At this moment in history...

...a relatively meaningless blog post was published.

Pessimism

Getting the mail is inevitably somewhat disappointing. Every day, the mailbox holds nearly infinite possibilities. Then you actually check it and the possibilities collapse down to bills, ads, and your roommate's magazine.

Things I Wrote Instead of My Lincoln Paper – Part 2

Why was it not necessary for me to "struggle with" or to "find" my identity as a young white man in America? Why was I never compelled to "discover what it meant to be" the son of married, white, middle-class, suburbanite parents?
Is this role, by virtue of its ubiquity or (real or artificial) 'normalcy,' already defined for me by society?
Or did I, in fact, find or develop an identity (or was I born with one?), but so organically that I failed to take note of the occurrence?
If that be the case, why should (for example) a black man of separated, mixed-race parentage have so much harder a time of it? Is, perhaps, the finding of an identity — or the curiosity about it — the real artifice, expected of non-'normal' youth by that great force of "society?"

Things I Wrote Instead of My Lincoln Paper - Part 1

Lincoln explains himself all too well.  How is one supposed to write a paper arguing that he was anti-savery, when he says things like "I have always hated slavery" and "I am ... anti-slavery?"  There is no argument!  Everything he says, he explains somewhere when he thought so, how and why he thought so, with and to whom he thought or said so, whether he has ever changed his mind, and everything else that one might normally expect to extract by analysis.

President Obama

Yes!! I just had to say it!

Well Put, Sir!

The Electoral College Sucks!

Or does it?

This just occured to me:

In a country founded (supposedly) on religious freedom but with no notion of racial equality, a black man is going to be president a long time before a non-Christian.

That's kind of funny.

Of course, it wasn't founded with gender equality in mind, either, and a woman almost made it.

This is eye-opening.

Faith in Humanity ++

So I managed to leave my phone behind today; it must have fallen out of my pocket. I realized it about 45 minutes later when I went check it to see where my midterm was. I retraced my steps to where I remembered getting a text (45 minutes before) and it was nowhere to be seen. I cursed my luck and went to my midterm, correctly guessing the room.

I managed to put the phone out of my mind long enough to do pretty well on the midterm (I think), then went to work (an hour early) to borrow friend(and coworker)'s phone. Lo and behold, there was mine!

Turns out someone picked it up and sent a text (at almost exactly the time I realized it was missing) to my last called number, which happened to be a friend who was on campus then. Apparently they met and my friend dropped off the phone at work.

And here I thought it was stolen.

Best Drinking Fountains on the UCSD Campus

Pepper Canyon Hall, by the bathrooms.

Hands down.

S.N.A.F.U.

So people are actually, seriously talking about letting the Michigan and Florida delegates vote at the Democratic National Convention. Michigan and Florida, where the candidates said they would not campaign. Michigan, where Obama took his name off the ballot. Florida, to which Clinton flew just before the election. (Yes, I know Obama's national TV ads ran in Florida, too.)

The point is, both primaries were decidedly unfair, and do not represent the opinions of the voters or their best interests in any kind of democratic way. Thus, the only reasonable solutions are to hold new elections, with all the candidates on the ballot and campaigning, or to nullify all the votes of the two states. Logistical nightmare or voter disenfranchisement? That's a harder decision than for whom to vote, but unfair representation is worse than either. It would be a disservice to voters and a perversion of what semblance of democracy we have.

Yes, that's the other, bigger point: why can't we have a plain and simple, democratic election? In a day and age when the votes of twenty-four states can be counted and announced nationwide in under a day, I see no reason for any sort of representative election system. It obfuscates and confuses, and more significantly, misrepresents the will of the electorate.

The superdelegate system was put in place in the eighties to correct for the problems of proportional representation by district (see here for explanation), and hasn't caused huge problems yet, but it's a fundamentally flawed concept,¹ as we are seeing in the very close Obama/Clinton race, in which the superdelegates may decide the election. The real solution is to abolish the compartmentalization of the electorate that caused the problem in the first place. No "winner takes all," no "proportional by district" or "by state;" just count up the votes of all of the nation's democrats and award the nomination to the candidate who gets the most votes.

Whoa! That was pretty crazy. Whoever gets the most votes wins? It's a revolutionary concept! Why has nobody thought of this before?

¹I suppose from the view of the party as an organization unto itself, the idea of the group's leadership having a say in who the party's candidate is is defensible, but I, as a voter, still find it unfair. Maybe later I'll rant about how stupid the party system is in general....

Whoa!

Someone recently reminded me of something about which I hadn't thought in a long while: Koosh balls. Just think about them for a second. Or even a minute - I'll wait.

They're pretty dang sweet, huh?

Frickin' papers! *grumblegrumblegrumble*

Can I just say (of course I can; that's why it's my blog) that I hate writing papers!(?) I thoroughly enjoy thinking about things, analyzing and connecting them, even organizing and expressing my thoughts. But there is something about writing a paper that turns my enthusiasm for cognition and expression into pure loathing.

Can you tell I'm working on one now?

Nothing to C'est

So I kind of feel like writing at the moment (I was inspired, for some reason, by this) but I've got nothing that makes for good subject matter, so I'll ramble (on). Well, I suppose it's false to say that I have nothing that makes good subject matter, as the breadth of my knowledge must contain something interesting, but nothing comes to mind. That, I suppose, is the real issue.

