Comment here and I will pick 3 interests of yours listed on your user-info and three icons of yours. Make a post explaining them and asking others to comment for their own.
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kickthehobbit asked me about:
Interests: aikido, cryptography, tex.
I have been doing Hombu-style aikido, the Japanese martial art founded by Morihei Ueshiba, since I graduated from high school. Unfortunately, time and financial constraints have kept me from it lately, but I intend to get back into the dojo as soon as I can, although I know I will be rusty. I like it because it teaches how to fall, to stand straight, and to not rely on strength --- and because, when done well, it is incredibly beautiful, both to see, and to understand what is going on.
Cryptography - well, for one thing, an interest in cryptography got me the education I am getting right now, because in David Kahn's classic book The Codebreakers I read that math and linguistics do go together (in information theory, the stuff that I am obsessed with, as the story I posted shows :-). Which got me thinking that maybe my hatred of math and my love of languages can be reconciled somehow...and the rest is history. When I took that cryptography course last semester, I felt very happy for some reason. But I do not want to make it a profession -- because the vast majority of professional cryptography work is, for obvious reasons, of military and law-enforcement interest, and thus classified. I think my life is complicated enough without a security clearance. Nor do i have the patience to solve many cryptograms myself. I just like the topic abstractly, as a dilettante.
TeX I will cross-post, sincecladdagh812 asked about it too, when I played that game with her.
TeX is a document formatting program. The thing that makes TeX far more awesome than Word is that everything is coded with commands: stuff like " \title{Lovely Paper} \author{Indicolite} \maketitle " will get you a professional-looking title page, where in Word you have to center it and stuff using "What You See Is What You Get." That way, if there is a great deal of formatting to be done, you can automate most of it --- and, although given my explanation it sounds counterintuitive, you have a lot more control. Word has driven me to tears with footnote and table formatting, not to mention math terms, because you tweak and tweak and then it suddenly decides it knows better than you do how stuff should look, and you end up with complete gibberish. TeX never does that: if the final product (usually PDF) looks wrong, then it is your fault, and you can go to the code and fix it. Besides, it is the math and physics industry standard for formatting papers. And I personally think it makes documents look beautiful, as well as being reliable. Another advantage of TeX is that you can save the very small, memory-wise, text file with the code, and move THAT from computer to computer, rather than moving some very large PDF (or Word) file with all the formatting info taking up memory.
Further advantage: the whole thing is freeware, and if you want more features, usually a Googlesearch would easily uncover a package you can add, that other people had written before you.
Further advantage: it always gives me a happy rush when something compiles successfully. Goes back to my Lego robotics days.
Userpics:
This is actually a detail of the painting "The Countess Yulia Samoilova and her protegée Amacilia Pacini leaving a ball" by Karl Briullov, particularly this detail of the Countess's head. I find that the Countess looks somewhat like I do in real life, or wish I did (my hair is brown, though). Many of my userpics are Briullov portraits. His most famous paintings are The Rider, and The Last day of Pompeii, a truly awesome work. In the painting I took for my userpic, the Countess Samoilova -- who was Briullov's main patron, so he painted many pictures of her and her family; the girls in "The Rider" are also her wards -- had, apparently, come into a very large inheritance. Even though, being a countess and all, she was already quite wealthy, as well as being very intelligent, a charming hostess, and, as the picture shows, quite beautiful, this inheritance made a great many more people want to suck up to her. So, according to the commentary I read, in that painting Briullov captured her barely-restrained anger at all the false courtesy offered her, even though she looks polite on the outside.
She herself was the life of St.Petersburg society when she lived there, so much so that when she held parties at her estate (Smolyanka) everyone who was anyone in St.Petersburg would try to get there. The tsar gradually got a little ticked off that those weekends, no one wanted to visit his estate, or do anything with him --- so, being a sore loser, if royal, he made the countess an offer she could not refuse, to buy Smolyanka. Sighing, she handed it over, but replied to him, "Majesty, people came not to Smolyanka, but to Samoilova." A short while later, she and a small group of her friends went riding out to the very most backwater end of St.Petersburg at the time (the far end of Yelagin Island) and she looked around at the desolate emptiness and cheerfully announced, "Here, people will come to see Samoilova." She made a brief announcement to the effect of "Saturday, picnic on Yelagin Island with Samoilova, all welcome..." (if you are somewhat nobly born, of course) and suddenly, the place became alive and the most fashionable place ever to have picnics, riding parties, etc. I really like that story, and I hope it is true.
This is a detail of one of the most famous Russian paintings ever, and by far the most famous work of Ivan Kramskoy: The Stranger (aka The Unknown Woman.) I used it because, well, it is an iconic painting, and until your question motivated me to search for him, I really did not know any other portraits by Kramskoy (I have now found some that I like, and I am particularly compelled by this one, I am not certain why.)
This is a painting by Raphael called "Girl with a Veil". I find it very different in style from other paintings by Raphael, but the online gallery I found it at claimed that it was indeed by him. I just picked it as a portrait that I like. I love paintings in general, but when they are realistic, I particularly like portraits: I like looking at people long ago, and guessing what they felt like, and what they thought of as the artist captured them.
And P.S
kickthehobbit asked me about:Interests: aikido, cryptography, tex.
