Be My Yoko Ono

At the Hirschhorn museum in Washington, D. C., Yoko Ono has an exhibit in the outdoor sculpture garden - a "wishing tree", where you can write a wish on a little paper tag and tie it into the branches.

Ben suggested that we wish for an infinite number of wishes. I suggested that we wish that Yoko Ono had never split up the Beatles.

We compromised and did neither.

I look just like Buddy Holly

Outliers
Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.

Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson

In Malcolm Gladwell's book, Outliers, he talks about something he calls the "10,000 hour rule", which is basically the statement that if you do anything for 10,000 hours, you will be good at it. He (or possibly someone else entirely) further argues that "talent" as we normally think of it doesn't really exist - if you're "talented" at something, what it really means is that you love it so much that you're willing to devote 10,000 hours to it.

Lately, I've been thinking that this might apply to relationships as well, based on two observations. One is that two people who don't love each other can build a functional relationship, if they have to - this is how marriage worked for a very long time. The other is that two people who do love each other are not necessarily inherently capable of building a functional relationship.

This is because a relationship isn't just about love - love is important, but there's more to it than that. Maybe the word I'm thinking of is "compatibility". Compatibility might be inherent, to an extent, but a large part it's learned. No two people are perfectly compatible right off the bat - part of any healthy relationship is learning to forgive each other for your flaws, and love each other in spite of (or even because of) them.

My point is that compatibility doesn't come automatically from love, but love makes it easier to develop compatibility in the same way that "talent" makes it easier to develop expertise. You can be compatible without love - it may not be a happy relationship, but it will probably be a functional one for the purposes of familial stability and so forth.

Now, before you start frantically wondering if anything is wrong with the relationships in my life - these are nothing but idle musings that in no way reveal my inner thoughts.

--
like a moth before a flame

What do you do when you fall off a horse?

"It pains me to watch you code," said Sullivan.

"Why?" I asked.

"You'll have something that's almost correct, except for one character, and rather than try to fix it, you'll delete the whole line and start over. This is why it takes you so long to write code."

I looked down at the whiteboard, anything to avoid his gaze, but Sullivan's best and worst quality is that he doesn't know when to stop.

"You give up too easily," he said.

"Let's get back to studying," I mumbled, blinking back tears and swallowing hard.

Granted, Sullivan is a bit of a jackass, but his words hurt because they were true, to an extent. I'm used to things being easy. When they aren't, I work at them until they are - or I just give up. This works fine as long as I don't want to do anything difficult, but most of the things I'm interested are pretty heady, and I'm gradually realizing that there's no easy way to get there; as my "head start" wears off, I'm facing the same long slog as everyone else.

These were the thoughts running through my head as I walked through the rain to my physics exam this afternoon. I had rescheduled it due to conflicts with later exams; unfortunately, this left me with about 24 hours to study. And study I did, until the sight of a differential equation made me want to vomit. I slept, poorly and insufficiently, and then it was time.

It was the longest exam I've ever taken (about 4 hours) and probably the hardest to boot. I started off confidently, but around the 2:30 mark, I encountered a problem of a sort that had slipped under my studying radar. After an hour of desperately trying to dredge up ancient memories from lectures and notes, re-deriving relevant properties from first principles, moving on and jumping back in an effort to startle the knowledge out of myself, and sheer wild guesswork, I was on the brink of tears. Digging my nails into my thighs, I resolved to give up and hand it in.

As I put my pencil down, I recalled my earlier conversation with Sullivan. Well, I thought, leaning back in my chair, I guess he was right. Here I am, giving up again.

I looked down at my paper one more time, then sat forward and grabbed my pencil. I wasn't about to give Sullivan the satisfaction of being right.*

*I don't think I got the right answer, but at least I tried...

--
stop me from thinking of what I once knew

Nerdiness as a Projection onto Three-Dimensional Vector Space*

This is not a new idea, but it has yet to be committed to print, so it doesn't really count yet.

