25 Things

The Facebook fad is to post a list of 25 things about yourself. Here are 25 things you may not have known about me.

1. I have accidentally tasted dog droppings.
2. I eat pears (on purpose).
3. I was the first person to go stir-crazy on the moon.
4. I am an expert in men's fashion.
5. There is a portal to another universe on my face.
6. I like to listen to Gregorian chants.
7. I eat chicken liver and beef liver (on purpose).
8. I love chocolate more than I love my wife.
9. I can whistle and hum at the same time.
10. I am a card-carrying member of the ACLU.
11. I am a card-carrying member of the NRA.
12. I am a card-carrying member of the public library.
13. I have a separate wallet for all my freaking cards. I call it my "satellite wallet."
14. I overslept and missed a class trip to Ottawa.
15. I used to keep gerbils as pets.
16. (Reserved.)
17. I like to learn about land use regulations.
18. When I was a kid I drew a picture of what I would have seen if I were flying upside down over the Mississippi River while eating a banana on which a fly wearing sunglasses had landed.
19. (Repealed.)
20. My first memory was when I was about 10 months old. I got spanked for spitefully pulling on my mom's hair.
21. I used to drink a lot of Dr Pepper.
22. I used to drink black coffee, but now I pollute it with milk and artificial sweetener.
23. I have a Glock and drive an Impala, but I am not a gangsta.
24. I have two front yards.
25. I am a debt relief agency.
    

Evil plotting

How to tell if your cat is plotting to kill you -- this page is thought provoking. It says, for instance, that if your cat is digging in the litter excessively it is probably practicing burying bodies. If it kneads its paws on you, it is actually checking your organs for signs of weakness. Anyway, I'd like to add another sign. Today one of my cats was rubbing her head against me and purring. Then she pressed her head hard against my hand, but that hand was holding a coffee mug. I spilled coffee on my legs. She was trying to burn me to death, but what a feeble attempt.

Wheat bread dilemma

The ingredients list on Sara Lee wheat bread says it's made of stone ground wheat flour, and that's good, but it also contains high fructose corn syrup, which is bad. Arnold brand wheat bread boasts that it does not contain high fructose corn syrup, but the ingredients don't specify that it's made of stone ground wheat flour. Which bread is better?

"It works"

The year — probably '95. The scene — the shop at the residence of my friend Kingsley. He and I were hanging out as we often did, and we always acted silly. One of my jokes was completely unremarkable: I picked up the telephone handset, listened for a dial tone, and hung up. “It works,” I announced. Later that day, Kingsley's sister came home, and she picked up a telephone, put it to her ear, said, “It works” — and she hung it up. Had she been spying on us? No, she was not even home at the time, it seemed. I think fate was just trying to amuse us. I hope so. (Or she did a good job of hiding.)

Later in life I became a telephone company technician. I often had to check dial tones. And then later Kingsley's sister and I both went to law school.

Free POP access to Yahoo! Mail

Yahoo! Mail still doesn't allow free POP or IMAP access, but some inventive programmers have developed a workaround. YPOPs! is an application that interfaces between Yahoo! Mail on the web and the e-mail client on your computer. It provides a local POP server for your e-mail client to reach, and when contact is made this program reaches Yahoo! Mail through its usual HTTP interface. YPOPs! fetches your messages and sends them on to your e-mail client (such as Outlook or Thunderbird).

The result for your e-mail program is that it can download your Yahoo! messages as if they are on an ordinary mail server. YPOPs! is a free open-source application. The developers warn that they are not sure if this violates Yahoo!'s terms of service, but I'm sure Yahoo! can easily block such applications if they want.

Visiting extremes in elevation

In June 1990 my father took me to visit the Grand Canyon. The rims are eight and nine thousand feet above sea level, and the bottom is almost a mile deep. We hiked partway down, so we spent a great deal of time at the edges of cliffs and ledges. Later we visited Death Valley, and it was there that I slid and fell and scraped my arm. Fortunately there was no further distance I could fall, being at the lowest point below sea level in North America. So after all that time at the Grand Canyon I later fell in the geographically safest place possible.

Silly voice mail habits

You do not need to tell people what time it is when you're leaving a voice mail for someone's mobile phone. Voice mail has a time stamp; we've got it if we want it. And why are you leaving a message anyway? If it's anything more than "call me back" and if we've got your number programmed in our mobile phones (or we've got caller ID boxes on a landline), then we know you called. Maybe you should leave a message if you don't want to be called back. And mention the time if you're like in a different time zone.

Pencil technicians

It seems like back in middle school we were pencil technicians. I was geeky, so my friends and I used mechanical pencils. We could basically field strip them and did so often when we were bored. I knew about different lead sizes (0.5, 0.7, 1.0 mm) and different models from popular brands. When shopping for school supplies I had to match up the right eraser refills, the right lead, etc. At three or four dollars each, a pencil seemed like an investment, so you just didn't “borrow” my pencil. I had loaner pencils on hand.

The Pentel Quicker Clicker was the workhorse. It was durable enough to be useful and complicated enough to keep me entertained during boring classes. It had an eraser seated in a metal clamp and a cap over the eraser, so there were all kinds of pieces to take apart. I think I remember a sort of needle in the bottom of the eraser for cleaning out lead, but I'm not sure.

A school supply tinkerer in probably fifth grade developed an entertaining activity with a normal wooden pencil. He discovered that you can take the end of a notebook spiral, bend it in parts so you had something like a hand-operated drill, and literally drill a hole through the pencil with the blunt broken end of the wire.

