it's amazing! try just watching the hands/fingers of the yo-yoers...what are they doing?

also, i found charlie's calling in life.

Hodson

I am killing it! http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=killing. (see definition 1) I was awarded the full funding that I requested from Hodson to go work with Kristine in the lab this summer! Also, I am going to be a junior lab assistant next year, and they raised my salary by 50 whole cents! Everything is coming up aces.

the end is near

only four of five more of all of my classes! yikes. the year has gone by very fast. but in talking to luke about it, it has also been really long. a lot of stuff has happened. just the past two weeks have been pretty crazy. senior prank last thursday, which meant part all day friday, and the alumni were in town. then croquet on saturday (what does a broom do?), tincher and i killed it, that was a lot of fun. there was a crazy amount of people there, though. pretty much the entire front campus was covered in bodies. then i swung-danced the night away at catillion. then sunday was the santa fe match, plus a soccer game. then a pretty quick week, before we drove up to philly on thursday night, party at dan's house. croquet all day friday at merrion, which is an amazingly posh and fancy cricket club. even the servants were all white. another party at dan's house, then the tournament started saturday, all of the st. john's teams made the ladder, then there was a party at this ridiculously rich dude's mansion. sunday we lost to a st. john's team in the semis, and we ended up going 1-2-3, and winning the overall six-wicket title, so we got a pretty sweet trophy for that, and then had a party when we got back to annapolis. and now there's hardly any school left, but it's filled with reality, don rags, sailing, intramurals, desperately trying to finish my treasure chest, etc.

here are some sweet videos:


gibbons are really freaky. why are their arms so long? why do they walk like people? why do they have pot-bellies? so many questions about that.
i had a bunch of different random things i had new ideas about, but i can't remember them now. i guess one of them would be friendship/best friends. it seems like the fleming children don't often have best friends. maybe that's not totally true, but i wonder what mom did to us, in any case. i like to think of it as a positive self-reliance. who knows.
more importantly, i came up with the greatest invention ever, but i can't talk about it in case it gets stolen. all i'll say is, wouldn't it be nice if you had a toothbrush that could brush all of your teeth at the same time? think about it.

bad jokes

fucking? i've never been to austria!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucking_austria

so many good lines.

busy weekend...how do it know

plumber? i hardly know her!

rectum? i nearly killed 'em!

it has been a busy weekend. went to philly on friday night, picked up settler's of catan, ate cheesesteaks from pat's and gino's (i preferred pat's). then spent the night in philly, up at 8 the next day to go play croquet in columbia. really bad traffic, lots of cheez whiz in the system, didn't get there until 2 o'clock, and then played some six-wicket on the nice, sunny day. got back to campus, had 2 hours of down time, and then there was a realty party (vogue-themed, a.k.a. girls get to dress all slutty and pretend its classy-themed.) i went in a jumpsuit. but it was fun, and i danced the night away. then i got up at 8 again this morning, played hours of croquet again on the nice, sunny day, got back to campus, had 2 hours of down time, and then had a soccer game. we won (i scored a goal! and assisted on two others) so that was also fun, if exhausting. my favorite part was that i was excited about scoring my goal, i came over to liz who was watching to ask if she had seen it, and she said "yeah, it was a little spastic, but..." no congratulations, no sharing of the excitement, just criticism. what a turd.



interesting thoughts of late...i enjoyed our hamlet seminar, at least the very end, when i had a brilliant comment about how hamlet and prince hal are the same character, just one has soliloquies and the other doesn't. of course now i have to write a paper about it, but i'm kind of happy about that, since now i'll be forced to think the idea all the way through. also interesting to see how after writing my sophomore paper on inquiry and analysis and synthesis, since then almost all of my math classes have been on the same subject, and my freshman lab class, and my language class now that we're doing logic. i can't tell if it's just because i've thought about the idea for so long that i can't help relate things to it, or its just a coincidence. in any case, it's been cool but also frustrating because i have thought about it so much longer that people just want to talk about things on a different level.

croquet against navy is in a week, that should be a lot of fun, it sounds like a lot of people are coming in.

pumpernickel

pumpernickel?! i hardly know her nickel!


