Brachypterous glucosuria

brachypterous (adj.): having short wings

glucosuria (n.): an abnormal condition of osmotic diuresis due to excretion of glucose by the kidneys.

Funnily enough, you can actually tell what 'brachypterous' means from random dinosaur trivia. Pterosaurs are flying dinosaurs (dinosaurs with wings). The brachiosaurus is pretty well known for its giraffe-like neck, but its name actually comes from the fact that its forearms/forelimbs were larger than its hindarms/hindlimbs. Since practically all dinosaurs are named in Greek, you can then guess that 'ptero' has to do with wings, and 'brachy' has to do with arms or limbs, 'brachypterous' would mean something like 'arm wings' or short wings.

Or at least that's my explanation; I'm no etymologist though. For reference, the Greek term for wing is πτερον (pteron) and the Greek term for arm is βραχιων (brachion). Not surprisingly, Greek for lizard is sauros/σαυρος - and interestingly, this is where Sauron from Lord of the Rings comes from (it happens that Tolkien is a much better etymologist than me, knowing some dozen of ancient languages). Also, people usually call pterosaurs 'pterodactyls'. I'm not sure why this is, since apparently δάκτυλος (dáktulos) is finger, so pterodactyl is "wing finger". Although pterodactyls do have talons, and there is probably something important about their fingers. Much more random, in my opinion, is the fact that a dactyl is also a verse in poetry. Personally, I find it strange that they would name a meter of poetry after a body part, nevertheless a finger.

(Edit: Apparently, according to Wikipedia, other things in poetry are also randomly named after body parts. Besides for the basic unit of a meter being a 'foot', you'll also see other words like 'dibrach', 'tribrach', etc.)

In any case, apparently I promised a mostly non-technical post today. Unfortunately, I do not really have any interesting non-technical thing that I feel especially like talking about. So, I think I'll just go off on random tangents all over the place.

First up, the TCHS Qualifying Round 2 yesterday was surprisingly simple. So, soon I'll get some T-shirt that looks something like http://www.topcoder.com/i/tournament/tchs08current.png. I assume it will, at least - I haven't actually gotten an e-mail from them. In any case, next week's round is probably the more crucial one, since they only take 50 people. Even though I'm routinely placing in the top 50ish now, it's far from guaranteed that I'll advance.

But I haven't been to Indiana yet, so hopefully I do advance =) (the automatic $250+ is a pretty nice incentive too). Now, maybe I should say something about urban sprawl. Some people seem to think that urban sprawl is environmentally or economically deadly or something along those lines, but honestly, more ecological damage is probably done by strip mining or logging operations, and there is market demand for it (hell, that demand seems to be driving a good part of Toronto's economy right now...) so it can't be that bad for the economy, as long as it doesn't escalate too badly and cause some housing bubble to burst or likewise. Honestly, "smart growth" plans are probably worse for the economy (and perhaps, the environment) than laissez-faire. I'm not really sure how to prevent urban sprawl from escalating out of control, but some market-based incentive strategy probably has a better chance of working than direct government intervention. Plans involving direct government intervention have a pretty good record of going askew...

Of course, you'd have to be rather insane to actually seriously listen to my very inexperienced random hypotheses on how to deal with such a problem. I expect there are at least three dozen important factors I have not taken at all into consideration. You'd have to be even more insane to actually ask me to solve such a problem, with my limited worldly experience. Alas, such tends to happen surpisingly often at school.

Diogenes is a pretty cool person, if only for his cynical James Bond style wit (although he most definitely wouldn't want to be compared to Bond). There are a bunch of amusing anecdotes about him - look them up sometime if you get bored. After all, what can you expect from someone who lives in a tub?

It's recently come to my attention that many video game characters like transforming into spheres (or, are already very spherelike):

Maybe Kirby doesn't count, but he is very ball-like. And his rock form in the original Kirby game was also a ball (a circle actually - 2D).

This is just taking well known ones. Of course, there's AiAi and Meemee and everyone else from Super Monkey Ball (even though they're sort of inside balls). There's even Super Mario Ball...

Perhaps we can come to the conclusion that graphics artists are lazy when they can be lazy =).

This also came up when I was searching for all those above pictures. Apparently, there's also one with a rabbit - the mouse, of course, is more accurate.

I'm drawing a blank now, so I think I'll stop here. Until next time, ciao.

-squidout

PS: Hmmm... (maximize)