I start Muir 50, the research paper class, tomorrow, so I may soon be very sick of writing. Of course, you, gently theoretical reader, wouldn't notice, as it's been ten months since my last post. On the other hand, that post (and indeed, the genesis of this blog) was during the last time I took Muir 50 (before dropping). So hopefully, (1) I'll be inspired to write for the class and (2) I'll feel like writing in general, and post here more. I did promise to write about certain things.

Last night I started thinking on a short-lyric, beat-ish poem about how comfy and warm my bed was, but I fell asleep before it got anywhere. I have to write a Christmas card - I keep forgetting that. I should also write an MQ article, but if I can't even think of anything interesting about which to write, how am I going to write something funny? Anyway, that's a little stream of consciousness. Incidentally, that reminded me of a Calvin and Hobbes strip - one of my favorites. Anyone know how to find images of print comics online? No, of course you don't; you're not there. ("You're never there." -Cake)

So I've got a topic now - I call it Physical Analogues of the Abstract or How my Brain Works - but I'm fresh out of inspiration. Look for a new post soon.

In other news, this is me. Except Ron Paul is stupid.
Also, I really need to stop using "in other news" and "also."

Update 9/20/08: Changed broken link to Wayback Machine archived page.

Rant of Speed

You know what ticks me off way more than it ought to?

The phrase "rate of speed."

Speed. Is. A. Rate.
...Already!!!

A rate is "an amount measured in relation to another amount."

Speed is the measure of distance traveled relative to time.
Hence, speed is the rate of change in distance with respect to time (dx/dt).

What makes it worse is that people using this phrase obviously think it's a highly technical term that makes them sound as if they're knowledgeable in the ways of physics, when what it sounds like is: "rate of rate of change in distance relative to time." That doesn't sound smart. That sounds like something President Bush would say, causing everyone to get all over his case about it.

So if you're referring to the absolute value of the derivative of displacement (especially when talking to me), do my perception of your intelligence a favor and call it "speed." Just plain "speed."

Unless you mean velocity.

And don't get me started on "deceleration."

Papers and reasearch and typing, oh my!

Boy I really hate having to write stuff. I've got a six-page draft of a paper due tomorrow, and it's at 2 3/4, generously speaking. And I don't want to touch it. Yuck.


In other news, as part of the "I don't expect a readership" thing, my posting will not be anything like regular. I may post several long-winded rambles (is that a noun?) one day, then nothing for weeks, maybe.

If you're reading this, check out The Hunger Site and its friends. For practically no effort at all, make a difference for someone, even if it's just for your own satisfaction about being charitable. Maybe make one your homepage or -heck- set all of them to open when you start Firefox or Opera (or IE?).

It was a bright cold day in April...1

Well, here goes - this blog is the result of two ideas coming together:
1. I occasionally desire to share cool stuff I find, learn, think, etc. (and some uncool, probably).
2. I have a lot of trouble writing.

"So," you say to your monitor, not realizing that probably makes you look a little kooky, "why does being bad at writing mean one should have a blog, which tends to require just that?"
Um, good question. It makes sense in my head, lessee if I can get it on (figurative/virtual) paper:
See, that's the trouble with my writing: it's not low quality, it's just tough to do. I understand concepts, have ideas, and such, but I have all kinds of trouble writing it out. I chalk this up mostly to my perfectionism which tends to require that I completely work out in my head whatever I'm going to write before I ever put pen/key to paper/doc. Hence, I tend to spend a lot of time staring at a blank paper (I'm going to stop distinguishing between real paper and a computer. You, whoever you are(n't), are smart enough to sort out that.) If I can just get something on the page, it gets easier after that. It's not easy, but the first hurdle is past.

Anyway, (I'm getting close to tying this into a point) my Mom suggested a while ago that I try The Artist's Way, which as far as I can tell consists of forcing yourself to write anything at all for 15 minutes or half an hour every day. Mom figured that this would help me with being able to "just get something on the page." It probably would have, but as you probably gathered, I never cracked open the book, so it didn't help me much. It just seemed like it would be boring at best, frustratingly stressful at worst to try to force myself to write about nothing in particular for a specific length of time.
Hence, (actual point alert!), blogging might be a workable way for me to practice writing because:
1. The lack of grading, and of an audience in general, relieves some of the perfectionism pressure.
2. Idea 1 from above, combined with—contradictorily—the perception of an audience,² gives me some motivation to write about something without it seeming futile.

So that's me on my writing - the first installment at least - I'll talk about procrastination later.


¹ This is the first line of the first post, and I had nothing clever to say here, so I borrowed some of the best-ever opening-line wit from George Orwell.
² While having a readership would be amusing and rather flattering, I don't expect it. I'm writing first and foremost (and only, really) for my own benefit, so there'll likely be a lot of rambling, as I tend to do that.
³ I used to use a lot of postscripts. They're great for adding info without disrupting the structure and flow of the writing (more on how my brain works in later posts), but somewhere around P.P.P.P.P.S., it starts looking a little cheesy. Also, when typing in a text editor, one can't really say they forgot to include something in the middle, and so had to tack it on the end. So I recently discovered that footnotes and endnotes serve the same purpose as postscripts, but... they're classy! Even when one uses a lot of them, it just shouts sophistication, intelligence, and well-informednesss louder. (No, there isn't a ³ in the text at all.)