Streams of Unconsciousness XII

This blog's production has followed a Hubbert curve

2011-11-15T20:57:00.003-06:00

If you look over to the 'Blog Archive' section of the right-hand sidebar, you may notice how blog activity has trailed off in recent years. The histogram of entries by year provides a good graphical depiction of the phenomenon: this blog's production has followed a Hubbert curve. Clearly, we reached a state of 'peak blog' four years ago.

At first, demand for blog-worthy posts was increasing exponentially, and I scrambled to extract thoughts from my head in order to keep pace. But eventually, the payoff from such mental excavation reached a point of diminishing returns. I was forced to find alternative methods of self-expression rather than writing crappy essays, and these substitutes that had previously been less economical became the dominant paradigm. Peak blog had come and gone, and yet the world turns on...

Haiku police

2011-04-10T20:34:00.002-05:00

Please count syllables
The first and third lines have five,
the second, seven.

More about rights

2010-11-01T20:53:00.002-05:00

It is my right to cover myself in maple syrup and run laps around my house screaming at 4:00 in the morning. It is a freedom of expression and property rights that is not a privilege that can be granted or taken away. But, obviously because I have the right to do something doesn't make that something right to do. If I chose to exercise that particular right, it would strain my marriage and my neighbors would almost surely exercise their rights to think I am a jackmunch. Simple, right?

Voting is also a freedom of expression, and if you have something at stake, it is logical for you to enjoy the use of that freedom (unlike the aforementioned use of it). But when you vote, PLEASE KNOW ABOUT WHAT YOU ARE VOTING ON! This means that if you didn't research any of the issues and the city council candidate's positions on them, SERIOUSLY CONSIDER NOT VOTING for anyone in that particular race. You have certainly heard something like, "We should always vote, because there are some countries in which the citizens have no say in what the government does", but by casting votes in ignorance, you are making this country more, not less, of a place where the best leaders are chosen by the governed. You are not adding anything to democracy by blindly choosing a name and your ignorant vote doesn't help the oppressed people in Zimbabwe.

Also, if you're a partisan type, please consider not going down the ballot and selecting entirely "R"'s or entirely "D"'s. One reason we have been saddled with so many unprincipled politicians is because we have so many unprincipled voters who refuse to hold them accountable. Why should either party bother with trotting out representative candidates when the party faithful will vote for whoever gets the endorsement, no matter how far from the ideals the candidates stray?

Vote if you must tomorrow, but for the love of all that is good, let's have a democratic and not a random process decide who our elected officials will be.

PSA: Don't chain up your kids; wake up.

2010-05-25T17:55:00.003-05:00

By the time you've followed this link, the total US national debt will have reached $13T, in all likelihood.

I have no idea how people can look at that number and feel no shame at all. Because guess whose fault it is? Among other culprits stand you and I. This is what happens when we vote for somebody solely because they carry your party's label. This is what happens when we let the shills on aligned corporate media outlets convince you that "left" and "right" ends of the political spectrum actually describe people's ideals. This is what happens when we follow every single red herring that is thrown our way. This is what happens when we outsource responsibilities that are intertwined with our rights as human beings.

Every now and then I just have to remind myself that 1) people will, whenever possible have somebody else suffer in their place, and, 2) I am just like everybody else.

Case in point: Last week, I was in my car coming home from work, listening to a podcast that was telling about how anyone with property along the gulf coast was about to become a holder of oil sand deposits. Wildlife viscosity was about to reach an all time high. Then, the fuel light came on in my car, and it occurred to me that I should tank up, so I went to the nearest gas station to fix this situation. That nearest gas station was a BP. And it was completely packed with other cars. Of course, having the extra time incentive (and also time to come to my senses) helped me reconsider my fuel vendor and go down the block to the Shell station. Not that Shell is necessarily more morally upright than BP, they're just luckier. Both companies only exist because you and I want freedom of easy transit and stuff made from plastic.

Screaming at sleeping people to wake up always makes them angry, and only sometimes actually gets them out of bed. So instead, I'm issuing a challenge for both of us. Next time you hear about how the world is going to hell in a handbasket, try apologizing for your part in it (be it through apathy, greed or anything else) to whoever is saying this, or other folks reading the comment board, or tracking the flow of thoughts in whatever other venue said alarm is raised.

Fun new phrase to use!

2010-03-25T18:21:00.002-05:00

I'm motioning for a new term to enter into the common parlance:

"Devil's Advotard"

Someone who, purely for the sake of argument, takes a contrarian position that shows little understanding of the topic at hand.

Example: I was told that I could buy a gun, and with it get a cash register full of money if I simply showed it to the guy behind the counter at a liquor store. But I decided to play Devil's advotard, and responded that the liquor store clerk would probably give me nothing near the gun's retail value if I offered him that trade, much less everything in the register.

Never think of a title until the conclusion has been penned.

2010-02-20T08:28:00.005-06:00

Legend has it that on one Saturday morning each year, I will arise from my slumber to publish a mighty rant, and then return whence I came. It's not true, of course; even though it's Saturday and I just woke up, I don't see myself going back to bed again this morning, and I do think it's a lot more likely that my rant will be weak and fruitless. In fact, maybe I should just stick to theses. After all, that's why I write and why you read: journals are interesting inasmuch as people's lives and thoughts are interesting, but they are always more interesting when they help illuminate the larger world that all of us share instead of just playing with the toys in their own little corner. This makes a great segue for out first theory in ages:

Postulate #18: Einstein's statement about compound interest is lost on a lot of people.

Einstein may have been being facetious when he claimed that it was the most powerful force in the universe, I guess I could research the context a bit better before cookin' up a theory centered on it. But, why I think he was misunderstood on this is because compound interest is a special case of interest of a more general and greater kind: self-interest. Barring divine intervention, there is no force that I see having a greater potential to influence human action than that of an accumulation of self-interest. In reality, nothing does shape society as much as people looking out for their own needs; often even people who are supposedly acting altruistically are unwittingly trying to justify themselves before society or trying to justify society before themselves. Either is ultimately self-serving. And so we rediscover the need for a greater external force if we dare attempt the challenge of denying ourselves and carrying our cross.

Postulate #19: Our generation will use the vast wealth of information available to it to make itself more closed-minded.

Now that anybody with fifteen minutes and something to share gets to broadcast it to everyone with web access, certainly there is more tractable information out there then ever before for the common citizen, which makes this so absolutely incredible on the surface. But when I read comments on political blogs I totally see this. People still flock to the pundits who they most agree with, who in turn are more than happy selling the advertising space on their sidebars as they preach to their choir. When a person can only read so much in the minutes they have available, the human need for community seems to trump the human desire for objective information, and as such people are better equipped than ever before to reinforce their existing schemas (the consensus definition is here, for those of you are forgetting what you learned in psychology). Maybe you don't agree with this, but then ask yourself, are you thinking about bailing on this post for something else that cyberspace has to offer that you'd find more agreeable? Does that change your mind any?

Corollary to postulate #19: The free flow of information that the web offers serves more to publicize things that are already popular than it does to "flatten the world" and give everyone a chance of being heard.

I say this based mostly on my own behavior: when I search for songs on i-tunes, I include popularity as a predictor in my mental models of song quality. When I want to listen to a podcasted sermon instead of reading the bible, who do I listen to? Mega-church pastors Mark Driscoll and Matt Chandler. When I need to clarify some facts, I turn to the great vending machine of truth-by-consensus Wikipedia, like I indicated above. All of these seem to confirm the axiom "To him who has, more will be given".

Postulate #20: Either paper currency in America or internet anonymity will be short lived.

Before you dismiss this as another one of my libertarian anti-inflationary diatribes, understand that I'm not talking about the debauchery of the US dollar right now. What I am saying in this case is that cash, or anything used as a medium of exchange that doesn't get saved on an electronic record for that matter, is too hard to track. That presents a problem to anyone claiming that they own every transaction that occurs within a set of geographical parameters, like a national border, for instance, and wants to take a cut of the profits. One of the world's sad realities is that stuff has to be paid for, and governments have three options for payment of said stuff: they can borrow, they can inflate their currency (essentially a form of borrowing from existing currency), and they can tax their citizens. The third option is pretty much the only one with any wiggle room. Taxation will need to increase, and so simultaneously, the powers that be will look for more control over what they can tax while people will have greater motivation to make untraceable and therefore tax-free transactions through Craigslist or equivalent sites for internet commerce. Since banks are already property of the public (or is it the other way around?), it's not that much of a leap to think that electronic transfers can be monitored for tax purposes. But people using online media to coordinate in-person cash exchanges still represents a loophole in the system big enough to drive an armored truck through. And so, I get to worry about things like the compromise of free speech because the internet will need to be monitored more rigorously in order to provide our country with the funding to "keep our freedoms safe".

Hot discussion: Artichoke Terrorism

2009-05-12T19:20:00.006-05:00

Day in and day out, people go on with their lives, oblivious to the danger that their artichoke supply faces.

Foolishly, the artichoke industry has centralized such that 75% of the entire worlds' artichoke supply is grown within a 10 mile radius of the quaint hamlet of Castroville, CA.

Oh, the greed of big vegetable! Do they not even care that the entire dip industry could be irreversibly damaged by a single terrorist attack?

I'm not about giving solutions to this dilemma. I just want you to be afraid, and for you to join me in demanding that some sort of legislation be passed to protect us from a national tragedy.

Get out the tin foil, it's National Paranoia Day

2009-03-30T18:59:00.006-05:00

So let's just ignore the fact that I haven't posted in six months and skip to the good stuff. Wednesday is April 1st, the day when friends become enemies and enemies become meaner enemies. All of a sudden, everyone you know is lying to you, trying to convince you that your car was hit by a meteorite, or that there are free dilly bars in the office freezer, or that the tic-tacs that they are offering you *don't* taste like habanero peppers. And these, of course, are the relatively innocuous pranks that people can do. Remember, a good prank is something that gets entirely resolved by saying "April Fool's". Hiding around a corner and hitting a passerby with a 2x4 is not a good prank because it fails in to meet that criterion, and to a lesser extent so does telling somebody that their family was eaten by a whale. Of course, the second one also fails just about every other criteria too. So let's reiterate: don't attempt either of those.

But, for as much distress as it causes me, I still participate every year. I'm part of the problem, I know. But anyway, I thought I'd give a sneak peek (also known as completely explain) what I'm planning for this year, because A) nobody who reads this knows who I'm bepranking, and B) it might inspire others to bigger and better things.

So, some context: As part of my job, I'm to be heavily involved in the planning stages for a lot of health-related studies, and a lot of them use pigs as test subjects for emergency medicine studies that you could never do with people (like overdosing on beta-blockers and randomly assigning them to current or experimental new detoxifying treatments, for instance). But, as the statistician, I don't actually collect any of the data myself, so I have to stay in touch with the researchers, or as we in the biz call them, the investigators.

From: Christopher Anderson
Subject: Investigator needed for new study

Dr. ______,
I have an idea for an new study proposal, and I am looking for someone in the emergency department to take the lead as principal investigator. As you know, many retrospective studies of bicycle accidents have found an association of mortality and severe head injuries with not wearing a helmet. However, I think a prospective, controlled trial in needed to prove this relationship definitively.

By using pigs as test subjects, we can randomly assign them to either have a helmet or not, and then supply each with a traumatic impact. Considering the resources available to us at the Emergency department at Regions hospital, the quickest, most economical and reproducible way of supplying such an impact is to take test pigs up in the life link helicopter to an altitude of exactly forty feet, and push them out over the parking lot.

Outcomes of interest are (I) survival and (II) memory loss, as assessed by time-to-completion food pellet release puzzles. The null hypothesis to be tested is that there is no difference in outcomes between pigs that wore helmets and those that did not, against the alternative that there is a difference in survival and memory loss between groups. This sets up a straightforward statistical analysis via t-test.

Let me know what you think! Look forward to hearing back from you!

-Chris Anderson

tobacco fumage in a free society

2008-10-29T19:08:00.001-05:00

One of the costs of living in a free society is that tobacco control is an issue that (at least I think) should be given some press. Two quotes by John Locke (the actual, historical, enlightenment era thinker, as opposed to the dude from “Lost”) illustrate the necessary tension in the matter:

"Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has a right to, but himself."

"All mankind... being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions."

Any action taken by a government in order to make it more difficult for its people to smoke is always an infringement upon the first principle. However, any action *not* taken to reduce the well-documented hazards of second-hand smoke is an infringement upon the second (shouldn’t part of being free mean freedom from being poisoned?) Therefore, one of the few things that can be conclusively deduced is that there is no perfect solution to the smoking problem as long as there are people that want to smoke.

Clearly the first question we should ask about tobacco control in general is, “what is the ultimate point?” At the end of the day, we absolutely shouldn't care that people smoke or use tobacco products. We just don't want to see the ensuing morbidity and we don’t want to pay for anything. So something to remember is that we are, at the very core of our effort, only trying to curb the harmful effects of tobacco use, and if there was some way to sever the causal link between its use and the development of illness, then we no longer need be concerned about whether or not tobacco was being consumed.

After this question, different approaches to tobacco control will no longer stack up equally when viewed ethically. The three general types of control methods that I can think of are educating people about the consequences of smoking, legislation making it more difficult to smoke, and technologies to make smoking less harmful.

Education and legislation have had more success in the past, and have less potential for success in the future than a technological solution. Hear me out: from the middle of the 20th century, prevalence of tobacco use has declined among the US population, largely due to the education of the public about the associated risks of tobacco use. Among a certain segment of the population, education is *very* effective. This segment, of course, is the proportion of people that are willing to learn. On the other end of the spectrum are people that are apathetic toward whatever the "facts" might say, and these people are completely out of reach of any awareness program ever (or yet to be) invented. Legislation has undoubtedly played a part in the nationwide decline as well. It is effective as long as people obey the law, and more effective when multiple people are held to account (for example, it is unlawful for SA to sell a 12-year old kid cigarettes, and both the attendant and the kid have to break the law in order for a minor to buy tobacco). However, programs like increasing the tax on cigarettes and limiting locations where smoking is allowed, while making tobacco consumption more inconvenient do not really affect the smoking rates in the population. Legislation will *never* be able to achieve a high degree effectiveness, because the citizens it is meant to protect must willfully subject themselves to it or have it enforced under some kind of penalty. Technology has not offered as much in reducing the morbidity, although treatments for emphysemas and smoking-related cancers would probably fall under the technological solutions umbrella. However, as far as effectiveness goes, technological solutions do not have the same kind of limits set on them by human nature that education and legislation have. So, perhaps in the future the ethical balance will begin to tip this direction- as people begin to realize that interventions of any kind are unethical if their probability of success is nil. Unfortunately, right now, if I'm not mistaken, a public health program of this type would have the least empirical support for why it should be implemented.

Legislation is, by nature, an infringement on liberty. Really, it does not take choice away from people, so much as it simply makes certain options less appealing by associating them with various penalties. These all have to be enforced and thus further reduce liberties of those they are leveed against, as well as the greater society that finances this effort (through freedom of spending, etc.). Technological solutions are burdensome in that they take a lot of time, money and work to develop, and often they create new social and ethical issues of their own. Education is probably the least burdensome of the three, although mandatory education is, I suppose, a type of encroach upon freedom as well (although arguably not as severe as the kind legislation causes).

But also, a primary hurdle for an ethical intervention to clear is that of fair implementation. The major obstacle for all three of type of interventions that I suggested is SES, which is negatively associated with tobacco use. Things like the cigarette tax will hit the poor in society the hardest. One thing we know for sure is that making poor people poorer will *not* make them more likely to stop smoking; however, being poorer will significantly decrease their chances of being able to utilize technological solutions and being educated away from not using tobacco. The SES gradient ensures that any kind of punishment that we can attach to smoking will be more easily avoided by the well-to-do who break the same laws as the poor. Again, I think education would probably be more fairly applied than technological or legislative approaches due to the availability of the public school system.

Wow, I wrote a lot about this; I'm going to call myself done for now. But, in conclusion I am going to say that legislation is wholly undesirable compared to educational and technological approaches to tobacco control. Education would be the perfect solution in a perfect world, in which people were rational and made well-informed decisions based on data and long-term gain. Innovations in the physics of tobacco use and its consequences could one day be the most effective way to deal with the tobacco problem, but right now we're still waiting for said innovations to come along while hundreds of people die every day...

I don't know. Period.

The right to immorality (but only for the unbeliever)

2008-10-09T09:21:00.002-05:00

TO every conscious being is given a responsibility by God to ensure that they themselves live morally. To do justice, to love mercy, to walk humbly before God; to have no other Gods before him; to love God with all their heart, mind and strength; and to see the man jumped by robbers on the way to Jericho, and, instead of passing him by, to bandage his wounds and see that he is cared for at our own expense. Living in this way is what God expects.

Of the people that are blessed enough to realize that this lifestyle is, in fact, God's will, only some of them will realize that it is right but it is unlivable, because human nature renders us incapable of living to this standard. Thus, they ask for Christ's help, and study his example in leading this sort of life, and necessarily in doing so, they become part of the church. At this point, it becomes their obligation to see that the rest of the church is constantly looking to Christ to live as God commands, as it says in Hebrews,

“Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called ‘today,’ that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. For we have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end.”

