rob was here.

I was at a friends house playing poker tonight, and he was serving shrimp. I really like shrimp. As I was standing next to the tray gorging myself on the little creatures, I began thinking of what the probability was that those animals taste so good. For that matter, why do they taste good at all? Why don't they taste bad?

Evolution tells us that they got their rich juicy texture from many hundreds of millions of years of evolution, because this helped them survive better (for some reason) than their less juicier cousins.

Then, all of a sudden, humans came along. At this point in my trails of thought I remarked "Haha! It's the end of the line for you!" as I went for another in the tray. Humans take kazillions of these critters from the sea. Where's your evolution now, suckers?! It won't help you now! Then I was thinking.. or will it?

There are levels of tastyness of shrimp.. That is, there are some shrimp that taste better than others. Lets put all the shrimp over some tasty threshold in Category A, or Grade-A shrimp. All the lesser grade shrimp in Category B.

Instead of looking at attributes of individual animals in the evolution process, lets look at percentages of categories.

Wouldn't it make sense, that as Category B gains percentage of shrimp population, more bad tasting shrimp would be sold in world markets. Less people would purchase said shrimp. Even if this happens in tiny steps over thousands of years, shrimp would be doing themselves a favour by remaining or moving to Category B, so they can live happily in the sea and do normal shrimp things.

I guess what I'm pondering, is if human economics can effect the evolution process like this, given a long enough (but reasonable) timeline?

The wierd thing is though; in the event that economics ever does alter the course of evolution, and say, creates shrimp that are less tasty and juicy, then the shrimp will be evolving in a direction other than the natural progression. If human civilization forces shrimp into Category B, maybe some other animal on earth are big fans of Category B shrimp, and is the reason they became Category A in the first place!

Oh, I lost at poker.

My ipod came with 4 ipod "ear pads". Those are the little black cloth-like things that go over the ear buds. I'm not sure what they are good for, although I've always tried to use them.

I lost one early on, probably when I was in term 8 of engineering.

I lost a second one when I was travelling through Spain this spring, on business. I have no plans, as of yet, to go back and look for it.

I lost the third one at some point this morning, seemingly between home and work.. (in my car, at tim hortons maybe).

At any rate, I'm down to one lucky ear pad. I'll call him Jim.

I finally got around to setting up a last fm account. You can find it here. Basically, it keeps track of my listening habits whenever I listen to my music at work or home, and tally's up the stats.

Huzzah. I'll add a link over on the side bar there too.

When you drive backwards does your odometer still go up? Or does it go backwards?

My parents computer died the other day. I was trying to figure out what part of it was the problem by swapping parts from my good working computer. I followed these steps:

1. Take power supply out of broken computer.
2. Put replacement power supply into broken computer.
3. Turn on computer.
4. Fans spin up.
5. The Black Smoke shoots out of capactitors on the mainboard.
6. Holy crap!
7. Turn off computer.
8. Sit for a minute in disbelief.
9. Turn on computer.
10. Fans spin up.
11. The Black Smoke shoots out of capactitors on the mainboard.
12. Turn off computer.
13. Turn on computer.
14. Fans spin up.
15. The Black Smoke shoots out of capactitors on the mainboard.
16. Turn off computer.

Conclusion: They needs a new computar.

i've been waiting for this to come upon us for some time now.

Soon.

About 30 minutes ago, I was driving home from work on the highway and I witnessed a cat get struck by a car in the opposing lane. The cat was still alive and in it's final throughs of panic in the middle of the road as I passed the scene. I pulled over immediately in a state of panic myself.

A few cars trailing the car that had struck the cat managed to avoid hitting it again by leaning to the shoulder a bit.

There I stood, on the side of the road. Two more cars were approaching from a great distance away (around 100 meters). Me, not wanting to get struck down myself, waiting helplessly for the drivers to either stop or pull around the mortally injured animal.

What happened then filled me with rage. The cars drove directly over the cat. Not actually hitting it with tires or the car, but driving directly over it at normal speed. They had plenty of distance and a clear understanding of the situation to assess what was going on and what I was trying to do. They didn't slow down. They didn't try to avoid it at all. Talk about a total lack of respect. We haven't invented words in the English language yet that can describe these type of people.

I managed to get to the cat. It was in terrible shape. I originally thought that it was active enough to take to a vet clinic (which was convieneintly nearby) so they could do a mercy killing. Instead, after no more than 2 minutes or so, when I moved it to the side of the road, it had stopped struggling and was still. I brought it into a wooded area besides the road and put it in a shadey area under some bushes. When I left it I'm pretty sure it was dead or at least that it would be soon.

The moral of the story? I don't know exactly. Out of respect, don't leave animals on the road. Moreover, if you see someone else trying to help something that's dying (even if they are trying to do something as simple as getting it off the road) try to help by staying clear of the situation.

Using a tool made by geoff holden, you can map out your surrounding blogosphere! pretty cool. Read the examples to configure your blog to be a XFN hub.

Here is my XFN map with a depth search of 4:

A friend of mine from school gave me an abba zaba bar the other night. Straight from Half Baked! It's not quite as large as dave chappelle's zaba, but it's awesome nonetheless. The taste reminds me of being six. Maybe I ate these as a young lad.





stretchy!

Thanks bev!