pretty sweet march madness game this weekend. had one of our girls tie it with 5 seconds left with a six-point shot (girls score double!) and then lost in overtime by 1 when of their girls hit a six pointer with 15 seconds left. madness baby, madness.
i'm pretty tired right now, but i think i'm done with my sophomore essay, which is great. the rest of the year should be a breeze. lots of shakespeare, croquet, tanning, crying, smelling, and the rest.
i read on wired.com that there's going to be eye-watching functions in the new Apple tablets that will give you definitions if you pause while reading, or eliminate non-essential information if you're skimming. crazy! the robots are taking over.
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/03/eye-tracking-tablets-and-the-promise-of-text-20/
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/02/televison-will-soon-watch-you-for-instructions/
i might go see avatar on imax 3d on tuesday...good idea?

h+g!

p.s. i tried to model this post after annie's blog as much as possible. success?

sophomore essay

i have not yet actually started writing my sophomore essay. and i don't see why i should. i have a whole week to do it when i get back. plus i've been doing some very intense thinking about it, which is basically just as good as writing. right? instead of working, i've been doing lots of reading, and going on walks with the d-o-g. i'm currently working my way through the omnivore's dilemma, it's fairly thought provoking. it's this guy's attempt to point out all of the problems with the food industry as it currently stands, instead advocating small-scale, local farming and buying. it's been compelling, and well written, but i am inherently suspicious of a work with such a clear agenda, so now i kind of want to read a book by the USDA or something advocating the current system. anyway, i'm only half-way through, so he hasn't talked about going back to hunting and gathering yet, maybe that will be the perfect system. all in all, i still hate vegans, and i love high fructose corn syrup, and no commie writer is going to change that.
i recently watched faubourg 36, or paris 36, this french musical. it was good, it was a little surreal, but no more than you would expect, and fairly entertaining. i also recommend the film previously made by the same director and featuring the same main character, called the chorus. it's about a group of troubled, orphaned boys turned into a chorus by their supervisor, it was also french and good. everyone could use to be a little more pretentious, anyway.

in follow up youtube meandering to the mbira array videos, i also found this crazy stuff with a dude amplifying his plucking of cactus spines (not a euphemism). it's very strange, but also somehow relaxing. there are a surprisingly large number of videos of people playing the cactus.
in birthday news, i am now king of the mirrors, and that is a good thing. i wasn't sure how much i would actually like having a bunch of mirrors, but i now rest assured that it was a brilliant idea. everyone is fascinated by mirrors (although some are clearly less willing to admit it than others). as soon as i opened the second mirror, i did make an infinity of myself, and it was awesome. people at school will not be able to handle it when i get back, even if my funhouse mirror that i ordered will not be delivered until november. that just means they'll be really surprised. i also got some cool eddie izzard stuff, mocked for looking like an old man, some scratch-offs(no winners, unfortunately), an awesome looking frog clock, and eventually i will be getting a new video card so that i can finally play all of the new computer games on my computer. all in all, a rousing success. the only thing lacking was some treasure for the chest, but since that isn't completed yet, i suppose there's no hurry for that. if you're still looking for a present to get me, it's not too late, here's an idea: http://www.wired.com/autopia/2010/03/oldest-attempt-at-a-flying-car-up-for-auction/
i'll close by reminding everyone to cheer for the terps in the ACC tournament that started today, but more importantly during march madness. i know greivis vasquez is a douche, but they have a good team this year. it doesn't matter than he slams the ball into people's heads, it just doesn't.

chillin

spring break has been pretty nice so far, and it's only been one day. i'm going to take that as a good sign. so far i have: slept past 8:00, had pho nam, cashed checks, done leisure reading, gone for a walk on an actual (50 degree and sunny) spring day, caught up on missed TV shows, and seen ladysmith black mambazo LIVE. this is the life, more or less. the concert was so crazy. everyone in the group loved doing high kicks, like foot to shoulder high, even the 60 year old dudes, it was pretty much their go to move. the picture above is of me practicing. they were also unexpectedly hilarious. not just because they were weird or anything, they actually had a whole routine that they did that was awesome. they just brought a lot of energy to the performance, and i now kind of want to see them in a more informal setting where the audience would be more willing to respond to it. but nonetheless, it was a really sweet experience, and their singing, needless to say, was great. even though they did only do about 8 songs in two hours, because they would get too distracted doing sweet dance moves to ever end the song.
in the book i'm reading about a neuroscientists study of baboons, he mentions a Sudanese boy playing what he called a plinker for him (that sounds more inappropriate now that i reread it, but i'm going to leave it). i realized what he was describing was a thumb piano like we have at home, and was compelled to do some further looking into it online. there are different versions of it, the kalimba, and mbala among them. the way he described the sound made me want to hear someone good at it play it, and it is definitely pretty cool.
check it out:
very soothing. and the ones being played by actual villagers are even cooler. it also reminded me of the singing bowl my roommate got for his birthday, which does the same thing as when you rub your finger around the edge of crystal glass. but the bowl is extra cool because it's usually made of different metals so they have different resonance frequencies and so a whole series of overtones is created, and it gets really impressively loud. i often sit in his room while he's in class and play with it for long periods of time. nobody tell him that i play with his singing bowl.
the other thing i was thinking about today was how many TV shows i watch now. it kind of bothered me, because it's seems like it's too many, but then i realized that they're all genuinely good shows. i think that there is just a lot of good comedy out there, and people are especially capitalizing on the situational comedy that TV can offer. mom also made a good point that awkward is becoming more and more funny, and really there's no end to possible awkward scenarios, so there's practically endless new material to work with. it also might have something to do with production costs being lowered, so they can afford to get lots of young, new comedians. pretty much everyone on the casts is funny. i'm thinking particularly of parks and recreation and community, but the office and it's always sunny also are up there. i suppose i should enjoy it while it lasts, but i also don't see it being something that would fade out over time. it's not as though people are going to find something more entertaining than laughing or jokes...those things are kind of the definition of entertaining. so that's pretty neat.

