Lastday.

Today is the last day of the calendar year for much of the western world, which is as it should be. It is a little before 9 am. I cannot wait for the next fifteen hours to go by. It has been a crap year, which is only partially represented by this video from someone who has no idea who I am.

It is traditional to make resolutions about how you will change your life in the coming revolution of the earth. I will get to that momentarily, but first a disclaimer: Consider a cost-benefit analysis of the New Year's Resolution. If you keep it, you are not only a) a better person and b) proud of that betterness, but also c) proud of your resolve. It seems like item c pales in comparison to item b; that is, the marginal benefit of the kept resolution is quite small compared to the accomplishment itself, and the benefits you would get by improving yourself without an annual checklist of your shortcomings. Now, the trapfall: what if you can't keep your resolution? What then? Well, that means that you spend next year as, essentially, the same person you were this year. But then, that's not so bad, is it? I mean, you were a pretty decent person this year, right? (Ignoring the two fires and the thing with the moose, I mean.) But if you had resolved to change, and didn't, suddenly you are a failure, just for being you! The marginal cost of a non-kept resolution is quite high, don't you think? Do you really want to go down that shame spiral, just for the thrill of (let's be frank here) giving yourself homework? Do you want me to stop asking these damn questions? ... Okay.

So, after all of that, here are my off-the-cuff resolutions, which are not "goals" or "guidelines" so much as "funny things I thought of just now".

#1: Be more of a self-righteous prick who whines about the absurdities of life around him in order to avoid doing anything about them. Wait, "more"? Crap. This year's prickery will be hard to top.

#2: Get an "A" in a biology course. Based on this semester's grades, I think this one might be tough to solve directly, so I'll have to be creative. I may have to apply to middle school.

#3: Obtain a Nobel Prize. Notice how I didn't say "win"?

#4: Damn, making this list is hard.

#5: Break my own personal record for number of consecutive years spent without getting punched in the face. Since I don't actually remember ever getting punched in the face, this one will be taken care of as soon as the new year starts, assuming I make it through today all right.

#6: Make resolutions for next year.

Anyway, as I said, resolutions can be tricky, even dangerous. I don't actually remember making any resolutions last year, and despite the crap year I've had, I have learned some pretty cool things, met a couple of new people, and generally had a good year of self-improvement. So here's to keeping on with that, at the very least.

Happy New Year's, everyone.

Wonderment.

I'm watching the X-Files, and it's got me thinking about church. As you may know, I'm not exactly a regular church-going man, but I've got nothing against any church that has nothing against me. I'm not really an atheist, either; I have no more proof against the existence of some divine being(s) than I have against the existence of parallel universes, a possibility some theoretical physicists believe is, well, possible. So why is it that there are scientists out there who are devoted atheists, but still hold beliefs like parallel worlds?

One obvious point is that, while religious people believe there is a god, scientists believe there might be other universes out there. Certainty vs. possibility. But that's not the whole story for me. For me, there is a common thread here, that of wonder. I'm using "wonder" here to describe the emotional reaction we have to the unknown, the feeling you get from thinking about what might be. And it is a damn important emotion, or at least, it seems to be; in the movie "Contact", a character cites a statistic of 95% of the world's population being religiously inclined. For many of the prominent atheists out there, science seems to provide them with wonder. They don't know what kinds of weird things will turn up when you study the world carefully and systematically, any more than religious folks know how their god(s) will do, well, whatever the hell it is gods do.

I tried talking to my dad about this the other day, but he mentioned the book "The Christian Nation", and we got off on a tangent. (By the by, America is not a Christian nation, and no one on either side thinks that it is. On the left, they think that policy should reflect the multitude of faiths that are practiced here, and on the right, um, forced deportation of non-Christians?)

At any rate, I think that atheists should keep arguing their case, but not because I think they're right. Mostly, I like anything that annoys Pat Robertson and his ilk, and as long as they're attacking atheists, they're leaving the gays alone. But they should bear in mind that not everyone wants to turn to science to get their weekly dose of wonder about the world, and church can be a good substitute for folks who just don't want to know what makes the universe tick. Sometimes.