However, christians should always be wary of holding the outside world to the same standards that we are held to by the word. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 5,

“What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? God will judge those outside.”

We may and probably will find it more difficult to maintain our standard of morality as our culture becomes more depraved, but that is *our* problem, not the unbeliever's. Their sin is all they have and it will not let go of them, even as God casts it into hell. God, in his wisdom, gave them free will "to do harm or to do good". How dare we declare him wrong by trying to make the moral decisions of others for them, even as we admit we are incapable of making our own?

The job hunt

2008-10-08T16:50:00.002-05:00

Dear Christopher:

Thank you for submitting your employment application with OUR COMPANY.

We will be reviewing all applications over the next few weeks, if we decide that we're not too scared of the current economy. If we find that there is a strong match between your skill set and our open position you will be glossed over immediately by our Human Resources Department due to the unfavorable effect your race and ethnicity have on our already marginal diversity. In the meantime, we will treat your application like a dead raccoon.

Thank you for your interest in OUR COMPANY!

PS: Maybe you should start raising chickens.

3800 calories later...

2008-10-06T11:00:00.007-05:00

I'm feeling the aftermath of my marathon-running stunt yesterday right now. Yesterday was great, finished with a personal best time (out of two marathons, but shhhh!) of 4:42:19 chip time or 4:48:24 race time. Thanks if you were one of the people praying for me!

The thunderstorms made things interesting. Running in the rain comes with a different set of hazards, namely chaffing. I had no idea nipples can bleed like that.

Like I expected, I'm feeling some muscle soreness too, maybe this is what it's like when you're eighty? I'm currently pretty much saturated on "vitamin I" , and I actually feel pretty good while I'm sitting here at the kitchen table, but going to my apartment's laundry room is going to be a special experience. Going down the stairs is what hurts the worst right now. But, I maintain that it's all still worth it.

It wasn't as hot yesterday as it was when I ran it last year, so I was able to shave about 25 minutes off my time. Because I am a huge nerd, and have previously decided that I would do absolutely nothing but sit around and heal today, I thought it would be fun to make a graphical comparison.

New look, same old drivel

2008-09-24T23:29:00.002-05:00

So I gave the template a good tweaking today. I needed something to do while witnessing the Twins squeak by the White Sox tonight on MLB gameday; it was one of those games where if I didn't fidget with something, I could have well bit all my fingernails off. Also there may have been other reasons for the overhaul but they escape me right now.

Here's a panzy tutorial explaining the new features. First, credit where credit is due, my *awesome* wife Tara is the only reason that I've been able to start regluarly posting again- normally people either have a job or eat pocket lint and tree bark to stay alive, but her skilled instruction of Minnesota's youth enables me to avoid both of these unpleasantries and put posts up at 2:12 on a weekday. Props to her.

Further down, you'll see a poll, which will change whenever I feel like changing it and always feauture a question and answers of no consequence whatsoever. I'd like to say I don't care what you think, but clearly that's not true, as learning what people think is the entire point of a poll. So, you may now get your vote on, if that's your bag.

Also, I changed the profile pic, and the about me section, and this turned out to be a little confusing to the eye because it looks like my self-description is talking about the picture above it, which would imply that I ate the entire rebar buffalo on the front lawn of the capitol of North Dakota. That's not how I meant for it to be, it's just coincidence.

And why the change of title, you might ask? Because "Streams of Unconsciousness" is obviously better. Duh.

Anderson vs. the United States

2008-09-23T15:51:00.005-05:00

When I started this blog four years ago, nobody could have ever convinced me that I would be eventually be giving the lion’s share of the air time to my thoughts about politics. But here we are, and even though I’m a little ashamed about it, I’m not going to stop today. Sorry. But part of my point, like you’ll find out if you keep reading, is that YOU are partly to blame for the reason why I’m so mad about what’s going on in the world right now. So you owe it to me to keep reading while I rant and rave about things how stupid we are as a country.

Another characteristic disclaimer of mine before I start: I honestly don’t think the p-word, Patriotism, has anything to do with this recent fixation on wanting to straighten things out with how we in this country conduct our business. My problem is that there is a country full of people who are somehow, on average, of average intelligence yet still don’t know their right hand from their left and are in need of some educatin’.

Ignorance in our society is pervasive. This is a major problem in a democracy, rule by the populace. People should either (1) know about the cost and benefits of collective action, and together determine the best course, OR, (2) they should be entirely removed from caring about what kind of appropriations of their time, money and effort are going on above their heads, while enjoying not having to do any research or math or real thinking. Of course, the original design of the nation as a republic was meant to protect against the monster of a government that is created by mixing and matching the components of (1) and (2)- through the mechanism of having each local population elect a local smart guy, that would then get together with the smart guys from elsewhere and make informed decisions as to how to cut the national pie. It used to be that saying you were a republican meant that you believed that this convening of smart guys from o’er the land was a good system of government. This is kind of like option (2).

On the other hand, it used to mean that saying you were a democrat expressed a belief that everyone with a vote should be able to help divide the national revenue and put a hand on the national steering wheel, because nobody could better represent a man than himself. This is option (1).

Clearly, both parties have gone astray from their original ideals. Nowadays, it seems that all it means to have a party allegiance is to have a preference as to which two people should be our co-tyrants. How sad! I submit that people from both parties would not get so worked up every fourth November if we had just stuck with the plan of keeping the president assigned to his role has a simple enforcer of congresses’ decisions. But alas, you and me have let things get out of hand, and nowadays a President is just given the keys and people are told to climb in the back seat and shut up. And we do. We go along with it by not only listening to the debates about the non-issues between “left” and “right” that the media feeds us, but we commonly recreate less intelligent versions of these debates among ourselves and call it talking politics. We vote people into office because of their accomplished personal lives, or because the other party’s candidate has something about their past that we find distasteful. We consistently vote for the lesser of two evils (and in doing so, we vote for the evil of two lessers). We have a feeling that the people we keep electing could do a better job, but we sigh and say “that’s politics”. And this is exactly what serves the status quo best, when we don’t believe that going to the poll and voting for a change will actually do anything. Do you think all the negative ads you’re about to see are really meant to change your mind about the opposition candidate? I think they mostly exist to make any independent want to separate themselves from such a perverted system by putting everything to the back of their mind, until they have to flip a coin on election day to cast their bit. This theory of mine is based largely upon past experience.

Yet the issue bigger than our ignorance or our apathy is our hypocrisy. As you can tell, we have wounds that run oh-so-deep here, but we’ve given up on treating them for now and have instead been focusing on screwing up the rest of the world (and liberating their oil, shhhhhh!) There is poverty all around us, and we insist upon not only being armed to the teeth with absolutely ridiculous military might, but holding it up in front of everybody else and, every now and then, actually using it to punish some government that isn’t as well run as ours or something. And to add insult to injury, we then tell foreign investors that they’re stupid by piling up debt and thinking that they actually believe us when we say the check is in the mail.

I am discontent, and let me tell you why. I’ve put the cash and hours in over 13 semesters of higher education for two science degrees to reach the unemployed status that I now have, which I can’t help feel is partly due to our “economy”, or lack thereof. Before that, I’ve worked since I was 15 and paid my taxes, and watched as 20% of them are used to enforce the "wheel of carpet bombing" foreign policy that we’ve had that whole time (including the Bill Clinton era). Now I can’t help feel like I have some blood on my hands for my part in funding the destruction. I’ve never taken out a risky mortgage or rolled the dice with any stocks, but I am, apparently going to give ex-Goldman-Sachs CEO Henry Paulson a break by helping fund the risks that he and his cronies took.

Most of my friends that I talk to about this are either too cynical to try and restore the republic by sweeping the corrupt off the top, or are woefully uninformed about how they are being used and convinced that McCain or Obama will turn things around. Like I said, I am discontent.

This is the perfect time to panic!

2008-09-19T00:22:00.005-05:00

Little known fact: the sky really is falling. Mock me if you must.

In all honesty, I'm downright concerned about the injustice that's going on in Washington and on Wall Street right now. And I'm sick of people being so apathetic about the whole situation when the Federal Reserve, Henry Paulson and all their cronies are doing everything they can to re-create the Weimar republic right here in America.

For those of you who don't remember, the Weimar Republic (aka post WWI Germany) is famous for printing so much paper money to the point where the Deustch Mark became so degraded that a wheelbarrow became more valuable than all the money you could fit inside of it. When something like that happens, the situation is beyond dire. "Up a creek without a paddle" is an upgrade from there. It's that kind of situation that can prod a normal, middle-class citizen into throwing themselves behind a Hitler because all they really want is change (in more ways than one).

I'm not saying we're going to elect Hitler 2.0 in 2012 and I know it's not the end of the world if the economy tanks, if the dollar collapses and we all go back to eating kraft dinners. But right now, there's a chance to stop that from happening and it really pisses me off that so many people are willing to look the other way while the people at the top get rich while essentially stealing from the would-be middle-class citizens who are in elementary school now. When they grow up, they're going to have to deal with the side effects of poverty that really do matter: increased illness and violence, hopelessness in attaining goals, watching their kids repeat their mistakes.

Injustice goes farther than not mugging a person on the street and emptying their wallet. It's also a matter of not giving a knife and a blessing to a known mugger.

Thesis Wordle

2008-09-09T10:16:00.003-05:00

I "Wordled" the introduction section of my masters' thesis, (naturally, just for fun). I found that I do, in fact, stick to the topic of updating the life tables in S-Plus/R quite tenaciously.

Happy Student's New Year! And other tidings.

2008-09-03T10:51:00.004-05:00

So, for all of you still out there in radioland, God bless you. I know that most of the people that read this piece of crud read it because they, to some degree, care about what I'm doing and what I think. So, at a clear risk of sounding blatantly cheeeeeeeeeezy, sorry I've ignored this outlet, amigos.

That said, at this point in my life, I'm really not experiencing the kind of adversity that brings about good writing. Honestly, I've got it made. This is is pretty much the high point of my life on earth: in peak physical condition, just married and loving it, on the verge of graduating, sitting in my living room in my pajamas at 11:00 on a weekday. I survey the world from my throne; I am king of all I see (until Tara gets home). Surely, it's all downhill from here until I kick the bucket.

This of course, is a top-notch terrarium for growing dissatisfaction (maybe second to this). To medicate said dissatisfaction, I have a fair regimen of self-concocted challenges: training for another Twin Cities Marathon, perfecting my teriyaki pork recipe, advancing Libertarian ideals, pawning clutter on Ebay.

Marriage isn't really hard yet. A lot of people ask about thisand seem surprised by my response, but it should really make total sense. The first 3 blocks of a marathon are pretty easy too, I tell them. You are physically incapable of physical exertion because you are locked in a human tidal wave that appears bent on walking the entire race. You just can't advance fast enough. That's marriage right now. Marriage a few years on might be more like mile 16, where you start walking if you stop thinking about each next step because you're just that hot.

Game day is October 5 for the 2008 TCM. I highly recommend the experience to anyone who (A) likes a physical challenge and (B) enjoys the power of metaphor. Sometimes when I was running last year, the thought crossed my mind, "If I can't suffer and run for another few hours for the sake of something as tangible and publicly appreciated as finishing a marathon, how can I possibly hope to run for my entire life for a kingdom I can't see with my eyes, and how can I hope to run everyday for an unpopular gospel?"

Who's in charge here?!

2008-07-16T16:30:00.004-05:00

I am so frustrated with this country right now, so I'm going to complain in some semi-literate fashion in order to make future, more verbal complaints that I may lodge a bit more organized and concise.

I was just looking for jobs, which isn't fun at all, when my friend Tim "Shoebox" Schumann sent me a link to an article which was, of course, preaching to the proverbial choir, but still nonetheless successful about making me wonder if people will start caring about how we as a nation act like a trophy wife who just got her hands on the company credit card. Honestly, are there any other people out there who actually want to stop deficit spending?

But then what really set me off was seeing this little diddy on the news feed less than two minutes later.

Let me sum up the situation. The vast majority of our country is making the same income as they were in 2000, but that income doesn't go as far because (A) inflation is out of control and (B) cost of living keeps going up faster than inflation. We've succeeded in spending trillions of dollars liberating Iraq's oil, which we will never see a drop of, and giving other people the world over a good reason to hate us. And what is the primary decision making branch of our government concerned about right now?

Whether Roger Clemens did steroids. What the crap.

I motion that it is no longer okay to call the lower house "representatives", because there is actually nobody out there in America who is having their best interests served by letting the HOR (interpret as you must) completely marginalize themselves and allowing this country to be run by an idiot emperor who is above any law and totally insulated from the reality that the rest of us experience. Grow some freakin stones, congress.

Also, I would like to complain that what I learned about separation of power, checks and balances and civil liberty in my high school government class was just plain wrong. Why even bother making kids learn that crap if it's not even true?

arguably our naughtiest post yet!

2008-07-14T01:18:00.004-05:00

The decision to start typing this first sentence of tonight's post was really made about three hours ago. I have a thesis to write, so originally the only little bullet point that I had on my completely imaginary to-do list after coming back from softball around 9:00 was poke at that for awhile and make it suck less. But, lo, the journey from the entryway of my house up to my room where my computer lay proved too much for the forces of productivity. I was greeted by jolly roommates who were watching the very beginning of a movie in its 4 foot by 6 foot glory via the new projector. Bedazed by the sheer volume of sensory input, I stood in the doorway staring blankly at the spectacle... and next thing I knew, I had sat down and we were half an hour into the movie. Bad idea. At this point I thought, "Any retreat that happens at this point will cost us dearly." Armed with this truth, I waved the white flag and took the express tunnel to a pleasant evening, 12 oz. of a 1:1:1 mixture of sunny D, grapefruit juice and Svedka. Game over, no thesis tonight. Mañana, mañana.

Now the movie is over and I see the error of my ways. Since I maintain proper hydration, more or less, and weigh 170 pounds, more or less, and hadn't given blood that day, a single drink wasn't going to get me to the point where I coudn't feel my face or anything, only sap all my motivation and make me far too joyous to possibly concentrate on the various maths involved with my line of work. But I had an awesome nap today, so I'm not ready for bed yet and won't be for awhile. And that's my little story for how I got here to my part of the blogosphere tonight, if you were interested. Which you weren't. Sorry to waste your time.

So, sorry that hasn't happened more often of late, like say the last two months. For those of you that are still out there in radioland reading this thing, God bless you. I think they were forecasting like a 30% chance of blog in this next week (this is pretty much contingent on whether I end up sounding the procrastinator's battle cry of "mañana!" some other night), but a very strong chance of *multiple* August posts. So put that in your pipes and smoke it.

The fresh scent of a new posting

2008-05-07T12:45:00.003-05:00

Today is, in all likelihood, the last day I will ever get to waste the Biostat department's money by blogging during the office hours they pay me to hold.

Please observe a moment of silence for this sad event.

I know, I know, it's a tough job, but someone has to do it. But enough about me, let's talk theory already.

Postulate #16: Athletes, in general, will always be sucky role models.
Even the casual observer can probably think of several instances of professional athletes exhibiting criminal behavior. I'll name a few: OJ, the 2005 Vikings cruise of debauchery on Lake Minnetonka, Michael Vick, Brett Myers' domestic abuse fiasco, Rae Carruth getting convicted of conspiracy to commit murder. Headlines like these happen a lot. The obvious factor that people blame is background or socioeconomic status as adolescents, but I think that another more important factor confounds the relationship between pro athletes and violence. That factor is testosterone levels. Increased testosterone levels are highly correlated with aggressive behavior, but lo, they are also highly correlated with increased muscle mass. Therefore, in selecting for outcomes associated with higher muscle mass, like pretty much every professional sport does, you are forming a much more concentrated population of conviction-prone people. But what are we going to do, not care about how well an athlete performs on the field in order to have a more socially beneficial pool of heroes for kids? That would be ridiculous too.

Postulate #17: Having a rear spoiler on a car will lead to a significantly reduced lifespan of the car's transmission.
The theory in this case is that since the rear spoiler is functionally useless on a front-wheel drive car, the only people that would go out of their way to have one on their car are those people that just want to feel youthful or something because they have a fast and sporty ride. These are the same people that peel out as soon as the light turns green, and this undue acceleration will bring about the premature demise of the transmission over time.

I'm actually collecting data on this to analyze for my final project in my ANOVA and design class,
you can help me validate my theory by taking this ultra-easy 5-question survey that will take less than a minute of your time, please for the love of all that is good, click here.

No news is good news, eh?

2008-04-03T11:40:00.003-05:00

So I see it's been awhile since I've been here. My apologies if you've still been checking this site with any hopes of finding anything new. I could say something about being busy if I wanted, but really nobody hears any of those cliche mumblings anymore, or at least they shouldn't. Perhaps I just haven't been thinking as much as I used to, or I inexplicably started holding my posts to higher standards during my little hiatus. Anyway you slice it, it's April and that's fine with me.

The first reason why April is a good thing is baseball season. Baseball has the same effect on statisticians that a dropped t-bone has on a starving golden retriever. It's a veritable playland of opportunities for prediction based on available data, but at the same time crunched into this totally subjective framework of cheering for your particular team. Being a baseball fan is this awesome fusion of cold, hard logic and utterly human passions and for having that quality I think it deserves some appreciation.