so close

it's so close to spring break, i can hardly handle it. i want it so bad it's like acid in my mouth (1 schrute buck to anyone who gets that reference(another to anyone who knows the going rate from schrute bucks to dollars)). unfortunately, i still have a 5 page music paper to turn in before break, aka tomorrow, aka shoot me now i haven't started it yet. but then i thought to myself, when start writing it when i could blog instead? after all, it's blogging i'm serious about, not school.
as promised, here is me at lola's (the girl on the right was some sort of side-show attraction, i was too lazy to photoshop her out):

also, here's a pretty cool video, i kind of want to set up something like that in my room.

the article explaining it is here: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/03/ok-go-rube-goldberg/

speaking of sweet things in my room, i ordered a giant fun house mirror two weeks ago and it still hasn't arrived yet, i am getting very impatient. it is putting a serious damper on my plan to have as many mirrors in my room as possible. it's also making it harder to build my death ray that focuses sun beams at people on the quad so i can burn people i don't like.
finally, i have lower back pains. it's awful. even my sweet computer chair yoga ball isn't helping. i've been doing lots of pull-ups, so i don't think it's back strength either. after all, this is what i'm working with right now. however, i recently found out that new studies have shown that it is back endurance, not strength that is a better indicator of probability of back pain, so i might have to do some endurance exercises. they sound pretty fun anyway though, you get to hang your upper body off the edge of a table and then try to hold it parallel to the ground for as long as possible.