Subjective measures of nerdiness have been around for some time, but I'd like to propose a quantifiable method, one that could preempt any possible arguments of comparative nerdiness.**

The nerdiness of an activity can be expressed as the product of the obscurity, intensity, and inverse of productivity of that activity.

N(O,T,P) = O(a) * T(a) * 1/P(a)

To clarify, obscurity is defined as the distance outside the mainstream (measured in parsecs), intensity as the volume of skull sweat produced by the average practitioner (measured in milliliters), and productivity as the amount of energy that would be produced if the activity were converted into energy at the ratio of E=mc^2 (measured in ergs).***

Admittedly, this formula was derived empirically, but it can be extrapolated successfully. Compare the locations in coordinate space of the nerdiness of playing football, watching football, and playing fantasy football. Playing football is not at all obscure, very intense, and (arguably) very productive, so this results in a low nerdiness score. Watching football is not at all obscure, not at all intense, and not at all productive, resulting in a comparable nerdiness score to playing football. Note, however, that as the intensity of football-watching increases (e. g. body paint, statistics tracking), the nerdiness also increases - this matches our observations. Finally, fantasy football is fairly obscure, fairly intense, and not at all productive; hence, it is nerdier than watching or playing football, which again matches our observations.

For another example, compare watching Babylon 5 with playing a space combat miniatures game set in the Babylon 5 universe. Watching the show is quite obscure, not very intense (but keeping up with the plotline makes it more intense than watching, say, Friends, and hence nerdier) and not at all productive. Playing the game is even more obscure, much more intense, and even less productive, and therefore much nerdier. Once again, this meets our observations.

The productivity term is included to distinguish between things that are nerdy and useless, and things that are nerdy and useful. Tinkering with obscure automobiles or programming languages is very nerdy, but it becomes less so if the tinkerer is then able to apply that knowledge. In a broader sense, this term distinguishes between theoretical physics (obscure, intense) and role-playing games (obscure, intense).****

Can the formula be used to compare the nerdiness of fantasy football and Babylon 5? Here, it breaks down due to the subjectivity of the measurements - which is more obscure? Which is more intense? If we could accurately assign numerical values to these properties, we could know the answer for certain.

One more interesting property of this formula is that obscurity and intensity are unrelated. The nerdiness of an activity is as much a property of how we interact with that activity as it is an inherent property of the activity. Sure, video games are nerdier than fishing - when taken at the same intensity level. But if one approaches fishing with great intensity, it becomes even nerdier than video games.

This makes sense. In my definition (and in my formula) of nerdiness, you can be a "nerd" about anything. All it means is that you're passionate about what you do.

*This is meaningless mathematical babble. The more accurate statement would be to say that this is nerdiness as a function of three variables in three-dimensional space, where the axes are defined as the variables, and the domain and range are defined in the first octant.

**This method does not solve these problems, unfortunately, as it only introduces additional subjectivity. So why did I come up with it? If you're reading this far, you shouldn't have to ask.

***See what I mean? Incidentally, this means that the units of nerdiness are parsec-millileters/erg, which I'm pretty sure has never happened before ever, so that's cool.

****If you don't think the intensity values for these two activities are comparable... well, you're doing something wrong.

--
my love is a louvre

Open Up The Door, We'll All Come Inside

I shopped at Costco for the first time a few weeks ago, and the duration of my visit to the store was consumed by considerations of how to fortify it in the extremely likely event of a zombie apocalypse.*

Costco is a bulk retailer, requiring a membership fee for the privilege of shopping there**. It is particularly notable for the sheer quantity and diversity of products it has for sale. A survivor trapped in a Costco would die of old age before starving for death - a single pallet of foodstuffs could provide basic nourishment for a year (though some diversity of diet would be required to avoid serious malnutrition) and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of such pallets in a given location at a given time. Hundreds of man-years of food is nothing to scoff at in a Class III scenario.