Home again, home again.

I am at my parents' house. This is someplace I come maybe four times per year; the wireless network around here is decent enough that it's worthwhile. Oh yeah, and my family is here.

On the drive over here, I saw a semi laying on its side on the side of the road. It was weird seeing such a massive truck from that angle, like looking at an elephant laying down for a nap. No one was hurt, as far as I could tell- the cops were there, but no smoke or fire department. I also saw no ambulance, but I realize now that I have no idea how long that truck had been laying there- the injured could have been rushed to the ER and the fires put out long before I drove past the scene.

On a lighter note (how could it not be?), I have discovered something new about the game that comes packaged with the Nintendo Wii. It includes a feature where the game predicts your age based on your sports performance. So, by playing such sports as tennis and bowling, the Wii derives how old you are. I am told that the better you are at these games, the younger it thinks you are, which I believe. After all, the young wish they were a little older, and the old wish they were much younger, so the Wii tells everyone what they want to hear. Dad tells me he scored slightly younger than my little sister, which is good evidence for my hypothesis. Now, all they need is a shuffleboard mode...

"What's a 'meme'?"

I learned of a fun blogging game. Here is my submission for your approval:

Jan
I made a new blog today.

Feb
Weird day at work today.

Mar
I spent the evening hanging out with a good friend.

Apr
Yesterday at work was crazy.

May
So, I went to get tested for HIV yesterday

Jun
June is slightly over one day old, and already it kind of sucks.

Jul
It has been such a huge month, and I haven't done my reader the courtesy of blogging about it.

Aug
For anyone who might have missed the beginning of my car radio saga, I will begin from the very beginning.

Sep
It's all coming back to me now.

Oct
Where's mine?

Nov
God bless America, I guess.

Dec
I got out of a test today because of inclement weather.


So, to recap: Blog, work, friend, work, disease, suck, nothing, radio, suck, suck, suck, snow day. I remember the whole year as being kind of crap; when does that stop? Anyone? Bueller?

On the plus side, my Blog's birthday is coming up. The new counter is its present.

See the pretty counter?

Thanks to Wendy's suggestion, I now have a counter on my blog. I get to know how many times it has been looked at. I installed it at 4:30 am, so that I could watch it go up every time I hit "refresh" on my browser.

In case you haven't noticed, the counter is not in my native language. That's why I had to watch it go up; so that I could see what the numbers 0-9 look like in Chinese. I might actually remember that.

Incidentally, I've noticed another difference between Blogger and Myspace. In Blogger, when you create a hyperlink, it keeps the font you were already using. Myspace seems to demand that all hyperlinks be in one of Times New Roman's uglier siblings. Or possibly a cousin. I'm not that good at font geneology.

Mmm... Yummy Kool-aid.

I now have an account on Myspace. But let me assure you, it was for a very good reason that, for the time being, I will not make public.

Be that as it may, it is an interesting experience. I don't think I fully appreciated the cleverness of that other site; it does not simply allow social grouping- it encourages it. And as we all know, when the internet encourages you to do something, by God, you do it. I probably won't keep the account; my adventures in Facebook were extremely short-lived. But they do have one thing Blogger has not yet revealed to me: a view counter. I know that, as of this writing, my Myspace blog has been viewed 10 times. By my reckoning, my Blogger blog has, too, but I don't know for certain. Anyway, check it out before it becomes gone forever.

Endings.

My hated biology course is over. I just checked my grade; I got a solid "C". Solid. Any more effort for that class would have been wasted. Cool.

Also, I have been working on a combination lock. In theory, it has 64,000 possible combinations. I happened to know a) the last number and b) that I could be off by one, so that narrowed it down to 400 possible combinations. I decided to be creative; I started at 38-38-24 and worked my way down. Two hundred and twenty-eight tries later, nothing. Then, after skipping around some and thinking creatively (and asking the person who gave me the lock in the first place), I found the combination. It was 0-20-24. Had I just started at 0-0-24 and worked my way up, I would have had it on the tenth try. But no, I had to be creative. Two hundred and twenty-nine tries of creative.

