Blog America: The Winter Poster

Some of you by now may have figured out the name schema for the titles. Well, maybe you actually haven’t.

To start out, here’s a few small things I found amusing: 

Canada is hilarious.

Some of my colleagues and fellow interns are Canadian, and from what they say, Canada is like Australia, except with the temperatures negated, and American-sounding accents. People live round the edge, and there’s squat in the middle; they use the metric system, they’re allowed into Cuba (I didn’t know this was a thing), etc. They think Americans are weird. 

Root beer is weird too. 

Root Beer. It is not in a mug. I find this can misleading.

You know that medicine you had to take as a kid, and it had that particular taste?

Yeah. 

Add fizz, and that’s root beer. Can’t say I’m a fan. 

Solar bins. They don't even waste light here.

They have solar panels on their bins. Why? To recycle light, of course. 

Pronunciations. 

Oh man.  

Meggan. Not Meeegan. Meggggggan. Meg. Gan. I think this is funny. And we say Harley like Hahhley. And they hear it as Hailey. 

Bar-nar-nuh. Bair-nair-nuh. 

To-may-to, to-mar-to. 

I keep trying to get Americans to copy my accent. This is so entertaining, as half the time they say “G’day mate” really well and it’s hilarious, or they sound british, which is hilarious. 

Literally rings of onion. It makes more and less sense than a doughnut.

Onion rings.

So apparently these are a thing. I heard of onion rings, and thought, “Surely not. That must just be a name, or they are synthetic, or something." 

But no. 

They are literally rings of onion. In batter. 

Of all the things they could put in batter, they chose one single ring of onion? Seriously?

That’s just weird. 

This is so cool. I want everyone to address me with that number.

According to Microsoft, my name is David John McKinnon the Second. I don’t know how this happened, but it is legitimately true. I am the second David McKinnon of my paternal line since the migration of John McKinnon in 1853.

It is indeed a room that is red. 

The Seattle library has a room called the Red Room. It is entirely red. This surprised me, for some reason.  

A Golden, Exemplary Book

So I finished reading Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. There goes my brain. 

Never before have I read a book so dense and well-planned as this. Even Eliezer Yudkowsky would have trouble reaching this level of nesting. 

In short, read it.

In long, read it now.

Well … 

Only read it if you will commit to it. This is not a book that can be read in little bits, here and there. You’ve gotta take significant chunks of it at a time, and those times cannot be too spaced out. Try and finish it within a four week period. 

According to Hofstadter, it’s sort of a statement of his religion. Fair enough. From what I can determine, on one level it’s a case for strong AI, or AI that can be sentient and reach our level of Actual Intelligence. It speaks of formal systems in mathematics, provides a case for them in biology, details recursion, strong and weak, in math, physics, biology, etc. It speaks of neuroscience and how our brains function, on varying levels of complexity and depth.

This all builds and builds and builds, and one can slowly start to see what Hofstadter is getting too, and you reach the climax and …. and then it ties them all together in one fell swoop. BOOM!

All this integrated with dialogues actually makes for a rather good read. 

Give it a try. 

My description is probably a little strange and not accurate. Sorry. 

Pike Place

So many people recommended I go here, so I went on Saturday with Melbourne coffee-hipster intern Sam. Wowee. 

Basically, we hung around downtown Seattle for the day. Here’s another shot of that funky needle thing they have here: 

Try sewing with that thing. 

Seattle. Some of it. It looks like Sydney.

Seattle is a great place. It’s like Melbourne, but cold, and with the most annoying and stupid driving system in the universe (to an Aussie). But there are many wacky people. So we saw a Segway gang. A bunch of people, riding around on Segways, all with hoodies that had some skull and crossed something on the back. Anna then told us that there were Segway tours of Seattle. Seriously. Google it. I’m not joking. 

A Segway gang. They had gang hoodies. We barely escaped before they changed topic.

Speaking of segues, Pike Place is fantastic. So it’s a street, plus this whole building that has several levels of just shops. Aussies, think Patty’s Markets type thing. There’s a cheese factory, the original Starbucks shop (shop, not vendor), and all sorts of the standard homeopathic crystal remedies for sale. 

Pike Place

I bought an Legend of Zelda Ocarina, to add to my collection of strange wind instruments to play whilst riding a unicycle. It sounds exactly like the game, funnily enough. Speaking of unicycles, there was a busker. He had a six-foot unicycle (see, I’m already talking in Imperial) with a chain, and he juggled knives whilst riding it. And when I say knife, I don’t mean a little kitchen I’m-mugging-you knife. That’s not a knife. This is a knife. Yeah, that sort of knife. He juggled them. 

Then he juggled a ball, a knife and a chainsaw. What a boss. 

Speaking of buskers, there were a few others. One guitarist had an enormous crowd all singing along to some popular song he was playing; another bloke had brought along a piano. An upright piano. Out onto the street. 

There was also a guy playing the UFO. 

There is no other way I can describe this. He was playing a UFO. And it sounded good. 

Unfortunately I don’t have photos of these marvelous things because my phone ran out of memory taking photos of other wonderful things. I hate you, iOS 7, for being more bloated than iOS 6.

Pike Place also has this store where they throw fish. Now, that’s awesome enough in itself, and I could leave the story there and it would be good.

Seriously, they throw fish around. It’s fantastic to watch. Sydney-siders, you thought that candy place in the Rocks was fun? Pfft. 

Normally, you get served fish by the fishmonger taking it from the ice and placing it on a board and wrapping it. This is one of the few times Seattle one-ups Australia in a contest of awesome involving animals: some bloke with a Ned Kelly-grade beard chucks a three-foot Pacific salmon to the other bearded bloke behind the counter, whilst they all yell in unison. It’s priceless. 

Literally. It doesn’t have a price, you just go and watch. (Sorry, I had to make that one. I hate that word along with worthless. Why are priceless and worthless opposites? They shouldn’t be, syntactically. Or semantically. One of the two)

Americans are crazy. I love this place. 

There is also this wall of gum. Standard back-ally brick wall, probably has a few bloodstains on it, but you can’t see them because it is covered in literally more than a centimeter thick layer of gum. If that doesn’t sound like much, chew some gum. Flatten it into your table. Do this until it’s a centimeter thick. You will now regret doing this, but you get the picture. It’s a lot of gum. It’s gross. It smells. And I really wanna know how it caught on. 

There was a music store, and wow man, it was old school. CDs from the 20th century - ACDC, BeeGees, Beatles, Rick Astley (his other songs). Cassettes. VHS tapes. Vinyl. So much vinyl. Or maybe the same amount, but it tends to look bigger on a  shelf. 

Bainbridge Island

It’s some island across Puget Sound. It was pretty cool. We took a ferry to get there. 

This is Andrew Peacock. The man, the legend. 

Andrew Peacock. In the flesh covered by a jacket.

We went to an art museum, which had some seriously dark and twisted paintings, and some children’s storybooks, which lightened the mood. 

Storytime with Omair!

We stopped at a 'beach'.

This is a beach on Bainbridge Island. This is reminiscent of England. 

That's not a beach, that's a beach

Notice that there are mountains in the distance. I didn’t notice this at first. Then I saw that they were not clouds. This blew me away. 

You’re just looking at the clouds on the horizon, and then you see some blue that isn’t the same, and you see that it’s a mountain, and you think trigonometry and distances and angles and holy cow that thing is huge. 

Far over the Misty Mountains cold

To dungeons deep and caverns old

 The sun went down while we were on Bainbridge Island. It would have done this anyway, I suspect, but I can't know for sure. The sun does many strange and wonderful things.