But what happens when you get bored of eating until you die? Costco also sells tools and some materials, and all sorts of useful things could be scavenged from the broad array of consumer products. Some locations sell alcohol, valuable both as a disinfectant and as a trade good.

Architecturally, the building has a lot going for it. It's essentially a warehouse, with heavy doors, concrete walls, and no windows, except for skylights. With proper preparation, you could turn a Costco into a veritable bunker.

However, this is the first hitch. The size of the building is in some ways a weakness. A single person, or even a small group, would have no way to effectively patrol the perimeter. This is not a problem where zombies are concerned, so long as all entrances are properly sealed and secured, but zombies are not the only threat one must face. A hungry human interloper would not be deterred by a simple locked door. And remember those skylights?

The warehouse-like architecture is also a disadvantage in that it offers little in the way of a second line of defense. The majority of the floor space is open and contiguous. When (not if) the outer perimeter is breached, the prepared defender will have ready a fallback location, but the design of the building offers few options. This shortcoming is not insurmountable; one could certainly construct a secondary perimeter from available materials (pallets, shelving, sofa cushions, etc.) or find an office or back room. The local Costco offers a walled-off section refrigerated for fresh produce; perhaps this will serve. But this leads us into the next issue...

Costco has a substantial quantity of fresh produce - meat, dairy, fruit and vegetables. All of this requires constant refrigeration, and we cannot assume that this will be readily available during an outbreak. Within a few days, fresh food will go from being an asset to a liability, presenting serious health concerns. Produce could be quarantined, but this represents a massive undertaking, the feasibility of which depends on available manpower and machinery. It must be done if the location is to be considered seriously as a long-term location, but even then, your fortress will become quite rank in short order.

Costco offers a wide variety of retail products; unfortunately, Costco shoppers have exhibited little demand for weaponry in bulk, and so the supply is likewise limited. Weapons must be improvised from tools; it is unlikely to find anything more effective than a hammer or shovel.

But these issues are seemingly minor. You've secured the perimeter, and established a secondary line of defense. You've eaten what you can of the fresh food and quarantined the rest. You've scavenged for improvised weapons, and are now safe and secure in your fortress until all this zombie nonsense blows over and you can go back to shopping at Costco instead of living there. Right?

WRONG, you stupid wrong idiot dummy. You'd be better off locked in your house with a can of beans.

Retail locations are, by definition, chosen to be accessible. A Class III outbreak might wreak havoc with the commute, but you'll still be in a place chosen specifically so that people could get to it. And get to it they will. There's plenty of precedent for this - retail locations like Costco are often the primary target of looters during real world catastrophes. In an outbreak with no end in sight, the complications are amplified. You can fight off the undead, but could you fight off a starving mother and her children? (Hopefully, the answer is "yes"... but would you?) How about a well-organized, well-armed militia?

At best, your group will be enlarged substantially. A thousand man-years of food seems like a lot of food... for one person. How many can you handle before you simply run out? Will you be able to handle disputes? The likelihood of a dangerous conflict increases factorially with population.

At worst, you'll be killed for a can of peas.

Somewhere in the middle, there's the very real possibility that your defenses will be overrun by rude houseguests who won't close the door behind them, and who will have little consideration for your personal notions of how much is appropriate for a guest to eat.

When considering the viability of any location as a defense, consider the following question: Who else would want to go here?

If the answer is "anyone and everyone", just keep moving. A survivable location should be unappealing to anyone who doesn't think of it as home. If you think that it's a good idea to hole up at Costco, that probably means that everyone else thinks so, too.

So, Costco is a bit of a trap, but don't let that dissuade you from sending out parties from your real secure location to raid the shelves. They have these giant things of fruit snacks for like $10. Beware, however, of those who failed to heed my sage advice - they'll be waiting for you in Aisle 10 with a shotgun.