I have been doing Hombu-style aikido, the Japanese martial art founded by Morihei Ueshiba, since I graduated from high school. Unfortunately, time and financial constraints have kept me from it lately, but I intend to get back into the dojo as soon as I can, although I know I will be rusty. I like it because it teaches how to fall, to stand straight, and to not rely on strength --- and because, when done well, it is incredibly beautiful, both to see, and to understand what is going on.
Cryptography - well, for one thing, an interest in cryptography got me the education I am getting right now, because in David Kahn's classic book The Codebreakers I read that math and linguistics do go together (in information theory, the stuff that I am obsessed with, as the story I posted shows :-). Which got me thinking that maybe my hatred of math and my love of languages can be reconciled somehow...and the rest is history. When I took that cryptography course last semester, I felt very happy for some reason. But I do not want to make it a profession -- because the vast majority of professional cryptography work is, for obvious reasons, of military and law-enforcement interest, and thus classified. I think my life is complicated enough without a security clearance. Nor do i have the patience to solve many cryptograms myself. I just like the topic abstractly, as a dilettante.
TeX I will cross-post, since
claddagh812 asked about it too, when I played that game with her. TeX is a document formatting program. The thing that makes TeX far more awesome than Word is that everything is coded with commands: stuff like " \title{Lovely Paper} \author{Indicolite} \maketitle " will get you a professional-looking title page, where in Word you have to center it and stuff using "What You See Is What You Get." That way, if there is a great deal of formatting to be done, you can automate most of it --- and, although given my explanation it sounds counterintuitive, you have a lot more control. Word has driven me to tears with footnote and table formatting, not to mention math terms, because you tweak and tweak and then it suddenly decides it knows better than you do how stuff should look, and you end up with complete gibberish. TeX never does that: if the final product (usually PDF) looks wrong, then it is your fault, and you can go to the code and fix it. Besides, it is the math and physics industry standard for formatting papers. And I personally think it makes documents look beautiful, as well as being reliable. Another advantage of TeX is that you can save the very small, memory-wise, text file with the code, and move THAT from computer to computer, rather than moving some very large PDF (or Word) file with all the formatting info taking up memory.
Further advantage: the whole thing is freeware, and if you want more features, usually a Googlesearch would easily uncover a package you can add, that other people had written before you.
Further advantage: it always gives me a happy rush when something compiles successfully. Goes back to my Lego robotics days.
Userpics:
This is actually a detail of the painting "The Countess Yulia Samoilova and her protegée Amacilia Pacini leaving a ball" by Karl Briullov, particularly this detail of the Countess's head. I find that the Countess looks somewhat like I do in real life, or wish I did (my hair is brown, though). Many of my userpics are Briullov portraits. His most famous paintings are The Rider, and The Last day of Pompeii, a truly awesome work. In the painting I took for my userpic, the Countess Samoilova -- who was Briullov's main patron, so he painted many pictures of her and her family; the girls in "The Rider" are also her wards -- had, apparently, come into a very large inheritance. Even though, being a countess and all, she was already quite wealthy, as well as being very intelligent, a charming hostess, and, as the picture shows, quite beautiful, this inheritance made a great many more people want to suck up to her. So, according to the commentary I read, in that painting Briullov captured her barely-restrained anger at all the false courtesy offered her, even though she looks polite on the outside.
She herself was the life of St.Petersburg society when she lived there, so much so that when she held parties at her estate (Smolyanka) everyone who was anyone in St.Petersburg would try to get there. The tsar gradually got a little ticked off that those weekends, no one wanted to visit his estate, or do anything with him --- so, being a sore loser, if royal, he made the countess an offer she could not refuse, to buy Smolyanka. Sighing, she handed it over, but replied to him, "Majesty, people came not to Smolyanka, but to Samoilova." A short while later, she and a small group of her friends went riding out to the very most backwater end of St.Petersburg at the time (the far end of Yelagin Island) and she looked around at the desolate emptiness and cheerfully announced, "Here, people will come to see Samoilova." She made a brief announcement to the effect of "Saturday, picnic on Yelagin Island with Samoilova, all welcome..." (if you are somewhat nobly born, of course) and suddenly, the place became alive and the most fashionable place ever to have picnics, riding parties, etc. I really like that story, and I hope it is true.
This is a detail of one of the most famous Russian paintings ever, and by far the most famous work of Ivan Kramskoy: The Stranger (aka The Unknown Woman.) I used it because, well, it is an iconic painting, and until your question motivated me to search for him, I really did not know any other portraits by Kramskoy (I have now found some that I like, and I am particularly compelled by this one, I am not certain why.)
This is a painting by Raphael called "Girl with a Veil". I find it very different in style from other paintings by Raphael, but the online gallery I found it at claimed that it was indeed by him. I just picked it as a portrait that I like. I love paintings in general, but when they are realistic, I particularly like portraits: I like looking at people long ago, and guessing what they felt like, and what they thought of as the artist captured them.
And P.S
 I took the "The Nine Muses" quiz on gURL.com | |||
 |  | My muse is... Calliope Calliope is the patron goddess of epic poetry. She is often depicted holding a writing tablet and wearing a golden crown, for she is the oldest of the muses and their leader. Her name means "The Fair Voiced," but Calliope inspires eloquence in writing. Read more... Who is your muse? | |
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