But whatever my thoughts about the pastime as whole are, the Twins are really set up to disappoint again this year. I can't think of any good reason to expect a team of mediocre veterans (i.e, Adam Everett, Craig Monroe and Mike Lamb) to all of a sudden compete with Detroit and Cleveland. Why must we keep paying way too much for this concept of experience? Wouldn't we get more of a return if we had spent that money resigning Santana? Just a thought.
And another thought. The metrodome should sell some sort of iron-on patches so people can convert their Johan Santana twins jerseys into Carlos Santana tour shirts or something.

But back to spring being good. Biking is also something that becomes a more viable option around this time o' year. I feel so healthy and eco-conscious when I bike to class or work on purpose (Oddly enough, I don't enjoy it as much when I'm just biking because my car died again). Yet biking is really a miserable experience when there's ice all over, and your tires are flat but its so cold you're afraid that you'll lose your fingers to frostbite if
you take your gloves off to get the little cap off the valve stem on your tire before the inflation process can start. (Did that last sentence make any sense at all? Oh well.) I'd really like to see more people using less gas, so I tend to be nice to bicyclists when I'm on the road. I guess also I think that fits pretty well with the whole "do unto others as you would be done by" bit. Regardless, you should be nice to cyclists too, if for nothing else than the economics of it. If supply and demand means anything, and a dude riding his bike to work isn't using gas, he's actually saving you money at the pump. Similarly, the jackmunch driving the hummer H2 at flank speed to the next red light is doing this on your bill. Just thought you should know.

This reminds me of one more thing that really pisses me off. Does anybody else care that Ben Bernanke and the federal reserve are giving our money to the housing and mortgage industries? No seriously, all of a sudden all of this extra money in circulation is de-valuing the dollar; this is kind of common knowledge. So my question is, the runaway inflation that the fed is causing is representing the public's interest how? Should we care that we have a state-sponsored organization that's actively creating a rift between the super-rich and everyone else? Would other people please get a little bit angry about this too?

I don't feel like dragging this rant on any further. My action points are as follows. Either (A) go celebrate spring or (B) egg Ben Bernanke's car. That is all.

Winter conversation tips

2008-01-31T12:57:00.000-06:00

It's flippin' cold out. You know this. I know this. Everybody else in the Twin Cities knows this. Therefore it doesn't make a good conversation topic. Also, please don't tell me about how you "don't mind the snow, but the cold is terrible!". Everybody else shares this opinion; it's kind of like saying " I like money" or "I don't appreciate car wrecks".

You can keep the same point of view, but here's a little-known fact: if you say the opposite of what you really mean, people still tend to understand your point and can even be fooled into thinking that you're interesting. For instance, if you wanted to express your feelings about snow and cold, you could instead say "You know what? I love not being able to feel my face after spending 30 seconds outside, but I get absolutely infuriated by the sight of that cold white powder lying all over! What a mess!" People will still be tracking with you. Try it.

Just a thought.

Thoughts on cleaning a coffee pot.

2008-01-26T12:44:00.000-06:00

This post may be boring, as the title may suggest, and I may have to take a mulligan on it. So you can just skim this one and get credit for reading it anyway. if you have to, just don't make a habit out of it.

So last night I came home to a noxious odor that seemed to have its epicenter in my kitchen. Sure enough, my $15 coffee maker from the temple of Walton had a semi-solid black gel in the bottom quarter inch of the pot, smoking profusely. Apparently, one of my roommates or one of their cronies had made coffee and gone somewhere without turning the cotton-pickin' thing off, leaving the brew to concentrate all night, grrrrr.

Thus, waking up this morning was complicated by a lack of coffee. I am an addict, I admit it. I need it to think. I make bad decisions on coffeeless days. Being just barely smart enough to *not* make coffee as usual despite the sludge, I figured maybe I could clean the thing and then make myself some of the life-giving nectar. The whole cleaning ordeal was a larger endeavor than I really wanted though, as nobody had bothered going through the de-gunkifying process for the 18 months or so. Coffee residues of various compositions build up differentially in key locations, and all of them are annoying and sticky. They don't just come off with soap and water; you need some acid in your cleaning solution or no amount of soaking will do anything. You're supposed to use vinegar, for whatever reason acetic acid dissolves purine bases like theobromine, theophylline and caffeine exceptionally well. Doesn't touch kahweol or cafestol though, oddly enough. I ended up using lime juice because of course we don't have any vinegar at my house anyway, it's inhabited by five guys who eat cereal and frozen dinners. As it turns out, the lime juice worked well enough in conjunction with a steak knife for getting the burnt crap off the pyrex, but it was a lot tougher to get the residue off of the filter basket. I had to get the ol' toothbrush out for that, and even then there were some spots that were just completely shielded from any kind of scrubbing. My solution to those was just to pretend that they weren't there. That left the water tank, which had a sinister orange tinted scum (was it algae!? sick!) in it. That, I decided, needed a very, very hot bath in boiling salt water. This idea would have been good if the tank was the first thing I had attacked, but after taking all the scum off of the walls the super-hot scum water had nowhere to go, so I had to pump it through the entire apparatus, which then needed to be cleaned again because it had the scum water in it. Freakin' piece of crap.

Where I'm going with all of this is that I can't shake the idea that I am that coffee pot. I'd say we all are, but no, you can find your own kitchen utensil to be your spiritual avatar. I was born to serve some function to God. But I became contaminated in many and various ways and am now in the process of being made useful again. The method that God goes about sanctifying a person is almost never the "fast" way- if God were trying to speed-clean everyone, he would drop a safe on you the second you became a christian (this would actually make a lot of people really, really happy, come to think of it). But even more than that, sometimes when you get one part clean, another dirty part is revealed. Or maybe the cleaning itself will initiate the need for a re-washing of something you don't really see a problem with, like when I flushed the algae brine through the recently cleaned filter basket and pyrex pot. Through all of it you see God basically showing off his patience. Clearly, on a physical level its still questionable whether the two hours I spent restoring something worth less than one hour's wages were well invested, but at the end of the day I'm just that much happier that God works on a higher plane.

Stream of consciousness, or babbling brook? Methinks the latter.

2008-01-19T10:29:00.000-06:00

So it's Martin Luther King day today. Back when I was in high school, I loved MLK day because it neatly separated fall and spring semesters with a guilt-free three day weekend. However, the holiday became substantially less appreciated for me as a college/ grad student. The U of M has a notoriously long winter break that always ends on MLK day for reasons that have always eluded me. And now here I am, taking a badly needed break after having a full month of *doing absoltely nothing*. I rest my case, whatever it was.

Maybe it's a little bit odd how we always seem to equate not having a schedule with doing nothing, like I just did (for comic effect, I swear it was for comic effect). Part of me still feels this need to conjure up some apologetics to prove that in some respects I had a "productive" month of living without a schedule. Don't worry; I'm not going to bore you with stuff of that sort. The issue is why that need is even felt at all, I suppose. Some people seem completely at peace with having other people see them as lazy. I am jealous of these people. I used to judge them and generally brand them as mooches; then I realized that they were the ones that had it figured out, that they would never have to deal with this irrational guilt that comes from not having a critical amount of structure to help you govern your day or your week or whatever. In conclusion, joke's on me. And maybe you too. Who knows.

In reading the last four lines I typed, I can see a lot of Donald Miller envy in my post today. I read blue like jazz over the last two weeks, can you tell? I wonder how my past entries have been affected by the style whoever's book I was reading at the time. Meh.

I saw the movie August Rush on Friday at the cheap theater in Roseville. I thought it was pretty much the happiest movie I had ever seen. I mean, emotionally, the same results could have probably been achieved by sitting me in a dark room and injecting me full of endorphins, but then I would have missed out on the great story and the downright amazing music. What I don't entirely understand is how easily people are dismissing this movie as "cheezy" because it turns out so well or seems unbelievable or something like that. Honestly, I think there's a ton of depth to this movie that is easily overlooked. First of all, the philosophical question "where does the music come from?" is something that a person should probably address at some point in their life, don't you think? Another story for another time, asking a different version of this question led to the resolution of a serious faith crisis that I had for a couple weeks when I was 16. Second: excessive use of coincidence is an annoying plot device, but by definition events are not merely coincidence when they are being orchestrated by an outside force. This orchestration of events, or symphony of life is a theme you should really pick up on if you were at all awake for this movie. I might have felt a closer connection to John Calvin than I usually do after watching August Rush, but at least I feel good about it. Third: People need to understand the idea that the human need to "hear" is constantly overlooked yet totally critical. Above all our chaos, which treats no two people alike, is some music common to everyone; furthermore, this music is always beautiful if you hear it, but the very thought of it is a total joke to people who have never listened for it. Does this remind you of anything else?

He who has ears to hear, let him hear.

And at the end of the day, even if everything I've said seems like pure rubbish to you, you should still see the movie in theaters to hear the amazing score through some really good speakers. Class dismissed.

No sense of proportion. Totally worthless.

2008-01-01T21:56:00.000-06:00

Even though I horribly overestimated the size of her finger, Tara said she'd marry me anyway. Sweet deal.

In case anyone cares...

2007-11-27T23:38:00.000-06:00

I'm really surprised at the lack of publicity surrounding the link between alfalfa sprouts and lupus. I just did a quick PubMed search of "lupus alfalfa sprouts" and found there was actually a bit of literature to back up the claim. Apparently, alfalfa contains a non-native amino acid called L-canavanine, which structurally resembles the native amino acid L-arginine and is often incorporated into proteins its place, producing defects in the folding patterns and function.

L-canavanine

L-arginine

Just thought you should know. And, I now feel be better prepared to defend my position if the person behind the counter at Bruegger's ever calls me out on hating sprouts again.

now with 33% more sanity!

2007-11-15T21:00:00.000-06:00

Updates are good every now and then. October came and went without one, as did the first half of November, but we're back in business now in some limited fashion. How neat.

In this issue, the focus will be gaining tangible progress toward achieving my goal of cumulatively posting 95 idiotic postulates.

Postulate #12: A wish for an ironic death has a higher chance of being realized than might otherwise be expected.

If you truly want to go out in an ironic fashion, and instead the grim reaper takes you by more conventional means (like having a stroke in your 80's), the fact that you were hoping for something more unusual makes the situation ironic in another way. However, this doesn't decrease your chance of having a "normal" ironic death, such as when Atkins died of a heart attack, or when an NRA lobbyist is killed by an assault weapon used in an armed robbery.

Postulate #13: At the time a pizza is entirely consumed except for a single slice, the survival prognosis for the last slice improves considerably. This effect is generalizable to all partitioned shared food items.

The consumption of community food is more complicated than you might think. There are multiple barriers that must be overcome for an entire (unit of whatever) to be consumed in a social setting. Consider a pan of brownies, cut and set on a table. The risk for an individual brownie of being consumed at time t is fairly low until the first brownie in the pan is taken. At this point, the hazard function for all brownies in the pan increases dramatically, and levels off until the brownies are nearly gone. At this point, it falls suddenly, as nobody wants to be the jerk who ate the last brownie. This last brownie will probably not be eaten until somebody needs to wash the pan the next day (or the next week in the case of my house).

Postulate #14: Facebook is becoming too bulky to sustain itself.

Facebook has been a widely adopted innovation among anybody who still has a chance of being cool. But as it has changed over time, it has become an increasingly more complicated organism, to the point where its utility is becoming compromised. The amount of advertising you'll have to suffer through while using it is only going to increase, that's a given. Also, the addition of hundreds of new "applications" (many of which serve nearly the same function but are incompatible with each other) overwhelm the news feed and notifications functions. Furthermore, the event feature is in danger of becoming a less formal craiglist of sorts, with three of the six events on my docket currently being equivalent to flyers for an apartment sublease deal, a cat needing a home and a moving sale. This effect is the most worrisome of the three to me, because I have a medium-sized social network and I am becoming desensitized to messages and events, but how much more so must it be for the people with 800 facebook friends? They must have an unquenchable stream of social spam coming at them. It is these people with 800 friends that are mostly responsible for the large-scale adoption of facebook (this is the so-called 80-20 rule, where 80% of the work is being done by 20% of the population. Read more about it in The Tipping Point.) Sustainable trends must not betray the original adopters, lest they go the way of Airwalk shoes.

Don't get me wrong, I still think facebook is great. I just worry for its future, that's all.

Postulate #15: The mechanism behind the widespread hate of the MS office paper clip character is classical Pavlovian conditioning.

Whenever you ask for help or are having trouble with something, there it is. And it appears at nearly the same time you notice that you're feeling frustrated with the stupid program because the stupid thing won't realize that I want three columns all the way down, or I really am trying to say beta sub-2, not vitamin B2, or something like that. The pairing of the office assistant with this feeling of frustration then continues when the unconditioned stimulus is removed, thus, we hate that damn paper clip whenever we see him now.

Minutiae

2007-09-23T22:49:00.000-05:00

So, as of yesterday (9/22), summer is over even in the most technical of senses. Can you say transvernal equinox? If you can, don't. People will think you are pompous and arrogant. I learned that lesson in middle school. That's a side note. I kinda feel like complaining about summer being over. I guess that won't make much of an entry though. Shoot.

Sometimes I post things on here because I have something to say. Other times, I post because I have an hour or so before I really feel like sleeping. Can you guess which of the two situations this is?

So, speaking of equinoxes, have you ever heard that on ten minutes on either side of the spring equinox, something in the Earth's magnetic field will change so that you can stand an egg on its small end? When I was in maybe third or fourth grade, my mom and my brother spent at least an hour trying to get that trick to work. Amazingly, we actually did get the eggs balanced after a lot of labor... but I'm pretty sure it had absolutely nothing to do with the sun's direct rays hitting a different side of an imaginary line going around the circumference of the earth. I guess what I'm wondering is, was my dad just making up this prank to keep us busy, or has anybody else ever heard something like that before?

I'm glad I told that story, it kept me from e-blathering about ethics in public health for a couple paragraphs. Sigh.

The blame game

2007-09-14T12:23:00.000-05:00

I was bored in class, so devised a flow chart to help people find the source of any general problem they might have. I call it culprit finder, v1.0.

--------------------------- Addendum, 9/17/07 -------------------
1) Click on the image to see it bigger.
2) Reproduction of this chart in any form without my expressed consent is not only legal but encouraged. Go nuts, Vicki.

On matters of belief

2007-09-07T16:21:00.000-05:00

I decided to create the new label 'personal parables' for this entry because the future is just history that has yet to be repeated. On second thought, I'm not sure about that, actually... but nonetheless I bet I'll be able to use it again. But enough nitpicking for now.

My friend Drew, who probably doesn't read this, has recently become rather fond of the idea that the 9/11 attacks from almost six years ago were actually some sort of conspiracy. If you're like me, you probably smirk at the ridiculousness of the idea. However, Drew is more than a little bit passionate about this issue, so, picking up on this, I've let him state his case on a couple of different occasions without trying to argue with him.

And the weird thing is, after listening to him long enough I can start to see a point coming through. The evidence is, remarkably, kind of compelling. Like for instance, the World Trade Center towers collapsed faster than should be allowed by physics under free-fall conditions (implying the use of explosives); larger fires in more poorly constructed skyscrapers didn't make them collapse; the building housing the SEC imploded even though it wasn't hit by a plane; the only video of Osama bin Laden claiming responsibility for the attacks looks fabricated. And so on.

So as for me, now I've gone from laughing at the notion to at least having to say I'm unsure. I think the facts are at least worth checking, and that research into the matter isn't necessarily a gigantic waste of time. I guess I'm a fence-sitter, if you will.

The question is, what can I learn from Drew when it comes to presenting the improbable to a skeptical audience? Because sharing the unbelievable is exactly what being a follower of Christ entails. The idea that God would become a person, die, and then be raised from the dead is really the same kind of improbability as a massive conspiracy being launched so that our government can start empire-building. In both cases, you start off with common knowledge, but if you honestly care about the truth you will need to learn more, to gather facts and draw conclusions. And you will want other people to do the same. The difference, of course, is that the stakes are much higher in the case of the gospel. What ingredients are we missing that make the average unbeliever unwilling to give the validity of Christ an honest evaluation? How much of the reception has to do with the passion of the presenter? That thought makes me a little bit nervous.

By extension, I think this also obligates Christians to be better at hearing other peoples' unlikely theories. It seems to me to be a classic case of doing unto others as I am done by: if I want people to hear me when I tell them that the dead are raised, I must also be willing to tolerate them telling me about things I might initially believe to be utter bullcrap in every way. The inconvenience I feel because of this is more than offset by the forgiveness that God offers for dropping everything to follow him. Amen?

Big questions (for little people)

2007-08-30T19:21:00.000-05:00

Today we discuss the issues that our readers *care about: which river is the best?

Facebook couldn't handle the topic.... can *you*?

IDTBOPP takes a look at some of the top responses.

Mississippi

Pros: Really, really long. Useful. Responsible for the founding of Minneapolis and thus has a profound impact on my social network.

Cons: Swallows freeway bridges that are very useful. Smells like butt. Too polluted to legally swim in. Responsible for the founding of New Orleans.

St. Croix

Pros: Fun to swim in, relatively clean, made nice cliffs by Taylor's falls, creates a much-needed barrier between us and Wisconsin.

Cons: Touches the Mississippi.

