Het honey, let's go hu---ummm...

I just need the headboard, thanks. (A classmate found this while looking for a bed.)

Poll results (at last!)

Previous poll:

Q: I have lost all respect for:
A:
... Midgets (1/10, 10%)
... Superman (2/10, 20%)
... Authority figures in general (1/10, 10%)
... The Bayeux Tapestry (2/10, 20%)
... Something that I used to respect (5/10, 50%)
... Vertebrates (2/10, 20%)
... Your mom (3/10, 30%)

Total: 16/10, 160%

Check out the new poll!

Hey honey, let's go hunting!

Camouflage Lingerie & Swimwear. Yes, really.

Random silliness and other updates

My lappy died last week. It's still under warranty for a few more months, but blah blah words, I'm replacing it. We'll ship it in & see if they can fix it, & if so, then Ben has a lappy too. Yay! The sad part is that despite my vehement exhortations that I would never buy another Windows box, I can't afford right now to (a) buy a Mac and (b) buy Mac versions of the software I need for school. So I'm trapped in Windows land again. This makes me grrr. But so what? How does this affect you, the reader? I'll have limited access to the Internets until my new lappy arrives, and so will not post as often. The result is that you will need to find another way to spend your hard-earned Internets time.

Random fun notes:
An issue of the Minnesota Daily last week included a story about a first-year student (18 or 19 yrs old) who last spring (1) went to a party, (2) was served alcohol by a 20-year-old student, (3) become very intoxicated (0.31% blood-alcohol level), (4) left the party, and (5) fell to his death from a parking structure. All tragic & shit, but my favorite part is the end of the story, where the UMPD's chief is quoted as saying, "A death like this can have life-changing effects."

In today's Daily, a front page story about sports injuries includes this gem from Jennifer Kearns, associate director of NCAA public relations: "It could be a temporary condition or it could be, in some cases, a permanent condition." Really. It could be either one of those. So, y'know.

odds 'ñ' ends, cont.

(here's that thing i remembered)

... Ad heard on the radio: "Attention piano buyers: If you're thinking of buying a piano...."

Also, remember that thing I said a few days ago about undergrads? High school girls are worse by several orders of magnitude.

Bizarro world

I just looked at Lady With A Hat in Internet Exploder. It hurts me to say this, but I actually like the appearance better in IE than in Firefox. There's just something about the way the font is rendered that is nicer. Here's a visual, to save you the trouble of loading the page in both browsers.

Firefox:


Interxploder:

Call Alanis

One of my classmates has a tendency to talk. And talk. And to keep talking, and talking, and talking. And she doesn't really have anything to say, but just has to keep talking. She can tell you about how she had trouble parking her car, and that will lead her to talk about her boyfriend, and then she'll talk about a random medical procedure, and her drawing class, and a pair of shoes that's really uncomfortable.

Today, she came into our studio and said she'd called to get cable installed at her apartment. And the cable guy wouldn't stop talking. It took her 20 minutes to get off the phone, because he just kept talking.

Fortunately, I didn't have to leave the room, since everyone else was laughing too.

odds 'ñ' ends

...Today on the campus shuttle I saw something that I'm still trying to process. A fairly heavy person of indeterminate sex (probably female, so I'll use the feminine pronouns, but I'm not certain) stepped onto the bus. Her hair was buzzed on the sides, and the top was short - between 1 & 2 inches - and bleached to a yellower shade of blond. She might have been pierced, but if so it was only moderate. Maybe a nose ring or something - nothing outrageous. To complete this picture, dress her in standard college student garb - jeans, t-shirts in layers, sneakers. Make the t-shirt Coke-red with the words "Chick magnet" in black, accompanied by a cartoon drawing of a bespectacled, scrawny nerd, shirtless and flexing. I still don't know what it means. It may well keep me awake for a night or two.

...[I can't remember this item... if I do, I'll write it down so I can share it later.]

