Aquatic Pumpkin Carving VG Cat Style

Ah another year, another pumpkin, the same ocean. Every year the UBC Aqua Soc, of which I am a member, does an underwater pumpkin carving dive near Halloween. Not entirely satisfied with previous years undertakings I decided to break down and try a template for the first time.

First i needed a better set of carving tools as my dive knife is about 2.5 cm wide and templates generally need much higher resolution tools, a couple bucks at the local dollar store fixed this. Then I needed to find a template. Inspiration found itself one day while I was reading one of my favorite web comics.

The process was long and tedious, mostly because i was wearing around 100 pounds of dive gear, northern water is cold and that means big suits and lots of lead to get down. I have captured the entire process for prosperity in my Photo Album. Not to many good pictures, unfortunately as i was lying on the bottom i kicked up a lot of silt and that mucked up some of my photos, Also 35 feed down in northern waters can be quite dark. Anyway, Here is this years final product.

Great Moments In Science: Forgetting the earth is round

It may surprise you, or may not, that in the middle ages we forgot a lot of information. A tonn used to be stored in the great library of Alexandra and a lot was lost in the dark ages. Im not an expert on what exactly was and was not known but one good example is the roundness of the earth. Ancient greeks and romans realized the earth was round over 2000 years ago. One of them measured it with a sick, it's quite a good story. Anyway he estimated the circumference to be 250 000 stades. Depending on your definition of a stade that's within 2% to 20% of the correct value of 40 008km. Hmm 40 008 seems like a veryround number, why the extra 8. Well the meter was at one point was defined as:

1791 March 30 — The French National Assembly accepts the proposal by the French Academy of Sciences that the new definition for the meter is equal to one ten-millionth of the length of the Earth's meridian along a quadrant through Paris, that is the distance from the equator to the north pole. (wikipedia)

Well now the definition is a more sensable "distance traveled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299 792 458 of a second", wow glad they got that cleared up. Anyway something may have been lost in the translation as there have been several different standards in the intervening years. Also It's hard to tell how accurately they could have measured the equator to north pole distance in 1791, hence the 8 km error.

Berry Good Sauce?

I went to a conference in Seattle last week, the 54'th annual American Vaccume Society Symmposium. I drove down and on the way we stopped at Arby's for a tasty roast beef sandwich. I'm always a fan of their special sauces, all super tasty, but this time i get an extra sauce with my meal. One which left me a bit puzzled. I ordered their Jalapeño Poppers and they come with a Bronco Berry dipping sauce. It has a very interesting flavor, sweet and spicy, a little berry like but not a berry flavor i have ever tasted. It made me wonder what a Bronco Berry was. I looked up the ingredients on the lid of the sauce packet and this is what I read.

• Sugar
• Water
• High Fructose Corn Syrup (wow even more sugar)
• Red bell peppers (hmm not a berry in it yet)
• Distilled Vinegar
  
• Modified Corn Starch
• Jalapeno Peppers (must be where the spice comes from)
• Dehydrated Onion
• Xanthan Gum (had to look that up)
• Spices
• Salt
• Sodium Benzoate (wasn't that a Frogert topping in the Simpson's)
• Potassium sorbate
• Citric Acid
• Red #40 and Blue #1 (hmm must be where the berry flavor comes from)

You may have noticed that no berrys where harmed in the makeing of this Bronco Berry sauce. So from what I have determined Bronco means Not in some other language. I maybe thought that this was a mistake in their ingrediants list but for some odd reason the recipe is all over the net. Don't really know why it's not all that good anyway.

Ah the joys of fast food.

It's Big, It's Orange and it's Awesome

The time for work has ended, the time for fun begins for the Orange Box is here.

5 games in one package. $45 dollars for an unimaginable number of hours of fun (measured in fun dollars per hour FDPH). Team fortress was an amazing game i used to play far too much and it was worth pre-ordering the box just to get to play Team Fortress 2 a week early. Want to know about it well just Google the 50 articles already written about it on the web cause i don't have time to repeat them all here. The real gem of this box so far is Portal. Now the game has only been out for 12 hours and i just played for an hour last night when it was unlocked on my steam account at 12. All i can say is it's freaking sweat. It's a 3D first person puzzle game. You have a gun that allows you to lift heavy objects and open a 2 way portal on any flat surface. Those two things can be used in ways that are hard to imagine at first. Let me discuss an example and then ill let you play it on your own cause you will want to.

You are in a tall room with a barrier halfway up the middle. In another room is a short drop to a floor below but nothing else. how do you get across? Throw yourself with gravity. place a portal high up on the back wall then go to the room with the small drop. place a portal on the floor and jump in. You will gain speed falling and when you enter the portal momentum is conserved throwing you partially across the room as you exit the portal up high on the wall. You don't get thrown far enough however so as you are falling in the room you calculate where you are going to land and put an opening there. As you enter the portal again you have built up even more speed from the high fall and when you come out the portal on the wall this time you get thrown across the room and over the barrier. i jumped out of my chair when i finally pulled that one off.



That creepy computer voice gets ominous during the game. I just know it's up to no good. I imagine there is a very nasty surprise waiting for me when i finish the tutorial levels. They say i'm going to get cake but i have a feeling this technology is top secret and they don't want their research subjects talking afterwards.

So now Xbox 360 people can rejoice for Halflife 2 can be yours and all other games will seem insignificant next to it's sheer awesomeness. I had to have my memories altered so that i could enjoy other games again after I played it.

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Update:
Finished portal. My guesses where partially correct and partially wrong. I am not going to reveal the ending, just know it is an awesome game. I loved every min of it and the ending theme is something that has to be heard. One of the best themes i have ever heard. It was composed by Jonathan Coulton a geek folk rock singer, he has com awesome stuff too.

YOU MUST PLAY THIS GAME