Cuyahoga

Pros: Only river to ever catch fire for an extended period of time

Cons: Only river to ever catch fire for an extended period of time

Red

Pros: Flows North, which is "out of the box" for a North American river. Keeps North Dakotans from just wandering into our turf. Carries more pesticides into hudson bay than water.

Cons: Flows North, which makes it a flooding hazard because of ice dams.

Yellow

Pros: Cradle of Chinese civilization; produces clean power for a people who don't lose sleep over burning soft coal to fill their energy needs

Cons: Has killed a million plus people in spring floods during the twentieth century alone. Furthermore, the name... *tee hee hee*.

Colorado

Pros: Had an active role in the formation of the grand canyon. Supposedly good for rafting on. Flows over the Hoover dam, producing around 2,000 MW of electricity.

Cons: Peters out south of the border such that it doesn't even reach the ocean anymore, giving Mexico just one more reason to hate us.

Simpsonic fun

2007-07-31T21:49:00.000-05:00

Self-portrait. Kind of.

If you are like me in that you can waste several hours playing around with newly discovered toys, perhaps you should reconsider reading this post, because I am about to advertise for one of said devices.

If you examine this link to the Simpson's movie page, you will find a feature called "Create your own Simpson's avatar" or something like that. I'm not going to insult you by giving some panzy instructions on how to use it, I'm just letting you know it's there.

So, I managed to "Simpsonize" myself and some other people who might read this blog. Without further ado, behold my avatar expo. Five perception points for correctly guessing who is who!

(A)

(B)

(E)

(F)

(G)

(H)

(I)

-------------------------- Addendum, 8/30/07 -------------------------

(A) is Tara. Obviously.

(B) is Hiland Overgaard. Nobody got this one.

(C) is phil Hintz, good job

(D) is, in fact, Coral Kuharenko.

(E)is my roommate Jon Schrupp.

(F) is supposed to be Chris Wachter, but I am but a mere man working with the lowly avatar creator, a woefully imperfect tool.
Apologies.

(G)is Dev. Good job Vicki and other contestant.

(H) is supposed to be Nicole, I thought the context of putting it next to Mike's might help with identifying it. I was probably wrong.

(I) is for "impossible to get", its supposed to be my mom at age 30 (I was working from an old picture.) I think I might actually be a little creeped out if anyone but her got that.

In other news...

2007-07-17T17:33:00.000-05:00

This is why going to college is a good thing.

Mid-years resolutions

2007-07-16T21:51:00.000-05:00

People who have an excess of this molecule in their blood are sixteen times more likely to be imprisoned.

I was probably a senior in high school when I saw the movie Evil Dead II. It was good for a chuckle but I really doubt it makes many peoples favorites list. I bring it up because there's this part in there where the main dude (Ash) basically has his hand get possessed, and he ends up lobbing it off at the wrist with a chainsaw. I think they were still trying to pass the series as part of the horror genre still, after all. Anyway, I had to wonder if whoever was writing the screenplay was intentionally trying to toe the line of Christian teaching or if it happened by complete accident. You have to admit, that scenario is right there in the bible:

"If your hand cause you to stumble, cut it off; it is better to enter life crippled than, having two hands, to go into hell..."- Mk 9:43

So, if your hand is clearly causing you to sin, cut it off. That part is crystal. The thing that makes this extra hard to apply is that in real life, things are hardly so distinct. When can you save your hand with antibiotics, and when is amputation the best course of action? Hands are a *great* thing to have two of, you know what I mean?

Okay. How this all ties into my woes with testosterone (the molecule you see at the top of the page but still don't care about) isn't what you probably thought of first. My dilemma is that I love playing ultimate frisbee, but lately I can't seem to make it through a game without turning into a total jackmunch. I've always been competetive but things seem to really have gotten out of hand. I criticize my teammates, I glare at the opposition, it's really ridiculous. Ugh. Then I get mad at myself about being mad, because what the crap dude, it's just a stupid game. At that point I have to just go and sulk for half an hour and wonder what's wrong with me.

Resolving to not play ultimate for the rest of the summer really feels like dying for me. Not just that but it feels like the easy way out in some sense. Isn't it cowardly to not trust for self-control and just play the freakin' game like a normal person? Yet still, when I look back at Christ's words, there it is, staring me in the face, convicting me.

The sweet lemons in the whole deal: if Christianity is made up, there's no way it's inventors would have made it this hard.

avocado advocacy

2007-06-19T12:43:00.000-05:00

I can never seem to fully express the inner joy that guacamole gives me. It warms me to my very core. It is bar none my favorite thing to bring to a party. If you've ever had any of the guac I make, you might think that I whip it up as a means to impress people, but really I'm just bringing it with the intentions of eating 3/4 of the bowl myself.

No, seriously.

That's is why I feel like it's in my best interests to publish my recipe.

*Three ripe avocados
*One large tomato, diced
*An entire onion (yes, really, the whole thing), diced
*Coupla tbsps. lime juice
*a spoon dried cilantro
*a lovin' spoonful of crushed red pepper.

Really, you can add these in any order that you like, but every second the avocados are citrus-less they oxidize a little, so I recommend adding the lime juice right after the goods are pitted and mashed.

It goes without saying that results may vary because I refuse to make it an exact science (are avocados, tomatoes and onions coming in standardized sizes now? No? That's what I thought) so try not to get hung up on whether to add one or one and a half tbsp. red pepper. Other than that, my only advice is make this a lot, especially when I'm around.

More treatises and the like

2007-06-05T00:45:00.000-05:00

I love June. It just doesn't get any better in our fair city. Obviously, I love June because its nice out and the higher education goes on hiatus, but it doesn't end there. I believe that there are some unappreciated subtelties that the month offers us as well, for instance, no hallmark holidays. Sometimes I think that June in Minnesota makes January worth it. Other times, I'm less of an idiot.

Anyhoo, my surplus of time this month has made this post possible, so, have some theses, kids.

Postulate #9: I just played a game of tetris that was totally unfair.

I always turn the piece statistics function on, because I'm a geek like that, and this is what it showed at the end of my ludicrously short and infuriating game.

13 ┬

10 ─┐

6 ┌┘

7 ‮‮ ⁫‮‪⁬‮‮⁫‮‪⁬□

6 └┐

9 ┌─

3 ──

Way, way too few straight pieces, I'm thinking.

If tetris were truly giving me pieces randomly and non-maliciously, we would expect each piece to appear 54/7 times. In the stats world we call this the "expected cell count".

The test statistic Q is calculated by summing the total from the quantity of each piece's expected count "u" minus the actual count "y" squared, divided by the expected count.

Mathematically, it looks something like this: Q= ∑(u-x)²/u

For our data, we calculate Q= (54/7-13)²/54/7 + (54/7-10)²/54/7 + (54/7-6)²/54/7 + (54/7-7)²/54/7 + (54/7-6)²/54/7 + (54/7-9)²/54/7 + (54/7-3)²/54/7 = 8.22

Under the hypothesis of randomness, then Q should follow a Chi-Square distribution with six degrees of freedom (7 cells, minus a degree of freedom for our estimate of u).

The 95th percentile for such a distribution is 7.815 according to Degroot and Schervish, my stat theory textbook. (See how useful it is? I'll sell it to whoever's interested at a reasonable price... anyone? anyone?)

Therefore, we can conclude that this game of tetris was significantly deviant from randomness at the p<0.05 style="font-style: italic;">Postulate #10: Having a girlfriend doesn't make me any less of a nerd.

See postulate #9.

Postulate #11: The world would be a better place if we just gave North Dakota back to the buffalo.

I went to a wedding in Bismarck last weekend, which cost me $126 in gas to cover the 1,000 insanely boring miles from and back to Minneapolis. North Dakota loses population every year, mostly because its residents are starting to realize how badly it sucks. Big, unused expanses of grass do pretty much nothing for our economy; however, buffaloes probably enjoy them or something. I dunno.

At least, if they're not ready as a state to throw in the towel quite yet, they should either A) make their state capitol building not look like a dorm or B) change their state motto. My first suggestion for a new tagline would be would be "We're sorry... we're really, really sorry."

This picture is better in a metaphorical sense, as the end of the rainbow is probably at the Minnesota border. To me, this was in fact a pot o' gold.

Boo Nodak. If I come back, it will be to exact revenge.

You can lead a horse to coffee...

2007-05-23T22:20:00.001-05:00

...
but you can't make him believe that its primary biological effect is competitive inhibition with adenosine receptors in the brain and that it won't really lead to dehydration. This is because by and large, horses are stupid and can't speak english or even understand simple hand signals.

I suppose I have to do a triathlon without using caffeine and keeping all other factors equal if I want to claim any sort of scientific validity about my experiment involving multiple cans of red bull making such an event go more smoothly. But 140 mg of caffeine and 48th out of 376 says it's probably okay.

Shut those old wives up, I've had enough of their stupid tales already

2007-05-18T14:53:00.000-05:00

I know I posted yesterday, but I have a bone to pick today.

I recently was reminded about how much I hate when somebody tries to refute actual knowledge with hearsay by simply being louder or more articulate. This happens to me all the time when I try to explain to people that FOR THE LAST TIME, DRINKING COFFEE DOES NOT DEHYDRATE YOU!

It's bad enough when people don't respect my opinion even if they don't know about the two years of lab work I did with nucleotides, the chemical family to which caffeine belongs. I'm not saying I know everything about it, I'm just saying that there's a very good chance I know more about this issue than you do. So please, once and for all, just hear me out and perhaps my good deed for today will be slashing through the ignorance that's out there and letting you be free from it.

Quick tangent before I start: people always seem to forget that science is about empirical observation. We explain things we observe with theories that cannot under any circumstance be proven, only evidenced by the observations. Proof in an absolute sense is for mathematicians and philosophers. Science, ironically, though its root word deals with knowledge, is always subject to a degree of uncertainty (be it ridiculously small sometimes) when in its pure form. It could be that tomorrow, apples will cease to fall back to earth when thrown into the air. That would certainly throw a monkey wrench into the theory of gravitation, and, we can't for certain say this *won't* happen. So if you're using science as your ultimate authority for defining truth you have my pity, and lots of it.

That said, when you try to explain to me with your freshman chemistry that caffeine will pull water into your bladder because it's a polar molecule (it is), you are really just mocking my trade. Especially when numerous studies such as Wemple (1997) and Tarnopolsky (1994) give evidence to the contrary. For more examples of how caffiene does not increase urine output when taken in normal amounts, look at the references listed on this page or this page.

I should say that when taken in exorbitantly large quantities, caffeine will make you pee and thus dehydrate you. But let's look at how large a dose it would take to illicit such a response. The threshold of diuresis for a non-tolerant person is 300 mg. To give some perspective, a cup of coffee has about 135 mg of caffeine in it and a can of Dew has about 55 mg in it. So, if you're not used to having any caffeine at all, you will need to slam six cans of mountain dew in a very short time to induce diuresis *from caffeine*. Of course, for experienced coffee drinkers it will take much more than this. Perhaps at this point I should remind you that the number one ingredient in the vast majority of beverages is water, and it is well documented that drinking water makes people pee, so if you're looking to your own experience for evidence to the contrary perhaps you should acknowledge the possibility for confounding.

After reading all of this, I think I've come off as a bit of a buttmunch so maybe I should just end this by saying that I know of the perfect opportunity for me to put my money where my mouth is. I'm running my first triathlon tomorrow morning, and I really would hate to give up my cup o' joe for the sake of superstition. I'll get some pictures and let you all know how it goes, maybe. Till then, peace out, and don't believe everything you hear.

An ode to Newton

2007-05-17T23:08:00.000-05:00

My computer seems to believe that today is may 17th. Can that be right?

Rhetorical questions like these always set you up for realizations of a more grand scale. Thoughts like "Another fast week bites the dust!" leads to "Next week will eventually be gone too" and "A collection of weeks that you have lived is sometimes referred to as 'a lifetime'. So I suppose all this is just to say something you already know, you are a vapor. Perhaps this is just a considerately placed escape clause; is reading this stupid post really worth your time? Weigh your options, reader. You are about to spend what could be hundreds or thousands of years in a small box under a piece of marble and you have stuff that probably needs your attention before then.

That I think is why I love this, this so called "exhibitionist practice of letting people read my journal" (of course, that is by no means what it is to me, but that's another argument for another time). This morning, I spent a couple of minutes sitting out on a dock in Northern Wisconsin this morning, freezing my ass off. The whole time I could hear what I have come to think of as the very voice of God telling me, "Hey, you! There is *good* out there and people need to hear about it! And here you are freezing on a dock, doing nothing, thinking that you're immortal or something!" So here I am now, and if I do nothing else today, I still have this small accomplishment that I did not fail to recognize that God should be getting my praise and yours in the time that it took me to write this post from scratch (well, okay, obviously not completely from scratch if you want to be like that again with the philosophy of externality).

Because let's face it, that's a major struggle of mine and probably yours as well: seeing a universe that is so packed full of cruelty and injustice and evil and admitting that there could possibly be a benevolent and all-powerful force behind it all. Sometimes the blackness seems to be the backdrop, and from our perspective there are just little pieces of something of any value at all shining through. Funny thing though, the shiny buggers that seem to be holes in the black fabric of the cosmos are actually multi-million-mile-wide balls of fusing gas atoms and the space around them is really nothing at all. This reminds me how much I love gravity. Seriously! That's all that really stands between us and a lifeless universe with a much more even distribution of matter. Just imagine what that would look like in the hypothetical absurdity where our own solar system is exactly as it is now, but the rest of the universe wasn't subject to gravity. No stars would ever take or hold shape, as there is there's really no other force that could possibly bring enough hydrogen atoms together to get the fusion process off the ground. We'd look up at the sky at night and see emptiness. The matter that comprises the stars we see now would still be there, floating around in space, but there would be no light generated for it to reflect, thereby alerting us of its existence. Praise God for classical Newtonian gravity.

Praise God for things to keep it in check, too. In the absence of other forces everything ever made that has mass and occupies space would eventually collide at the universe's center of mass. In the absence of other forces, your liver would, purely through gravitational attraction, pluck a leaf off of a tree in Japan and pull it straight through the earth so that your liver and the leaf could be as close to each other as possible. Dumb! Of course, since there are other forces like electromagnetism out there, we don't have to worry about that ever happening. But that still doesn't take away from the very real attraction that your liver and that leaf have. Gravity is thus undeniable proof of our connectedness. Any two people, even the most bitter and hateful people out there, are at the very minimum attracted to each other with a force equal to the product of their masses times the gravitational constant G, divided by the square of the distance between them. Think about it.

I suppose I've kind of detracted from the thrust of this post by waxing physical. So let me just reiterate. Find something good, and go tell someone about it, because someday you will meet your maker.

Brane phartz

2007-04-30T16:14:00.000-05:00

Okay. About April 2007: fastest month *ever*. Has anybody else noticed how time isn't what it used to be? I'm really starting to suspect that some evil supervillain has somehow succeeded in making the second ever slightly shorter, resulting in a net loss of maybe a few hours by the end of the day. Since I have absolutely no idea how that could even happen, I'm not going to try and do anything about it, I guess I'll just have to roll with the punches.

What?

It's funny how the two things that we feel most constrained by, time and money, are both just human inventions and exist only via social consensus. Time might be real in string theory, but just as a sort of dimensional space. Other than that its pretty much just a way of explaining sequences, right? Money, of course, used to be worth the gold that was backing it up, but now that's not even really true anymore as most of the world's money is imaginary. It's nothing more than perceived value. Let's consider the humor of this for a bit. Every time you make a purchase, you are basically ripping somebody off by giving them something mostly imaginary in exchange for some real quantity. The flipside is that every time you get your paycheck, you are receiving an imaginary quantity in exchange for the very real effort you gave to the man who keeps us down.

And yet still as I sit and write this, I'm starting to develop my own plans for maximizing things within my own time and money boundaries today.

Maybe I should live as a free man and only worry about *real* problems. Like the boogeyman for instance.

Or, after reading everything that I've come up with in this post, maybe a better option would be just taking 6 benadryl tablets and sleeping until finals blow over. The tests and interviews I had last week left me nicely insane for this weekend. I have this theory that the human brain will compensate for long periods of maintaining focus on study and attempt to "balance out" by producing complete nonsense thoughts in the wake of said times. I need a name for this effect and I'm in no state to come up with anything decent at this point.

Freakin' stat theory. Get out of my head.

Goods and services

2007-04-19T19:12:00.000-05:00

Postulate #6
I look like someone you know.

People tell me this an awful lot. They obviously don't realize how much I want to crank the sarcasm up to dangerous levels and say something like "Nooooo! Seriously? You know a guy that's 5'10" with an average build and brown hair? That's sooooo crazy!"

Postulate #7
People who abide by the five-second rule are actually healthier people than those who don't.

The five-second rule, though lacking any scientific basis for preventing fallen comidables from becoming contaminated, may be good for you because it provides great target practice for your immune system. In present day America, when we get sick, it's usually because we've inhaled an aerosol droplet of saliva from someone carrying a cold. It has nothing to do with whether or not we throw away food as soon as it hits the floor. Furthermore, people who won't eat any food of any kind at any degree of floor contact other than "none" are often uptight anyway, and being uptight is associated with higher levels of stress, which is associated with poorer health in general.

I'd like to see a cohort study done on this.

Postulate #8
The Twins would win more often if they brought Matt Garza up from AAA.

