dislike for them was widely known and my grandparents decided that they would rather stay out of the Reich's reach. They applied for student visas to France and moved to Paris within weeks from the invasion.

Of course, that lasted less than a year until the Nazi forces invaded France in May 1940. My grandparents joined La Résistance Française and were active members, conducting various espionage and sabotage missions against the Nazi administration. On July 15th 1942, a day before the Rafle du Vélodrome d'Hiver (the roundup of Jewish people starting in Paris) the resistance became aware of the plan and smuggled thousands of Jews overnight, my grandparents included. They escaped to Toulouse in the south of France where they stayed for a few weeks until the Nazis started rounding up Jews from there as well. They hired someone to smuggle them on foot to Spain through the Pyrenees mountain range. Their group consisted of a dozen people and the trip took several weeks in difficult conditions. Finally they arrived in Barcelona after crossing the Pyrenees in the area of Portbou.

They lived in Barcelona until September 1944, when they managed to acquire a visa to move to Québec, Canada where they lived for a few years. My father was born in Canada in 1947, and the family moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1951. Fajwel died in Argentina in 1965. Regina moved with my parents to Israel in 1968 and lived with them in kibbutz Megiddo until her death in 1973, mere days before the Yom Kippur war.

Nyassa ship manifest, September 29th, 1944. My grandparents are listed in lines 9 and 10.

Simkhai [Grindr's CEO] says it’s important to fill out your height, weight, ethnicity and other fields on Grindr. This will allow users who filter people on the app to find you. “If you don’t fill them out, you won’t come up in the search results,” says Simkhai.

Alternatively, you can leave your height, weight, and ethnicity blank and make sure that you never get a message from a person who filters by height, weight, and ethnicity.

(Quote from Grindr tips: CEO Joel Simkhai gives advice on optimizing your experience)

“If our society ever opted for Orwell's Big Brother approach, the instrument of choice for oppression would have to be the credit wake. In a totally noncash economy with only a vestigial barter black market, a person's activities could be tracked in real time by monitoring the credit wake of his or her universal card. There were strict laws protecting card privacy but laws had a bad habit of being ignored or abrogated when societal push came to totalitarian shove.” —Brawne Lamia

From Hyperion (1989), by Dan Simmons

Probability function of reading a section in an academic paper

P(abstract) = 0.99

P(introduction) = P(effect of assignment on prof's opinion of me) × P(I care about prof's opinion of me)

P(related works) = P(introduction) × 0.9 when related works is the second section

P(related works) = 0.01 when related works is the second to last section

P(discussion) = 1 - P(I'm reading this paper after midnight)

P(conclusion) = P(introduction)

P(future works) = P(I'll get asked to discuss possible future works in class)

P(acknowledgements) = P(my name is in that section) = 0

Otherwise P(section i) = P(section (i-1)) × 0.9

That cute guy on the bus

We both shyly stare at each other only to avert our eyes when the other one notices, standing next to each but not saying a word – until he get off the bus first and then we stare at each other through the window, smiling, as the bus drives away.

There's a rush of adrenaline as I'm imagining myself starting to talk to that guy (and let's be honest, also imagining less innocent things…)

But I never act, and I end up feeling like I missed the opportunity of a lifetime.

And it happens again and again.

Language

A sunny late Saturday morning in July. I put on my gym shorts, play a Davie Bowie album on my phone, and start running. “The seawall is beautiful”, I think. In English, and for a moment I find my subconscious’s choice of language surprising. Some thoughts pass through as voiceless, immediate concepts while others are a “voice” that talks to me. Of the latter, my head has been alternating between Hebrew, English, and Spanish for the large part of my life. About a third of my inner voice speaks to me in English, Spanish happens on extremely rare occasions, and Hebrew takes the majority.

Inner world

As I spend more and more time in Vancouver I feel like English takes a larger part in my inner voice, but it all depends on context. Thinking about what I’m going to say before saying it is almost exclusively English at this point. Thinking about computer science has been in English for years. Having growing up with my Spanish-only speaking chef for a grandfather, thinking about food is in Spanish. Math is exclusively Hebrew.

Perception

Different languages create different realities for native speakers. For good or bad. Having Hebrew as my native tongue makes me see the world in a dichotomy of male and female: busses and computers are male, bicycles and restaurants are female, cars can be either (אוטו Oto is male, מכונית Meḥonít is female, both words mean “car”)

I wonder how my friends whose native language is English see objects. I wonder what crazy world my Spanish native friends see when they look at a male restaurante. I wish I could switch my world view as easily as I can switch the language I speak.

Math

I try to switch to English when I’m thinking about numbers, so I’ll be less confused by day to day arithmetic and basically just to immerse myself in the local language. I pick two random numbers - “Eight times seven is fifty six”. Too easy. I run in front of a building numbered 786. “Eighty six times seven is…” abstract numbers churn inside my head until the answer spews: “…שש מאות ושתיים”. Shit. David Bowie sings “It Ain’t Easy” in my ears. Amusing coincidence. I shift my focus to something else. Maybe next time.