*For the purposes of this discussion, consider an outbreak of Class III or larger.
**Most of these tactical conclusions can be applied to other general retailers. (Wal-Mart, Kroger's, etc.)

--
I don't see you laughing

Anorexics of the World, Unite!

Okay, so apparently there are plenty of anorexics in the world and they certainly like to organize.

But even the skinniest, most beautiful anorexic should be able to see the selfishness and wasted effort in her actions. I have a solution that will work out to everybody's best interests.

Why couldn't all the anorexics of the world (sorry, bulimics, you're left out of this one) unite on a massive hunger strike? They don't even have to agree on a cause; although unification would present a stronger message, consensus from such a large community is unrealistic, and everybody has their pet causes. They are well familiar with the consequences of malnutrition; they would take care not to overexert themselves, and wouldn't make the common "rookie" mistake of drinking too much water, which can hasten the metabolism. Concerned doctors and parents would have no choice but to support their lifestyle; they would no longer have to go to great lengths to conceal missed periods and vomiting spells. Perhaps most important of all, standing up and fighting for a cause in which they believe would give anorexics self-esteem and confidence, though hopefully not too much or they might not be anorexic anymore.

So the next time you start to calculate how many calories are in your toothpaste, stop and think of the potential you possess to make the world a better place for all of us.

Anorexics: Making pallbearers' jobs easier since 1962.

An Allegation of Subtle Gender Bias in the SAT I Reasoning Test
One Student's Shocking Revelation

I recently took the SAT's. Since I finished each section in about half the alloted time, I had a lot of opportunity to look around the classroom, bite my fingernails, calculate powers of two up to 2^30, and discover a subtle gender bias inherent to the structure of the test. What I found may shock you. So be warned! These words are not for the wuss-of-heart.

For each of the nine multiple-choice sections, the answer sheet has 40 rows of empty bubbles to fill in, each row consisting of A, B, C, D, and E. These rows are arranged in 4 columns of 10 rows each. If the answers were chosen randomly so that no one letter was favored over another, the distributions would be roughly even, in the long run. This was my initial expectation.

However, looking at each column of my answers, I found that the distributions were rarely symmetrical. This is to be expected, since each column is not going to be a reasonable sample of all the answers. However, I began to wonder if the variance from symmetry was not just random, but systematic.

There were a total of 17 complete columns filled with answers by the end of the test. 8 of them had more answers on the left than on the right (bubbles A and B), and 9 of them had more answers on the right than on the left (bubbles D and E).

This is clear indication of gender bias. By the classical definition, "right" represents the masculine and "left" represents the feminine. By having more columns with answers on the right than columns with answers on the left, the SAT subtly pressures test-takers towards the masculine, and away from the feminine. Since all test-taking is ultimately an expression of the self, the College Board is forcing female and effeminately male test-takers to go against their true natures.

One might argue that basing this allegation on one test (my own) presents insignificant evidence to prove gender bias, especially when the difference between right and left is so small. However, the College Board's refusal of my request to provide me with complete test results of every student for the past six months only proves that they have something to hide.

One might also argue that I cannot base this allegation on my own test, since my answers might be, to put it bluntly, inaccurate. However, this is false; I received a perfect score on the SAT, so my test is indicative of the platonic ideal of all completed SATs, and is thus representative of the College Board's sexist standard.

Still unconvinced? There are 40 blanks for answers in each section. The prime factorization of 40 is 2^3 * 5. In the Pythagorean numerology, 2, the first even number, represents the masculine, and 3, the first odd number, represents the feminine. Their union is their sum, 5. With its answer sheet design, the College Board is telling each and every one of us that men are 3 times as important as the union of male and female.

Each and every one of us SAT takers deserves a personal apology from the College Board for this blatant misogyny. The only way the College Board can redeem itself in my eyes, and in the eyes of America, upon the revelation of this truth, is by redesigning the test at its core so that the answers are arranged radially, rather than in columns, thus making the distinction between right and left, and by extension the distinction between male and female, meaningless.

