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: