like makeup. A girl who wears makeup all the time, when it comes to a special night and wears makeup, or even more makeup, there isn’t much of a wow factor. And when she takes it off, its feels like whoa, someone just got out of bed. Whereas a girl who never wears makeup, and then that special night she does, it just blows you away, and you easily find yourself complimenting on how beautiful she looks.

If you’re a guy, apparently if you dress up nicely every day, yeah you look decent, but so does that girl that wears makeup everyday. But if you dress less than casual and then suddenly one day you are wearing something nicer than usual, people notice you more.

Can’t we look past the makeup and the clothes? No. We can’t. We are human. Tragic beings susceptible to the whims of appearance.

fuckititsfriday asked: Have you seen Legend of Korra yet? The first two episodes are on iTunes and they're pretty good!

yes i’ve seen them!! it’s sooo freakin’ awesome! They haven’t lost their touch, and I honestly can’t wait for the next episode… its driving me insane!

science:

How long is the coast of Britain? The answer, surprisingly, depends on the size of your ruler. If you measure with a big stick, you will only pick up the rough features, but if you measure with a smaller one, your route will be longer. In 1967, Benoît B. Mandelbrot wrote a paper called How Long Is the Coast of Britain? Statistical Self-Similarity and Fractional Dimension. In it, he contends that, contrary to popular opinion, “curves of dimension greater than one are [not] an invention of mathematicians.” Instead, Mandelbrot says, many real-world curves are actually statistically self-similar: in some sense, the small parts can be said to be scaled-down versions of the whole. And we can put a measure on the “degree of complication”, a measure that has many things in common with the notion of a dimension.

You are no doubt familiar with fractals, those beautiful self-similar patterns the study of which Mandelbrot is credited with founding. You may have heard that they have fractional dimension, a term that seems prima facie nonsensical. If we think of dimension as, say, the number of coordinates needed to specify a point in a figure—one on a line, two on a plane, three in a volume—it makes no sense. You can’t have 1.58 coordinates. But as Mandelbrot explains in his paper, and as explained excellently here (9-min video) or here (text), it follows directly from a different, but equally intuitive conception of what a “dimension” is.

Consider a line segment. Suppose you want to double its size. How many copies of the original do you get? Straightforwardly, you get two. But if you consider doubling both sides of a square, you get 2*2 = 4 copies of the original square. And if you double each side of a cube, you get 2*2*2 = 8 copies of the original cube. If you triple the sides, you get 27 copies. In fact, we can quite simply make an equation relating the dimension D, the enlargement factor eand the number of copies, c. It looks like this: c = e^D. Using logarithms, we can transform this into the following: D = log_e(C)=log(c)/log(e).

You can easily verify this for the cube, the square and the line. Tripling the sides in the cube, we get D = log(3³) / log(3) = 3log(3)/log(3) = 3.

Now consider a simple fractal like the Sierpinski triangle. Each iteration of the fractal is made by removing the middle third of each triangle, creating three identical copies. Each one is half as big as the previous iteration. When we enlarge one piece, we get three copies of the original. Plugging this into the equation, D = log(c)/log(e) = log(3)/log(2) ≈ 1.585. So the fractional dimension of the Sierpinski triangle is almost 1.6; it is neither 1, like a line, nor 2, like an ordinary figure in the plane.

You can find a list of fractals by fractional dimension on Wikipedia. Some fractals do actually have integer dimension; many do not.

The quadratic cross, for instance, has a dimension of 1.49.

What does this have to do with science? Well, as Mandelbrot suspected, fractals and fractional-dimension curves are very useful tools for describing a number of real-world phenomena, not limited to pretty pictures and coastlines. Everything from earthquakes to heartbeats to ice crystals has been described as a fractal phenomenon.

everytime I want to post something angry …aka rant… I realize the promise i made to myself about not ranting on tumblr, but posting more positive things… and then it makes me think of positive things instead of the negative things that made me want to rant in the first place. =) working resolution!

yeah, its about time I actually shutdown my computer….

I haven’t ever really truly lost my voice in my entire life. Until today. I woke up with a sore throat yesterday, and it slowly went away. But today when I woke up, it hurt to breathe! I couldn’t talk. At all. 

It was a devastating feeling. I went about my day silent, telling my friends that I couldn’t talk. They offered their condolences and would continue talking. That was when I noticed how much I talk on a normal basis. I was unable to laugh. Unable to give my opinion. Explain things that I knew (which bugged me especially when my friends were confused about something). 

Then for staff meeting today with all the CAs on property, we had speed dating as an icebreaker. It was so cool! Except it was the worst day for me to lose my voice. You can imagine how THAT went.

Anyway, losing my voice made me realize how important my voice really is! I couldn’t imagine using sign language to communicate with people. How crazy, and how much effort! I COULD NOT LAUGH! I was in pain whenever someone told a joke! Physical pain.

As I type this, I hope and pray that my voice gets better tonight. I’m also praying for my mother, who is having surgery on her ear tomorrow (the ear she is deaf in because of malpractice on a previous surgery some 15 or 20 years ago). And on another note, my little brother’s birthday was today, and it pained me to have to whisper ‘Happy Birthday’ to him because I wanted to yell at the top of my lungs. He turns 12, and I’m afraid I don’t have much time left before we’ll never be as close as we are, because he’ll start puberty and then the awkward phase will begin haha.

Well, let’s hope I find my voice tomorrow morning… because if not, I’m afraid my doctor will have to find it for me…

My Aunt gave my mother some photos the other day when we went to visit her. She had them printed in black and white. My mother accepted them gratefully and said they were beautiful. I thought so too. They were pictures of our family, and they were really quite nice.

When we came back home that night, my mother was confused and a bit annoyed. She remarked [in bengali of course] ‘why would she print these pictures in black and white? They are so nice. She ruined them.’

To which I said, ‘well, maybe it’s the style of picture she wanted.’ 

‘Style my foot. They would have looked 1000 times better in color.’

It made me chuckle as I picked up the photos and flipped through them, looking at them closer. It made me notice too that the photos would have looked extremely different in color. The eyes would be drawn to all the colorful clothes we were all wearing. My mother’s intricate sari, my sister’s radiant kameez. For once, my eyes went directly to our faces…. and stayed there. Lingering on expressions. On eyes. No distractions.

Well, I thought the pictures to be elegant, while my mother thought them useless. Funny how a little color, or lack thereof, can give you so much perspective.

Windows 8 is coming, and I can’t wait to see what Microsoft has in store! I’m sure they will continue to refine their build well into 2012, and when they release it, I think it will be interesting to say the least. For the first time, I believe early adopters will be very polarized with Windows. Before, either you hated it or you loved it. Xp, loved it. Vista, hated it. Windows 7, loved it. I think with Windows 8 there will be a dividing line with some people loving it and some people hating it.

The Metro UI is Microsoft’s way of modernizing. I think that they need to integrate the UI smoothly with Aero, otherwise it will feel too ‘placed’ and not an organic experience. If Microsoft can blend Metro and Aero close enough together and yet still remain a distinct experience, Redmond will finally give Cupertino a run for its money!