time to get serious about blogging

First of all, I'm glad to have rediscovered achewood. http://m.assetbar.com/achewood/uua6CbbVm
Anyway, sometimes you have to decide to really commit to something. Because otherwise, what's the point of living? You just float around without any purpose in life. With that in mind, it's clearly time to get serious about blogging. It's back by popular demand. (Shout-out to Kristine)
Sadly, I can probably encapsulate the past two and half months of not blogging very briefly. I went home for break and killed it, won Christmas, and then went back to school. School has been fun, although I'm not sorry that's it's the first day of March. I actually don't mind the winter that much, (especially when there are so many awesome sledding opportunities, thanks to feet of snow being dumped on us) but it has sent a lot of people at school into the doldrums which is boring of them. It was stunning how few people went out to romp in the snow. They missed out on the sweet sledding ramp built of six chairs and two recycle bins that is fairly unmelted. This is what Annie looked like when she went down: My intramural basketball team went winless, although we played probably one of the best games of the season against the undefeated Hustlers in our final attempt. Our B-team put us down 17-0, we staged a furious rally to close the gap to 8 by half. Inspired, our B-team refused to score until 2 minutes were left in the 3rd, on a set of 6 free throws from a double-technical following a shooting foul. The fourth-quarter was back and forth, several players had four fouls. Yours truly buried some dagger three pointers, and discovered the meaning behind a Browning quote that I memorized after seeing it in the Shackelton biography: "Just when things looked their worst, they turned for the best....so thin is the line which divides success and failure." Unfortunately, I was on the reverse side of this dividing line. Down 5, I nailed a three with 10 seconds left and was the hero. Even the referees were happy about it. Down 2, I stole the inbounds pass, and threw up the ugliest looking fall-away scoop/hook shot in history, ignorant of the fact that my teammate was open underneath the basket. Still, the game was a lot of fun. On a side-note, the jump program has finished and was a resounding success, despite the fact that I did not achieve the ultimate goal of dunking. I had 2 blocks and probably 8-10 rebounds in our game, and my legs are like tree trunks.
On the treasure-chest front, for those who remember that epic, things are going very well. The top AND bottom are now complete, I just need to add some trim, and screw in a hinge. Don't worry, I have already put in a birthday request for some gold coins or bars to make it a properly treasure chest. We'll see if the 'rents come through. I did some searching, and was surprised to find that there's actually a huge gold market on Ebay. It was really hard to avoid bidding on anything.
As for the search for immortality, everything is coming up aces. Things are progressing well in terms of doing some work at Tulane over the summer. My independent research is also going well, as I recently read a ton of articles about resveratrol, which has produced some amazing results in lab studies. From what I was able to parse out of all the articles, the important part is that it activates SIRT1, a type of protein, that helps reduce free radicals. What's hilarious is despite the fact that it as yet has not been tested on humans at all, lots of people are apparently as desperate as I am for life extension, because there are whole groups of people that are now taking resveratrol supplements. I think they're mainly doing it because they don't have the willpower to live on a calorie-restricted diet. Also, everyone is making a big deal about how it's naturally in wine (although in absolutely negligible quantities, you'd have to drink hundreds of bottles a day to get a significant dose). I think they just want an excuse to drink wine out of a soda can. It is almost spring break (OW-OWW) which must mean it's time to go to Austin! Apparently that place is pretty sweet, and I think the timing works out so that my visit to Charlie coincides with South by Southwest, although I don't know that I'll be able to overcome his inertia enough to go to that. Also, is it sad that this is the first image that turned up in a google search for spring break...with moderate safe search on? Is there any way these girls were young enough to actually be on spring break at the time? Anyway, as it turns out, the return to blogging was fairly painless. My next post should have some excellent pictures of me and my buds all duded up for Lola's. Plus, check out this sweet video:

Booyah

Well, I haven't posted in a while. And that's because I've been busy and because I haven't really done anything worth sharing. But, I have nothing to do for the next 30 minutes, and I didn't want to play Solitaire, so here I am. I guess I'll just tell you about cool stuff other people have done.
My brother Mark sent in a puzzle he invented to Games magazine, and now they're actually going to publish it! And he's getting paid for it! Crazy. Unfortunately, this might mean the end of his academic career, as he will only invent stupid puzzles from now on.
I got my permanent cap for my tooth on Wednesday, which is nice, because now I don't have to eat with the side of my mouth like some weird chipmunk anymore. Also, I got bored with my beard dye, and so I died my goatee black to match my moustache. It looks awesome, in fact.
Recently I was on wired.com, and as always, they had some sweet stuff. It got me really excited about treehouses, because they had an article about all these really fancy 6,000 foot treehouses with plumbing running up the trunk and other crazy stuff. They also had a cool thing about how plants might actually have a social life, growing less aggressively around "family" members to share the nutrients.
My mom told me when I was home that there have been meta-analyses published recently that say there is actually no benefit to stretching before playing a sport, and that in fact it could hurt you. Now I'm just confused, because I had been feeling a lot better recently after sports when I stretched beforehand. Although that might have been more from stretching out afterwards. In any case, I'm going to keep doing it, and will rely on the Placebo effect. By the way, my team won the soccer championship, thanks to a goal that I scored singlehandly. That was pretty cool. Then we celebrated like this:Just for fun, here's this sweet video, also:

Finally, a pop quiz. Do you know what the oldest game in the world is? No cheating by using the Internet, and no "funny" answers.

busy, busy, busy

i am still going strong with my novel. after today's writing, i'll be at 15,000 words, all of them good. other things that are cool...i got a new phone, after my old one finally succumbed to water damage. i played croquet on sunday and got to wear my new white pants. there are only 4 more weeks of school until christmas. oh, and there was the king's singers concert on friday, which was totally awesome, as expected. actually, annie laughed through the entire concert, which made it awful. she kept trying to run through the aisles and telling people to move or she would run them down, the gays. that was weird. they did this song, it was really good, annie laughed a lot. i've watched it probably 25 times in the past few days.

this is the king's singers version.

i had other important things to say, but i forget them now. basically, all of the things i talked about in last post are still going on. no noticeable gain on my vertical yet, but it's only been a week, so i have faith. also, i may have an idea for my sophomore essay, which is about sacrifice in religion.

