Monday, June 29, 2009

In My Absence...

While I am away, you should check out Kayla's blog!
http://www.idunnouu.blogspot.com

Saturday, June 27, 2009

My Bad...

Sorry guys. I thought I'd have more time over the summer to blog... but it doesn't seem like I'll be near computers very often. I may spit out a post or two ever couple weeks, but don't count on my usual tenacity until the school year starts again. So let's take a brief hiatus, and I'll be back posting with regularity in a couple months. Thanks!

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Follow Up On New New Toy!

Well, it's been a couple days and that damn X-Ball is still just as amusing as ever.
Here are some examples of what you can make:










And here's my boss playing with it for an obscene amount of time:

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

New New Toy!!

In Chicago I bought an awesome new toy!
It's called the x-ball.
Worth every dollar I paid for it, and more. I must've spent four hours playing with this damn thing yesterday. Not only is it incredibly amusing and awesome, it's probably really good for your brain too. Supposedly it helps with coordination, creativity, and spatial processing. Even if it doesn't, it's a damn good toy. BUY IT!

Monday, June 22, 2009

Chi-town And New Toys!

Hey guys! Sorry I haven't posted in a little bit... Been a busy weekend, in fact right now I'm in Chicago exercising and blogging from my brand new iPhone!!

I promise I'll be back soon to keep the blog going.

Friday, June 19, 2009

The Idiot Escapades At Computer Geeks (Part IV)

Here we are again... in moron land.
So, as it always starts, a man comes in to the store with a very, very old printer. He says he just bought it and he's only missing the power cord. I tell him that we can't help him, and more than likely, no one can. On older models like that the power cords are proprietary, and even if he manages to find a cord it'll be worth more than the printer itself.
"Well, what's the printer worth?"
"Absolutely nothing." I tell him.
So he walks out the door, leaving the printer on our counter. Half an hour later our receptionist asks if she can just throw it away. Well, I don't care, I basically told the guy that it isn't worth it at all to fix, and he just leaves it here, so yeah, I tell her to throw it out.
Five minutes go by and the guy walks back in.
"Hey, can I have that printer back?"
So of course, I'm the f*cking supervisor, I get to go retrieve it from the dumpster.
Damn printer probably broke from falling into an empty, smelly, oversized garbage can. Of course, this poor guy will never know it, because he's never going to get the power cord for it!

Thursday, June 18, 2009

Almost Done... (2/16?)

It's 8:30 AM and I am about to take my final exam of this year (for Linguistics)... If I pass this exam I will receive my Associate's Degree... AT 18 YEARS OLD!
...
Actually, if I don't even go to this exam, I'll still get an 80% in the class... and still get my degree... AT 18 YEARS OLD! I'm still going though. I didn't wake up this early for nothing.

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

I'll Be Impressed If Anyone Reads This Whole Post

Yesterday I had a nice debate with my dad.
I don't remember how it started, but we ended up talking about free will.

The argument basically ran like this:
If there was a demon that could know everything about you up until the instant before you make a decision it would be able to predict with 100% accuracy what you will choose.  Most people have a definition of free will that runs somewhere along the lines of "Free will is being able to trick the demon." However, it is impossible to do any such thing.  The reason for this is that our choices are based on our personality, which is based on our history.  This personal history is made up of 3 things: genes (this may not be true, but it doesn't really matter for this argument), memories, and external stimuli.  Memories are simply the storage of external stimuli, so they don't really matter either.  But these forces that are acting upon you (external stimuli: friends, family, situations) to form your personality  are not uncontrollable, but the way they act upon you is. 

At this point my father argued that you do in fact control how your personality is formed.  He seemed to think that you can choose which past experiences you remember, or at least how you remembered them.  However, even if this is true, "you" are making that choice based on your personality, which is once again, based on your past experiences, therefore, not under control by you.  (Even if "you" somehow had control of which memories you store and how you recall them, "you" are still nothing more than a collection of previous memories, and the previous 'you's are simply collections of previous memories.  That causal chain can go all the way back up until your birth, which "you" could not possibly have chosen.  Ergo, none of the choices you make in your lifetime are truly yours.) 