Duh. Obviously.

Beware of falling cheese

2007-04-08T12:01:00.000-05:00

Hey, blessed Easter to all in netland. I'm once again stranded in Texas for a weekend, being forced to relax, and by extension also blog. Indubitably, it's just downright swell outside, maybe 13° on a good temperture scale or 55° on a bad one. Thus, I have the window in the computer room open until my one of my parents finds out and complains, and they probably will pretty soon, as they've totally become southern panzies when it comes to temperatures. Funny.

So, we just got back from one of the weirder Easter services I've ever gone to. I woke up this morning honestly feeling joy about the resurrection, because hey, "If it's only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are above all men to be pitied." But then upon getting to church I started feeling something different entirely. I was greeted by hordes of well-dressed people with ridiculous smiles that were all trying as hard as possible to make sure I was completely comfortable as a visitor. And they were really failing at it pretty miserably. Invariably, people would say something like "Happy Easter!", and then we would introduce ourselves, and then we would realize that we didn't really want to hold a conversation with each other and awkwardly part ways. I was really happy when the service started.

For about 10 seconds that is. Then, the production started; the colored spotlights hit the stage, and like 6 different singers, which were all probably relatives of the guy from Office Space (the one with over thirty pieces of flair), unleashed a massive barrage of corny music on us. There was a severely mulleted band behind them, with more members than pre-plane crash Skynyrd. How could I possibly take them seriously? So, instead of clapping my hands nervously with the people around me, I ended up just crossing my arms and silently convicting them of lip service and insincerity. Anybody else see the irony here?

I, for one, have loved the movement toward authenticity, and it seems like more than a few churches have been trying to achieve that lately. How cool! But, woe is me if I come to take my own modus operandi of worship as the only right way to do it. Is it more effective to have a more mellow production that encourages reflection than to put on a show like you'd see inside the Magic Kingdom? Probably... but as the adage goes, form follows function, with regards to worship just like pretty much everything else. It all comes back to the gospel, and the good news is this, Christ died so that I can go and judge no more and worship him with my offensively cheesy Texan brothers and sisters for eternity. Amen.

Team Science!

2007-03-29T16:34:00.000-05:00

So, anybody want to contribute to science and possibly have a decent belly laugh in the process? I may be able to help. At the very least, this will give me a chance to use blogger 2.0's label feature. So it goes something like this.

When I was in college, one of my chums from campus crusade made a web page that will display a quote from a database of lots of them upon command. You can even, dare I say should even, add your own. At least click through a few of them, otherwise the rest of this entry may not make sense without the context.

So, after spending maybe half an hour cycling through quotes one night this winter break (I got really, really bored over break. Please don't hate me) I got to wondering, just how random is this so-called random quote generator?

There are a couple ways that we could answer this question. The simplest would probably be to just ask Amos how he coded the page.

Lame!

The alternative way would be to determine through experiment and statistical inference whether or not the quote generator is truly random. Much more work, to be sure, but on the other hand its a good project that I'm pretty sure has never been done before, and eventually I'm going to need a plan B presentation topic...

Ho: The random quote generator is, in fact, random.
Ha: The random quote generator is really only a quasi-random quote generator.

So, this is a theoretically easy thing to measure. Most quotes in the database are fairly short, no more than a few lines of text, thus I decided to add the entire Gettysburg address to the bank so that when a person is cycling through the quotes rather quickly it will still be easily recognizable. So, the experiment part is to simply refresh the page an exorbitantly large but known number of times and just record how many times Mr. Lincoln's speech is observed.

We can then perform a Pearson's chi-square test comparing the number we observe to the number we expect to see, given the null hypothesis of randomness. (The consequence of randomness, of course, is that all quotes in the database have a 1/X [X=the total # of quotes] probability of being displayed). Therefore, the expected number of times we see the Gettysburg address pop up is equal to the number n total refreshes in all trials times the probability p of occurrence.

The other hypothesis that I want to test is that the page is programmed to preferentially give the same quote as the previous refresh, but in a different color. I call this effect "color swap dejavu." If this turns out to be statistically significant, we can also infer quasi-randomness because of the weighting given to the last quote in the sequence.

In this case knowing how to do stuff is the easy part. Now the trick is to simply start counting up enough refreshes to produce at least 15 hits. I'm going to need a clicker and a lot of time, and, if you feel so inclined, some help gathering the data. I mean, let's face it, you want to know too, and the sooner we get enough hits, the sooner we can find out (with 95% confidence) what is going on in that thing.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Addendum 3/29/07
I just found some of the old data I took a while back. I swear, it was like 10 days worth of work, and also I swear I don't always use my time this frivolously. Anyhoo, it might help if you're foolish enough to assist in this project!

Ex n q hit? CSDJV
1 100 452 0 0
2 100 452 0 0
3 100 452 0 0
4 100 452 1 0
5 100 452 0 0
6 100 452 0 0
7 100 452 0 1
8 100 452 0 1
9 100 452 0 2
10 100 452 1 0
11 40 452 0 2
12 100 453 0 0
13 100 453 0 2
14 100 453 0 0
15 100 453 1 0

Walruses lay their eggs in trees.

2007-03-26T15:36:00.000-05:00

The eggs then hatch into larvae, which look much like cheese curls. Most do not survive to the pupal phase.

Ahem. (Looks around, nervously)

After following that act, this week's content may appear to make more sense.

I don't think I've been public enough about my music life lately. Therefore, I present, in no particular order, my "Top 5 albums I've recently either purchased or borrowed with intent to purchase":

1. OK Go- Oh No

This CD is pure euphoria. I love it. OK Go is a Chicago group that's really found a nice way to flavor straight-up indie rock. Yet behind it all, you can tell they have some geek tendencies. Oh No is their second release, and almost certainly their last as an independent production- they won a grammy for this video, which is, in fact, awesome.

If I had to choose a favorite track on this: Invincible

2. Switchfoot- Oh! Gravity
Oh! Gravity was officially released on 1/1/07, which coincided quite nicely which the free leaching offered all of New Year's Day on u-torrent. I was actually kind of disappointed with this one my first listen-through, especially the opening track(title) and closing track(let your love be strong). Perhaps it was because their previous release, Nothing Is Sound, would be in the running for my favorite album *ever*. Anyway, two weeks after the intial let-down, I decided to spin it again and found that that time, it was waaaaay better for some reason. I've probably heard it all the way through about 10 times now and it still hasn't stopped growing on me. My prediction: barring some sort of head injury to Jon Foreman, these guys are always going to be singing something worth hearing because their songs are just so lyrically sturdy.

Favorite Tracks:
Yesterdays, Awakening

3. Jars of Clay- Good Monsters
I've only heard this twice, as it just came out, but I can tell I'm going to be impressed with it already.

I've heard people say it's really different than stuff that the band has done before, and to that I just have to say "Whatever." Maybe the instrumentation might be different but it's still totally Jars of Clay. The first time I heard this CD was on St. Patty's day, and I had absolutely no idea what I was listening to until Dan Haseltine's instatly recognizable voice comes in.

Favorite Tracks:
Oh My God, if they would find a way to end it! What do they mean by the abrupt fizzle after a 2-minute build?
Otherwise: Good Monsters

4. Imogen Heap- Speak for Yourself

This lady is so original and talented. I'm kind of afraid that she's slated to die in a drug overdose or a suicide like so many other musicians that have those charcteristics.

I'd say this album employs the coolest use of vocal distortion I've ever heard.

Favorite Track:
Hide and Seek (Cliche of me to choose the blockbuster single? Maybe... so sue me.)

5. David Crowder Band- All I Can Say

This isn't necessarily new, it's actually their first CD. And technically, it's done by the University Baptist Church praise band, which just happened to have all the same members as David Crowder Band. There was a multi-year period of time that there was, I swear, zero copies of this available for purchase. But it's finally in print again! If you're a Crowder afficianado, you should go get it from their website or elsewhere.

The first track, All I Can Say, is one of the best songs that mankind has ever produced, and I will not be argued with on this matter.

------------------------------------------
Bonus list:
Dwarves that were cut in the waivers before Disney decided on the final seven for "Snow White":

1. Bleedy
2. Sweary
3. Inverse Hyperbolic Cosiney
4. Lispy
5. Gary

When thrift and Europe collide

2007-03-17T12:50:00.000-05:00

Warning: This post contains a (probably narcissistic) recount of my own exploits that could be offensive to some readers. Viewer discretion would be encouraged, except I obviously don't care that much because the content is here, ain't it? So continue at your own risk (and the risk of anyone else that might be affected if you have a slightly worse day, because lets face it, people are all connected at some level) of being hit by a literary cheese log.

So, I'm having a bit of reflection time after taking a three-hour nap today right now, and in case you were wondering, and you weren't, jet lag= very yes. But, everything good comes at some sort of cost. I mean, seriously, I'm so tired of hearing all that "the best things in life are free" bullcrap. Like, for instance, going to freakin' London for two days and Barcelona for four cost me about 1.2 kilobucks. But dag, yo, it was worth it.

First of all, did I mention it was only $1200, including air fare? It was, like a shade under seven Franklins to Gatwick, and then EasyJet is just ludicrously cheap, like $74 from London to Barcelona, which is almost worrying. Can that much money per person even cover the cost of fueling the plane? So getting to Europe isn't so bad, it's once you're there that the expenditures can get out of control. Luckily, both me and my little bro Nick (who sucked me into the whole Euro tour adventure) both carry the gene for thrift (if I had to guess, and I don't, thank God, I'd postulate it's on chromosome niner). It was pretty clutch of Nick to have a girlfriend who is studying abroad in Barcelona this semester, such that we could eat all of her food instead of buying it at restaurants. Turning continental breakfast into continental lunch by filling your pockets with ham and cheese also helps (that was more in London but whatev). And for the love of all that is good, don't take taxicabs.

Did I mention I love mass transit in Europe? I don't know why people would ever drive there, when it's like 20 Euros to fill the Nalgene-bottle sized gas tank in your Citroen or smart car, especially when the tubes and buses are so convenient. I mean, crap, in Barcelona, it was sunny with a high of 22 (aka 75 F) every day, so just walking somewhere, even for like an hour, was downright fun. Plus, this is what you get to see on the way:

The Spanish did pretty well for themselves when picking a place to live. Did I mention yet that Barcelona is the most beautiful city I've ever seen? It's only getting better, too. It's gonna be home to the coolest-looking cathedral *ever* built, Sagrada Familia, scheduled to be finished in 2021; this is the masterpiece of the genius architect Gaudi. If you don't know who he his, you should click here.

London wasn't bad either. The first night there, I broke a two-month fast from alcohol (I have my reasons but I'm not going to elaborate) with a John Smith's lager, which has revolutionized the way I view dark beer. Usually, I'm not so big of a fan of dark beer- I never recommend Guinness to anyone unless I think liquid yeast is their thing. But this John Smith's stuff was amazing. Same with Pedigree, which I had the next night, that was a lighter one that was just amazingly smooth. So, England, I laud you for your brewing. You just keep up the good work, ya hear?

And then some other stuff happened but I'll write about it later. Maybe. For now it's back to the grind (exasperated sigh).

Subtitle courtesy of David Crowder Band

2007-03-05T15:59:00.000-06:00

So, have I mentioned I'm going to Europe?

I'm going to Europe! In two hours. Not that I'm excited or anything, but I could pee my pants at any moment.

Sorry if it seems like I'm just bragging that next week is probably going to be more fun for me than it is for you. That wasn't the intention of this post. I really just want to talk about how ridiculously and almost nauseatingly lucky I am.

"The beauty of grace is that it makes life unfair"

-Relient K

Lives can change so dramatically and so quickly. It's scary if you're busy holding on to whatever you can, but its also a reason for the hopeless to hope. Providence can come in the blink of an eye just like misfortune... I think of where I was 3 months ago and where I am now and the difference those three months have made to me. And now here I am, awestruck, tazered by God's grace. Which is great, but, where do I go from here?

Psalm 50:7-15
This is God, your God,
speaking to you.
I don't find fault with your acts of worship,
the frequent burnt sacrifices you offer.
But why should I want your blue-ribbon bull,
or more and more goats from your herds?
Every creature in the forest is mine,
the wild animals on all the mountains.
I know every mountain bird by name;
the scampering field mice are my friends.
If I get hungry, do you think I'd tell you?
All creation and its bounty are mine.
Do you think I feast on venison?
or drink draughts of goats' blood?
Spread for me a banquet of praise,
serve High God a feast of kept promises,
And call for help when you're in trouble—
I'll help you, and you'll honor me."

So it turns out gratitude is all I can give. God already has everything he needs. What he wants is for me to give him credit. And that, mis amigos, is what I intend to do. So, the thesis part of the whole thing is that God has bailed me out of some trying times, and he can do the same for you. Our God is infinitely clutch! He totally knows it, too and actually looks forward to the next time he can rescue us. Why?

Really, that's for Him to answer. If I had to venture a guess, it's this: every bad situation you've been rescued from is, in some ways, just a metaphor for how God has rescued you from the ultimate bad situation of being both sinful and accountable for your actions. You were once an enemy of God, but now, not so much. Quite the reverse in fact.

I will sing, sing a new song... okay, have fun in North America, suckers.

giving five$

2007-02-25T16:59:00.000-06:00

Hey, check it out, it's a metaphor! If you make it through the interview part, you get the 3X5 deal!
------------------------------------------------
Five tips for landing a job

1) Begin the interview by showing that you're not passive. If the interviewer's office door isn't 100% open, kick the door AS HARD AS YOU CAN and force it so. Walk into the room with elbows locked at a 90 degree angle, keeping your palms facing each other, with fingertips pointed the direction your body is facing at all times. Think tense, think rigid. Avoid smooth movements as you approach the interviewer, this will make them think that you are too laid-back to hire.

2) Avoid eye contact at all costs until spoken to in harsh tones. Begin reciting pi to as many decimal places as you can in a nasally voice. Keep those eyes away from the interviewers!

3) Ignore their attempt to shake your hand. This is a trap. If you shake their hand, they force you to take your arms out of the "power position" that they have been in since entry. If you feel bad about leaving the interviewer hanging, you can turn your body such that your fingertips graze across their hand.

4) When they offer you a chair, do not respond to the first offer, or even the second. With any luck, you're still reciting pi; just keep doing your thing. You don't want them to think that you're the lazy type who will just sit down the first chance they get. Only sit down if they offer a third time and you can take a seat without losing muscle tension.

5) Keep avoiding eye contact as long as you can. Eye contact is only useful when people are in love or when they want to fight. Do you want either of those feelings to be communicated to the interviewer? Didn't think so. However, you probably won't be able to avoid it for the entire interview, so know the proper damage-control protocol: immediately lock eyes, turn your body, raise your shoulders (to make yourself appear larger) and begin hissing loudly. Wet your chair. Continue hissing until they look away.
--------------------------------
Five more of the "lesser spiritual gifts"

*Slowness
*Overreacting
*Deodorant
*Noogies
*Toastmanship

--------------------------------
Five of the least popular flavors of Best Yet soda
(only available in unwieldly 3L- bottles!)

*Pine
*Eggplant
*Butter
*Salsa con queso
*Yam

--------------------------------

Five of the weirdest allergies you could have

*Beaks
*Communism
*Limericks
*Static
*Bling

Fobonics as a second language

2007-02-22T18:20:00.000-06:00

Those of you that are still with us in radioland, thank you, we're sorry about the technical difficulties. [I'll think of some excuse later and insert it here].

It seems that some, and by some I mean one, of us was confused by my resolve to give up arson for lent. To them, I say: It's a freakin' joke. Of course I'm not really going to give up arson; I will continue to burn buildings down recreationally. Stopping just for lent would be blatant legalism.

I've been told that the common thread that runs between all things funny is the element of the unexpected. I guess I buy into it. Like in the case of the joke above, it's funny because the claim goes in the opposite direction that you expect it to go. Kinda like the tech stock I bought in 2000. Grrrr.

So I wonder, why is Engrish so funny? Is it because my brain expects people to follow the rules of my native language and gets surprised when they don't? Or is it because of some repressed ethnocentrism? Or just straight-up ethnocentrism? I should probably find out eventually, but in the meantime, hopefully I can continue to enjoy things like this trip down memory lane.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Addendum, 2/24/07
After further thought, I've become inclined to pick up a new pet project: the web-based crazy excuse generator. I'll let you know when I have some sort of product ready.

95 theses (give or take a few)

2007-02-12T18:41:00.000-06:00

I feel great today. So good, in fact, that I will put several of my own pet theories on the chopping block for the benefit of my readership. Happy hunting?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
It seemed pretty natural to wonder why I was not enjoying the situation as I sat stopped on 35 southbound. I was really pissed about not having taken the smart way, West River Parkway to Minnehaha Parkway, even though it really wouldn't have cut that much off the trip. But, at least I would have been moving the whole time, and that would have somehow been way better.

Postulate #1: We hate being stuck in traffic for the same reason we want more money.