I'm an idiot.

New oven!

Yesterday, my oven died. It turns out, it was a burnt-out coil, which was replaced today. See, I have an electric oven, and the way it works is by sending electricity through a wire near the bottom of the stove, which produces light and heat. The wire died yesterday, and today I got a new one installed. In a way, my oven is a very specialized kind of light bulb.

Speaking of light bulbs, I recently learned that Edison, when he was trying to make one, spent a month (going almost without sleep) testing different kinds of filaments to see what would make a good light source. It seems a shame that, for the very last month of human history in which there were no electric lights, Edison, the very man who invented them, would be so sleep-deprived.

In other thoughts, I've been struck by a concept: the means of design. Marx was very concerned with the means of production, but during the past twenty years or so, the means of production are not how people get rich. It's designing those means of production that holds the key to serious money. The problem is, though, how do you come up with designs? Is it just an ethereal "aha" moment, that comes from nowhere and strikes without warning or explanation? I don't think that's exactly it. A good example would be a knitting pattern (and by "good", I mean of particular interest to me). Not anyone can just sit down and make a new knitting pattern; not everyone knows how to knit. You have to be trained in the ways of knitting, learning how to knit and purl, what ribbing will do, how to cable, and just all manner of things that let you shape a garment the way you like. All of this information is easily available, but unless you start looking around for it, you might never know it's out there.

So I believe that all this information, taken together, constitutes the means of design for knitted garments. Okay, okay, it's a lot of thought for freakin' knitting, the latest hipster craze. But what about car engines? Computer programs? Pharmaceuticals? These are not things you can just sit down and make; ya gotta have the knowhow. So those who design the means of production for these things get rich; who trains those designers? Teachers, of course. My guess? The teachers who understand how to teach the means of design, who are already in some demand, will become much more so, and the classes they teach will become incredibly expensive. I expect that this will become another way to divide the haves from the have-nots. Those who got rich in the last economy will be able to send their kids to the best engineering schools. Of course, engineering programs typically demand actual intelligence in a way, say, political careers do not. So just being part of the upper class will not get you by in the next round. Wait; Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Barack Obama... Crap! I'm too late! It's already happened! Okay, disregard this entry.

I'm a crackpot.

Crackpot - INTJ 13% Extraversion, 86% Intuition, 66% Thinking, 60% Judging

People hate you. Paris Hilton hates Nicole Richie. Lex Luther hates Superman. Garfield hates Mondays. But none these even rates against the insurmountable hate, people have for you. I mean, you're pretty damn clever and you know it. You love to flaunt your potential. Heard the word "arrogant" lately? How about "jerk?" Or perhaps they only say that behind your back. That's right. I know I can say this cause you're not going to cry. You're not exactly the most emotional person. You'd rather spend time with your theoretical questions and abstract theories than with other people. Ever been kissed? Ever even been on a date? Trust me, your inflated ego is a complete turnoff with the opposite sex and I am telling you, you're not that great with relationships as it is. You're never going to be a dude or chick magnet, purely because you're more concerned with yourself than others. Meh. They all hate you already anyway. How about this- "stubborn?" Hrm? Heard that lately? All those facts which don't fit your theories must just be wrong, right? I mean, really, the vast amounts of time you spend with your head in the clouds...you're just plain strange. ***************** If you want to learn more about your personality type in a slightly less negative way, check out this. ***************** The other personality types are as follows... Loner - Introverted Sensing Feeling Perceiving Pushover - Introverted Sensing Feeling Judging Criminal - Introverted Sensing Thinking Perceiving Borefest - Introverted Sensing Thinking Judging Almost Perfect - Introverted iNtuitive Feeling Perceiving Freak - Introverted iNtuitive Feeling Judging Loser - Introverted iNtuitive Thinking Perceiving Clown - Extraverted Sensing Feeling Perceiving Sap - Extraverted Sensing Feeling Judging Commander - Extraverted Sensing Thinking Perceiving Do Gooder - Extraverted Sensing Thinking Judging Scumbag - Extraverted iNtuitive Feeling Perceiving Busybody - Extraverted iNtuitive Feeling Judging Prick - Extraverted iNtuitive Thinking Perceiving Dictator - Extraverted iNtuitive Thinking Judging