This would usually be an effective disproof of the natural concept of free will, but my dad was not impressed.  I went over it a few times and pinpointed where he was getting lost.  It was around here:
If there were two identical versions of you in two identical universes about to make two identical choices they would always do the same thing.  That was what he didn't agree with.  So we simplified it.  Say there's a neuron that, when it fires, will cause you to blink.  If there were two identical universes with two identical firing neurons in two identical situations you would always blink in both universes.  He agreed with that too.  So I changed it so that the same neuron no longer controls your eyelid, but whether you'll choose toast or a banana for breakfast.  He no longer agreed.  Somehow he thought (and still thinks I would assume) that there's something that allows you to choose the outcome of your physical choices.  He said that the whole is more than the sum of its parts.  I asked him how that could possibly happen, and he had no idea, he just knew that it does.  

So basically my dad believes that even though all your choices are based on standard physical processes that occur in your brain, and in any other situation the outcome of these processes would be completely predictable, your conscious decisions are somehow affected by an unknowable, metaphysical force.  So, a soul.  He denies this allegation, but that's really the only thing it can come down to.

How about the one person who made it through this whole post? What do you think?

Do It!

If you haven't taken my advice and started reading Watchmen yet, you need to.  I'm working on a "paper" of sorts, all about it, so if you don't read Watchmen, you can't read my paper! And I need you to read my paper! It'll be incredibly philosophical and philanthropically intellectual.  And then, not only can you boast to your friends about how you've read Watchmen, but you'll be able to say you understand it better than them too!

P.S. Do NOT see the movie.

Monday, June 15, 2009

Baseball? You F*cking Kidding Me?

The world is surely in a sad state. Bryce Harper, a 16 year-old boy, is quitting high school to become a professional baseball player. He's going to make $20 million a year to play a f*cking sport. In what way is he bettering the world? People work for up to a decade getting a higher education degree so they can make, what? Maybe $100K a year (if they're incredibly lucky)? What are they going to do with this hard earned knowledge?.. Entertain people? F*ck this world.

I feel like ending this post with a quote from Idiot America:
"This is the moment in the hangover in which you discover that... things are in the wrong place. Religion is in the box where science used to be. Politics is on the shelf where you thought you left science the previous afternoon. Entertainment seems to have been knocked over and spilled on everything. We have rummaged ourselves into disorder."
America sucks.

Sunday, June 14, 2009

1.61803399

Tada! Phi. The golden ratio. 1.61803399 etc.



Actually, the uppercase (as is shown in the picture) more often represents (among a bajillion other things) the reciprocal of the golden ratio, or 1/1.61803399 = 0.61803399

Saturday, June 13, 2009

Here It Is...

I got my tattoo today! I'll post pictures later.

For now I'm off to pride fest with my ex-girlfriend...
Life is really strange :/

Some Thoughts On Religion

So I went to view my blog page and this quote popped up at the top:
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

-Steven Weinberg
I've been debating with my parents about this one for a while. Can religion really make a good person do an evil thing? Does the fact that he did an evil thing make him an evil person? Is a man who saves a kitten from a tree simply to impress his girlfriend still a good person? Is it our actions or our intentions that define our morality? What do you guys think?

Life Does Not Care

I find it hard to remember that. Everyone does.
We too often anthropomorphize life, remarking how cruel and unfair it (and sometimes even she) is. The universe is purely subjective (or so it seems). There are no lucky or unlucky people. Only perspectives and situations. The suffering, elation and apathy you experience is a direct consequence of how you view the events around you, because they have no intrinsic good or bad elements.

I don't know what the point of all this is. Perhaps it's a reminder to myself that complaining about how unfair my situation is implies that I have been wronged, and that I don't deserve it. But there is no wrong and there is no deserving, there is only perspective, and the happiness I created is it's own reward. Perhaps this rant has been to remind myself that there is nothing more beautiful than happiness suspended in an ether of meaninglessness and pure nothing. But above all, that everything I just said, and everything I will ever think is nothing but perspective.

Poll

The nice blogger over at atheistrev.com has called me out on my bullsh*t. He saw the poll on the sidebar (Do you believe in God?) and pointed out the fact that the "I don't know" is completely out of place.

I'm going to leave it for now, for fear of complicating things... but maybe in the future I'll post a new, more sensible one.

God's A Dick...

In my Linguistics class we were talking about the Tower of Babel... and I know we all realize that god is a dick, but I never really payed attention to this one before.

So it basically goes like this: all of humanity (god's creations) are working together to build a tower to heaven so that they can meet their father and almighty god. Well god, he doesn't like this at all. 'How dare they try and attain perfect happiness through cooperation!' and he makes everyone speak different languages so that all the esprit de corps is completely in vain. So since god was upset at our camaraderie, he made us forever live in discord.

The moral of the story? Peace and love are for chumps. Differences matter.
The end.
(god's an asshole)

Hm...

