Here are some students returning to study in Gaza, as well as some cards in place of those who are no longer students - or anything, for that matter. Those kids' expressions hold anything but a future of peace.

Integrity channeled through Tony Benn:

Is a two-state solution even possible anymore? Do implanted settlements and Israeli-exclusive highways cutting through Palestinian territory effectively nullify any progress?

Obama's first call from the Oval Office was to President Abbas. I have invested hope in our new leader.

Blame the few,
build a wall,
bomb the poor,
train the new.

Basketball in the mornings has been everything I was hoping for. The court is empty enough where I can practice/warm up for a while, then get a couple games in. I've lost weight and my shot is money. Can't complain.

Knitting is going well, finished my second scarf with a ribbed pattern, and hope to try something more complex for my next. I really enjoy the monotony and repetitiveness of it, and have been searching for stuff to watch/listen to while I knit. This scarf was completed alongside the Karate Kid trilogy (boy does III suck), and plenty of talks from:

I've been absolutely addicted to this site. If you enjoy inspiring presentations about science, technology, politics, culture - anything - just go. Normally I would link to some of my favorite videos, but that is pretty much every video so far (aside from a couple). So many awesome topics: space travel, the longevity of human life, the science of genomes, environmental solutions, the workings of poverty, breakthroughs in technology, etc.

Speaking of longevity, scientists have discovered a jellyfish that is immortal. After mating, it starts to revert back to its child self. As a result, this jellyfish is starting to spread like crazy throughout the ocean. Really, really, really amazing!

Rockadoodle sucks.

Work on the next memory continues, and I'd say we're about 75% done. We need to reshoot a scene tonight, but it's coming along.

Message from the Memorineers:

The days of adventure are gone. They exist now only in the fickle memory of those who were bold enough in their youth to risk the vast edges of the known world. The Arca Memori is our only chance of extracting and preserving these fragments of history. It is our sincere hope that we who brave the outer realms of science can capture their remembrances before these explorers, these lonely wanderers, these men and women who challenged the world and sometimes won, are, like their days of adventure, gone.

Each month we, the Memorineers, will release a recorded memory from the vault to inspire and entertain those who share our fascination with the strange and fantastic.

NOTE: Memori are best experienced with a headphonic apparatus firmly affixed, amplified to the highest comfortable level of decibel, and the FLASH VECTOR INTERPRETOR, invented by the science heroes of Adobe. Please view using a quality Safari or Firefox brand browser module.

If you are interested, please take a moment to visit The Arca Memori.

Here are some production photographs.

Congratulations Jane & David! Last Saturday I played a song with a couple of her friends during the ceremony (Korean-family-central), and it was awesome to see them so relaxed and ready to take a break after such hectic planning (and Jane's fantastic letter-pressing) leading up to the big day. All smiles, good times, great fun, cool.

Happy birthday, Clio (it's not today, it was on Sunday)! May your 2009 be filled with blue lines, tweens, ink, digital and natural color, bristles, paper and film.

This ad has been showing up on buses, and it's how I feel most of the time. Word is it's an atheist campaign, but the message seems agnostic, and I approve. I don't like pushing ideas on people no matter what their belief (if they aren't hurting anyone), but it seems that throughout history, mass, organized religion has caused as much trouble as politics, science, or anything else. If there is a God, then fine, there is. If there isn't, fine, there isn't. I can't imagine a God that wouldn't save someone if they were a good person yet neglected to go to a special building on a special day.

For the science portion of this post, here's an article about a clever girl who invented a solar-powered fridge that is helping people in third-world countries store some perishables for a little while. We need more people like this in the world.

If you have 45 minutes to spare, this video is incredible. Usually people with these forms of number/arithmetic autism have social disabilities, but Daniel has remarkable super-brain-powers with no social side effects. Scientists are going crazy because he's able to describe exactly what he's thinking and what he visualizes. A little spoiler: he can do ridiculous arithmetic with no effort, sees numbers as scenery instead of values, and recited pi to 22,000 decimal places. Check it out.

I bought an iPhone development book (a bunch are available now that the NDA is over with), and so far it's fun learning about the SDK, view controllers, .xib files, screen rotation and such. The great thing is that building apps for the iPhone follows the model-view-controller approach (like Ruby on Rails), so that's very familiar territory for me.

I usually really enjoy any repetitive task as long as I can see the results as I'm doing it (like stamping tons of envelopes or folding tons of shirts), so I had a feeling I'd take to knitting - that and I think it will be fun to make some retro 8-bit patterns (I like to refer to the number of stitches as the resolution, and each stitch as a pixel). I had a lesson with Mandy and Maurene, and here's the first, sorry little thing I knat:

See those two holes in the middle? Yeah I don't know either.

We spent many hours today working on the Arca Memori, putting the finishing touches on construction, wiring, threading, masking, and running tests. We have done much planning over the last couple months, but weren't sure if it would turn out the way we intended. At the end of the night, it all came together and our worries were put to rest. There is only one (major) piece of the puzzle left - but it's a rather expensive one, and we're still researching possible alternatives. Almost there... I'll keep you posted.

We rang in the new year at Nick's in Playa Del Rey (part of my old stomping grounds / highschool pizza-delivery zone). Some highlights included: homemade pizza goodness (great sauce, Nick!), a gaggle of Big Brother staff, glitchy original NES Dr. Mario (a whole new game including level "HO", speed (SPUUT?) set to "MUD" and music set to "Shill"), and invisible fireworks in the fog and on the beach - dreamy yet warlike.

This afternoon we hiked about 7-8 miles on the Mt. Wilson trail, and the lighting on the way down was awesome! It's too bad the city was so smoggy... only the hillside actually looked great.

The lack of basketball has been getting to me the last couple of weeks, so I joined LA Fitness for access to their courts. There's two right by Nucleus, so I figure I can get my fix before work. So far so good, and the courts are great - nice springy hardwood.

Danny and Jamie hooked me up with perhaps the best Christmas gift of all time - 3 quality cereal containers, 3 boxes of cereal to fill them up with, and some milk. I can't even begin to tell you how much this has already affected my life. That's pretty much the best reason to get out of bed in the morning. Cereal is the best.

The Israeli Defense Force has a YouTube channel showing their highly-funded, highly-sophisticated, technologically-advanced targeted destruction in hopes for a positive PR spin to counter graphic wartime Gaza images such as this.

Have a nice day!