Sounds like an endorsement for sushi to me!

Adding Fish to Your Diet May Prevent a Heart Attack

And then, looking up, I saw her.  A girl covered in diamonds.  Or stars.

It was so bright that I dropped my blade; fell silently to the downy green of the Irish hillside.  The faintest, softest settling of metal upon earth.  And thus, my eyes fell upon her in almost the same way.  My shield and armor became at once too heavy for me to hold up, and I collapsed into the grass.

I felt a hand under my chin, raising my head.  I saw into those eyes, surrounded by jewels, earthly or heavenly, and I felt no weight or movement.  I didn’t hear the screaming of men as they killed their kin or the shrieking of metal as it rewrought itself.  I didn’t hear the quiet of men passing into darkness.  I saw only this creature, terrible and strong, beautiful and brave, sent to end the slaughter.

She stood me on my feet, and, without a word, put me to sleep, yet my eyes were open and seeing.  This she did to all who remained of the Great Clans, some unnoticing of her presence even then.  When the last man was turned toward her, she began to walk away from these hills that we had sacrificed needlessly upon and into a cave at the base of the Cliff of Nordth.  At the mouth of the cave, her brilliance faded to become a halo around her.  Then, we watched in stricken awe as she spoke her first words to us.

“I am Galendri, the Servant of the Skies, and Mem, the god of the Skies, whom I serve, would ask that you cease your ill trust of each other and do him the favor of returning his kingdom.”

I like the History channel.  They have this one narrator that I really like.  And HOLY CRAP I just figured it out.  It’s Mr. Gilmore!  It’s Edward Herrmann.  Wow.  That’s so cool.  I’m watching Behind The Da Vinci Code, but I haven’t read the book, so I’m not that interested in this.  They have been Da Vinci crazy on the History Channel lately.  Leonardo is truly a fascinating person.  It’s mind-blowing (you just blew my mind).  But then they show this guy wearing a bomber jacket and smoking like a chimney.  It was funny.

Now I’m watching Aqua Teen.  It’s a new one.  I liked it, but I also really wanted to like it.  Meatwad’s big thing is “Off the chain!”  “Do you see the chain, because this was off it.”  Oh, Meatwad.  It’ll be good to get new Aqua Teens going.  Now I just need the newest DVD.  *hint*hint*

Ok.  I’m tired.  I’m going to bed.

I just saw my uncle Kevin and my aunt Shannon (and their son Sean) on television! They were on a commercial for the Lewis Drug in Sioux Falls. Holy Crap!

If I had been on the ball, I would have a picture to post, too, but I don’t. So, I’ll just post this image I found when I googled “Holy Crap”.

I usually try to have cohesive meals. I try to have meals that could be described by one genre: Chinese, Japanese, Italian, Mexican, American, etc. My lunch today was nothing cohesive. I had microwave burritos, Japanese green tea, banana bread, and Cheez-Its. Random.

There’s no school today. Classes after noon were closed, and the offices were closed, too. It’s pretty bad out. I picked today (of all days!) to walk to class. Looking outdoors, I figured that it was too cold for my car to start, so I decided just to walk. My car probably would have started fine. It was relatively warm out, but it was very windy. Also, it was raining, with the temperature being slightly below freezing. This means that when I finally got to my Math021 job, I was a half hour late, my pants were soaked, and all my exposed skin was red and painful from the battering of tiny ice crystals from the sky. Oh well.

I’m watching “March of the Penguins” right now. My brother “found” (*cough*cough*) a copy online, and he lent it to me. It seems a fitting film for the weather around me.

I should be working on Discrete Math, which would have been due at 1, but I think he’ll let it slide. I just have one proof left.

Given a piece of paper 1 inch by 3 inches, only a finite number of characters can be written on it in 12 point font. Therefore, only a finite number of positive integers can be described in 12 point font. Explain why defining S={x in Z+ | x is described above} leads to a contradiction.

This dry weather is murder on my nails. They get really dry and then they crack easily. I start catching them on bookbags and doors and sweaters and all that. It’s terrible.

I’m reading The Chronicles of Narnia, one book of which has been made into a movie. The books go pretty fast, and I’ve found that I really enjoy them. It does remind me, though, that I need to get going on LOTR eventually. I think I’m smack in the middle of The Fellowship.

Who the hell invented penguins? They have to be the strangest bird alive.

It looks like the Guardian took a poll on the top Geek novels.  I don’t have much of a depth of geek novels.  I love the works of William Gibson, but I’ve never read Hitchhiker’s Guide or Dune or 1984, though I own 1984.

It seems like, in the context of the poll results, “geek” was made to mean “sci-fi”.  I would think that Lord of the Rings would have been a top pick, but that’s a fantasy book.  I’m sure the Star Wars books are big, too, but I think they only wanted to count stand-alone novels.

Could I even do 20 geek novels?  Certainly Neuromancer and Mona Lisa Overdrive.  The Incident could be considered a geek novel.  Hmm… I’ll have to look that up when I get home.

Frozen Beyond, originally uploaded by m!les.

As his hand went to grasp the metal doorknob, he felt his breath. There was something in there. Something cold.

I think Flickr and WordPress make a good team. Personally, I like pictures over text. And a good set of pictures in a blog post makes that post that much more enjoyable.

This is a picture from a set of photos I did where I used a can of condensed air, turned it upside, and frosted some things inside my apartment. It was very cool, but I used up a lot of condensed air.

Oh, well. Totally worth it!

From: “Jens Franke”
Date: Fri, 04 Nov 2005 16:53:08 +0100

We have factored RSA640 by GNFS. The factors are

16347336458092538484431338838650908598417836700330\
92312181110852389333100104508151212118167511579

and

19008712816648221131268515739354139754718967899685\
15493666638539088027103802104498957191261465571

We did lattice sieving for most special q between 28e7 and 77e7
using factor base bounds of 28e7 on the algebraic side and 15e7 on
the rational side. The bounds for large primes were 2^34. This produced
166e7 relations. After removing duplicates 143e7 relations
remained. A filter job produced a matrix with 36e6 rows and columns,
having 74e8 non-zero entries. This was solved by Block-Lanczos.

Sieving has been done on 80 2.2 GHz Opteron CPUs and took 3 months.
The matrix step was performed on a cluster of 80 2.2 GHz Opterons
connected via a Gigabit network and took about 1.5 months.

Calendar time for the factorization (without polynomial selection)
was 5 months.

More details will be given later.

F. Bahr, M. Boehm, J. Franke, T. Kleinjung

I got this from here.