Parisa's Blog

Some scientists in Pittsburgh have revived canines from a state of death, in effect creating zombie dogs. They drain the blood from the dogs, fill their veins with a cold, saline solution, and a few hours later, the blood goes back in, they give the pup a little electric shock, and he's ready to go play fetch. The dogs are clinically dead after filled with saline, as they have no brain activity, heart rate, or signs of breathing. There are plans to test this method on humans within a year, and although it isn't a technique that could preserve bodies for years, it could give doctors another option when it comes to treating patients that have high blood loss.

This is incredible. Being able to suspend life seemed only realizable in science-fiction, yet this shows real promise to do just that. The dogs showed no signs of brain damage, nor any other signs of physical or mental change. I just hope that legislation doesn't get in the way of advancing this science, and that one day, I will get a chance to walk among the real living dead.

Went to the Pride Parade and Party in San Francisco with some of the Sandia interns today. After we emerged from the BART station, I immediately smelled this marijuana haze over the city. We got a late start and only saw the last few floats of the parade, but marched into the streets with the masses towards the rest of the city. It seems that standard law enforcement has no real power (or maybe just regard) with respect to drugs today. I saw a guy smoke up next to me with two police officers standing just 5 feet to my side. He didn't seem at all perplexed when he saw me watching him, or when the officers turned his way seconds later. There were also tons of people selling pot brownies and magic chocolate chip cookies, and many of those familiar ice cream vendors selling more of.. well, I don't even know what they were selling, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't drumbsticks.

We all got food from a few of the many stands near the Civic Center, and sat down to watch the crowds. We saw a lot of guys wearing just thongs walk by, which by the end of the day seemed natural, if not too conservative attire. After food and some quality people watching, we set off to see what else the city had to offer. It's not every day you can walk down city streets without any sign of traffic. Whenever I go into the city, I feel terribly small - the buildings tower over me, passerbys pay no heed to my existence, and I'm a complete victim to the structure of traffic control, obeying the red and green lights like a machine. Today I felt as though people rose above the machines, and even if only for a few hours, owned the city.

We walked around the streets for a few more hours, once stopping into an S&M booth to check out the new trends in leather, spikes, and chains. Beyond S&M, there were sex toy booths, condoms and lubricant everywhere, and even a Catholic group that advertised their inclusionary stance. I took a few fliers from the Church lady because I wanted to see what their church had to say. The fliers were dissapointingly vague. Still, I was pleasantly surprised to at least see Catholic and inclusion on the same piece of paper. Maybe there is hope... wait a minute, I'm in San Francisco. Anything goes.

We got back to the Civic Center just in time to hear Third Eye Blind perform a good set, followed by En Vogue. I was surprised to know they were still around, and even more surprised that I recognized not one, but two of their songs. After they played, things pretty much died down, and we took the BART back towards home. A few of the interns and myself got Thai food at Lemon Grass, and discussed the troubled state of our nation with regard to education, foreign relations, and big business. I think we could have talked for a few days about who to blame and how to fix things, but the restaurant kicked us out at closing, and so the problems will last for at least a while longer.

Remember when your mom yelled at you for playing video games all day, and made you go do your homework or waste time in the great outdoors? Booya, in your face! Turns out some schools in California, in an attempt to fight childhood obesity, are adding DDR and EyeToy: Play to their P.E. curriculum. In addition to having PS2s and touch pads for the games, the schools are adding stationary bike/video game combinations to get the kiddies to do some exercise. This isn't the first I've heard regarding DDR and weight loss marvels. Atkins? South Beach? Subway? Say goodbye to the fad diets of yesterday, and march over to Best Buy to purchase your new fitness plan in a box. Ah, the sweet irony.

Although I didn't get my exercise from DDR today, I did go hiking up Mt. Diablo with Mela and Yisong. About one mile up and I started feeling the onset of a blister. We pretty much took the 3 miles up and back down on a gravel-coated trail. We ran into one snake, a few lizards, hundreds of monster pine cones, and one lost Asian. All of us were complaining of sore feet, hips, and backs on the way down. At the ripe age of 22, you'd think that we'd be a bit more agile, but alas, we just add to the statistic of physically weak and feeble Engineers.

