today

Biologists Rony Garcia and Jose Moreira from the Wildlife Conservation Society's (WCS) Jaguar Conservation Program rely on Obsession for Men, a cologne known for its complex scent, to help lure jaguars in the Central American country.

Note that this scent works on jaguars. There is no research of its effects on cougars .

The discovery that Obsession for Men acted as a magnet for jaguars was the result of an experiment by the WCS's Bronx Zoo in New York. The WCS was looking for ways to get cheetahs in front of camera traps, and, after several years of testing with different fragrances, found spraying the musky Obsession For Men near the heat-and-motion-sensitive cameras drew the cats for longer than other scents.

Links:

• Scientists use Calvin Klein cologne to lure jaguars at Yahoo! News

I wore a pair of torn jeans to office today. I was trying to look fashionable, but I later saw that I was wearing a torn jacket as well. I hope I did not project an image of someone-who-does-not-get-paid-enough.

I watched the pilot of the X-Files tonight. Memorable quote

What I find fantastic is any notion that there are answers beyond the realm of science. The answers are there. You just have to know where to look.

Now, since the real test for any choice is having to make the same choice again, knowing full well what it might cost - I guess I feel pretty good about that choice, 'cause here I am, at it again. — Oracle, The Matrix Revolutions

I had a very weird dream tonight. I saw that I was a space traveller and we came in contact with aliens who could live in 17 dimensions. These aliens did not try to kill us off, but they made us humans well aware of the inadequacies of living in "just" 3 dimensions. These guys looked similar to humans, but I do not remember what other things they could see that we could not.

I arranged my closet and I found out that I have more shirts than t-shirts. Luckily, I have only one pair of pants and 6 pairs of jeans, so I am not handing back my geek badge anytime soon

Proscribe: to denounce or condemn (a thing) as dangerous or harmful; prohibit.

This word seems closely related to the word Prescribe, but I could not find any source which would mark proscribe as the antonym of proscribe.

I attended the Hackers and Founders meetup yesterday. It was a high energy meetup and I liked it. When I walked in, I was already 2 hours late but there were still quite a few people around. I walked in, took a name tag and tried to "merge in". Merging was easy - the folks were friendly and did not mind if you joined the discussion.

Some observations

• I did not have a good answer for "what are you working on right now" . This made me realize that from a technology perspective, I have not worked on anything interesting for some time now. I have tinkered with a few things in the past 6 months (man!), but have not really done a deep dive on any of them.
• There was a focus on programming language in the group. I am not sure if the choice of a programming language is really a big deal when creating a webapp. Rails, PHP, Python, Perl, Java - all have a good web framework. One of the arguments was that it would be difficult to organize PHP code in a coherent manner. In my opinion, that is a matter of discipline instead of language.
• I did not find people thinking of totally different ideas. Or maybe, the folks were not telling those ideas . The ideas floated around ads, community, social networking, websites etc.
• I am not a unique case when it comes to the case of creating a startup. A few folks there had a regular job and were planning on side projects.