So what I decided was that the universal hatred of being caught in bumper-to-bumper traffic is not because it makes people late but because it makes us feel powerless. You can't go forward, you can't go back, you can't change lanes, you just have to sit there until a gap opens up. There is, as far as I can tell, nothing you can do from the inside of your auto to make the cars in front of you move (and if there is a way, please share this knowledge with the rest of us). And because of that, you lack the freedom to go where you want to go and do what you want to do. And the freedom to do what you want to do is exactly the reason why you want more money than you have. So maybe the greedy among us really just appreciate personal freedom to a larger degree, or maybe people that take the roundabout way are also, in general, greedier than average, or maybe I'm just off base.
-----------------------------------------
Not to brag, but I'm pretty sure I have the spiritual gift of Tetris. If there was a Tetris section on the SAT, I probably would have gotten a free ride to Stanford. So, of course, I play a lot of it, and I've observed that when I do, the most comfortable position to put my legs in seems to be with my left ankle on top of my right knee. This is weird, because in almost every other situation, I prefer the mirror image of that position, with my right foot on my left knee. Why?

Postulate #2: The right hemisphere of the brain handles tetris, and increased activity in the right brain causes the left side of the body to be used preferentially.

We know that we all have our wires crossed when it comes to motor functions. The right side of your brain controls the muscles on the left side of your body. This is why when people flash a fake smile at you, the left corner of their mouth often goes higher than the right. Faking a smile is mostly taken care of by the right half of the brain. So it would make sense that the spatial abstraction required of my right brain by tetris "overrides" my default left-brain dominance, causing me to change the way I sit.
------------------------------------------------------
Who was this Valentine dude? The patron saint of corporate pawns?

Postulate #3: A rose by any other name would still be a ripoff.

Sweet lemons? Yeah, maybe. But I still think it's true.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Have you ever noticed that the vast majority of the memories you have from high school were from 11th and 12th grade? I realize that the contained events of the last half of high school happened more recently, so they should be fresher in your head, but still, there has to be something else going on here.

Postulate #4: The improved recollection of your junior and senior years of high school is caused largely by being able to legally operate a car for their duration.

Sometimes, you forget stuff because it's just not worth remembering. And it's amazing how much more interesting stuff I did once I didn't have to run it by my parents.
--------------------------------------------------------------

Ice-cream headaches, or brain freeze, or whatever you want to call it is caused by constriction in the blood vessels in your throat. The heat contained in your neck is transferred to the cold matter sliding down your esophagus as a consequence of thermodynamics, and as the temperature in your arteries decreases, they contract ever so slightly. This means less blood gets to your brain, so it complains.

Postulate #5: Wrapping a warm, wet towel around your neck will enable you to slam your milkshake as fast as you want.

This is actually verifiable by experiment, and I would have tried it already but I never have any ice cream around. A dollar to the first person to test this.

A sarcasm-soaked E-napkin

2007-02-05T18:47:00.000-06:00

I think notepad is kind of like a digital napkin. It may be a bit ghetto, but as long as you have a computer with the man's OS on it, notepad is always there when you need something handy to write a thought down that you *know* will be gone in five minutes but should probably be saved for future use. You then put your e-napkin in your e-pocket (aka gmail) and then immortalize it at your leisure.

So, thanks to notepad, a google chat conversation between myself and Steve Struthers has been saved for your entertainment.

Steve: http://jacobswellchurch.org/

its kinda a mega church

it seems a lot like if The Upper Room in Edina were transplanted to phillips/uptown

me: I love this line
"When we are handed a sheet of paper or click on a link with a list of statements, we believe that something vital is short-circuited. More than that, we become a brand: ??Oh, you're that kind of Christian/church.?? We are a brand culture. We don't want to be a brand church."

Steve: yeah, they got me with that

I clicked to on it to find out what brand they were

me: hahaha

categories save me so much thinking

do they realize what they're making me go through?

Steve: but by refusing a category,.. they become the "non-catagorizers",... which is basically Emergent Church

anyhow, thats how I decided to brand them despite their intention

everything needs a box

I have a box for non-boxers

me: give me a big enough box, and I'll get God into it...

Steve: you actually don't need that big of a box...

you just need to get a smaller god

me: maybe I'll look into that

Steve: they are easier to manage

and they cost less anyhow

me: I think that, because I am wise, I can exchange the glory of the incorruptible God for an image of corruptible man, and of birds and of four-footed creatures and reptiles

Steve: yes, but you have to be wise to do that

me: I only have to profess to be wise

there's a difference

Steve: it helps to sum up with long chains of logic to prove your wisdom and defend the box your God is in

me: right, because the world in it's wisdom can know God, that's why God uses the wise things to shame the foolish

Steve: exactly,.... think your way to God

its like a cosmic IQ test

figure out the divine way, get the right theology, and God has to let you into heaven

me: right, the only fair way to settle the score is to make grace available to those that can understand the mechanics behind it

Steve: just solve the puzzle

For it is by intelect of understanding God's grace that you have been saved through faith

it is the brain teaser of God,... not of works lest any man should boast

me: I think we're on the same page here

Steve: (Paul's first draft to the Romans)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Doh!

2007-02-04T23:48:00.000-06:00

I was going to write about something tonight, but I just hit my head *really* hard on the stairwell ceiling overhang thingy... I can't even think of what it's called right now. Brain... is... angry... No more overzealous descents down the steps please.

It's a blur!

2007-01-28T20:24:00.000-06:00

This has to be the best music video ever made. The song is top notch by itself, but any video featuring an anthropomorphic milk carton is obviously the jackpot. Check it out:

General mirth

2007-01-23T16:25:00.000-06:00

I love being a teaching assistant. At least right now, as I'm sitting here during my office hours getting paid to write this post. That's right, this is why they pay me the big bucks. Yesterday I just came to OH's to nap. It was glorious.

Before you read any further, I'd like you to ooooh and aaaaah over the new and improved sidebar, featuring the time remaining until a Minnesota team worth watching starts doing its thing again. Special thanks to Tim Johnson for providing the idea as well as the HTML code.

Here are some words that I find fun.

Defenestrate, transitive verb:
To throw out of a window.

"Only the truly perverted would dare to defenestrate Santa Claus."

Capernoited, adj
1) Crabby, peevish
2) Muddleheaded, tipsy

"The last time I was capernoited was when this bear gave me some white powder to try. But the bear didn't speak English -- I should have known something was wrong."- Hiland Overgaard

Lactomangulation, noun
The name for the event in which the act of opening of the milk carton is so badly performed that the reverse side must be used as a spout.

"I find you guilty of lactomangulation, and I denounce your deed! I don't suck at opening *your* milk!"

Okay, that's not a real word. But the first two totally are. Maybe more later?

Last on the agenda: the most wholesome place on the web, the daily puppy.
It's just like it sounds.

What's in bay six?

2007-01-20T13:45:00.000-06:00

So welcome to another installment of...whatever. I'm thinking about two ideas right now and I'm going to see if I can squish them together into a coherent post.

First order of business: I've decided that we all need secretaries. This week I spent most of the day, every day, running around like a headless chicken in a semi-valiant effort attempt to accomplish I don't even know what. I was trying to order some software for the class that I teach, but in order to get SAS at a non-ludicrous price, I have to be registered for classes myself to have student status. An in order to be registered for class, I needed a skin test for tuberculosis. And that, my friends, is ridiculous (do I have TB? No, I do not have TB. Why would I have TB?) And in order to get the test for that without paying an arm and a leg, I needed to get my student insurance renewed. So I go to the student health center (Boynton), get the paperwork, fill it out in the utterly stereotypical bureaucratic triplicate style. *So gross*. Between two separate -two step Mantoux tests, getting insurance forms, handing them in, handing in immunization docs, and then getting blood drawn as a sacrifice to the policy gods, I've been to Boynton eight times in the past two weeks. I'm pretty sure people think I work there now. So basically, if we meet at a party, and you tell me that you work as a health admin, you will lose your front teeth, and I will not feel remotely guilty about it. I hate you and I hate your red tape, unless I get a secretary to navigate through the maze of forms.

Complicating things, I have this inconvenient conviction that people that call themselves Christians should be regularly gathering together for prayer, hence I'm trying to reinstate the night of prayer at Hope and Hiawatha churches. But just try getting cooperation for something like that sometime, you'll feel like you need a secretary, or something. I have this theory that the best way to get people to attend is to get them involved with some aspect of the event, so we have songs, power point, greeters, an emcee, and all the stuff that people think they need. Basically, the night that I've put together for tomorrow is totally overkill- but at least it's a start. Here's what I see the church doing in Acts 2:

"They were continually devoting themselves to the apostles' teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer."

And here's what I see the church doing at the present:

"They were continually attending on Sunday mornings and feeling really good about singing songs, and developing more marketable theology while hoping that other people will have the whole prayer thing covered."

So, what I'm telling you to do is to start being a freeloader. Prayer is the one thing that we do that we don't do. It's all about saying "God, we can't do this, please take care of this for us." Realize that we are all the same in a lot of ways, and if you aren't praying for the church than there's a good chance that nobody is. Maybe God is willing to move, and he's just waiting until we're ready to give him some credit. Or maybe I've spent too much time on my soap box and I should get down. Either way, I still think you should come to Hiawatha church, 4155 41st Ave S., on Jan. 21st, 2007, from 6:30-8:30.

Waxing, waning and other tricks up the moon's sleeve

2007-01-10T15:21:00.000-06:00

Here's a story from yesterday morning. I was in my mostly automated start-the-day routine, and I had just changed into some fresh undies, and was working on the pants part of the outfit when I realized I had to fart. So I did, thrice, all of which were obnoxiously loud and of course, smelled like potpourri. Even in my barely conscious state of morning stupor, I was able to mentally articulate this thought: "I've only been wearing these boxers for like 30 seconds, and I've already ensured that they will smell like butt for the rest of the day." For some reason I thought about this event a couple hours later, and decided that it's a decent metaphor for the human condition in general. We're all given the clean underwear of a heart and soul and mind, and immediately we all fart in them in our own ways. And then we deal with the farts and the fart underwear the rest of our days.

Maybe some things that have happened in the last month are shaping my thoughts right now more than they should. I'm just saying, its kind of been something to cling to, I guess, that we're all a bunch of F-ups.

Yeah, about that. I've been on a bit of a hiatus from sharing opinions for the last lunar orbit for various reasons. Certainly not for lack of introspection though. Problem is, a lot of my ideas still aren't done cookin'. What it all means is that I'm being evasive, and if you've asked me how I'm doing anytime in the last couple weeks you've probably figured that out. Or been lied to. So, uh, I'm sorry, but I'm not.

So do you remember the scene at the very end of the movie Castaway, where Tom Hank's character is standing at this crossroads? That's totally me right now. Except that there's red tape blocking the road in every direction except the way I just came from. I'm just kind of frozen. Ugh.

On the other hand, I just joined up with last.fm, which is awesome, and craploads of fun. You can find out what it's all about by clicking here. Just know that it has my recommendation. If you do join up, come find me, my screen name is topher_anderson.

I hate yams

2006-12-12T21:41:00.000-06:00

Yesterday was one of those days where the most common phrase to run through my head was, "Aw, crap."

On Sunday, I had finally achieved the critical mass of moxie to ask this girl on a date, and she actually said yes. But apparently, that was only because I had caught her off guard and she panicked. She followed up with an email yesterday to make it abundantly clear that she thinks I'm an idiot. Reading the thing kinda gave me the same feeling that you get when you're driving, and you look in the mirror and see cherries flashing, and you know it's because of something you did. Except maybe multiplied like 20 times.

The real problem here isn't so much that this particular endeavor didn't pan out. The problem is that I'm 0 for my last 5 in engineering *relationships*. It begs the question, "What the hell is wrong with me? How did I become a real-life Charlie Brown?"

Some thoughts:
If I were a subatomic particle, I'd be a rejectron.
If I were a fruit, I'd be a rejectarine.
If I were a shape, I'd be a rejectangle.
If I were a flavor of Hi-C, I'd be rejecto cooler.
If I put both ports of a nine-volt battery on my tongue, I'd probably wish that I hadn't.

Okay, now for some adventures in statistics, such that I'm kind of studying for finals while I'm comlaining to cyberspace. Let's assume that if I ask a girl on a date, the probability of her actually going on the date with me is 10%. What is the probability that if I ask five girls out, none of them will say yes?

This is a classic binomial problem, with parameters p= 0.1 and n=5, and x= 0 sucesses. So, the probablity that this occurs is:
(n!/(x!*(n-x)!)* p^x * (1-p)^(n-x)
Which becomes : 5!/(0!*5!)*(0.1)^0*(0.9)^5 = 0.59, or 59% of the time.

So, that fact that I'm disappointed means that somewhere inside, I think that my chances should be greater than 10% when I ask a girl out, becuase that particular outcome of zero takers in five tries will occur more than half the time.

So maybe lets estimate a little higher, saying that my chances are 20%. How many times should I expect to get turned down again before I actually hit pay dirt?

This is will follow a geometric distribution, which has a "memoryless" property. Thus, the expected number of attempts needed is E(X)= 1/p = 1/0.2 = 5. Which fits with the theme of today (Aw, crap!) pretty well.

The very confused optimist inside of me keeps trying to point out that there could be something else going on, though. Like maybe I have some sort of mental power that turns normally intelligent girls into total dumbasses who make terrible decisions when I attempt to date them.
Or perhaps there's some way that I can consciously locate and dispose of THE STUPIDEST SELECTION CRITERION EVER, which is only trying for girls who are going to deny me.

We all know that they say when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. But what about when life gives you diarrhea? At that point, you should just leave life's little present alone. Don't do anything with it, and don't even think the word "smoothie". So, is this the first case or the second? I've been trying to think of some positives, which would imply that the first is correct. Here's what I have so far:

-I don't have to clean my car out anymore
-I don't have to pay for a date with money that came from a student loan
-I don't have to shave until Christmas
-I have one less stupid present to buy
-Denial helps me study

Which is what I should be doing now. Alrighty then. Next entry from Texas! Woohoo, or something.

The robot war has a brief armistice.

2006-11-22T17:43:00.000-06:00

So last week I was in my shared office, cramming for something or another, and had one of those moments where you all of a sudden realize that you've been staring at something for a while that has nothing to do with your coursework. Not the staring at something with intent to glean information kind of staring, more of the "I'm looking off into space and anything that is technically in my line of sight will stay there for awhile" kind of staring. If you know what I'm talking about, then you also probably know that coming back to reality can be a weird experience because you haven't been seeing whatever it is your eyes were looking at in your head, but you still know something about it. In this particular situation, the thing that was in the way of my gaze was this health advisory poster from Boynton:

Signs of chronic stress
Physiological
*Headaches
* Insomnia
* Gastrointestinal problems
* Weakened immune systems
* Fluctuations in eating patterns and weight
* Fatigue
Psychological
* Irritability
* "Low" moods
* Impulsivity
* Inability to concentrate
* Low motivation
* Emotional tension
* Behavioral and attitudinal Perfectionism
* Procrastination
* Avoidance
* Dissatisfaction, disenchantment, or cynicism
* Isolation or disconnection
* Overcommitment or feeling pressured

And then, as I came out of my trance, it dawned on me that in the past couple weeks I've had all these symptoms (except the GI problems, thank God) at some point.

Therefore, if this that stupid poster is worth anything, I guess I've been a little bit stressed out. But, I have some questions about the matter. Aren't these really common symptoms, that everybody is going to deal with to varying degrees? Can we just say that life is stressful?

Then again, there's a chance they could know what they're talking about. I mean, I have a right to be happy about the 4-day weekend that starts tonight, but probably not *this* happy. I admit, I was gettin' my dance on at the bus stop this afternoon; every now and then you find yourself in such a situation and I think are morally obligated to act on impulse (which, i suppose, is a sign of chronic stress). What's the worst that will happen in that case? That someone you've never met before and won't ever see again might enjoy seeing you do something out of the ordinary?

This might be another entry where my conclusion ends up being "whatever", but as such, I don't care. Thanksgiving rocks and that's mostly what I wanted to say anyway.

Nevermind, one more thing: As part of my expected thanksgiving rumination about my various blessings, again I'm really, really thankful that farts aren't socially contagious like yawns are. Just imagine it, you observe another person fart, and then all of a sudden you have this incredible urge to pass gas, too. In a room of 500 people, there would be a toxic gas buildup in less than an hour unless there was awesome ventilation going on. Although that would be a barrier to the formation of the megachurch... hmmmm....

And the apathetic will disco down

2006-11-08T17:28:00.000-06:00

Today marks the start of the political offseason. Finally. This is the beauty of representative democracy to me: I only have to think about the issues once every couple of years. And, now that I've lost any sort of power I had until the next election, *they* (and we know who they are) leave me alone. No more crap flyers under my wiper blades. No more TV commercials about how the other candidate enjoys shooting at children with a pellet gun. The advertising gets so ridiculous that it almost makes me wish we lived in a dictatorship, where all you see are positive ads for whatever despot is at the top of the food chain.

Okay, maybe that's overdoing it, but still, don't you just wish the powers that be would give you some credit? Now we have, like maybe a 2-week window where you're not being screamed at about what you should do. Then, the consumerism season hits and instead of being told how to vote you get told where to spend your money (your family needs this piece of crap that we're vending or they will think you hate them!).

So I guess my point is go watch TV, while the ads are still harmless and inane? Or, maybe it's that life is too valuable to be spent throwing poo at others, metaphorically to be sure, but please not literally either. Or, it could be that Amy Klobuchar should celebrate her victory by getting some orthodontic work done, for the people, Amy, for the people.