I started my day at work off with a seminar titled "Insight into Terrorism", a 2 hour presentation given by some Joe^* employee of Sandia. Joe had 22 years experience in counter-intellignce work for a few of the 3-letter government agencies. The talk was quite interesting, and went over a lot of the financing methods Al Qaeda used to fund the 9-11 bombings and still use today to collect money for their cause. Some of the more interesting ones came from convenience store fraud, where they illegally redeemed huge quantities of grocery coupons and collected fraudulent welfare payments. The government has made currency a lot harder to counterfeit over the years, so they just found some clever loop holes. Also, it turns out that laundering money is a lot easier than I would have otherwise assumed. If you don't want to just eat a couple hundred thousand dollars worth of diamonds, and crap them out on the other end, you can just have someone with an ambiguous name shovel money into some foreign account, and take faith that most other governments won't just freeze an account on a tip from the U.S. (good for them). Of course money is more a means than reason for the driving success behind terrorist attacks. Their scrupulous efforts to remain discrete in planning and communication, given the huge amount of attention and acclaim it brings if successful, certainly displays the arduous committment that Al Qaeda has instilled in its followers.

To lighten the blow of all that terrorist stuff, I went to a wine tasting class at Concannon Winery with Mela, Therese, Cheryl, and Mario. It was taught by this huge wine nerd, cast from the stereotypical wine taster mold. He was really informative about every grape, region, process, and flavor, and even explained some of the jokes from Sideways that I certainly didn't catch when I saw it on the plane ride to California. Making wine is easy... you just mix some grape juice with sugar and yeast, and through fermentation, are left with alcohol and C02. If you don't want sparkling wine or champagne, you get rid of the C02. The only real difference between red and white wine is whether the grapes are left to sit on the skins (red wine) or not (white wine), as the actual meat of almost all grape breeds is light. We also learned how wineries make the creamier and butterier wines (malolactic fermentation), the oaky and vanilla-flavored wines (oak barrel aging) as opposed to the crisp and fruity wines (steel barrel aging), and how wines mature and change flavors. Of course all of this valuable information was lost on me because I tend to favor the straight liquors, but it was nonetheless entertaining.





After we learned the basic tasting technique (stick nose in glass, swish wine around, inhale, taste, swish, swallow or spit) and got examples of the different flavors we should be looking for (sweet, sour, tannin, flowery, smokey, steely, oaky, fruity, dopey, and doc), we got to the tasting of real wines. After I tried 10 or so whites, I was a little too tipsy to care whether the wine tasted like cinnamon and pears or had a more delicate body. My favorites whites were the Sauvignon Blanc, Muscat Canelli, and Chardoney, and as far as reds, the Pinot Noir was drinkable. We sat next to some soon to be wine snobs, but luckily the crowd I was with took the whole experience a lot less serious. As Therese put it, "the best wine is the one poured in the glass in front of you." Amen sister.

* Names have been changed to protect identity and provide ambiguity.

So I decide to go running at 8:00am because I couldn't fall back asleep. I've never liked running just to run. It might be some psychological residue left behind from years of soccer where the punishment for making mistakes was to run, or the fact that my knees always give rise to pain before my muscles. Anyways, I dusted off the new iPod, and went for a spin around Livermore. Whenever I listen to music and run, I always feel like I'm in some low-budget movie, the rest of the world is staged, and I just move to this somewhat relevant soundtrack playing behind my thoughts. My iPod shuffled up "Wouldn't Mama be Proud" (Figure 8, Elliot Smith), "Youth of the Nation" (Satellite, P.O.D.), and Solitude (Thelonious Monk) - not bad.

In the afternoon, I went to the Livermore Rodeo with Kapil, Yisong, and my two roommates, Mela and Jessica. Mela and I bought these horribly cheesy cowboy hats (although I guess mine looks more like a pink pimp hat than a real rodeo one), and then saw cowboys do their thing on bucking broncos and bulls. If you've never seen wild cow milking, well, you are missing out. One rider ropes a "Mad Mamma Cow", another comes by to tame the cow, and then a rider comes by to try and get a tiny cup of milk from the thrashing, pms-ing beast. It was my favorite event because the humans definitely had the disadvantage and were just being tossed like rag-dolls in the big muddy, dust pit. None of the riders fared too well against the bulls during the main event, and one was carried off injured from a nasty fall. We ended up staying for the whole rodeo, slightly (very slightly) entertained by the rodeo clown and announcer's off-beat banter. There was so much hoopla surrounding this event - there was a crowned rodeo queen (who circled the pit wearing turquoise and purple chaps after the closing of each event), a chili cook-off, a morning parade, and patriotic skydiver that flew into the rodeo pit behind Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the U.S.A.". The opening ceremonies were bloated with god blessings and patriotism, and we saw a few confederate flags flying high in the stands and parking lot, but it was much more urban than anything we probably would have seen in the real south. Even if not 100% authentic, Livermore doesn't mess around when it comes to rodeos.