...From Heloise, she of the Helpful Hint, two tidbits (from the Strib, 9/17/07):

Plastic Grocery Bags
Dear Heloise: Please let your readers know that plastic grocery bags can be used at inner-city churches that have food pantries and clothing for the needy. I also take my bags to area nursing-home residents. SUE, via e-mail
For what? So they can tie one over their head and end their suffering? Or maybe the eccentric ones like to store things like their toenail clippings and feces.

Sound off
Dear Heloise: I refuse to use the "self checkouts" in grocery stores! Why should I pay the same price for my groceries, doing all the work myself, as the next person, who gets service? Give me at least 10 percent off my total grocery bill, and I might think about doing it myself. I know I am not the only one who thinks this way. BOB in Texas
Well, Bob, I'm not sure what to do with your helpful hint, but here's a couple of other things that might get you riled up: The newspaper used to cost a penny, and you still had change to buy a phosphate at the local malt shop! Plus, young people use curse words! And the whippersnappers have the gall to congregate in public places! When I was your age, computers used punch cards! You don't even know what those are!

Technology is starting to piss me off

First, it's shitty wireless access in the studio, which is not going to be repaired, apparently. Or, if it is, it's being repaired at the speed of administration (rather than the speed of business). In other words, it might be fixed by the time I die.

Then I lose my effing phone. It's been found, but it's still a pain in the ass.

Today, I scanned several maps over at the map library, and stored the images on my USB jump drive. I came to studio, and tried to (1) copy them to my laptop and (2) move some files to the jump drive so I could walk down three flights of stairs and print them.

I get a message that says, "This drive is full" or some shit. I hit OK. It's the last I see of my jump drive. The thing couldn't be found by any computer I tried it on. I had hoped that smashing it would bring some small satisfaction, but it turned out to be much harder than expected, and the effort involved negated any enjoyment I might have gotten from it.

I now need to go spend another hour at the map library, relocating the maps and scanning them again. I also had a bunch of other stuff on the drive, but I'm not sure what. I can only hope that it was all duplicated elsewhere. If not - well, as evidenced earlier this summer, 2007 is the year of irrecoverably lost information.

Rock, paper, scissors, dynamite, tornado, cockroach, quicksand, law, peace, snake, ...

Ahh, the old game of Rock-Paper-Scissors... perfect for making those tough life decisions: Who's going to make dinner? Whose turn is it to ask for an abortion? Which person gets a new desk? But what if we threw a couple more choices in there?

RPS-25 was created to provide a more complex game with more possible outcomes. Each item is dominant over 12 others, and the result is 300 possible outcomes. But why stop there? The inventor of RPS-25 took things 76 steps further & gave us RPS-101. Each gesture defeats 50 of the remaining 100, the result being a total of 5,050 possible outcomes.

Some of my favorites:
DYNAMITE explodes BABY (actually, DYNAMITE explodes a lot of stuff....)
SPIDER in your BEER
BEER diffracts LASER
MATH confuses PRINCESS
MATH enrages MONKEY
SCISSORS alert AIRPLANE security
and any of the BRAIN ones....
BRAIN invents BUTTER
....... foils VAMPIRE
....... performs MATH

Climate change

I know that it's happening, but some of these manifestations are odd, to say the least. Thursday's Strib offered this forecast for the morning: "53° Light jackets, a few clouds."

Screw the world - Jeebus is coming back soon!

"End Times" Theology Endangers Us All

I've believed this for a long time, but haven't taken the time to express it so clearly.

HoTT T33n GurrrlZ 4 SALE!!!111

By way of Julie: Marry Our Daughter, a site for people interested in selling their teenage daughters into arranged marriages, per the Biblical tradition of treating women as property.

**ADULT LANGUAGE WARNING**

I have trouble believing this this is real. It's got to be a joke. Then again, they seem pretty serious about it, and are quick to point out that the concept of a "Bride Price" is in the bible, and therefore protected as a religious thing. I have to ask, do Americans have any inalienable rights that trump religious beliefs? I mean, if my religion tells me to go out and slaughter 2 children on every full moon, then collect all the corpses in a giant freezer, and have a festival of necrophiliac sodomy on the Winter Solstice, does that make it okay?