Running Man

i am pretty busy these days, as it turns out. i've been keeping up with my 1,500 words a day for the novel, but the writing and brainstorming are pretty time consuming. although i am having fun with it, which is key. i also just finished this book that a kid on the hall lent me, called Born to Run, about these ultramarathoners and this tribe in Mexico that lives in caves and run for days without stopping. it was amazingly good, and definitely is trying to alter my lifestyle, with success so far. i'm not going to become a vegetarian, but i did go for a barefoot run with the kid on my hall who gave me the book yesterday, it was a lot of fun. basically the book is about how shoes have ruined running, because they give too much cushioning and allow us to run improperly. it also has lengthy excerpts explaining why it wouldn't make sense for humans to be bad at running, and running therefore bad for us, which was the current school of thought 10 years ago. he goes so far as to argue that before tools, running was our main means of hunting, where we would just run an animal to death, thanks to our ability to heat-control with sweat and take multiple breaths per step, both of which other animals can't do. pretty cool. all in all, by the end of the summer, i will be running 5 and 6 hours at a time, barefoot. sweet! i'll probably run from annapolis to home and back. so that's my book review/endorsement of barefoot running.
the jump program has also been going well, we just finished the first week and i was never too sore. i'm not sure if that's good, though, that might mean i'll have to wait longer to see results. but speaking of working out and seeing results, i can now do 8 pullups, proper form and everything. 3 weeks ago i could do 2. the goal is 10 by thanksgiving, 15 by christmas. upper body strength, here i come. i'm not sure if the treasure chest will be done by thanksgiving, unless i go in more than once a week. but there's not really any hurry on that.
in other activities, i might start doing madrigals on mondays and st. john's chorus on wednesdays. i haven't been doing enough singing lately, and the basses i hated from mads are gone, and the chorus is doing these faure pieces that i really like. so that could be fun, but i'll have to give them a trial period and see if it wouldn't be stretching my schedule to thin.
finally, we're reading the new testament now in seminar. at the end of it last night, i had a brilliant idea about the different types of sacrifice in religion, and what sort of role it was supposed to play. specifically human sacrifice, with the examples of Agamemmnon killing his daughter for wind, Abraham for all intents and purposes sacrificing his son Isaac, and then God sacrificing his son Jesus. I had a whole list of consequences of each of these, and I shared the idea with Liz, about how human sacrifice seemed to evolve, and then she told me that that was basically what Kierkegaard wrote, which was a pretty cool experience. It's rarely happened, but it's pretty incredible that I was thinking on somewhat the same level as him. More importantly, it reinstills that there is at least an approximation of truth available, if two people can arrive at the same idea entirely independently.
anyway, this has been a lot of my talking, with no entertaining links or videos, so here are some goodies for you.

Awesome

I was talking with my roommate last night, and I realized that my life is super awesome right now. Here's why: Saturday was Halloween. I went as a bee. I ate pounds of candy, and dyed my moustache jet black. It looks really good, from near OR far away. Although to my chagrin, my roommate shaved, and so I am the last person on the hall whose moustache from S+C still remains. Oh well. Sunday was the first day of November, I won both my fantasy football games, and I started the novel I'm writing for National Novel Writing Month. It's 15-1600 words a day every day for the month. It was harder than I expected, but I got it done, yesterday as well, which I'm even more proud of. Also on Sunday, Liz called and made my entire day better. She told me that she and her roommate were about to have a tea party, and actually use their teapot for the first time, and when they opened it up, they found one of the beer cans that we had hid around their house while they were out of town 3 or 4 weeks ago. They thought they had found all 50 of them. Fools. And yesterday the Jump Program finally actually started, and so I am really excited about that. I will dunk by the end of the basketball season this year. More importantly, I made a bet with my 6-4 friend who's running it that I will dunk over him at some point this year. So I'm going to have an extra two hundred dollars at some point. And on the side, I have my woodshop project that is sort of nearing completion. And I've started going to badminton on Monday's and Thursday's, and that's a lot of fun. I also might do a learning Chinese study group on Saturday afternoons, but that's still up in the air, for weird reasons. I was pretty happy with myself when I looked back at the list of things I said
I was going to do at the beginning of the year and saw that the only one that I had dropped out on was sailing, which I am planning on doing in the spring. Plus, I've added a couple new ones. Finally, I'm super psyched about the King's Singers concert coming up on Friday, it is going to be crazy.
The only problem with the writing is that it will take up a large chunk of what had been my free time, and so now I have even less time to do reading than I did, and I just keep adding to the stack of books I want to read. Last night I just started one that promises to be really good, about these superathlete runners in Mexico, who run for hundreds of miles at a time and live in secret caves. Oh yeah, it's a true account, too. I leave you with this:

