Tina, Erik, Chris, and I played a game of pets. Chris and blocked Tina and Erik out of the pets in the middle. Even though it was looking like I would win I lost one point on poop making Chris the winner by a half point.
Steph and I went to Eliot’s place to watch a documentary and have dinner. We took over some berries we got at the farmer’s market. The food was delicious and the documentary made us think. We then had an interesting discussion on the topic of the documentary; the ownership of exotic animals as pets. The documentary focused on a man who had 5 lions, and all the troubles he had to go through with them, and all the things they had to go through being owned by him. The lions had the much shorter end of the stick, as they were kept in really tight confinement.
The major questions that the film brought up were, what animals are ok to keep, and why?
One reason that was discussed is that the animals could be dangerous to humans, like venomous snakes, and large predators. This one I don’t think is significant due to the very low number of people that are killed or injured each year by pets. This isn’t being insensitive about those people getting hurt, but there are a number of reasons I don’t find this significant. One is that the death rate from exotic pets is less than that for dogs. Dogs kill 25,000 people per year estimated, with lions coming in at 100. The next reason is that most of the people who die from these exotic pets are the ones assuming the risk of owning them. That is a little bit of Darwinism at work. The last, and most important, is that the death and injury rate from exotic pets is so much lower than that of other forms of preventable injury and death that the returns on addressing it as an issue simply aren’t there. We have bigger fish to fry.
The second issue they bring up is the environmental factors. The people who don’t properly contain their pets and the people that “free” their exotic pets can create large problems around invasive species. The boa constrictor in the Everglades is a great example of this. They have started breeding in the wild and now are all over the Everglades. This is a major problem and one that would have to be addressed at a large systematic level.
The third issue, is one of animal rights. This is to say that animals should have a certain minimum level of care and freedom. Lions should not live in a horse trailer for 6 months. They need significantly more space than that. Animals should also not be left alone for long periods of time. When done to humans this treatment is called solitary confinement and is looked at as a form of torture or punishment. This is one of the reasons that I have 2 cats as pets, instead of just one. Many shelters are also moving towards not allowing single pet adoptions. With exotic pets there is another level of care that sometimes must be given so that the pet can have a healthy life, and this requires specialized knowledge or training (can be attained from google usually but the effort must be put in).
The fourth that is touched on is the legality and certification issue. Dogs require tags, but lions and wolves don’t. This is just that there are no laws regarding lion ownership, but it would be much easier to do a categorical list of animals that require certifications. E.g. animals that have an expected full grown weight of over 10 pounds must be registered as pets, then keep a list of animal weights when full grown. This works much better now that we have the internet and databases.
I look forward to going to the documentary night again.
Riley came over and we tried out the Oculus on Steph’s computer. We first tried it on my PC laptop, but it wouldn’t work there. Each time we tried to start it there would be a blue screen of death. So on steph’s desktop we got it working, tried a few of the example situations, and then we got it to work with Halflife 2. This didn’t go as well as expected, as many of the aspects of the game caused a sick feeling. We couldn’t really go more than 5 minutes at a stretch without getting a little sick, and after a total of maybe 15 minutes we couldn’t take any more of it. I really liked the experience, but I just couldn’t handle it. The parts where you sit in one place and look around were really nice, and didn’t cause a sick feeling, but so many parts of the expected game experience didn’t work. These include turning, jumping, crouching, falling, sitting, strafing, stairs, and just moving in general. It will take a lot to get something like this to be mass market feasible.
Steph and I drove over to the farmers market on Sunday and got some tasty food. We got lots of berries, raspberries, blackberries, and strawberries. We also got some Bolani, even though they were out of the pumpkin kind. We didn’t bike, but here is a pic of my new bike! (the old one was stolen while I was at PAX)
Of course we also got some samosas, which were delicious as always.
The kitties are pretty amazing. Steph has been helping me walk the kitties. They have also started getting under the porch area, but haven’t been too hard to get out yet. I’m a little concerned that they will soon like it enough to try to stay under there when I want to bring them back in. They have also been pretty cuddly lately, and I got some fun pics of archer kitty.
We went out to eat with Andrew, Lindsay, and Jeremy at Zeni. It was delicious, but not the best idea for a dinner before the dancing games. We then went back to Jeremy’s place to play the game Just Dance, which was the knock off version of Dance Central. We had a great time, and it was much more tiring than expected. Steph and I called it a night early, since we had an early morning from the diving. Many of the dances were hilarious to watch people do.
Steph and I went to Breakwater to dive the metridium fields. Metridiums are pretty 2-3 foot white anemones. We took the pipe out to the end and then went due north. I was able to spot a Sea lion along the pipe when looking back at Steph, and I saw one again when we were out at the fields. We also say a sea hare, which is a 1.5 foot long slug. It was the size of a rabbit and looked like a purple land slug. Steph got a headache after the first drive so we headed back. We went into Palo Alto for lunch at Umami burger. We then headed back to our places to clean our gear.
I had a great time playing trucker with Iliya, Adam, Tina, and Eva. I did really well on the first two rounds, with a gunboat on the first round, a rolling cargo sphere for the second, and another gunboat for the third. The gunboats worked pretty well, but the lasers got be a good bit. I ended up giving up the last round, but did better than the others since I mainly gave up instead of getting shot down. I won out of the people doing the same level of difficulty, Eva had more, but did an easier route.
This was an interesting overview of Buddhist practices and their spread to the West, specifically the US. The way things changed were to open more to everyone and less focused on the teaching and efforts. This was great to look at how some Buddhist practices were getting really cult like, and some had died from these practices. The teachers teaching that there don’t need to be teachers kind of got me. I thought that part was pretty funny.
It's an Exciting World 