On the other hand, this makes me reconsider my opposition to having kids.

***UPDATED: It is, in fact, a hoax.***

Suck it Jesus

SuckItJesus.com was set up as a petition to prevent the censorship of Kathy Griffin's Emmy acceptance speech.

In her speech, Griffin said that "a lot of people come up here and thank Jesus for this award. I want you to know that no one had less to do with this award than Jesus." She went on to hold up her Emmy, make an off-color remark about Christ and proclaim, "Suck It, Jesus. This award is my god now!"

Needless to say, idiot Christians, unable to cope with the fact that not everyone agrees with them, are flipping out. This is the same type of bullshit that the Muslims pulled back when that Dutch newspaper printed cartoons they didn't like. While this event is unlikely to spark physical violence the way the cartoons did (face it, Islam, as practiced and as represented, is a more violent religion than Christianity - abortion clinic murders notwithstanding), the same sense of entitlement to respect drives both of these misguided systems (as they are currently practiced). Here's some advice for all you religious nutbags out there: GET THE FUCK OVER YOURSELVES. First, "you" never seem to have trouble saying things that you know will annoy/frustrate/offend other people, and are eager to protect your freedom of religion and speech to say whatever you want about those people (the gays, for example - who, incidentally, constitute a large segment of Ms. Griffin's fanbase, and whom God hates, according to some). Second, your cows are "mighty good on a bun," and I'll eat them if I want to.

Poll no. 27: Results

Q: You gonna eat that stapler?
A:
......Yes: 4/7 (57%) (You selfish bastards.)
......No: 2/7 (28%) (Why not? Has it gone bad?)
......Wanna split it?: 1/7 (14%) (Learn to share!)

New question imminent...

Only slightly more useful than a minor in Basketweaving

I saw in today's Minnesota Daily that we have a Center for Interdisciplinary Applications in Magnetic Resonance.

School = blog

When the semester started, I'd expected my rate of posting to drop to nearly unity less itself. Oddly, I'm still posting as often or more so than during my vacation time. How odd, I said to myself.

College newspapers are fun

The Minnesota Daily, our university newspaper, has a "question of the week" in today's edition. The question is something about YouTube, blah blah words, but the fun part is at the end.

[Student name] said, however, that too many people are posting videos for recognition rather than to get a valid point across.

"I feel like people aren't (posting videos on YouTube) to get things across, but just to get recognition," she said.

Google Earth is dead to me

I was looking for Millennium Park (in Chicago, near Navy Pier) on Google Earth. I know where it is (just north of the Art Institute), but I couldn't find it. I looked at Microsoft's Live Search - their response to Google Maps/Google Earth, and it's right there. Pritzker Pavilion is so clearly identifiable, that I could tell at once what I was looking at. What does Google Earth have in that spot? A pasty beige rectangle dotted with construction equipment. WTF? Surely it isn't that hard to update your satellite imagery, Google Earth. Surely it isn't that hard to update your satellite imagery.

Comp 1001: Writing to convey information

Let me regale you with another example (is that really something one can be "regaled" with?) of poor textbook writing from my GIS text. The authors are discussing maps, and the issue of map scale - that is, the ratio that tells how much of real life distance is represented by a specified unit of measure on the map. One common way to show the scale is with a representative fraction (RF)....

This is a simple ratio in the form of 1:1,000,000 or 1/1,000,000. In an RF, the number on the left side is the map distance, and its value is always unity.

Unity. Not 1 (or one). Presumably that would be too.... pedestrian? I mean after all, we're academics. We're supposed to be smarter than other people, and we ought to express ourselves in such a way as to make clear how smart we are. Am I right? By using the term unity in its mathematical sense as a reference to the numerical value of 1, we show the reader, who has never met us, that the tops of all our hats have worn thin in the center.