Pictures and Sentences

So I finally imported all the pictures on my camera to the computer. But first things first, I need to explain my new experiment. You're going to have to earn looking at these pictures. A week or two ago I put up my thing about thinking and how you already know what you're going to think, do you actually need to think in complete sentences, etc. Now I want to try applying that to my speaking. Because for the most part, I feel like the second halves of sentences can be extraneous, their content being obvious from what was said at the start. Obviously in some cases, like if you're going to say, "but", and then add a thought in a different direction, then you would need to finish it yourself. But I feel like other than that, people could hold entire conversations that were still coherent without ever using complete sentences. Is this a perverse idea? It seems different in nature to me from IM-speak or abbreviations or things like that, but maybe it's only more extreme. In any case, it will probably entertain me if I actually do it properly because I'll be forced to always actually think about what I'm saying so that I can make sense and will stop talking when the rest of the sentence becomes obvious. Although I'll probably need to explain what I'm trying to do to people, otherwise they might get really frustrated. It could be interesting to discover how few people, notice, however, because I think there's a natural inclination to be predicting what other people are going to say before they say it, so they might just start talking as soon as I pause for long enough. One last thing, is that I'll be curious to see, especially if I don't tell people about what I'm doing, is if they're able to just start saying their own thought after I pause, or if they'll have to finish my thought for me. That would cool to find, if it really bothered people to leave the thought hanging, even if the ending were obvious. So that's that.Oh, that's just my mom, filtering her brain. Don't mind her.Here's my fish tank. It's hard to photograph well. But here's a close-up of some of the fish, anyway.The bigger ones are Green Cobra Guppies, and the small orange one is an Endler's Livebearer.

That's the freakish, horrifying lump on my chin. Thankfully, most of it turned out to be dried pus! So it's much smaller now.

To end on a nicer note, here's that picture of my moustache I've been promising for so long. I know the suspense was deadly.Also some things I'm excited about: my treasure chest is actually starting to look like a chest and not lumps of wood. Maybe I'll take the camera to the woodshop tonight and take some photos of it only half-done, plus some action photos. Maybe. Also, there's a new Terry Pratchett, which I will read soon. And finally, I just ordered some books by Stephen Potter, called Gamesmanship, Lifemanship, Oneupmanship, and Supermanship (in a collection), that are his satires on people's competitiveness, and what they're about seems pretty evident from the titles. But the basic premise is that if you're not one-up on someone, you're one-down. I think they should be pretty funny. And if they're not, that's okay, they'll still be my new guides for how I will live my life.

Self-Repair

So I am currently back at home, awaiting my dentist appointment tomorrow. Scarlet took a tumble on Friday, and so i had to get stitches in my chin and i chipped a tooth. For a while, I looked truly gnarly. Fortunately, I didn't actually take any photos, so few will know just how much like a hobo i looked. Especially when I still had a fat lip. All in all, quite a surreal experience.

In math today, we talked about how much of a revolution to conversion from a geocentric to a heliocentric solar system was. I argued that it wasn't that extreme, considering that the idea had already been floating around for thousands of years, all of the observations remained the same, and the math was pretty much the same as well, between Copernicus and Ptolemy, including diagrams. People in my class were pretty salty about this, because they wanted to make a big deal about the religious aspect and humans no longer being the center of the universe. But I stand by it. It seems like it was more of a revision than a revolution. A revolution would be something like Lavoisier or Harvey or Lobachevsky, that would remain significant even when taken out of context, whereas it seems like Copernicus wouldn't have been shocking if it hadn't occured during Christian-dominated times. I'd say this is because those other examples relied on fundamentally different methods, observations, and hypotheses, whereas Copernicus only changed the last bit. Hypotheses are always changing, but the other parts seem like they generally stay more consistent.
I was also reminded how difficult it is to truly have an original thought. Copernicus is generally known as the inventor of the heliocentric system, but it had in fact been thought of thousands of years prior to that. I feel like that's probably true for a lot of different "discoveries", where either I personally am unaware of the true originator, or the world as a whole has forgotten them. And while on the subject of discoveries, I was again fascinated by how frequently several people discover the same revolutionary idea at the same time. Like Newton and Leibniz with calculus to give a more famous example, or Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, who I would be really surprised to find most people know about. I suppose that happens because it's the natural next step in the thoughts process, so why wouldn't two people both take that step, and it would be a reinforcement of the idea that they had taken the logical next step. It's still pretty cool, though.
In final science news, some physicists are actually claiming that the reason the particle accelerator in Switzerland isn't working is because the collisions are causing particles in the future to come back in time that interfere with the machine. I'm not sure if that would be a good thing or not, but mainly, I don't believe it. Let's pop a quick intervention on those scientists for being so crazy. And once again I recommend people check out wired.com, it's got some really cool articles up about spiders, day-dreaming, and Earth-twins.

