Emmy and the Faucet

That Beautiful View

So, I've been home for a few days now, and the holidays were fun, though I'm pretty glad they're done and over with (mostly, still New Years to go). The average temperature since I arrived is probably around 10 degrees, and there's about as much snow sitting around as I've ever seen sitting around this place. That said, for one of the first times I realize how pretty the Minnesota winter actually is. Exhibit below.

Despite the cold and despite the hassle that the snow represents, I'm really glad I came from this place. For one, it gives me the ability to laugh at anyone who claims that any other place in the lower forty-eight is "cold". For two, I got to take this kind of sight for granted.

When people think of beautiful scenery and nature, they don't often think of places that get lots of snow five months of the year. They think of places like Florida or California or Hawaii that are always pristine in weather, or at least offer no-jacket weather most of the time. The beauty of a place like this where it's bitter cold much of the year is the fact that you can tell the dramatic difference between seasons. During summer, you come to appreciate how nice air conditioning is. During winter, you thank the inventor of central heating.

I do miss living here, but I'm not quite sure if it's more or less than I had anticipated prior to my move. Every place has its advantages for the most part; if Minnesota is my scenic nature preserve, New Jersey is my representation of humanity, industry, and the grace of urban architecture. Well, the cities surrounding it, anyway.

A whole week to go here, and I've got plenty to do. Not a dull moment!

Eclipse

So, I'll be posting a bunch of crappy photos I take of the eclipse here. Enjoy.

Schedule for Week Ending 12/26

Monday - 11:00 to 20:30 (9.5 hours)

Tuesday - 14:00 to 17:00 (12.5 hours)

Wednesday - 09:00 to 20:00 (23.5 hours)

Thursday - 09:00 to 17:30 (32 hours)

Friday - HOLIDAY (40 hours)

Weeble Wobble

So in the midst of this week, I'm quite happy with work all the sudden. The shift in gears that made me arrive here? Probably the fact that I'm extremely busy this week, and that comes with perks.

1) Being busy allows time to pass much more quickly when I'm at work. I'm all for having a boring day, but that usually involves me finding something that I'm able to do at work that's enjoyable and takes several hours. Usually this is difficult to do, considering the fact that at work I'm cut off from pretty much everything I enjoy.

2) Being busy allows me the luxury of feeling like I'm doing something positive at work. Sitting in the lab and running consoles during tests, or even (as I did today) being the test director for a portion of testing, provides me with a feeling of accomplishment.

3) Business provides me with structure. A lot of the time it's hard for me to figure out when I'm going to come in for work, and a lot of the time I don't have anything time-sensitive to do. I rather like having to come in for specific things.

Anyway, the recent blitz of official and semi-official testing has been helping quite a bit with my work-esteem. Additionally, I've been familiarizing myself with the system to a degree which makes me feel confident in my abilities. Hooray for progress!

I recently got a very good review, which goes a long way in advancing my satisfaction at work. Hopefully early next year, I'll do well on the ship, do well in my new assignments/baselines, and get my promotion. Things are looking up!

Schedule for Week Ending 12/19

Monday - 14:00 to 20:48 (6.8 hours)
Tuesday - 06:42 to 16:00 (16 hours)
Wednesday - 01:00 to 08:00 and 16:00 to 24:00 (31 hours)
Tuesday - 08:00 to 20:12 (19 hours)
Wednesday - 00:00 to 04:00 and 14:00 to 24:00 (33 hours)
Thursday - 11:00 to 18:00 (40 hours)
Friday - 12:00 to 17:00 (45 hours)

Top Gear

Lately, I've been quite obsessed with the BBC show Top Gear. Tony has been a fan for years, but for whatever reason it just caught on with me. I never saw it as any more than a "hey look at that car" show, but it's quite hilarious.

If you're not familiar, the show features Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May in their automotive adventures. They test out various cars and have various challenges which test not only the cars, but the hosts themselves. I've heard from various sources that Top Gear is one of the most accurate and fair shows in terms of their car reviews, and in watching quite a few episodes over the past couple weeks, it certainly seems to be true.

Each of the hosts seems to have their own preferences when it comes to cars. Hammond seems to be the only one that truly loves motorbikes, May seems to prefer taking his time and is the one of the three most likely to prioritize handling and comfort over speed, and Clarkson who likes things fast.

