Winter conversation tips

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.

No sense of proportion. Totally worthless.

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

In case anyone cares...

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!

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

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

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

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)

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

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)

(C)




(D)

(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...

This is why going to college is a good thing.

Mid-years resolutions

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

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

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...

...
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

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

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

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

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

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!

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.
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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