Fish

So, I finally got my fish, and they are all really awesome. Except for the two that have died already. But I'm pretty sure I didn't kill them. They were both happy and swimming around, and then I woke up two mornings ago and one of them was stuck in the filter intake (which most research I did said meant that it was sick to begin with). And then this morning one of them was just belly up at the bottom of the tank. So I'm not really sure what's wrong, but the rest of them still look happy and awesome, so I'm not too worried about it. Unfortunately, fish tanks don't photograph too well, especially when your camera is running out of batteries. But when I get new ones, I will definitely put up pictures of the tank and my moustache, which is definitely still going strong. The end of the competition was last week, and I think it's hilarious that still no one has shaved, because they're all too happy with their 'staches. Also, props to Mark, who tells me his whole house is bullish in facial hair.
In other shopping news, I had an awesome Long Weekend, I got lots of sweet clothes and room decorations from Unique Thrift. I also found out about miracle fruit, which is this berry that makes things taste sweet, so now my roommate and I are going to buy a miracle fruit plant. It's pretty much perfect, because it goes well with pickles, which are the only thing in my fridge; grapefruit, which I eat every morning at breakfast, and limes, which I just bought a bag of. I'll send out invitations to my miracle fruit tasting party soon.Also, last night was the seminar on Caesar and Cato the Younger, during which I was struck once again, as with Federer and Nadal, by the two types of greatness. Butch and Sundance are also a good example. The basic premise is the same as the Shakespeare quote, "some are born great, some achieve greatness..." Caesar was born to due great things, and Cato had to work his ass off his entire life to do anything. That's why we want to be Caesar/Federer/Sundance. We wish we were entitled to greatness like them, that it was our inevitable destiny and that it would come easy to us. We have mad respect for the Catos/Nadals of the world, but it's rare that someone has the willpower like them to hoist themselves up to greatness. Granted, Caesar did have to work hard, and Cato had a natural determination, but the distinction is what is interesting. I might write my sophomore essay on this idea, but I'm not sure if there's enough there, or if I would want to use Cato and Caesar as my basis. Just an idea, at the moment. In other updates, I have started a woodshop project, I'm about a third of the way through making a miniature treasure chest. Additionally, I made bread over Long Weekend and my roommate's sister is here visiting and she brought his bread-making stuff with her, so we'll be making bread like crazy. Plus I want to make borscht sometime. Also, check out these amazing microscope pictures from Wired: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/10/photomicrography/all/1
And this quite hilarious video. Guaranteed it will make your day better:

Tarzan

"Tarzan had become an omnivorous reader, and the world of possibilities that were opened to him in this seat of culture and learning fairly appalled him when he contemplated the very infinitesimal crumb of the sum total of human knowledge that a single individual might hope to acquire even after a lifetime of study and research."

So I've been re-reading Tarzan of the Apes and the Return of Tarzan, and they are still really good books. Additionally, I put in that quote from Tarzan because it's basically word for word what I said at one point in my Freshman Essay, as an argument for immortality. A whole lifetime could be devoted to one single field, who wouldn't want to repeat that over and over again with new fields? Or I guess you could just Wikipedia it and die happy, you fat loser.
I've realized that I don't like paintings or statues when they're of people. They just kind of creep me out. Especially when they're really ancient. I think part of it is that they never really look like people, but they're close enough that it's disturbing. Also I think old things have just started boggling my mind. Like that Euclid had written his Elements 2500 years ago, and yet we still learn the same geometry today. It's hard for me to wrap my brain around the idea that some 18 year old 2000 years ago looked at this manuscript and learned the same thing that I did. It's the same as when I walk around campus and think about how old the buildings actually are, and how people were walking through them 200 years ago. It doesn't make me feel insignificant, rather I'm sort of proud of how I'm in the same place as all these other people were, it's just hard to fully understand how something as stupid as the building is still around when everything that makes it interesting, like all the people who were in it are all gone. I was talking to my mom about this and she shared the sentiment, saying that it's weird for her to have all of her mom's old clothes. She doesn't want the stupid clothes, she'd much rather just have her mom around. So in that sense I don't think it really is that comforting to know that we can make an impression on people even after we die with what we leave behind, like buildings or writings or photos or anything like that. I'd infinitely rather just be around myself.
Anyway, it's Long Weekend tomorrow, which is crazy, I can't believe we're this far into school already. More importantly, it means the moustache-growing contest is over. I'll have pictures up tomorrow of how it looked at the end. I'm not sure if I'm going to shave it, I might let it ride, or let me beard grow out to accompany it, we'll just have to wait and see. Oh and by the way, the final dye count was 3 times. The roots kept growing out blonde again...