This woman sold crack to your children!
Paid for by the campaign to re-elect Mark Kennedy

Question Marx

2006-11-02T20:34:00.000-06:00

Man, this blog is lame. Really, lame and square. Not at all what I intended. I don't really see the point in getting rid of it. Or even trying to reform it. But not just ignoring it either, I can't do that. Know this though: things will change. Bet on it.

However, I think a side project is totally what I need right now. One that's more of a social event than this. So, I proposed starting a team blog, and there's at least an outside shot of everything actually coming together. A lot still needs to happen, mostly recruiting and such, but if it does, I suspect that most of my creative energy will go into that and most of my complainage will go into this. Because obviously, I'll still need a whining pedestal, ya know?

A few weeks ago I was (evidently, if you read motive soup) wondering what the point of doing this experiment in bloggery was, and since then I've decided that it could be both just for me and to be more connected to other people, but the balance was probably shifted more toward the second one of the two options. So, in achieving that end, it makes less sense than I'm comfortable with to be doing this as a solo act.

Furthermore, despite my best efforts to be real, I'm discovering that the me that occurs in isolation is really just a substandard imitation of the me that happens in a more social context. So, why not use the good version of yourself to do your self-expression when you have the choice? It's basically the same decision as putting gel in your hair, and we do that all the time without fear of condemnation.

Part of humility is not constantly running to cover up your faults. Hence the non-deletion of things I don't entirely know about anymore. But on the other hand, we owe it to each other as people, and even to the one who created you to, as cheesy as it may sound, be the best freakin person you can be. Hence the goal of writing better stuff in the future.

And, if it applies, sorry about any tuna contamination that I might have accidently introduced to the community mayo.

Going public, again

2006-10-24T23:13:00.000-05:00

After much deliberation, I decided to put a link to this page back on facebook again, which, according to site meter, was responsible for about 90% of the referrals to this page. I've kind of wavered back and forth as to what the point of this blog actually is- is it a journal that serves mainly to preserve thoughts that I fancied were (at one time) worth keeping, or is it more of a social thing that serves to let me be better known by those that are interested? Or, is it both, or neither? I guess however you classify the animal, I think I should work on striving toward being more of an open book.

Maybe more on this later. But right now, I hear the words of my former mentor Joe Phillips echoing in my head: "Sleep is worship."

Amen.

Riding a unicycle off the deep end

2006-10-23T23:12:00.000-05:00

You know what's really fun? Winding down from midterms. I think that my mind tries to make up for the hours of intense focus spent studying beforehand by letting various schemas and social conventions slide a little bit more than usual. Which is great. When I'm not scaring people, that is. I think I'm about, we'll say five times more likely to talk in a weird accent for no explainable reason. I am all of a sudden much more susceptible to random dancing. And, blowing bubbles in my milk. *Chocolate* milk. And hiding behind the couch. And probably more stuff...

Now here's the most beautiful part about it all: the midterm I took was in my regression class.

I'll probably be back to normal by tomorrow afternoon, which is almost a shame, because even though there's a decent chance I bombed the exam, I'm still in some kind of euphoric state.

I suppose I should be making the most of this. Time to go fight the giant rocket turtle, I guess. Freakin' Gamura. Or take my medicine. Which is also imaginary. Hmmm.

Motive soup

2006-10-16T21:04:00.000-05:00

Influence.

About a minute ago I was thinking about the word itself and I may be onto to something.

'Fluence' is simply some derivative of the latin for flow, right? I'm looking up the root right now.

Apparently, a webpage from some secondary school in Washington state will back me up.

So then influence as a verb is the act of flowing into something. To influence someone, you flow into them. And to be influenced by someone, you let them flow into you. And to succumb to influences, all one must do is go with the flow.

What brought this all up is that I've been wondering what role I'm playing or I'm even trying to play in the lives of the people I know. The whole bit's kinda frustrating, really. Is my desire to alter the trajectories of friends and fam, supposedly for the better, really just another form of the chronic attention-seeking that I've always suffered from? If it is, what do I do about it? Seriously, it's a burning moral question, is it possible for me to be visible and humble at the same time? It seems at first that there's a simple answer, but then you think about what it would look like when you're just living life, shootin' the breeze with some people in a random entryway in a random building and you come up with the best damn joke in the world. On one hand, you know that your motives for telling the joke might not be up to code, but on the other, if you hold it in, you're depriving your fellow participants of gut-wrenching laughter, literally stealing that amazing moment from them.

Maybe for me, my problem isn't the wanting to be seen, my problem is the terms and conditions that I attach. Because sometimes, I really don't want to be seen. Last week was an academic pressure-cooker for me. It might be the thing I hate most about school: the constant realization that any person, pick any person, from my circle of friends or acquaintances is great and all, but they sure as hell won't help me rock my stat theory midterm. That's up to me and the empty seats on either side of me as I study in the SPH student commons, conveniently sitting two stories underground where cell-phone reception is completely implausible.

So here's the hypothesis: if people were more important to me, I would be more important to them. I'm not saying I should give up on my master's degree, that's all good and everything. But it's unreasonable to ask for a larger share of the hearts of those around you if you plan to vacate whenever is most convenient for you. To bring this full circle, influence is a giving of oneself, in some form or another. And constant influence, in the form that I want anyhow, means constant self-giving.

And the rest is best left undisturbed for now, I think.

Bubble Tape was cool once too

2006-10-14T02:07:00.000-05:00

I’m not going to pretend this entry is at all normal within the scope of society as a whole. But, you don’t read my entries because they’re normal. You read what I write because I’m the twentysomething with suspect mental stability that still slides down railings.

Submitted for your edification:

Campus Bannister Sliding Report, 2006-07

Coffman union, stairs from patio to Delaware St.

-This railing is a good long slide, but has one of those flat parts at the end that might hurt a bit if you don’t jump off in time. Rating: ☺☺☺

Moos tower, Washington ave. exit to 2^nd floor

-There are three great railings to choose from here, all of which are good for a joy ride. Absolutely useless between classes, when people going up the stairs actually use them as intended. What a bunch of squares. Rating: ☺☺☺

Walter library north interior stairwell

- It’s a huge, marble railing that’s super fast with a convenient landing step at the bottom. The only problem is that a balance error will probably land you in traction at Fairview, if you’re lucky. Rating: ☺☺

Moos tower 2-620 auditorium

- A bunch of little mini-rails going down the aisle of a stadium-seated auditorium. None of them really provide enough incident angle for a decent ride. A great way to look stupid. Rating: ☺

Ford hall, west interior stairwell

-The best I’ve found yet. The paint that they used in the early 1970’s must cut down on rail-to-pants friction. Also, seldom being used by anyone else.

Rating: ☺☺☺☺☺

Hasselmo hall, church st. exit

- Short and sweet, a good ride to be sure, but again, a timely dismount is required to avoid getting owned by the flat part of the raling at the bottom of the steps. Rating: ☺☺

Cancer center, river road exit

- Twenty angled feet of solid cement surface. Impossible to slide upon. Good for anyone who hates himself. Bad for anyone who is trying to enjoy life. Rating: um…

Mostly harmless musings

2006-09-22T21:25:00.000-05:00

Editor's note v2.1, 10/04/06
There's no way around it. I am a blogtard. I'm way past being able to look smart with this last post and now I'm just trying for not completely stupid. Frickin pictures, frickin margins, is it really that hard to understand what I want without me telling it in html?

I've fixed and republished this thing sooooo many times. I know there has to be somebody watching this unfold, and I'm sure they are laughing at me.
--------

I was thinking last week that I should probably get to writing another entry in this thing before I'm waist-deep in fall semester and too preoccupied with the, um, magic of everyday activities to bother with keeping thoughts that aren't answers to some problem. Also, it won't hurt to bury some of the last entries I put into this thing with some fresh material. I'm looking back on some of the crap I wrote last month and seeing the merit of taking the link to this McBlogg off of facebook.

For some reason that may or may not have to do with three of my classes, I've been thinking about statistical significance lately. Is 95% confidence enough for the amount of results that we're taking as gospel? If you've read about what one hundred studies have just found every year (that are significant on the p<0.05>level but not on the p<0.01 level), you can expect 1-5 of them to be bunk. So, don't believe everything you read. Including this, I guess.

Speaking of questionable findings, one of my roommates somehow convinced the other six of us to take the Myers-Briggs test and send him the results back, because it would be fun or something. Ah, the Myers-Briggs. Fascinating stuff; too bad it's horribly overrated. I think there's definitely something that's widely appealing about getting all the stuff that is personality boiled down to four binary variables. But we're totally fooling ourselves if we think we're even remotely consistent in attitude or behavior from situation to situation. I can be really laid- back or completely driven, it just depends on when and where I'm being looked at. I know people who really love the test, and I'm sure they'd try and defend it by saying, "But it just tells you what your general disposition is- the way you're hard-wired." Nay, I say. Not that test. The MB asks specific questions, that people are most likely answering with specific instances and past events in mind, and getting general results back. It's totally skewed to give more weight to recent actions, too. My roommate Phil Hintz thinks he's a fieldmarshal because he took the test after coming back from work as a shift leader at Pizza Hut. Yeah, sure. Phil Hintz is the most diplomatic, happy-go-lucky, don't-worry-about-it-I-might-pull-through-it's-just-a-flesh-wound kind of guy I know. And this is just one of many examples where the MB misses the boat. Now, if there was a way to make people take the thing the right way, I might put some more stock in it. But as it stands, there isn't, and I'll continue to think of it as horoscopes for the educated.

BTW, I have to point out that my roommates are all great, every last one of them. It's amazing how little conflict we have for having seven dudes in not that much space. Having seven dudes sharing one bathroom is a setup that's almost too ridiculous for a reality TV show. Technically, we have a downstairs bathroom too, but none of us is really brave enough to use it regularly. I call it the penalty box. There's talk of a home improvement project, and for once in my lifetime I'm actually interested, even if it is empirical evidence that I'm getting older. I don't know if this is a good first thing to try though. Behold the challenge:

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. And even though I think 'they' are idiots most of the time, I'll give them that much. So, having defined the problem thoroughly, it's time to move on to formulating a solution. This is where I'm stuck. I can't just move on to the experimentation phase; I'm afraid I might buy $400 dollars worth of stuff that *might* do something for it, and then break it in installation or find out it doesn't work like I hoped it would. Thus we learn that the scientific method CRASHES AND BURNS when it comes to improving your rented space.

I saw a random banana peel on the ground today, and initially I wasn't sure if I should look at it as a safety hazard or a potential comic moment. After pondering this question for maybe five or ten seconds I decided that I had never actually seen or even heard of anyone slipping on a banana peel before, and there was a nonzero chance that a squirrel might choke on it if I just left it there. And so inertia won out at that point, backed by the rationale "unless we come up with some awesome plan, we only have about thirty years to choke squirrels with banana peels, because some rather useless fungus is driving the Cavendish banana into extinction." Click on me if you care.

Last on the docket: I really hate planning events. I realize why I don't ever initiate things that involve lots of people. I'm working on trying to organize a night of prayer for my church(es, I suppose), and just feeling swamped by it. It's gonna involve a lot of being an adult to finish that job, which is another way of saying I'm going to have to do some stuff that I don't feel like doing. But, my prediction is that it will be worth it (which makes sense seeing as how I haven't thrown in the towel yet). I've heard way too many clever ideas lately for how we can make the Church a more loving place, but sadly none of them involve giving more individual and corporate attention to prayer. I mean, look at what we as Christians are- do we honestly think we can think our way around the problems that continuously sideline us? What we really need is actually for God to do something, folks. So, my point here is that you should help save the world and come to the night of prayer, 6:30 PM, Hope Community Church, 707 10th Ave S, Minneapolis.

Reflections on a personal object lesson

2006-08-28T11:10:00.000-05:00

When I was younger in my faith, I would read passages like 1 Corinthains 12, when Paul says "earnestly desire the grater gifts", and then pray something like, "God, please make me a prophet!". Before I really knew what was in the prophetic literature of the OT, I just kind of assumed that prophecy was some guy in a robe walking around doing miracles. Then I actually read the Old Testament, and saw that it was a lot more than that, that a common way for God to give a message to the covenant people was through an object lesson, which often came at the expense of the prophet. For instance, God told Ezekiel, to lay down on his side for several months, then bare his arm and prophesy against Jerusalem for their iniquities.

On Saturday, as I was driving back from St. Cloud, trying to make sense of some recent events, it occured to me that I may be an object lesson to some people in my life. I'm not claiming to be a prophet, but I think that God may still use events in a person's life to serve as warnings to others. And, if that's the case, please learn from this.

If you've read any of the previous entries I've posted on this blog, you'd probably have pieced together that this summer, I decided to pursue a girl who I had been friends with for a while. Long-ish story short, she turned me down, but insisted that we should still be good friends. It's been less than fun to live through, but it's a great illustration of what Christ goes through with us regularly. He comes to us, offering intimacy. We then counter-offer, saying, "Jesus, I like you, I have a great time with you, and I love what you do for me, but I'd like to keep getting what you give me from a safe distance. I'm really just too busy for something serious with you." He must just have to shake his head, thinking, "Don't you understand? You can't get all that I want to give you if you want me an arm's length away!" Seeing this analogy takes away from some of my anger, but adds to the grief that I'm feeling. Here I am, a flawed and evil man, completely bitter about being strung along and then shot down by another human like me, when I've done the same to the God who gave me life. Not only am I a reject, I'm a hypocrite on top of that.

What a wretched man I am! Who will set me free from this body of death? Thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ our Lord! (Rom 7:24-25)

Maybe I'm wrong, maybe the real reasons that the way this summer played out for me are way over my head, far too complicated to understand. That's a distinct possibility. Or on the other hand, maybe this will still make sense in the long run and I'll find out that my learning this lesson was the only reason for this paritcular unfolding of history. But either way, I still hold these truths: Behold, Christ stands at the door and knocks. Draw near to him, and he will draw near to you. You're as close to God as you want to be. It's high time to take his grace.

Love your enemies, kids

2006-08-25T11:04:00.000-05:00

Today, this is my greatest challenge. God, it seems impossible. I understand why I should, that makes perfect sense. In the words of Derek Webb, "My enemies are men like me". It's the execution of this principle that I have the trouble with. When I hurt, I find myself wanting others to hurt too, even though I know that I'm not redistributing the load of pain on myself, I'm creating a fresh load for someone else. That makes me a big dink. I try to emulate Christ, but if I got crucified today, would I be praying for the folks who did the deed?

Probably not. Which is exactly why Christ was up there dying for me in the first place. Because I am completely incompetent and worthless on my own. All I have is the hope in the truth of God's words when he says that his grace is enough. And if the best thing that I can ever be is the prodigal son, then dammit, that's all I ever want to be.

Your own life and opening lines to Dickens novels

2006-08-21T20:46:00.000-05:00

I've been a fan of Chuck Dickens since I read Oliver Twist in junior high. However, it recently occured to me that the way he started A Tale of Two Cities has kind of lost its poignancy now that we all seem to think our lives are melodramas and soap operas. "It was the best of times , it was the worst of times..."- isn't that all the time? When I say that, I'm assuming that a lot of other people in 21st century America share my problem of expecting thrills from real life, and getting, well, real life, and ending up disappointed. Don't think I'm entirely pointing the finger at movies here; I don't want to sit through two hours of the stuff that a real human should actually expect to encounter as they go through life, the waiting, the irrelevant details, the complicated people. What I want is to personally change in such a way that I totally believe this: it's better that I'm flesh and blood and spirit, and not someone's intellectual concoction that exists for the sake of entertainment.

I think I've gone back and forth from feeling really frustrated to having an eerie and surreal peace about a hundred times in the past two weeks. Perhaps not the best or the worst of times, but they get honorable mentions or something. Dare me to summarize?

First of all, there's the single most important relationship I have, me and God, and we've been getting along well lately, except for maybe today so far. But, when that's going well, there's really nothing that can run you off the road. Second, I'm still making easy money at UPS. What a sweet job, they pay me to keep a truck on the interstate for an hour and a half, get a workout for 40 minutes, and then stay awake for the drive back. It's just like stealing. Lastly, I've probably just lost a war that could have turned into my own personal Vietnam.
Sometimes I wonder what we'd be like as a nation if we had given up in Vietnam in 1965. Definitely, things would be different; maybe, things would be better. Certainly, we would not know what we know now, and certainly, hundreds of thousands of Americans and Vietnamese would still be alive. I think most would do well to see what happens if they ever get a chance to change the way we did things as a nation back then.

Right now, I'm still kinda hung up on the losing part. Rejection sucks. There's just no way to make it easier to handle. It's for real this time. I saw a winnable war ahead, she sees Vietnam. I'm going to be sore for awhile because what I realize that she doesn't seem to is that the only way to know what kind of war it is is to fight it. But whatev, I guess. If courage came easily, they wouldn't call it a virtue. So now I guess it my turn again to show my own.

Right after this angry poem, that is.

Dearest Cheslie, to what shall I compare thee?
Thou art like the sun
Because you burn careless idiots like myself.

Dearest Cheslie, to what shall I compare thee?
Thou art like I-494
Because youre always too frickin busy to take anywhere during peak hours
*and* I can count on you to make me 30 minutes later than I should be.