Then, just for giggles, let's look at the brief mention of temporal scale as it applies to maps: "The unit of measurement of a temporal scale can be years, months, days, hours, minutes, or seconds." But nothing else, apparently. Decades, centuries, and larger units are not to be used (it would seem).

Culturally inappropriate!

Fran and I are talking about world issues, and we briefly mentioned Chinese population growth policies. The following phrase popped into my head: "This is Bob Barker reminding you to spay or neuter your Asian."

Pretense and affectation

Is there some point at which pretense and affectation will reach a critical mass that will cause an event to collapse under its own weight, tearing a hole in the fabric of time and space and creating a singularity from which no attention whore can escape? I certainly hope so, but the fact that it didn't happen at this event makes me wonder how high that threshold is.

Darwin Award, Emmy, or both?

While we're on the subject of " 'reality' 'programming' ".....

Every once in a while I hear about a new reality program and think, "Surely, this is the bottom of the barrel." I am always wrong. I would be this time too, I assume, so I'm not going to say it.

Ben told me about this new show on CBS called Kid Nation. (Apparently it's been all over the news lately, but I've completely missed out on it.)

The premise is simple: 40 kids, aged 8-15, are left to fend for themselves in a "New Mexico ghost town" for a month and a half. You know, so they can "creat[e] and [sustain] a (sic) 'idealized' society free from interference by meddling adults. Show creator Tom Forman said the goal is for 'kids to succeed where adults have failed.'" (I'm curious what Mr. Forman means by "success" and "failure," but I would be shocked if those terms were ever defined in even the vaguest sense.)

Are these people even remotely capable of anything resembling a thought? The 'noble savage' is not a new idea, but these children are hardly 'pure' - the real experiment would be to take them from their parents as infants - before they absorb any cultural programming - drop them in the Amazon with a box of Pampers and a paring knife, and see what happens.

Somehow, this experiment "went wrong" - several kids (allegedly) "accidentally" drank bleach (though not enough to kill them - I'll take "Carefully Placed Household Cleaners and Camera Crews" for $10 million, Alex), a girl was badly burned (allegedly), -- gosh, who could have foreseen such a thing!?

The waiver that parents had to sign is available for your perusal. I suppose one could make all manner of assumptions about the type of parent who would sign such a thing. Who leaves their kid in the care of a corporation, and agrees to "[waive] the network’s liability for emotional distress, HIV, pregnancy and death, among others" - all in exchange for $5,000 (the up-front compensation for participants)? Should such a person be considered responsible? With parents like that, who needs pedophiles? If these are the value systems those parents intend to pass on to their children, maybe the kids would be better off as part of an innovative solution to a potato famine.

Ever been dumped?

Friend and classmate Jessica pointed out this BBC realitye programme where 11 strangers have to spend 21 days living in a landfill. They have to build shelter, figure out how to stay clean and where to poop, and maybe find some salvageable scrap to sell so they can get some "luxuries" for themselves. Fortunately, they don't have to acquire their food from the landfill - for the first week, the show's producers provided them with 424 pounds (the money kind, not the weight kind) worth of food - the amount the average Brit throws away in a year.

I wonder how long it'll take for an American network to replicate this show. And I wonder how many people you could feed for a week on the amount of food an average American throws away each year. Probably more than 11.

Okay, okay - you don't have to shoot me now

Whew - I found a backup copy of my browser bookmarks. So that's nice.

Just fucking shoot me now

As a very disorganized person, I thought it would be nice to try out the Sunbird calendar application from Mozilla. I can't say for sure if that was my mistake, or if it was trying to access the increasingly shitty U of M wireless network, but I found myself with a fucked up network adapter, so I decided to reboot my laptop. When I tried to restart Firefox, I had the joy of finding that it had been reset to 0. All of my bookmarks are gone. Every fucking one. Backup? Well, I thought Firefox kept a backup copy, but either I'm wrong, or it was also erased. I imagine there's some chance a backup is stashed somewhere, but I'm not optimistic.

Seen on a bus this a.m.

