Butterflies: A Winged Rainbow

If you go to San Francisco, the California Academy of Sciences has an impressive array of butterflies like this one to watch, enjoy, and collect on your arms, if you have awesome butterfly-attracting skills. You can find them pretty much all over the world, with the exceptions of the polar ice caps and arid deserts.

But the coolest thing about them, and the one that makes almost everyone smile, is their color. Of course, you can find butterflies of any color of the rainbow, and many more than that: in crimson red, vibrant orange, sparkling gold, verdant green, iridescent blue, majestic purple, stylish black, the list goes on and on. :)

What's even cooler, for biologists and other interested minds, is why and how butterflies are so colorful. Evolutionarily, there are a multitude of reasons for striking colors: warning signals (bright colors often mean poison in nature), reproduction (color is attractive), temperature (dark colors, especially black, absorb heat), and camouflage (because not being eaten is a good survival strategy).

How do butterflies have such striking displays? Yes, most have ordinary pigments that make them a certain color or other, but some have structural color too. Lepidoptera (the order that includes butterflies and moths) means "scaled wings." These scales in turn have several layers off of which light reflects and interferes constructively, creating vivid, intense displays of a certain color, just because of the physical structure of the scales. Combine this with regular pigmentation, and you might have a blue iridescent scales and red pigmentation that cause you to see purple, blue, or red depending on the angle. So cool!!! :D And so we get the amazing displays we see all over the world.

Before-After Pictures: Something Happened!

It's hard for me to say exactly why before-after pictures make me happy, but I could certainly venture a guess. The feeling is likely related to those that cause people to write in the sand, graffiti on the wall, carve on a tree, or build a statue; all these signs indicate the presence of some intelligent (or at least sentient) agent. "Someone was here." Combine that feeling with that of a video or action shot, and you get the emotional equivalent of "someone did this." If it is your own handiwork, then of course there is the minute but inevitable ego boost. If it is someone else's, we nevertheless derive some enjoyment out of documenting what has come to pass.

On the other hand, perhaps the joy of before-and-after has nothing to do with agency at all. It has long been known that brains, be they those of a human or any other animal, are attuned to change. And what is a before-after picture if not simply a documentation of change in the most minimalist visual manner? This is what was; this is what is. :)

When kids think adult thoughts...

And adults think kid thoughts.

Those precious moments of unanticipated maturity when a child thinks about consequences, or thinks from someone else's point of view, or tells you an idea in an incredibly detailed and rapid stream of coherence.

That childish state of mind so sublime for an adult in which self-content and peace, worldly innocence and naivete, and never-ending wonder and curiosity are all infinitely more probable and powerful.

GIMP: A Visual Playground

Time: Freshman year of high school.
Place: CAC (Computing Across the Curriculum)
Mission: Learn how to copy, paste, blend, rotate, and color images in GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation System).
Emotion: Bored out of my mind.

Because, as interesting as CAC may or may not have been, 2 weeks are not in fact necessary for an average high school student to learn how to copy, paste, blend, rotate, and color images. So what are we supposed to do? I didn't even have a Facebook account to goof off on (these were the old days). With no better option presenting itself, I just started playing around in GIMP instead - copying, pasting, rotating, and coloring; the strange part of this story is that I kept playing around after the class ended, for the whole rest of the year. And the next year. And the year after that. And until now, at which point I have a bigger but still, really, quite modest tool set:

• Duplicate
• Flip
• Rotate
• Scale
  
• I-warp
• Gradient map
• Polar

And this is the set of steps I use to make pretty much everything I make with GIMP now, including the pictures on this post and on Facebook, which I do have now, of course. :) GIMPing is SO MUCH FUN, mostly because it is simply playing around with these steps that I listed to arrive at something recognizable or enjoyable. Practically no artistic talent required, although if I did, I'm sure I could make even more fantastic masterpieces. However, in the midst of a life where it seems crucial to try to become the best or a leader in whatever I do, be it school or anything else, it's nice to have something with no pressure or discontent at all. :)

Baking: Chemistry for Hungry People!