I don't know what's happening! I'm trying to keep up my posting... it isn't working so well :/
But, you'll be happy to hear, the Kindle I got for my birthday is awesomeeeee! Reading is funnnn.

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

The Idiot Escapades At Computer Geeks (Part III)

Jeez... a lot of these posts lately...
This'll be a short one, I promise.

I was helping someone through a computer problem over the phone and he thought that he sounded like an idiot. He really didn't sound like an idiot until he said, "Sorry I'm so bad at this. I'm not technically computer knowledgably saavy."

Yeah.

Friday, June 5, 2009

The Idiot Escapades At Computer Geeks (Part II)

A lady comes in. She seems nice, but slow. I replace the power chord on her laptop. She has trouble understanding what I did. I explain a couple of times and she feigns comprehension. I know she's still lost. That's okay, you don't need to understand a computer to use it (which is a travesty). She asks "What do I owe you?" and I say "Nothing." She says "Oh, thank you..." and before I can say "No problem," she says "...Jesus!" and looks up reverently into the sky with her arms outstretched.

I should have made her pay.

Thursday, June 4, 2009

Idiot America

I just bought an awesome book!
I've only just begun it, but even the intro is pure genius. It's called Idiot America. Here's a snippet. (The author is outraged at the Creation Museum's portrayal of dinosaurs on the ark and Adam as a eunuch.)
"These were impolite questions. Nobody asked them here by the cool pond tucked into the gentle hillside. Increasingly amazingly, nobody asked them outside the gates, either. It was impolite to wonder why our parents had sent us to college, and why generations of immigrants had sweated and bled so that their children could be educated, if not so that one day we would feel confident enough to look at a museum full of dinosaurs rigged to run six furlongs at Aqueduct and make the not unreasonable point that it was batshit crazy, and that anyone who believed this righteous hooey should be kept away from sharp objects and their own money. Instead, people go to court over this kind of thing.
Dinosaurs with saddles?
Dinosaurs on Noah's Ark?
Welcome to your new Eden.
Welcome to Idiot America.
"

Yeah, hopefully the rest is just as good. I'll keep you posted.

Tattoo!

Check it:

Probably getting that (phi) on my upper chest... left or right shoulder?

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Nerd Power, Hoooo!

I love nerdy jokes...
Particle Physics t-shirt @ SplitReason.com


I feel bad about it though, because I know the only reason I like them is because 90% of the population wouldn't understand them.

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Crap...

So... when I was in 8th grade they had us make time capsules for ourselves to open when we were graduating from high school.  I didn't go to the "unveiling" because I thought I remember everything I put in there... I was wrong.

There was a tiny note that read (in my handwriting):
"To the future me, from Callif.  I want a tattoo, get one for me.
P.S. Don't forget me."

Of course, I feel horrible... Past me would get so depressed if he knew I'd forgotten all about him (his favorite poet was John Keats... he wanted to be famously immortal), so I need to get a tattoo, because if I can't be loyal to myself I have no hope for the future.
I know, it's a rash, foolish, permanent decision... oh well.
Now to decide what to get...

Monday, June 1, 2009

A Beacon of Hope

Very rarely do I find something to rant about that gives me hope. TED Talks is one of those rare gems, a pinnacle of brightness in a bleak, cynical world.
"I'm fed up of talking about making change; you only make it by doing it."
I have such an insane amount of respect for these people. I can only hope that one day I will amount to something as great as the change these amazing people are bringing about.

Brain Damage

If you haven't heard yet, an abortion clinic doctor was killed in Kansas today. I learned this from PZ Myers, who also posted a link about getting a free pro-life book. Of course, I had to sign up for the book. It's a free book! Even if it is filled with drivel, it'll give me an opportunity to hone my argumentative logic. So I signed up, and got a verification e-mail from the author.

A cursory glance at the e-mail suggested nothing out of the ordinary... blah blah, thanks for signing up for my book. blah blah. But then, my critical reading eye started tingling...
"My father Ronald Reagan was touched by God many times, including when he was inspired to right his book Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation."
What?!?!?! He was inspired to right his book?!?!?! My poor brain is going to explode. I don't think I'll be physically able to read this book anymore.

Should anyone really be listening to this guy's opinion about moral issues anyways? He doesn't even know the difference between write and rong... bahahahaha.

Jay-Walking "Da Capital"

I wish my parents hadn't shown me this jaywalking video...


Yeah... now I remember why I'm so outraged all the time.