My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 99% on Extraversion You scored higher than 99% on Intuition You scored higher than 99% on Thinking You scored higher than 99% on Judging

Link: The Brutally Honest Personality Test written by UltimateMaster on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test

Robots are great!

I've been looking up robot-building books on Amazon. It's interesting stuff. I want to build robots now, but I don't have the disposable income. I need a better job, but that's old news.

Anyway, between the robot stuff and my recent thoughts about the importance of education, I have come to a weird conclusion that may entice a lot of young people. There is a common strain of thought throughout this country (and probably others) that math is no longer a useful subject of study. After all, why bother learning math when McDonald's is kind enough to put pictures of their menu items on the register? And for really complex stuff like tax returns, there are cheap and effective pocket calculators. So who cares about math?

The ivory-tower intellectual answer is simple: math promotes thought, and thought is an inherent good. While I don't disagree with the second premise, the first one is a little shaky. Think back to middle school math classes: who really paid any damn attention? Be honest! I didn't think so. So if almost everyone who took math remembers it as a painful experience, where a bunch of meaningless formulas were thrown up on a blackboard (remember blackboards?) and memorized and forgotten, with little lasting effect on one's mind, why bother learning it at all? It doesn't seem to promote much thought, except about that cute girl sitting two rows up. You know, the one who would lean forward in her chair, so you could see the top of her panties? Yeah, you know who I'm talking about.

Back to the subject at hand, I think math should still be taught in schools, but as an elective. It's important to know math, but you have to have an interest in it if you're going to actually get anything useful out of the class. It's like philosophy or football in that respect.

Does this mean we should just put a big gaping hole in students' schedules? No. No it doesn't. We may not need math in the schools the same way we used to, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't teach the students anything. Instead, I propose replacing math with something so similar, that at least one university accepts it in lieu of the math gen ed requirement. Something that students actually crave intellectually, something they'll find immediately useful in their own lives, something that requires no specialized previous knowledge, but which cannot be replaced by any currently existing machine. I propose logic.

Think about this for a second. How many arguments did you get into with your parents in middle and high school? Sucked, didn't it? Wouldn't it have been nice to be able to argue in a way that, instead of ending in the usual "I hate you! You're ruining my life! I wish I was never born!", moved your parents over to your way of thinking? At the very least, if your parents did win the argument, you'd know that they'd done it fair and square, because they're older than you and have more experience with this sort of shit. I think that a good solid logic course in the schools would really capture the students' attention, and show them how to think in a way that math, because of its complexity and rote-learning style, really doesn't.

What's more, logic promotes exactly the same kind of thinking as math. Math, after all, is based on logic, not the other way 'round. Without logic, there is no math. Without math, logic still persists, and must eventually produce math. So even if you believe that math is its own good, an end rather than a means, you should still support the teaching of logic in the schools, since it will lead kids to explore math, if they have any interest in it at all.

There is a downside, of course. Without logic, there'd be fewer huge rants like this one. And do we really want a bunch of whiny, snivelling teens and preteens to have access to modes of thought powerful enough to produce this crap?

Almost over.

I have but one day of lectures remaining. I am so glad it's almost done with for the next month. Man, I could have gone to law school or some shit. (Here's hoping that link works; if not, just put in the scores as follows: GPA: 3.54, LSAT: 167).