Aside from reviews of both regular and super cars, many of the challenges the three are faced with involve purchasing a car for less than a set amount and going on a road trip. For example, one challenge involved the trio buying cars for less than $1,000 in southern Florida and heading over to New Orleans. Breakdowns abound, but they made it in a reasonable amount of time, giving their cars away in post-Katrina New Orleans. At the end of the road trip, the thirty second summary made you realize exactly how much the cars had been through and how close a person can get to a motor vehicle in just a few days.

Anyway, the comedy is why I came, but the sheer power of some of the cars the hosts drive is mind-bogglingly. Some people, undoubtedly, are attracted to the show by the cars and stay for the comedy; I've undoubtedly been the other way around.

Sick Day

Bluh. I called in to work today; it seems that I have a pretty bad cold out of nowhere. I have a full nose and my throat is a bit sore, but more than that, I didn't get to sleep until extremely late last night. At a certain point when I have trouble sleeping, I want to say "screw it" and do something productive for a bit; last night that productive thing was driving my check to the apartment office for December rent. Then I came home and crashed.

But it also gives me time to figure out my schedule for next week. Hooray.

Monday - Sick Day (8 hours)

Tuesday - 10:00 to 18:00 (16 hours)

Wednesday - 10:00 to 18:00 (24 hours)

Thursday - 08:00 to 16:00 (32 hours)

Friday - 12:00 to 20:00 (40 hours)

Celebration, Florida

The idea of a modern-day Pleasantville really creeps me out.

It all relates back to the fact that denial of the truths of humanity is futile in my eyes. No, that doesn't mean that the entirety of society should just give up on making people more empathetic and kind to each other, but to pretend that people already are empathetic enough is self-defeating. In order to properly fix the problems of society as a whole, one needs to recognize that problems exist.

Celebration, Florida is Disney's take on how a town should work. Its population crested ten thousand sometime in the last ten years, and it has always been blessed with a low crime rate. However, for the first time since the town's inception, a murder was committed within Celebration. This reminds me, and I hope it reminds others who idolize the "Disney Town," that as much as we want to live in a pretend world, we don't. We have a world with problems that need solving, with good people who want to do the right thing and bad people who don't.

I'm not happy the murder happened, but willful ignorance and pretending that plugging our ears and shouting will make the world any better just bother the hell out of me. Yes, it can be painful to look at the truth behind your and other people's motivations, but it's necessary. You can't fight the bad parts of human nature without knowing what they are. It really reminds me of this RSA Animate presentation done by Barbara Ehrenreich about the dangers of optimism, entitled "Smile or Die":

Inflection Point

Andy came up to visit yesterday, and we had some good conversations, as we always do. One in particular was on the nature of learning, and for whatever reason it reminded me of the concept of inflection points. I'll explain what it is mathematically for those not quite so inclined.

For a purely mathematical definition:
The inflection point is the point at which a curve's second derivative changes sign.

Now, I don't expect you to know precisely what that means, but take from it that an inflection point is where things are going straight ahead for a moment. Imagine a winding road and two curves - one to the left and one to the right. There's a point directly in between these curves where the steering wheel is perfectly straight; that's the point of inflection. It's the point where things stop accelerating in one direction and begin to decelerate.

Everyone experiences lots of moments like this, and mine seems to be upon me regarding my job. It seems like after two and a half years, I'm beginning to lose my sense of purpose. I spent the entirety of the last thirty months building that purpose up - learning to do new and useful things, becoming more and more integral in the execution of testing at my facility. Now, it's almost like it's slowly beginning to decline, as if in two and a half years I'll pass zero and head into the "worse than useless" territory. Of course, that's a negative viewpoint to have, but it's something that I'm sure everyone experiences.

Now, the only remedy for an inflection point, of course, is another inflection point. If you're trending down, you have to experience one to move back up. Here's hoping I experience one in the coming few months.

Upcoming

'Cause it's one thing, or another...

Oh hey, there, internet. I figured I should let you in on the goings-on of the upcoming few months. Thanks to some random things popping up, it seems I'll be quite busy!

DECEMBER 24 - JANUARY 3 ......... Operation Frozen Failure

Heading back to Minnesota for a couple weeks. As in past years, I'm sure I'll see plenty of people who're scattered all about this great nation of ours. Also family, and Christmas, and happiness. Only three weeks away!

JANUARY 14 - JANUARY 31 .......... Operation Waikiki Washout

I learned that there's a fairly good chance I'll be heading to Pearl Harbor in Hawaii for a couple weeks for super secret ship stuff. It'll be weird going from one of the coldest places in the country to one of the warmest within two weeks.