Accent

A while back I was talking to a friend about laptops and I mentioned something about the battery, it came out sounding like “buttery” and we both laughed at this. A few weeks later I mentioned wanting to find an accent elimination coach and he said he’s against it - he would miss my adorable accent induced funny times. “In two years, you won’t find it funny, but I will still sound out of place.” We didn’t really expand on this. I have a weird accent in English. Almost nobody can guess where I’m from, not even other Israeli expats. I don’t have any theory as to how this came to be.

Vocabulary

Studying in English felt surreal at first. Most of the English lectures I had in my life were on YouTube or TED. Getting used to having this as a daily reality took some time. Teaching a lab in English is a doubly new experience, I didn’t even know what was going on there for the first few times. My students are sweet and they don’t even react when I stutter, misuse/mispronounce a word, or pause for a couple of seconds to think of the right word to use. Having an active social life in English still feels weird, and I’m not sure why that is. I’ve noticed that I feel more comfortable and can convey more complex thoughts when I’m speaking with friends who are also non-native English speakers (who are not Hebrew speakers) and I stutter and shy away more when there are native speakers in the crowd. It feels as if every deep, subtle word in my vocabulary is erased.

…

Languages shapes your world and I struggle to keep mine complex.

Picking a lab desk

I started going to weekly research meetings in the Software Practices Lab (SPL), which is the lab that I intend on joining and doing my research in after I finish with my courses (maybe even before?)

There are twelve personal desks in this lab, numbered on top in the following diagram:

Given the choice, I would prefer a desk where I wouldn't have my back to the corridor, so either 3, 4, 7, 8, 11 or 12.

But, given that I'm me, I won't be satisfied with a finite set of six numbers. I need to math it.

Wolfram|Alpha to the rescue! The series we want is:

Because… you know… this is preferable to doing stuff I actually need to do.

The Inn for Chronic Wanderers

Chronic wanderers are those who are never happy with staying in the same place for too long. They must experience working in one place, studying in another, exploring the endless urban jungles of the world… I started to feel this itch as well, which is one of the reasons I've decided to take my life in a new direction and move to Vancouver.

Vancouver seems to be a city of chronic wanderers. Most people I meet here came from another place: Some from just around the corner, some from the other side of the world, some locals who went and came back. Many of them are already planning their next venture.

When I was chatting with new people on dating sites before coming here the regular questions were "What do you do for work?", "Where do you live?", "What do you like doing for fun?". Here another question pops up: "How long are you staying?"

I've asked this question myself, especially after someone tells me that he came from afar. Or sometimes they just answer the question without being asked: "I'm moving to Toronto to jump start my career", "I'm going to travel the far east for a year", "I'm going to Amsterdam to learn how to speak Dutch".

I've been asked this question as well; "At least two years" is my standard reply. I'll be studying for a masters degree in Computer Science. What will happen after that is anyone's guess. Will I find someone here that would make me want to change my plans, whatever those will be after a while? Can this beast be tamed by finding the so called "one"?

I've often wondered how chronic wanderers handle love. Although I have met a few chronic wanderers who are in a relationship, I could never find a pattern. Sometimes their love is swift; ending just as fast as it started. Sometimes it's persistent; Keeping the relationship alive with Skype and facebook and expensive bi-monthly visits. Sometimes it's exclusive and sometimes open. Sometimes it's delusional and hurts one or both sides more than either are willing to admit. Sometimes it's more real than any other love.

Meeting potential dates

(a slight gay perspective ahead, but not exclusive)

The way I see it there are four ways to meet potential dates (I'm slightly cheating with the fourth)

  Online is the most common and most mechanical of all. It feels a bit unnatural because it's very "goal oriented." You end up reading someone's profile and calculate how well you think the two of you would fit each other before you even bother sending a message. Or you just send messages to every cutie you can find, hoping the good one will answer.

In a club (or similar) is a different kind of "goal oriented". Usually you're drunk and horny and mostly interested in a quick fuck… Sometimes it end up lasting more than a hookup, but this is rarely the case. (Although when it is, it tends works well!)

Through friends is a weird one. In a sense it's similar to online dating because you're still over-thinking it, but your friends are the ones that do calculate the match potential. They know the two of you pretty well and since they're a third party they're less influenced by the hot and cute factors.

Randomly, such as meeting someone at the gym, on the bus, in knitting club, etc… This one is my favourite; Because I like randomness, and because it always makes for an interesting story. The unexpected nature of this first encounter already connects you in a deeper way than any of the above.

  Unfortunately, we can't plan for randomness.

Subway

On my first day in Vancouver, less than a week ago, I took my lunch break from all the bureaucracy in a Subway. I got a small sandwich and got on with my day after five minutes. The person at the counter was impatient and rude. It didn't help that she had a thick accent that I had trouble understanding. It also didn't help that I was tired, jet-lagged and preoccupied, and I was stuttering and it must have been hard to understand me as well. Our short interaction ended with a disapproving, almost judgmental facial expression on both of us.

