Posts from — October 2005

I did really poorly on my database test today. All of my proofs were weak, my diagrams were mostly wrong, and one question I didn’t realize the answer to literally until the last 5 seconds of the test. I don’t have a grade yet, but last time I felt good about it and got a 75, so my hopes are not high. I did study a fair amount, but my understanding of the concepts just didn’t seem deep enough to tackle problems I hadn’t seen before. I’m especially angry about the one I figured out at the very end… it asked for a “detailed technical explanation” but I only had time to write one sentence. On a 20 point question.

This has motivated me to start working harder, so I’m going to be grounded for a bit and try to focus on my work. If you need to get in touch with me, call, since I most likely won’t be on AIM until I get a bunch of stuff done.

Not a happy Halloween nor a merry Christmas.

(more here)

From the Morning Call: Someone Stole My Scotch After I Passed Out, Man Tells Police

Crime sure is hilarious.

From the comments on the article:
“I would like to report a loss!!! I was out at McGrady’s the other night and someone stole my man lighter. You know the kind that has a naked man with a heat activated leaf over his paacooowww!!! I want something done about this. It was vert dear to me…..my uhh grandmother gave it to me after she died and has alot of sentimental value”

I sure wish Michael Behe would stop sullying my diploma.

Classes I’m considering for next semester…

User Interface Design (TBD)
Semantic Web Topics (Heflin)
Software Architecture (Hoffmeister)
Bioinformatics (Lopresti)

If you have experience with any of these, input is appreciated. It’s likely I’ll be working on a thesis starting next semester, so I won’t be taking as many courses.

If anyone in the Bethlehem area has a couch to sell, I’m in the market (for something cheap).

I can’t wait until the day my neighbors move out. Can’t come soon enough. Events shall take place following that.

You Passed 8th Grade Math

Congratulations, you got 10/10 correct!

History Fact: I did, indeed, pass 8th grade math.

I got vanilla mint toothpaste last night… it’s good, but it weirds me out a bit.

According to a poll of 1000 Americans, 39% of them expect to pay an estate (“death”) tax when they die. About 2% of Americans will pay an estate tax as they die.

On that note, I highly recommend the documentary Orwell Rolls in his Grave. The film discusses the power of consolidated media ownership and its effect on the government. The implications are quite scary and I believe that the fundamental points are sound. Much of the material is similar to things often discussed by Noam Chomsky, but I found this documentary more approachable. The film suffered a bit (albeit much less) from the same problem of Fahrenheit 9/11 in that it didn’t quite try hard enough to find both sides of some stories. Specifically, I didn’t like the supposition that Al Gore certainly won Florida in 2000. It is debatable and worth discussing, but I still believe that there are good arguments for both sides. (wikipedia has a good overview of the post-election recounts) If Bush et. al. manipulated the system (Fox News calling the election early, Katerine Harris, Jeb, etc), that’s one argument, but arguing that Gore won the election is a different claim. For better or for worse, the former claim seems more convincing than the latter.

Relating back to the first topic, read the first sentence of this story from Fox News: “The unpopular estate tax is in the process of being phased out…” (my emphasis). Amazing that stuff like that is acceptable journalism. According to all of the polls I read, many people want to change the estate tax so that it does more to protect small business and farm owners, but few want to abolish it. Even if it were “unpopular” as the article suggests, the poll that I referenced at the start of this entry demonstrates that a whole lot of people don’t even know what the tax is. Since this is the case, maybe popularity isn’t the best metric for evaluating a policy…

Take a look at Google’s map of the world and estimate how large Greenland is compared to Africa. (A lot of other map projections exhibit the same behavior, it’s not unique to Google)