FEBRUARY 16 - FEBRUARY 22 ............ Operation Disney Disaster

Going to Orlando with Dana for a few days to meet up with the family. I can't really take a week off from work, nor can Dana miss much class, but hopefully we'll have fun. Planning on flying late on Wednesday and returning the following Monday/Tuesday.

SOMETIME IN THE MID-LATE SUMMER .......... Operation Cross Country Catastrophe

I have a dream. I have a dream to zig zag across the country, stopping at tourist traps and taking as many pictures of myself next to giant fiberglass animals as possible. Check out the Google Map I made here to check out all the possible stuff we're potentially going to see!

Review: Only Revolutions

Yesterday, I finished (and for that matter, started) Mark Z. Danielewski's second novel, Only Revolutions. I fell in love with his first and most popular work, House of Leaves, earlier this year for its atmospheric feel, innovative layout, and challenging text. Never before had a book made me feel so outright frightened or borderline insane. It was definitely a rush, but I could see how people would judge Danielewski as pretentious or gimmicky. In the end, though, it's the gimmick that made me latch onto the book as something genuinely unique.

Only Revolutions can be considered a mash up of quite a few things. Its writing style isn't quite poetry, isn't quite narrative, isn't quite jazz/hip-hop inspired rhyme. It's pretty much whatever the author felt like, with a few very strict rules to follow. For one, each page of text has one hundred and eighty words on it - ninety of them oriented one way and ninety the other. If one counts all words on both pages of the open book, then, it totals precisely three hundred and sixty.

The book, without spoiling, evokes in both its text and in its design the cyclical nature of everything in life. Periods of happiness and sorrow, the birth, rise, fall, and death of each generation and paradigm. What intrigued me most, though, were the changes that every object, person, and setting in the book seemed to undergo (references change the nature of bracelets the characters wear, the cars they drive, the scenery).

During a segment of the book, the lovers are stranded and work in a diner for money. Even their work shifts seemed to be in flux - with Sam and Hailey's shifts floating toward one another and then slowly moving away. When they escape this drudgery, they are off just as they had been before, without care or explanation, but it just makes sense in that way. No one wants to be imprisoned in their own boredom.

There were very few constants in the tale of Sam and Hailey. The American landscape was key, here, the roads they traversed and the vehicles they used to do the traversing. The fact that no matter what, the landscape, the stone, and the sky, would be there long after any insignificant reproach of our species had passed. One could say that love was constant throughout the majority of the book, but the progression of the love the two characters had for one another was also in flux. Sam would cheat, Hailey would be tempted, they would hardly see each other throughout some stints of their work. Their relationship grew until it became lifelong.

The ending changes everything, and then restarts it down the other side; it's perfectly feasible to read one side of the story and flip the book, then read the other as if it was a sequel. I found it to be as evocative as any piece of literature I'd read, particularly a portion dealing with the threat of the loss of a loved one:

"Butchering their prejudice. Patience. Their Value. Because I'm without value. I'm the coming of every holocaust. Turning no lost. Rending tissue, sinew and bone. Excepting no suffering. By me all levees will break. All silos heave. I will walk heavy. And I will walk strange. Because I am too soon. Because without Her, I am Only Revolutions of Ruin."

This in particular reminds me of a very child-like feeling, that feeling of tremendous loss that draws all your attention, forces you to focus. That kind of loss that turns you into a whirlwind of anger and misguided rage. We, as we grow, learn to shrug this feeling off in favor of doing something more productive, but as a child (sixteen and freeeeee), we would destroy the world to get back what we had lost.

Schedule for Week Ending 11/21

Monday - 12:00 to 23:00 (11 hours)
Tuesday - 12:00 to 20:00 (19 hours)
Wednesday - 12:00 to 20:00 (27 hours)
Thursday - 12:00 to 24:00 (39 hours)
Friday - 12:00 to 16:00 (43 hours)

Schedule for Week Ending 11/14

Monday - 11:00 to 15:00 [driving] and 17:00 to 24:00 (11 hours)
Tuesday - 17:00 to 24:00 (18 hours)
Wednesday - 11:00 to 15:00 [driving] and 15:00 to 20:00 (27 hours)
Thursday - 08:00 to 16:00 (35 hours)
Friday - 08:00 to 13:00 (40 hours)

Where I End and You Begin

There's a gap in between
There's a gap where we meet
Where I end
And you begin

I'm sorry for us
The dinosaurs roam the earth
The sky turns green
Where I end
And you begin

I'm up in the clouds
I'm up in the clouds
And I can't, I can't come down
I can watch but not take part
Where I end and where you start

I will eat you alive
There will be no more lies.