Today I passed in front of the same Subway. It was permanently closed.

I shouldn't have been so quick to judge; she had a good reason to be impatient and rude... she must have been stressed about the impending close-down of her workplace. You can never know why someone is acting up. Was she relocated to a distant branch? Was she laid off?

Daybreakers

I recently watched a movie called Daybreakers, a complete spoiler of this movie follows: It's about our world, ten years after a virus started converting humans into vampires. By the start of the movie 95% of the world's population are vampires (the classic kind: immortal, no heart beat, burn in sunlight, addicted to blood, humans convert into vampires when bitten, starvation results in madness.)

The remaining human population is being hunted by the US military for food and put into blood farms that look like an exaggerated but not unrealistic version of dairy/meat farms, but supplies are running low and corporations are competing to find a blood substitute that doesn't rely on humans.

It's not a good movie. They created an elaborate and interesting world but the movie lacks suspense, action, drama, or convincing acting. The atmosphere is very realistic, with many vampires finding themselves in a reality which was forced upon them. They're incapable of living without betraying their ideals. Some vampires refuse to drink human blood, preferring animal blood, but these have all been extinct by the time the movie started.

The most interesting part is that two cures are found for vampirism; The first one, in which a vampire was almost burned to death by the sun but was saved by falling into a river, and was turned back into a human due to the UV radiation. The other cure, with more long term consequences, in which a vampire who drinks the blood of a vampire-turned-human, is converted immediately back as well.

The movie ends with the hint that the vampire population will soon perish, because the remaining vampires will try to drink the blood of the increasingly larger human population which will convert them into humans themselves, or die of starvation.

I'd like to see a movie that starts ten years after Daybreakers ends.

Think about it. A world war is inevitable because the entire world will undergo a shocking restructure. Entire infrastructures would be destroyed and rebuild. Years of starvation would follow until the pre-vampire era food industry would be reinstated, albeit now completely vegetarian due to the animal extinction. Those who controlled the human farms will be seen as ex-slavers. There will be two classes of humans: Those who were never turned into vampires and those who had. The humans that were hunted and farmed will be that world's holocaust survivors, but this time 95% of the world would be their Nazis. I feel like this would be a much more interesting movie! Would the never-turned population be treated as heroes? would the once-vampire humans feel remorse and shame?

Route 443

Read this first: http://www.btselem.org/freedom_of_movement/road_443 This is a map of route 443 and how it compares to highway 1: http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF&msa=0&msid=215695422329710637677.0004d5751d60dafee9b0e Highway 1, in red, and route 443, in blue, are about the same length (both in distance and time it takes to get from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv and vice versa) - but to get from Jerusalem to Modi’in it doesn’t make much sense to use Highway 1. Both of them have very beautiful views. In 2005 two cousins moved to Modi’in, and their parents followed a year later. I was living with my parents in Jerusalem at the time. Whenever we were driving to dinner at my aunt’s place we used Highway 1 because my parents were afraid of the violence on road 443. As the time passed the violent attacks became a distant memory and my parents got more comfortable driving to Modi’in on 443 and eventually started using it to get to Tel Aviv, where my brother and I had moved. My brother and I also got comfortable using route 443 to visit our parents in Jerusalem. I always knew there was some moralistic problem with this road, but it was just a way to get from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem for me. Whenever I got to where 1 and 443 split I just let my GPS app decide for me, based on which road was less congested at the moment. But the feeling that I’m playing a small part in something wrong was always there at the back of my head. Every couple of years the military checkpoint on the side of the road that’s closer to Jerusalem moved farther away from Jerusalem and into Palestinian land. It wasn’t by much, 500 meters at first, 2 km after, but the general feeling was that “we” are enforcing a new reality by silently annexing that land. The checkpoints also changed from ad-hoc tents to semi-permanent structure, to full-blown construction projects I can only estimate in the hundred-thousand dollars range (at least.) All the while, Israeli settlers were feeling more and more comfortable on the road; it was mostly the billboards: “5 rooms villa in Bet Horon.” Very affordable. Last week I was driving to Jerusalem and my GPS app told me to take 443, I blindly followed. This was the first time I drove there during the day in months. About ten minutes beyond the checkpoint after Modi’in I saw something new: a huge sign with the name ”Benjamin” and the image of a roaring lion. All of a sudden the feeling from the back of my head came forward and I was filled with disgust. Benjamin was one of the twelve tribes of Israel, the tribe that lived in this area thousands of years ago. These settlers, with the tiny gesture of placing this sign, are claiming historic connection to the tribe of Benjamin and by extension to the land. I Don’t know if they believe it themselves or are just using it to further their cause. I don’t know if that matters. I want to consider myself a moralistic person, it's amazing how easily one losses track of what they believe is right and what is wrong, because it's comfortable to just drive on 443. I don't want to do that anymore.