This morning I saw this image on the side of a city bus. I giggled because I saw it as a figurative representation of one method to prevent fetal alcohol syndrome: don't get pregnant. Then I realized they didn't intend it that way. Oops!

*I didn't have time time snap a photo, but pulled the imaged from the Minnesota Organization on Fetal Alcohol Syndrome web site.

If it wasn't for red tape, we'd have no tape at all

The wireless signal in our new (and awsom!!!11) studio is pretty weak, and cuts out occasionally. I sent an email to the department head to see if it would be possible for the IT folks to add an access point so that we'd have a better signal. Here is the response he received:

I'm afraid I can't offer an immediate fix. The university's NTS department runs the networks (wired and wireless). They are proposing a campus-wide upgrade for the wireless network on campus which they hope to get approval from the regents in October for the necessary funding. Until then, I don't think that they will be willing to add any additional wireless access points. I'll check, though.

Why am I not surprised?

Irrelevant and obfuscatory

If I ever write a text book, I'm going to try really hard to make it actually useful. And provide relevant content. And make sure it's clear - or at least reasonably so.

Within the first 3 days of classes, I've been frustrated by both of my textbooks.

In one of them, the author(s) is/are discussing the difference between deductive and inductive reasoning. Deductive reasoning, we're told, is informally called "top-down" - it starts at the higher level of theory and works down to details and observations. Induction, in contrast, works from specific observations up to general theories. For this reason, it is sometimes called a "bottom-up" approach to research. Then we get this little gem, inserted parenthetically:

(Please note that it's bottom up and not bottoms up, which is the kind of thing the bartender says to customers when he's trying to close for the night!)

Yes, they include an exclamation point, presumably to emphasize the importance of this clarification between the two phrases. And thank goodness for that, because if I'm in a discussion with someone and they mention inductive reasoning, I don't want to embarrass myself by looking around for a glass or bottle to drain before grabbing my coat, slapping a fiver on the counter, and dashing out the door! Not only was the information irrelevant, but it completely derailed my train of thought. Now every time I see an opening parenthesis, I don't know if I should be paying attention or not.

In my GIS textbook, the first sentence of the first chapter is:

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are also commonly known as Geographical Information Systems outside North America.

I had to read it four times to figure out what they hell they were telling me. I wrote technical documentation for 5 years, and I'm pretty sure that sentence would never have made it past my reviewers (and they weren't writers).

Obviously, expertise in a field of study does not translate into an ability to communicate one's expertise. Sadly, it seems that most textbooks are chosen by others who, while experts in that field, frequently share that lack of understanding good communication. I guess it's the college textbook version of the circle of life.

Undergrads are so annoying?

I'm sitting at a table in the union, blah blah words. There's this kid behind me (not sure what he looks like) but he's talking like this? With every sentence ending like a question? And I don't really know the context of the conversation? but he's saying things like, "You know, I don't really um want to close any doors, you know?, I really want to keep my options open, like?" and "Yeah, like, that's the only way I'd go to grad school is, like, if it was abroad, cuz I spent 12 weeks in France, you know, something something?" 50% of the vocalizations in that conversation are superfluous.

He's talking to someone who apparently represents some group? and she's saying, "So um we've been around for like 17 years (almost longer than either of them has been alive)?" Oh, I think it must be the Peace Corps or some similar organization?

New poll question

New question is up! Inspired by Mary & Shari, with help from Family Guy on the execution.

Poll results

Results of the most recent poll:

Q: The most exciting thing(s) about Fall semester is:
A:
....Learning new stuff! 4/6 (67%)
....Seeing classmates! 2/6 (33%)
....Commuting! 1/6 (17%)
....Living away from home! 0/6 (0%)
....The excessive workload! 3/6 (50%)
....Borrowing thousands of dollars! 5/6 (83%)
....Fast food and sodie pop! 5/6 (83%)
....Did I mention the commuting!? 1/6 (17%)

....Total! 21/6 (350%)

New poll up as soon as I think of a question.

Does art matter?