Magenta

Magenta doesn't exist. Really, it doesn't.

Mindblowing conclusions abound here, but I figured I'd write about this topic since it's so damned interesting. Okay, there's a light spectrum, that runs from red to violet. You probably know this, and it looks like this:

Red is the longest wavelength and violet is the shortest, with lengths of about 750 nm down to 380 nm. The perception of color in your eye has to do with the three types of "cones" in your eye. Each type of cone has peak sensitivity in a different wavelength - generally separated into red, green, and blue. In actuality, however, these are closer to yellow, green, and violet; perception of the other colors are due to differences in perception in different type of cones. For example, cyan (the light blue between blue and green) has no particular cone cell particularly for it. When the violet cone and yellow cones give roughly the same response to the brain, and the green cone is a bit higher, the brain concatenates this information and creates cyan. Thus, all colors are perceived as a mixture of wavelengths.

Here's another bit of an experiment. Stare at the little black dot in the middle of the yellow and cyan circles below and then stare at the black dot to their right.


For yellow, you should see its opposite in the afterimage: violet. For cyan, you should see red. This is due to cone cells getting "tired" in your eye. Look at it like this:

When you stare at the yellow circle, the yellow cones get very tired, the green cones get pretty tired, and the violet cones don't get very tired at all. The color white is made up of all the constituent colors; violet and yellow and green, it essentially stresses all the cones equally. Since the yellow cones are really tired, they drop out of the equation for a second or two; same goes, to a lesser extent, for the green ones. That chiefly leaves the violet cones to express white to the brain, and the best they can do to pure white is violet. Hence, why the afterimage appears to us as violet.

Now try it with this one:

This time, green receptors get very tired, yellow quite tired, and violet not so tired at all. But if you look at the spectrum above again, you'll notice that green is closer to violet than yellow is, so the violet receptors get a bit more tired than with yellow. Just as with yellow and cyan, one would expect the complement of the color should be perceivable when you stare at the black dot on the right. For green, that complement is magenta, the color halfway between red and violet.

But hold on a second. Try and find magenta on the spectrum:

You'll find it's not on there. What gives? Well, in a lot of image processing programs, the spectrum is like a big circle, with the left side looping back to red eventually.

As previously mentioned, the red-to-violet spectrum goes from longest to shortest wavelengths of light. It's a line, not a wheel, and at its respective ends we have other types of electromagnetic radiation: infrared and ultraviolet. The "northeast" region of the wheel above is actually not on the spectrum. So how can we see it?

When the brain perceives violet and red light wavelengths coming from the same object, it has to process them somehow. It could, similar to what it does for colors like blue or cyan, is just take the "average" of the color and just pick something in the middle. In the linear spectrum, that would cause it to process the color into a shade of green. The other option is just to invent a color with no actual wavelength. The brain takes the second option, and perceives this as magenta, even though magenta has no wavelength.

Schedule for Week Ending 11/7

Hurf durf.

Monday - 13:30 to 24:00 (10.5 hours)
Tuesday - 12:00 to 17:30 (16 hours)
Wednesday - 12:00 to 22:00 (26 hours)
Thursday - 07:30 to 16:00 (34.5 hours)
Friday - 07:30 to 13:00 (40 hours)

Woop.

Sanity

Today Dana and I ventured down to Washington to attend the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear being held in the National Mall by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. There were claims before it happened that it was a completely apolitical rally; rather than to prop up a candidate or party, it was a plea for sanity in the current political atmosphere. I really didn't believe it to start; Stewart is well-known for his attacks on hypocrisy and double-talk of both the parties, but he's clearly liberal-minded.

After the final speech of the day, I think Stewart proved his point. Watch below.

The most important take-away from this speech is that this message is for everyone. As separate as the two sides of the political debate are right now, people are exaggerating a little too much, people are taking rhetoric a little too far. It's important for everyone to take a step back and realize that liberals aren't, in general, trying to destroy America and Tea Party members aren't, in general, horrible racists who hate poor people. Everyone has their unique beliefs, as Stewart echoes in his car analogy.

The point is that debate is healthy. Debate is what takes problems and figures them out, looks at them from every possible angle, and then looks for a solution. Debate is what the conservative does with his liberal friends, where shouting isn't allowed or is even necessary. People disagree and they always will; people who identify on the same side of the political fence will disagree with you. There are millions of issues that make up someone's political opinion, and it's seriously unlikely that someone will agree with each and every one. And Stewart's message? That's okay.