Well, Apple traded CPU providers today. Why? Probably a combination of that crazy Steve Jobs and an apathetic IBM. IBM promised a 3GHz G5 one year after the 2GHz G5 was announced, and here we are, 2 years later and Steve looks a bit foolish for relaying that promise and still having no product to show. As for IBM, sure, Apple is the trendiest thing to hit the American population since the crimping iron, but what are a few Macs when you have the next generation of video game consoles covered. I'm sure it hurts to lose a company with the media attention that Apple commands today, but IBM also has plenty to keep its hands full. I suppose it's dissapointing that Apple is moving to the X86 CISC architecture, but the lines between CISC and RISC seem to be more clearly drawn in academia than in actual production. (For example, the PowerPC601 supports more instructions than the Pentium, yet the Pentium is a CISC chip, while the PowerPC 601 is considered to be RISC. Whatever.) I don't have a terribly legitimate idea how this will effect Apple. Apple will still be using IBM for their higher-end stuff, and maybe now they will take over the PC market ::chuckles:: after having switched to a more widely compatible X86 architecture. The change is going to mean a lot of work for Apple and their contributing software developers to make a smooth transition from IBM to Intel processors. I'm sure Steve and his secret staff have lots of good ideas up their sleeves, so I'll just wait for more rumors and the sporadic updates from the man himself.

Well, I went to San Fran yesterday with the boys of East Palo Alto to hit up the famous, perhaps overly hyped Haight Street - Cmon, how remnant of the sixties can a street that boasts the Gap and Ben & Jerry's really be. We parked on some neighborhood street and walked the steep hill down towards Haight where we were greeted with a mass of psychodelic colors, dread locks, and vintage thrift shops. We bumped into one poor lad who was bumbling something about having to get his broken space ship from Kentucky to San Francisco, and needing help in his expedition. Being as we all had to work in California for the entire summer, none of us really had much to offer in the name of assistance, but we all had high hopes that some stranger would come along to help the bloke with his mission. It took just under 2 weeks for me to meet my first legitimate San Franciso weirdo.

We had a quick lunch at the People's Cafe, and then went to the Anarchist's Book Store at the end of Haight. I bought The Time Machine by Wells for a cool $1.50 - hardly an anarchist purchase, but at a nontheless socialist price. We then went to Amoeba Music, a huge warehouse of CDs, DVDs, tapes, posters, and music savants. On the way back down Haight Street, we checked into Toy Robot and Giant Robot, two Japanese pop culture shops where artistic toy models/robots, tshirts with minimum screens, and art is sold. I still haven't leared to appreciate the Asian pop culture revolution that I suppose hit america when I wasn't looking. I'll have to remember to go back to Giant Robot when I do.

I ditched the guys a bit to check out Buffalo Exchange, a vintage shrift shop displaying some interesting apparel in its store-front window. I ended up buying a sweater (mostly because the city was freezing and I only had a tank top on), and a pink, mesh tank top. Haight had some quality vintage/thrift stores, and were I alone for the afternoon, I would have spent more time in them, but my company seemed less interested in shopping. We set off for Golden Gate park, where we passed a few bands of hippies, "masseuses", and people looking to sell the "spice". We popped squats at the top of some hill, and watched an especially accomplished skateboarder practice some tricks, and two shady men with their "ice cream trucks" make rounds about the campus to sell their product. We then set off to find the Golden Gate Arboretum, only to get there a bit too late to actually go inside and see the spoils - Ah well, another day.

Because we had about an hour before our reservations for dinner, we set off more seriously on a mission to find the Tanner house. After tracking down the street coordinates in a map of the city, we circled Alamo Park before we finally came upon the landmark house, the residence that alone conjoured memories of T.G.I.F., the Ranger Joe theme song, and Uncle Jessie and the Rippers - we had finally found Stephanie Tanner's home. After we all sat on the benchs in awe, snapped our photos, and relished in a well-deserved breather, we set off for the Kan Zaman Cafe back on Haight. We got an assortment of hot and cold appetizers and main meals to share amongst everyone. I think my favorites were the stuffed grape leaves, hummus, and fallafel, but everything was rather good (though not terribly authentic in terms of the depth of spice). A few people ordered the famous middle eastern spiced wine, and after a good reception to the drink, we decided we'd try a batch of our own at night in celebration of Yisong's birthday. We returned to the guy's apartments, and Keenan and I whipped up a batch of our own version of spiced wine (minus the Brandy we forgot to buy, and Cardomom we were just too cheap to look for), and made everyone try it in the hot tub. After a vote of success from the guinnea pigs, it was decided that it will be banana wine the next time we get into the bartending mood.