On the Merit of Ideas, or Lack Thereof

This post, read out of the context of the previous two, will be utterly devoid of meaning.

*****

A girl in my history class wrote her term paper on "Graffiti: Art or Vandalism?". She's a pretty smart girl, so I felt bad that she would be wasting her time and brainpower trying to answer such a meaningless question.

I will give you, gentle reader, the benefit of the doubt, and assume that you are well versed in the koan of Master McCloud, namely his (not entirely original) idea that if one defines "art" as "something not directly furthering human goals of survival and reproduction", there is at least a little bit of art in everything we do, and at least a little bit of the survival/reproduction drive in even the "purest" art.

Thus, the problem is one of categorization. For most people, graffiti doesn't get to be art because art is supposed to be beautiful and graffiti can be ugly, or because you can only do art on things that you own. Saying that graffiti is vandalism is saying that it is just as destructive to property as breaking windows or starting small fires. Slightly smarter people tend to try to classify graffiti somewhere between the two by attempting to define the elusive quality of "artistic merit", which is something I'm not even going to touch.

This problem of classification is one I consider a lot, especially in school. In our English class, we are reading "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close", a fictional story in which the collapse of the twin towers is an integral element. Some insisted that it was still too soon to write a fictional account of such an event, and we quickly became bogged down in a debate about under what circumstances it was acceptable to make fiction of such things.

"Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close" is, in my opinion, a good book; I enjoy reading it and thinking about what it says. It could not have been written without using the collapse of the twin towers as a plot element. I don't care if it's "too soon" or not, if we get a good book out of it. If my entire family died tomorrow and somebody wrote a fictional account of it the next day, I would be happy if it were a good book. If it wasn't a good book, I would only be upset because they had wasted my time.

In the same sense, the tags of "art" and "vandalism" for graffiti are fundamentally irrelevant. The only thing that matters is whether or not the graffiti is an improvement over what had been there previously.

To bring this down from the fluffy realm of idealism to the spiky land of spiky reality, where everything has spikes, occasionally poisonous, I propose an idea. That I am posting this idea here rather than posting it in a well-thought-out letter to the Goveror speaks volumes to its validity and practicality.

What if the Department of Graffiti Removal were to change its classification of graffiti from "everything" to "anything that garners more complaints than praise"? Set up a graffiti hotline. If you see something you like, you phone in and say so, likewise if you see something you don't like. Every week or so, the tallies for each tag are added up. If it's positive, the piece stays. If it's negative, scrub scrub. Not only will this discourage pointless, ugly graffiti (it'll just be removed) but it will promote creation of graffiti good enough to draw praise from passers-by.

Thus are the problems of graffiti, world hunger, religious strife, and the common cold simultaneously solved. Tomorrow, I discuss the validity of the Third Amendment itself.

On the eventual triumph of Eastern Civilization over Western Civilization

If you haven't read the previous post, I humbly suggest that you start there. Go! Go ahead! I'll wait for you below these asterisks!

*****

Finished? All right, good. Quiz time.

1. How do Westerners greet each other?

If you answered "Handshake", you get a point. You get a bonus point if you said "Air kissing, if by 'Westerner' you mean 'European'."

2. How do Easterners greet each other?

If you said "Bowing," then you're two for two, assuming that you got the previous question correct as well. If you got the bonus, then I guess you're three for two. That's like 150%!

3. Which of these two methods of greeting can potentially spread disease?

You can see where I'm going with this.

As far as things that I worry about go, H5N1 rates significantly below getting stuck in an elevator with a girl on the list of things that keep me up at night. The first time I heard the sentiment expressed that the world is long overdue for its next pandemic, be it bubonic plague or whatever, was when I read Robert A. Heinlein's "Friday", which was written twenty-five years ago.