Dearest Cheslie, to what shall I compare thee?
Thou art like Qwest
Because when I try to settle something with you, you put me on hold for a long-ass time
and then hang up on me anyway without giving me an honest chance to negotiate.

Okay, break is over, I'm ready to be an adult about this again. Over and out.

2006-08-02T20:29:00.000-05:00

The world is a big enough place where you can always find someone who will put it better than you can. And today, whoever masterminded this demotivator really hit the nail on the head for me.

So the issue I'm dealing with right now is at best a case of garden variety disappointment with the situation surrounding my fave girl, and at worst a case of flat out rejection. Not that I'll be able to know for sure where it falls anytime soon.

There's an internal argument raging within me from various corners of the Wesleyan quadrilateral. The voice of scripture tells me that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life and that everything else I know is secondary. Then there's the voice of reason, telling me to cool down. After all, I live in a fallen world; who am I to demand exemption from its effects?

Opposite this is experience, which hasn't yet learned to use an inside voice. "CAN I JUST CATCH AN F'IN BREAK?! JUST ONCE?! AM I ASKING THAT MUCH TO HAVE SOME GIRL LOVE ME LIKE I LOVE HER?! WTF."

God, help me listen to what is right and not what is loudest.

Um, in other news, we have answers to some riddles from last week:

Beginner level: The sun.

Intermediate level: (V/Vw)•ρ, where V is the volume of the bag, Vw is the average volume of a woodchuck, and ρ is the unitless compressibility factor for woodchucks.

Awesome level: You cannot, under any circumstance, get a cat to perform that operation.
-------------------------------

Addendum, 8/7/06

Upon re-reading this thing a few days later, I have decided that 1) The penguin is my favorite flightless bird, 2) my formatting for some of this entry kinda stank, and 3) I definitely have the spiritual gift of overreacting. I think this post might really be funny in a few years when I look back on it. First of all, a little clarification, I don't think I got rejected on Wednesday night anymore. I did get a really confusing answer, to be sure, but if I was a little more careful with my equals signs, I could have saved myself a lot of grief. I was assuming "not yes" equals "no", which honestly to me still makes sense, even though other things imply it isn't as true as I might want to think. The whole"not yes" operator is a tricky one to interpret because coming from some girls, it means "I'm reaching for my mace" and from others it means "Ask me again later." Seems that Chels is the second type. So maybe my thespian antics of crying "Woe is me, Woe betide me, I am vanquished!" were a bit out of place. I might just have to add that to the pile of evidence that shows I'm human.

Closing note: I love my mom. She's one of my favorite people. I have never for more than a few seconds doubted that she loves me. Overall, she's come out way ahead of the curve, as far as moms go. But mom, I really don't appreciate the predisposition to paranoia that I inherited (that I *know* didn't come from dad). It makes a lot of work for anyone who's trying to get to know me, and it also makes me write blog entries when I should be sleeping. Don't take this the wrong way, mom. I love you a lot. I just want to stop being a turtle.

Random goods make you happy!

2006-07-29T18:13:00.000-05:00

Sometimes, you say what has to be said, and sometimes, it's best to just stop thinking and laugh. Hence, an assortment of stuff that I find funny.

1. You have my guarantee that this dinosaur is dumb.

2.

This is probably the most ridiculous thing I have ever seen. Anyone want to buy it for me to wear to parties?

3. Here are some riddles of various diffilculties, for those of us who like challenges.

Beginner level: I'm 186,000,000 miles away and really, really bright. What am I?

Intermediate level: How many woodchucks can you fit in a bag?

Awesome level: ĦœЏФ βηњ Ώй↔ ẫỚ βηњ ۞ ‮‮‭‡ ?

Answers next week? Until then, all I'm gonna offer is something cheesy, like, "You'll know it in your heart when you've solved the riddles."

4. God help me, I'm awkward. That's why I have these pre-packaged one-liners to resuscitate(sp?) my conversations when they fizzle into dead air:

-"So I stopped taking my meds today. If people die, they die."
-"Well, at least *I* didn't have anything to do with that mess of oil being spilled all over prince William sound! Poor shorebirds..."
-"I demand your gold in exchange for my solid waste!"
-"I guess there's nothing left for us to do here except swallow whatever we have in our pockets!"
-"I recently decided that pig fart and manure makes the best fuel."
-"Has anyone started their taxes for this year?"
-"So I *finally* figured out the math behind predestination."
-"I think that in most situations, I'd rather be respected and well-liked than on fire."
-"This is what it was like when I was aged in an oaken cask for six months, to develop a more mellow flavor."
-"Your face looks like road kill."
-"I don't mean to pry, but where do you fall on the whole 'wax paper' issue?"
-"That bear owes me a popsicle!"(This one works best when preceded by a sneer and muttered in an angry tone)
-"Sometimes, I like to just guess at the total volume of urine that humanity produces every day."
-"I know I haven't known you that long, but I can tell that if you were a keyboard character, you'd be an ampersand."
-"I think we should call Cleveland 'Pearl of the rust belt.'"
-"Little known fact: a horse poops six times a day, on average."
-"Can I just apply for German ethnicity, or aam I going to have to bribe someone?"
-"Should cows fly airplanes? They might not always make it to the bathroom on time, but darned if they don't stay cool during hostage situations!"
-"It's fun to criticize, but I know without a doubt that if I was el presidente, my foreign policy would be carpet bombing."
-"Besides talent, all our band needs is a name. How 'bout 'Star Duck and the head squishers'?"
-"Sure, you can stare at whatever you're staring at, but it won't make you any less boring." (don't try this one until you've tried a couple others from this list in the same exchange)

5. I have a poster of the procrastinator's creed that I meant to put up in my old apartment, but I moved out before I ever got around to the task. After all, I only lived there for nine months.

Irony is beautiful when it doesn't hurt.

6. I would wager that the University of Minnesota is the only place on earth that people have seen a squirrel die of natural causes.
7. I just had the letter O from a scrabble game fall out of my shorts, and lack a satisfying explanation.

8. If you're interested in turning this planet into spacedust, this link might help. Very witty, methinks.

Personally, I never understood why people would want to do something like that. What is their motive? Yet for a few years, we were totally dependent on Cpt. Planet to foil the schemes of Sly Sludge (on yonder side of page) and Doctor Blight.

8. I have recently come to the conclusion that it is no longer fashionable to talk about Darwin awards.

9. LOL, ROFL, Creed got sued for sucking.

Um, other stuff too, but, uh, big gulps, huh? That's great. Welp, see ya later!

Several short treatises amounting to madness

2006-05-18T23:01:00.000-05:00

Hey, good to be back (picks cobwebs out of hair). I'm going to stop promising things like "I'll blog more regularly". It's been bunk when I said it before, and I believe one of the definitions of insanity is expecting different results from the same action every time it's completed.

That said, it's thursday night, and I'm bored, and I think I've accumulated a critical mass of random thoughts. Behold as they spill before you into convenient categories.

Sports
Are they the opiate of the masses for the 20th and 21st century? I won't pull the trigger on taking a stance. If that hypothesis is somehow valid, I would in fact qualify as a druggie via my penchant for Major League Baseball.

With regards to the twins, their goose is cooked unless Terry Ryan can pull the trigger on a blockbuster trade. Most people say Torii Hunter to the Yankees, but I say Rondell White to *anyone* in exchange for a pack of crayons. He's a DH, but his thing is hitting into double plays. Sorry pal, you gotta go. Francisco Liriano will be the best pitcher in baseball someday; his stuff is absolutely filthy. But he can't save the team on his own.

The physical universe
In other news, I no longer find any practical relevance in Murphy's law. Contrary to popular belief, it is not an inherently pessimistic montra, but simply states, "given infinite time, anything will happen that can." However, infinite time is not something that the universe has to work with. Being a theist, I think the universe is not a permanent fixture. As stated in Psalm 45: "The heavens are the work of your hands/ they will perish, but you remain/ they will wear out like a garment/ you will roll them up like a robe". But even my more materialist friends agree that because of the 2nd law of thermodynamics, the universe is drawing toward a state of heat death, in which all energy will exist in a form that is useless for any chemical reaction or mechanical work. Bummer. This severely limits the plausibility of the condition for Murphy's law being met. Hence my conclusion, Murphy's law is valid in the hypothetical realm, but worthless to those of us stuck in a physical reality.

Infestations
There are mice in my house, and there are rats in the building where I work, which is a pain. But it makes me think, what if buildings were commonly infested with larger animals? People would be totally desensitized to the humor involved in buying a goat trap (really just a freakin huge rat trap), smearing some peanut butter on the lever, and finding a crushed goat on it the next morning. Maybe even a live goat, struggling to get free.

My problems
Girls want guys who appear really tough, but are actually really nice on the inside, or something. That's what my friend Sarah said, anyway. If that's true, it would explain a lot about why I'm single, because I'm a total panzy, but kind of a jerk once you get to know me. From the outset I've lost the idealist "He might be okay underneath" or "I can change him" girls. But down the road, I lose the more pessimistic "well, at least he'll be nice" crowd. My solution to this dilemma? The 5:00 shadow. I checked my attributes, it adds toughness +5.

Life would be a lot easier if it were like an RPG, because everything I owned would be accessible from an off-screen inventory whenver I needed it. It makes me wonder why you find so much stuff in chests in those games, because why do people need to store stuff if they can just carry it around with them wherever they go without any movement penalty?

Lameness
That is the only category to put MN state Highway 297 in. Here's a visual aid to help me state my case:
If you look really closely, you can see the sign that says "Speed Limit 25" in the background, as well as the end of the road. The really sad part is that I'm standing only a few hundred feet from the beginning of the road. It's 1/4 of a mile long.

Music
I'm listening to the alblum Funeral, by Arcade Fire. It's really good, and you should get it or something.

Until next we meet, fare thee well.

Calling your own bluff is tougher than you might think

2006-03-02T23:19:00.000-06:00

Ciao, friends. Qwest sucks, but despite this well-known fact I finally have internet again, which means I can make good on my commitment to blog more. I admit, resolution is really the wrong word for the thing that I made around new years. It was more of a proposition. Even without resolve, reasonable propositions might still count for something, am I right?

Anyone reading my last post probably assumed that I was being tongue-in-cheek or something when I promised to chart my sleep habits for all of cyberspace to see. You can laugh or cry, and you can judge me for wasting 60 minutes of my life, but all those who doubted me can go ahead and SUCK GRAPH!

"Great!", you might say, "But what does it mean?"

(On second thought, nobody I know would actually respond that way)

I intend to use heinous overgeneralizations and basic techniques taught in high school math to reach a nonsense answer to this question. So, when we assume linearity, we can see that the points fall around the best-fit line of y= 0.0104x+0.2968. This allows us to declare the following by extrapolation:

1) I got up at 7:20 the day before I started recording data points.
2) 67 days from now, I will be waking up shortly before midnight

The future looks bleak for me, friends. Or, maybe it's not so bad and I'm making some feeble point about jumping to conclusions or offering simple solutions for complicated situations.

In other news, I decided that if I had to choose a favorite book of the bible (and I don't have to choose one, so there), it might be Hebrews. That may be partly related to why I forced Hope On Campus to look at this last night:

"1Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. 2Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. 3Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart."

I think this is a good word for anyone, but especially those people who see alot of text (as found, for instance, on this post) and then skip to the end and try to just catch the concluding point. No, brother, that's what perseverance is about.

It's now late, and decent thoughts are getting harder to come by. Thanks for playing!

Blog rides again!

2005-12-22T23:04:00.000-06:00

Who woulda thunk that a 3-post blog would still be here after 15 months of neglect? Pure insanity! All of a sudden I got hit by a wave of fresh ambition tonight, and it culminated in my ressurrecting this thing. Perhaps this go around I can be a little more successful in getting stuff out of my head and into the aether of cyberspace, for the sake of posterity or something. Doesn't that sound noble? I could probably even turn in into a new year's resolution for ought-six. That'd make people think I'm deep, right?

Fools.

In other news, I'm staying over at my parents house in Texas for the next week and then some. On second thought, that's probably a closely related story to my newfound resolve to blog again. But I digress. There is nothing quite like raiding your parents fridge to brighten your day. Parents' houses must have some weird chemical in the air that makes their grown children not only gravitate toward the fridge, but feel completely at ease opening it up and plundering its contents with reckless abandon. You know I'm right. Conversely, staying over at the 'rents place can be a pain because even though I have nothing to do here, I can't sleep until noon because that will totally give them the impression that I do that all the time and that I'm living a life of slothful inertia back in Minnesota. Reflecting on whether I actually am or not makes me want to actually keep track of when I'm waking up and get a graph going. Has that been done by anyone sane before? Really, it wouldn't take that much time, the problem is that nobody else would really find reward in knowing when I woke up. I guess I don't care what time other people roll out of bed, why should they extend the favor?

On the other hand, people, we have science at stake here.

It's on now.

Scruffy will be okay, right dad?

2004-09-28T01:59:00.000-05:00

As last week slowly turned into this week, I kept getting hit over and over again by the notion that if I don't cough up 20 minutes or however long it takes to write an entry, this blog would be bound for oblivion. So good thing I saved it, for the sake of all those bored random people hitting next blog and actually reading these things. If you are one of them, I laud you for your discipline. Or something.
My classes have started requiring effort again, and even at semester #9 I still think I'm feeling some vestigial remain of shock that the coursework isn't always the child's play that the first couple weeks are. I had to write two papers last week, and I swear I hate doing that kind of stuff more than anyone who has ever lived. I think I'd rather have a leech on my eyeball than go through the process of typing those things again. Sick.
It looks like another semester of being overcomitted outside of class too. I have to find someone to play bass for me on Sunday, because I won't be able to make practice on wednesday. Of course, there's no question that it will be worth it to see Franz Ferdinand live at the Quest. But I guess my whole point is that I have other stuff I should be doing right now, and my work of perpetuating the blog is done for now anyway. Peace.

Has anyone seen my stupid glasses?

2004-09-20T17:32:00.000-05:00

Today marks the second monday in four months that I've missed my ritualistic ultimate frisbee pickup game. It's one of those days where a bunch of little annoyances attack your plans at the same time, and even though any one of them alone could be crushed, their superior numbers cause you to throw in the towel for the time being. It's probably for the better that I'm sitting here, waiting for my former roommate Dan to drop by and pick up the gigantic stack of with his name on it that has piled up this summer. He got three important looking pieces of mail from the federal student loan office; I hope those weren't as important as they might seem.
And then there's my sprained shoulder. Have you ever been completely focused on some activity, and just totally misjudge where the ground is? That was me a week ago. I don't recommend it to anyone without Wolverine-like healing ability. The whole ordeal could have been worse, I guess. I completely landed on my clavicle (or something) and heard a pop, but just assumed that since I didn't feel like screaming I didn't break anything and was just imagining stuff. Foolishness. It hurt soooooo bad the next day, I decided to see a doctor and get it x-rayed. It was mostly a lot of this stuff:
Doctor: Does it hurt when I do this?
Me: No.
Doctor: Does it hurt when I do this?
Me: No.
Doctor: Does it hur-
Me: AIEEEEE!!!!!
To top off my list of minor grievances against life is how lost my glasses are. I would pay at least 30 million turkish lira to get those back. I've been wearing contacts since I lost them two weeks ago, and my eyes are starting to complain a lot. I was about to put my contacts this morning when I looked in the mirror and saw how bloodshot my right eye was, and how that followed considering that there was a blatantly obvious stinging sensation coming from right about there too. At that point, it goes against all sense to put something into an eye that looks like that.
Dude(tte)s, if there's one thing blogs do well it's giving you a license to complain. I don't think I would have gone off like this in conversation, but it's so simple and probably freeing, or something, to make people know about all the non-physical things that I wish would become physical things so I could drag them up to the top of Oak street ramp and throw them over the edge.

Check 1, Check 1,2

2004-09-18T20:23:00.000-05:00

Hello to all my bored fans out in cyberspace, it's the Chris show, starring me (Chris) and Chris (me)! For the first time EVER!!!1 (gotta have the 1).
I'm going to be candid with you, reader. I don't at all deserve to have a podium in which I tell anyone able to type in the right web address about all my recent exploits and unqualified opinions. But, since important people that are doing interesting things usually don't have time for this crap, this is what we get. Thus, as the Frenchies say, C'est la brie. Really, they say that; I was there once.
I feel obligated to tell you some "important" stuff about me, because this is the first of my little bloglings to hatch. On the other hand, most of the people reading this are fellow members of the ADD generation, and will want to go ride bikes in less than a minute anyway. Maybe I should wrap things up already... my brownies are gonna be done in like 5 minutes anyway...
Okay, here's the basic dirt on me. I'm 22, and I'm 3 classes away from getting my Chemistry degree at the University of Minnesota. The implication here is that I am somewhat of a bum; I'm taking 12 credits this semester, 6 of which are the pass/fail kind. I quit my job as a research assistant last week, and I plan to live off of my meager stockpile (of rubles) that I have built until it runs out. The upside of this is I have more time on my hands than I've had since like 9th grade. Thus, it was either make this blog or learn how to juggle, and I still haven't worked up the determination to practice throwing and dropping those stupid machetes for long enough to get good at it. Bah!
Since I haven't told anyone about this yet, the forum topic this week is what the *spank* you are doing reading this. So go ahead now, comment away. Weirdo.