Thinking

Charlie looks really pissed that this guy distracted him while he was thinking.

So I realized today while I was zoning out instead of reading Lucretius that most of the time when I'm thinking, I'm really just waiting for the words to form in my brain, when I already know what they're going to be. It's like when you're having a conversation with someone who talks really slowly, and you can predict where they're going, so you just have to wait for them to finish their sentence. That's really weird for me to understand, though. It only happens when I'm thinking in words, but that's pretty much all the time, except for maybe when I'm thinking about to do when I'm playing sports, or something like that. What's extra weird about it is that I realized I can skip ahead to the end of the though when I'm only at the beginning of the sentence, because obviously I know what I'm going to say already. I guess it'd be stranger if I didn't know what I was going to say.
But the whole concept of knowing what I'm thinking before I think about it (in coherent phrases anyway) just raises a whole lot of questions for me, especially when I realize that I can skip the coherent phrases part. It's seems as though when I'm thinking, it's basically like I'm talking to myself, just not out loud. So the biggest question for me is, am I wasting a lot of time thinking sentences all the way through when I already know where they are going? Obviously it's worthwhile if I'm having a conversation or something, but could I train myself to think in shorthand? And then the question that that leads me to is: would I even have enough to think about, if I were constantly abbreviating my thought process to the essentials? Or would my head just be empty more often. (Go ahead, make your jokes about how it's always empty) It seems like it'd be a hard experiment to do.
Now here's what's really weird, is that I just wanted to talk about how I wonder whether or not my thought process is affected by carrying through the words to the end, because that's what leads me to new thoughts, is the phrasing/word choice or whatever of the old thought. And then I got distracted by my roommate and had writer's block/forgot what I wanted to say or whatever, and I couldn't figure out how to put it into words. In my head the phrase "I wonder if" just kept repeating. So I'm not sure if that invalidates what I've been saying this whole time, or not. Because on the one hand, I did know where I wanted to go with the sentence, whether I could put it into words or not, but maybe that's the value of actually talking to yourself in your head, so to speak, as it forces you to actually think it all the way through. I feel like that helps you remember the thought, for one thing, like writing it down.In conclusion, I'd like to point out that Aristotle says all the gods can do is think about thinking. You might think I'm about to say that makes me a god, but I don't want no part of that shit. It hurts my brain. Also, this might have been really boring to other people, so here's something everyone should find cool: hyperthymesia. 4 people in the world have this condition, it's having a super memory, so they remember every detail from every day, and it usually activates at around age 12. http://blogs.static.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/34971.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthymesia.

What is laughter?

so today i rediscovered the joy of inventing new types of laughter. the highlights: the noise you make when you're about to sneeze, repeated over and over again, or wheezing like mary poppins when you lie down on her. the other fun new game that we came up with is pretending that people are laughing when they make random other noises. like if they sneeze, just get really angry and say, "what are you laughing at?", or if they yawn, then act really nervous, and ask them "what's so funny...why don't you share with the rest of us". or if they start coughing, tell them to calm down, it wasn't that funny, they're acting hysterical. the possibilities are endless, really. and hilarious because they're confusing.
also, i'm approaching critical mass with the things stored in my cell phone. i have filled up my note to self voice memo function, and so i've had to switch to typing things into the notes section. i've decided to start carrying around a small notebook and pen, so that i can remember everything. other cool things i've found out recently...they can take fMRIs of your brain, and use a program to create a picture of whatever you were just looking at. crazy. also, some other crazy people have made a cloth entirely from golden orb spider silk. it took them four years, but it is really gorgeous. i couldn't find any pictures of it, but you can find them in this article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/23/arts/design/23spiders.html.