However, I don't believe that discussion of H5N1 is merely so much feverish air. Is the idea of a Spanish-Flu-proportioned pandemic really so far-fetched? This doesn't mean it will happen anytime soon, or even within the next century, but consider it thusly: If there is a 1% chance of a pandemic every year, there is a 100% chance of a pandemic occurring within the next 100 years. Don't believe me? Flip a coin twice. According to the laws of probability, there is a 100% chance of getting heads at least once.

Even the strongest skeptic must concede that there is at least a slight possibility of pandemic, and it's easier to consider preventive measures now than when we're busy coping with such severe symptoms as fever, headache, fatigue, sore joints, sneezing, and chills. We have nothing to lose by adopting my simple proposed preventive measure, and everything to gain.

I'm not the first to predict the "demise of the handshake", and I was inspired to write this when I read an article about how the WHO is actively promoting the elbow bump as the societally acceptable form of greeting. But honestly, bumping elbows is retarded. Everyone thinks so. Just ask anyone.

But you know what's about an infinity times cooler than the elbow bump? Bowing. You know, like the Japanese ninja did before they commenced serious flipping out. Unlike the elbow bump, bowing is awesome. Also unlike the elbow bump, people already do it. It doesn't spread disease, and it serves the same purpose as the handshake in displaying a certain amount of vulnerability. (Shaking with your right hand shows that you're unarmed, bowing exposes the hands and the back of the neck.)

The benefits don't end there. Remember back in elementary school, when bullies would beat you up every day on the playground during recess? Then, when you had finally managed to stagger back to your feet, they would offer you a handshake as a sign of reconciliation? Foolishly, you would reach for their hand, your heart full of gratitude and relief that perhaps, finally, your torment was ending. Of course, your torment was only just beginning; they would grab your arm and pull you down again, stomping your face into the dry, coarse playground sand. Don't you remember the taste of every grain of that sand, slowly mingling with the taste of your own blood as you swore that one day, you'd have your revenge, and by God, it would be sweet?

With bowing, none of that second part would happen.

So go on! Next time somebody moves as if to shake your hand, respond appropriately by recoiling in terror from the unseen millions of germs that await you. Show them how real men and geishas alike greet each other: with a display of submission. The alternative is to go down in history as the Typhoid Mary of the 21st century and to watch, helplessly, as Western civilization shakes hands with disease-ridden doom and is hopelessly overrun by the impeccably sterile, yet insidiously crafty Nipponese.

Welcome

Welcome to my website, The Third Amendment, named after my favorite amendment, the Third Amendment.

This website exists for three reasons.

The first is self-validation. Simply put, I need to be able to voice my ideas in a place where they can be read. Otherwise, they might as well not exist. For the most part, I thought little of Emerson's "Self-Reliance", but one part resonated particularly strongly with me. In order to be self-reliant, one must trust that one's own ideas are good, even if they're not. How many times have we read someone else's idea and thought, "I could have thought of that!". I do that all the time, but there's no proof that it was actually my idea first unless I can get it down on paper before the other bastard can beat me to it.

The second is philosophical. I've made fun of LiveJournal and MySpace and blogs as much as anyone, possibly even more so since I've been able to maintain a moral high ground, having none of the above. However, I also believe strongly in free speech, and the free propagation of ideas. With all the news about Net Neutrality lately, I'm beginning to consider a world in which that free propagation of ideas across the Internet is seriously threatened. What none of us elitists, who deride those retards so haughtily, realize, is that even the lowliest LiveJournal scum, who pollute the Internet with their worthlessness, are better than those of us who have nothing to say at all. I realized that this superfluity of user-created content is what we free-speech advocates have dreamed for, and yet we deride it mercilessly. If I want to be able to consider issues of free speech on the Internet seriously, I have to have some vested interest in it, which is something that every lamer with a blog can say... but not me.

The third is to promulgate a specific idea, one that I believe will, in one way or another, define the 21st century.

So, come one, come all! The grammar is sharp and the spelling is checked. Once I pass the vaunted "no readers" threshold, there might be some updates.