Yes, according to this article that I found via Arts & Letters Daily. The gist of the story is that the current obsession with standardized test scores, and the tendency to teach with a focus on improving those scores, has undermined the perceived value of the less quantifiable skills students learn through art (and music):

As schools increasingly shape their classes to produce high test scores, many life skills not measured by tests just don't get taught.

[...]

While students in art classes learn techniques specific to art, such as how to draw, how to mix paint, or how to center a pot, they're also taught a remarkable array of mental habits not emphasized elsewhere in school.

Such skills include visual-spatial abilities, reflection, self-criticism, and the willingness to experiment and learn from mistakes. All are important to numerous careers, but are widely ignored by today's standardized tests.

Day 1

So far, this first day is going okay. I haven't been to a class yet - my first one starts at 12:45, but after that I'm in class almost straight through till 9:45. Picked up my buss pass, a notebook, and now I've got a couple hours to kill. If you have any innovative ideas for how to kill time, please let me know. Strangulation and stabbing are fine, but they get old after a while.

Who talks like that? [Clarification]

Am I the only person who thinks it's ridiculous when a character in a book or movie or tv show says, "Blah de blah, [name]. Blah de blah." Nobody talks like that in real life. Nobody says something, then says the name of the person they're talking to, then says the thing again. I've never heard that in real life, reader. I've never heard that in real life.

**Clarification**
Ben suggested I post an example to explicate what I mean here. The best example I have is from Futurama, where they've just watched an episode of All My Circuits. (I can't remember the dialogue exactly, but I'll paraphrase as accurately as I can.)

Amy (crying): Will Calculon's evil twin ever come out of his coma?
Hermes: I don't know, Amy. I just don't know.

Hermes's line is an example of what I'm talking about. Another might be, after a trip to the grocery, "I'll bring in the milk, Jane. I'll bring in the milk."

Anti-gay Republican something something

Seriously? Another one? (Adult language warning). Vocally anti-gay Republican senator Larry Craig of Idaho was arrested in the Minneapolis airport back in June for - you guessed it - soliciting sex in the men's room.

** UPDATE **
I'm bringing this one back to the top of the queue after reading a couple of great posts that need to be shared.

Buy stuff. DO IT!

"Product placement" - a nice little euphemism for "advertising disguised as something else" - has gotten so pervasive, and it's really starting to annoy me. I suppose it's inevitable in a society of the money, by the money, and for the money, but at what point do people say "ENOUGH!"? (I am intrigued by Adbusters, but what impact have they had?) I doubt I can just stop buying everything that annoys me with its marketing. (Although A-1 steak sauce is off the list, and I won't really miss it. I actually don't even like the idea of subjecting you, dear reader, to that ad, but I must share the annoyance!)

I've bitched about this before - ads in menus, 3 minutes of ads ahead of the trailers at a movie, name dropping on TV programs (e.g., T-Mobile (regularly) and Home Depot (recently) on The Closer - otherwise one of the best shows that's ever been on TV), designed into clothes, ads being transmitted into our dreams - oh, wait - that one's not real...yet.

I'm surfing the internets and the TV is tuned to the Science Channel. And there's this show about building stuff - they're talking about roller coasters tonight. The show starts out with the host doing a voice over about how after he graduated from college, he wanted to "learn the stuff you don't find in books" or some such. During this voice over, wherein he uses words that connote rugged masculinity, they show him walking across a desert landscape backed by towering mountains, toward his black Toyota Tundra. Then he takes off, leaving a trail of dust, and the camera zooms in on the Toyota emblem on the grille.

Ben pointed out: Hey, at least Toyota's sponsoring a program about science/engineering, rather than some "reality" tripe. Which is a valid point, yes. But why can't they say "This program is sponsored in part by Toyota blah blah blah"? Why the conceit of an ad, with all its psychological bs? (Is it ironic that Toyota is also listed as a sponsor for The Closer?)

Oh, then, just to piss me off a little bit more, he comes to Minnesota, to look at some bigass roller coaster at Valley Fair... IN A SNOWSTORM. WTF?!? COME ON!