Exact temperature of heaven

The temperature of heaven can be rather accurately computed. Our authority is Isaiah 30:26, ''Moreover, the light of the Moon shall be as the light of the Sun and the light of the Sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days.'' Thus Heaven receives from the Moon as much radiation as we do from the Sun, and in addition 7*7 (49) times as much as the Earth does from the Sun, or 50 times in all. The light we receive from the Moon is 1/10,000 of the light we receive from the Sun, so we can ignore that... The radiation falling on Heaven will heat it to the point where the heat lost by radiation is just equal to the heat received by radiation, i.e., Heaven loses 50 times as much heat as the Earth by radiation. Using the Stefan-Boltzmann law for radiation, (H/E)^4=50, where E is the absolute temperature of the Earth (-300K), gives H as 798K (525C). The exact temperature of Hell cannot be computed ... [However] Revelation 21:8 says ''But the fearful, and unbelieving ... shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone.'' A lake of molten brimstone means that its temperature must be at or below the boiling point, 444.6C. We have, then, that Heaven, at 525C is hotter than Hell at 445C.

Applied Optics, Vol. 11, A14, 1972

Less blogging

I haven't blogged much in a blog like this one for two reasons:

1. I can update my status on Facebook and Twitter. This microblogging relieves my blogging needs most of the time.
2. I have been putting photos on Flickr every day. This gives me the opportunity to write something about my day.

I'm going to start copying some old blog material over here, though. Can you distinguish between the old and new?

On the hash, plus two more thoughts

The symbol "#" has too many names, including octothorpe, pound, hash, number, square, and splat. It seems like the English-speaking world hasn't really decided what to call it. That's kind of like the kitten we have in our house that is usually called "kitten" because we've tried so many names but not decided on any.

Are the ways of humans wicked and warped against the way of nature? Or have the idealists among us misunderstood nature?

Here is a new philosophical consideration: Some people believe that it is best to give an honest day's work for an honest day's pay, but others just don't like eating cat food!

Free market train wreck

Our country's financial crisis has been caused by a wreck of the laissez-faire train. Now that taxpayers are bailing out the private sector on a massive scale, I don't ever want to hear anyone ever assert again that businesses are managed better than government. If that were true, businesses would be bailing out the government. Now, I have a few observations.

1. Financial executives with seven-figure salaries and Ivy League degrees have proven themselves to be freaking retards. Who ever thought that it would be a good idea to invest in the subprime home loans? How does it make sense that risky loans packaged together can be safe, AAA-rated investments? Warren Buffett warned that this defied all logic. And if you ever even watched the news, you would know that the pundits have been warning about the impending "burst" of the housing "bubble" for the last decade. Furthermore, home prices have been inflating out of reach of average consumers, so it has been obvious that the trend couldn't continue. So as for the home mortgage piece of the economic puzzle, the writing has been on the wall.
2. This is a turning point in history for the ideology of government's role in economics. The politicians and business leaders who clamored for relaxed regulations and free markets now have egg on their faces. These same people are now asking the federal government to buy out bad investments and partially nationalize private companies. Sensible regulations could have avoided this mess, but lawmakers listen to campaign donors instead of reason. The derailment of the free market train is leading us to a new economy in which government will be much more involved.
3. There has been something fundamentally wrong with the American economy for a long time. Politicians like George W. Bush and John McCain have expressed optimism for so long because they are wealthy and isolated. However, average people have seen their earning power and job stability declining for decades. Globalization and bad policies have allowed the U.S. to sink in world markets rather than lead them. Our leaders need to recognize the fundamental problems rather than be satisfied with their personal wealth.
   

The incentive of regret and avoiding it

I feel like I have a new approach to making decisions. Often, decisions seem straightforward and calculated to be something that works toward good results as well provides immediate satisfaction to some extent. Well, I have recently made decisions to take on short-term commitments in order to avoid feeling the regret of not making those decisions. That is, I have done things that I felt I did not want to do, but I thought they would make me a better person and provide an opportunity that later I would regret passing up, especially because they may have made me into the person I needed to be. This kind of makes sense, but it has struck me as a weird way of making decisions. Specifically, they were things I did in law school that I didn't have to do. Now I'm wondering if I'll take any jobs or other commitments that I'm not excited about for the sake of experience.

Invasive plants

Whenever I look up plants on the Internet, I often find out that things growing in the wild or domestically are deemed invasive. They come from Asia or Africa, and they proliferate much more rapidly than plants that are native to America. Often there are American counterparts to an exotic species that looks very similar. The invasive plants are said to be something to fight off or to never plant in your own yard. For instance, you'll see exhortations to never plant English Ivy, and it's even illegal in Oregon.

Well, this is America. Can't American values be applied to the ecosystem? We value competition and leadership. We like to find ways to work faster and more efficiently. If these vines and shrubs can come over from Asia and find ways to grow faster than their American cousins who look exactly the same, then I say let them. In America we like to adapt to change when change means progress, so the ecosystem can adapt, too.

The evolution of shrinking blogs

The posting of short status messages on services like Twitter is often called "micro-blogging." The messages are limited to 140 characters. In a ridiculous development I have seen a service called Adocu in which you can post only one word, and the website calls it "nano-blogging." If this is the trend, then I propose the next step to be "pico-blogging" in which you can only post a three-character code to communicate your status. After that there will be "femto-blogging" in which you can only post a single character. The logical conclusion will be "atto-blogging" in which you only set a flag, a one or a zero (on or off, yes or no). I don't see how we can miniaturize any further. Micro-blogging is wacky enough already.