In fact, lots of different styles of cooking fall under chemistry for hungry people, but baking especially! And while I have made salad, soup, pasta, paninis, quesadillas, burritos, roti, and more, I have never baked until this winter. And look! It turned out pretty OK! Yay! :D

Anyway, making bread was SO MUCH FUN and SO MUCH EXERCISE!!! Stirring a concoction of oats and flour and more flour and honey and more flour and flax seeds is hard, at least for my spindly physique, but it was made up for by the bread rising all by itself! Kneading was much more manageable and way more fun, but apparently I'm absolutely terrible because there were tons of cracks in the dough. Fortunately, thanks to the expert advice of an awesome teacher, the bread turned out golden, rich, and delicious (and fed us for 3 days)! :)

Squishables: "giant, round, fuzzy, stuffed animals"

"Hug them." Perhaps one of the only things as awesome as a real live animal is a GIANT FUZZY version of that animal. Look at that jellyfish! While real jellyfish come in a large and fascinating array including lethally venomous, aimlessly bobbing, and adorably upside-down, this particular variety of Cnidaria can use mind-control. It will forcibly compel you to pick it up, hug it, smile ridiculously and then use it as a pillow; I know this from my own experience of course, but also from careful scientific observation of my mother and sister, whose jellyfish this is.

Why do people hug, anyway? Comfort, compassion, consolation, warmth, happiness, and affection. Hugs are fantastic, but sometimes, one finds oneself in severe need of a hug but with no one to share it with. Enter stuffed animals, and especially, enter Squishables! Big enough to wrap your arms around, fuzzy enough to bury your head in them, soft enough to squeeze your worries away. In terms of finding a good well of happiness, you could do much worse.

Yet then again, you could do much better, because (and let's be honest here) the reason stuffed animals are so great in the first place is as a surrogate hugger. As amazing and wonderful and life-saving my panda Penta has been, for instance, hugging a real live loved one is even better, as far as I can tell. The possible lack of cuteness is more than compensated for by the ability to love and hug you back, and of course, a hug with two people involved makes more people happy. :)

A Meal Equally Satisfying to the Eyes, Nose, Tongue, and Body

I enjoyed this beautiful meal at P. F. Chang's over winter break before returning to college. The broccoli forests, the Great Wall of tofu, the rice grains of sand--a small masterpiece, for me.
One of my general heuristics for eating reads as follows:
1) The more colors, the more variation.
2) Barring artificiality, the more variation, the more nutrients.
3) The more nutrients, the more healthy.
Meals can truly be fulfilling experiences (they are supposed to fill you anyway, after all). The spicy, garlicky tofu and eggplant combined with the salty noodles and tempered by the rice and broccoli was tremendously satisfying. No knives were necessary (apparently this is the philosophical point of chopsticks), and everything was easy and delicious to eat. This meal in particular was also mentally pleasing, because I ate everything in the order it would probably disappear--the forest and plains first, followed by the cliffs and wall, until nothing was left but a desert of sand. OK, fine, I am easily entertained. But really, there is something special about a meal that you enjoy every part of, at the end of which you just have to sit back with a sleepy smile and a hand on your stomach. :)

A Life of Smiles

:)

Apparently babies smile around 10x more often than adults, on average. This isn't that surprising when you consider that adults in a baby's vicinity spend a lot of energy and time trying to keep that baby happy, but even then, all things considered, it seems that babies are rather easily pleased. I believe that this, at some level, is what people are trying to say with "A happy life is a simple life." A life without stressful complications, a life without unattainable desires--more or less, a life easily pleased.

I've been told that I am very easily pleased. This might be true, but I think it would be more accurate to say that I am extremely lucky. My life is good: no work that I'm not doing because I want to, all necessities provided to the point of luxury, friends and family all around me. Jainism uses the concept of karma--that is, good deeds lead to good fortune, and vice versa, even from past lives to the present one. If that's the case, I must have done something remarkable in my last life to deserve this, on the level of creating hundreds of jobs, or eliminating the water deficiency in a village.

With that out of the way, let's get to the point: I smile a lot, I have good reason to, and so I've decided that that is a good enough reason to make this blog. I can keep track, and perhaps coax a few more smiles out of a few more people. :) I still haven't decided what kind of blog it's going to be, per se--short monologues like this one, picture posts, short little phrases...so it'll probably be all of the above to begin with. I definitely want to ramp up to 1 a day, if I can dredge up the discipline. Like I said, I certainly have no shortage of reasons. :D