In statistics today, I found out about a stupid-ass article from some stupid-ass New York rag talking some smack about Columbia university. Now, what really set me off was the paragraph talking about how "taxpayers foot the bill for dorms where kids have sex". A: Columbia university is a private institution. I don't know the exact extent to which taxpayers foot the bill for anything, but I'm pretty damn sure they don't have to pay for dorm renovations. B: If kids are having sex in dorms, is that really a good justification to NOT have taxpayers to renovate those dorms? I mean, is it okay to refrain from making residence halls safe for our kids, just because they might have SEX there? This pisses me off, but not as much as my classmate who had no idea why I found that article so damn obnoxious and holier-than-fuck. Fuck. Not just an expression of my irritaion, but a good recommendation; everyone should fuck as much as they want. And no one should withhold government funding of anything because the people who receive the benefit of this funding happen, shock and horror, to enjoy sex.

Classroom presentation hell.

The reason I hate my biology lectures is that it is a situation where a guy knows what he is talking about, but not how to talk about it. So he makes up a bunch of powerpoint slides and reads through them waaay too quickly, giving us a bit of an information overload. If there are questions, he answers them, but in terms of what he's already talked about, so it isn't particularly helpful.

Today in bio lab, we had to do presentations and (even worse) sit through other students' presentations. It was exactly like the lecture above, except for the part where the lecturer knew what he was talking about. Other people seemed nervous, which is surprising. I know stage fright from personal experience (you think just talking in front of an audience is bad, try talking about your own perverted sex life), but let's face it: I walked into that classroom knowing I wasn't going to pay any damn attention to anyone else, so I see no reason to assume anyone else would pay any damn attention to me. But, just in case some smartass got any ideas, I did the whole thing monotone- I'm got all Ben Stein on their asses. I think one of my classmates slipped into a coma while I was talking. It was one of the easiest things I've had to do this semester. And now, I never have to go back to that lab again.... until next semester.

College life

Ah, college. It's been an interesting two days. Yesterday, I watched Penn & Teller's "Bullshit"; specifically, the episode where they take a look at college. Their attempt to make college look like bullshit is, well, underwhelming. Today, my physics professor gave us an essay about the benefits of a solid college education. The author mentioned Boethius' immortal work, The Consolation of Philosophy. This is the same book my old logic prof gave me for being a badass philosopher. Fun stuff.

So should you go to college? I don't know. You probably already did; if you liked it, go again. If not, enjoy your freedom. It isn't for everyone, I know. I myself am a law school dropout. I suppose there is only one statistic that could possibly settle this dispute: Does the average college student tend to get more sex than the average college-age high school graduate who doesn't attend college? It's been 10,000 years since the human population exploded, making survival of the species fairly immune to the actions of even large groups of people; there is no need for everyone to have as much sex as possible. Still, it can be a lot of fun, and is generally available to the public, often for free. So basically, whichever group (students or nonstudents) gets the most nooky wins. Someone should do this study. Now that I think of it, there are a lot of sex studies that should be run. Over, and over, and over.

I'm not exhausted. Yet...

I woke up today at around 7 pm, after 5 hours of sleep. This would be fine for a normal day's load, but in addition to a full shift of work tonight, I have been subpoena'd as a witness for a case tomorrow at 8 am (right after work), I have a physics test at noon (which I might miss due to court), and a stats class at 4 (which I'll probably skip to get some damn sleep). I hope that it will all work out, but my coworker tonight (that's right, singular form- I only get the one other person on my shift) is kind of a flake, so even if she's there and I don't have to do phlebotomy (da daa dadada) I'll still be stressed from having to track her down to get her to do her job (obligatory final parenthetical).

I have posted an ad on craigslist kalamazoo. I will probably update my resume in the near future. I may look into switching schools soon. I just need a damn break, some real income, and a good night's sleep. I'm glad the semester is almost over, but a new one begins in a few weeks' time; I don't know if I can keep doing this shit. No, wait; I know I can't, hence the ad.

Snow Day!

I got out of a test today because of inclement weather. It's pretty cool; I haven't been this excited about a snow day in a while. Now I am just hanging out, waiting for work to begin. Life is good, but it'd be better if I didn't have to work tonight.