Conservatives and Tea Partiers need to take a step back and realize that President Obama and the collection that we call the Democratic Party isn't out to destroy the country. They are genuinely convinced that they are doing what's right. Liberals and Democrats need to take a step back and realize that the movements on the right are not motivated by racism or sexism or fear of Muslims - they are rooted in the sentiment that money is being wasted and that that needs to stop.

It's easy to believe you're right, and it's necessary for you to have a real punch in your argument. But being so convinced that you're right that you can so utterly dehumanize people who disagree with you is a dangerous trend. After all, nobody knows how this whole thing is to shake out. President Obama might be wrong. John Boehner might be wrong. I might be wrong.

You might be wrong.

Jackass 3D

Tomorrow night I'll be seeing the third installment of this series, and presumably the last if the age of the players is any indication. With Clown College-trained Steve-O cresting 36 and ringmaster Johnny Knoxville turning forty in March, it seems that these fellows are likely to run out of steam quite soon. As actors or reality show stars, the group may have a longer shelf-life, but when it comes to being bucked by bulls or going around loop-the-loops in pocket bikes, their careers may be setting.

One of the interesting things I've noticed in looking through the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes is how split the opinions of the film are. It currently has a 69% fresh rating by the way, fairly good, despite the seemingly niche, cult-like status of the films. To illustrate my point, here are a few of the reviews snippets I scrolled by:

Positive:
"Infantile? You betcha." - Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out New York
"It's gross--and it's fantastic." - Christopher Smith, Bangor Daily News
"It's gleefully immature. It revels in destruction. And it made me laugh a lot, like it always does." - Eric D. Snider, Film.com

Negative:
"It's a disgusting, repellent, sadomasochistic extension of the kind of slapstick that made 'The 3 Stooges' so popular and filled with gross, gruesome pranks that men seem to find hilarious." - Susan Granger
"They're still here, suffering for their art. Now it's our turn." - Roger Moore, Orlando Sentinel
"Too many of these sequences are merely disgusting." - Stephen Whitty, Newark Star-Ledger

There's obviously a common thread here: all the critics agree that the film, and the series at large, is immature, disgusting, destructive, and occasionally painful to watch. The difference between these two groups is, clearly, whether or not the films are entertaining. I don't think anyone would say that the Jackass films are the highest brow, nor are they truly "film" in the strictest sense of the word. But entertaining, that's the real sticking point.

Now, I have to say that historically I've enjoyed Jackass and its constituent sketches immensely. I don't pretend that they're enriching or dramatic or even all that well-put-together. The fact of the matter is that they're entertaining and make me laugh, and that's a need of mine that needs to be satiated, just as fine art and high drama and fast-paced action have corresponding needs.

Anyway, from listening and reading various reviews on the subject, it's pretty clear that there are two pretty clear camps that people fall into concerning Jackass:

a) It's gross but it's funny. It's definitely not Shakespeare or even James Cameron, but it's entertaining on some level. Perhaps it is indicative of some new American desire for lowest-common-denominator entertainment, but it's a part of the wave and not its progenitor. The bottom line is that it's low-brow entertainment, and it's entertaining.
b) It's disgusting. It's indicative of and the epitome of low-brow gross-out humor and shows that something is truly wrong with American society that a film like this can be so wildly successful. There is a line, and this movie crosses it.

I have a feeling that I'll enjoy it, having enjoyed all the previous content (save for a couple sketches, especially the ones involving paper cuts). Reality programming is largely hit-or-miss for me; if it has a good hook and entertains me on any level, it's usually pretty easy to get me as a regular viewer. I never would have dreamed that I'd enjoy shows like Teen Mom or Jersey Shore, but a few viewings were enough to get me interested enough in the "characters" to continue watching.

Jackass has elements of this. In seeing the sketches, the pain tolerances, the fears, and the breaking points of the cast are on display. Steve-O does the little painful things that have to do with body modification. Johnny does the big painful stuff that could result in bodily harm. Dunn and Bam are the butts of jokes and have pranks pulled on them. Despite being a primarily sketch-based show and series, each one has a pretty unique personality and character. Of course, the other element is the sketches themselves and the "what'll they think of next" quality of Jackass.

We'll see what camp I fall into after seeing it. And, apparently, what camp Dana's in!

Trivia Taken Too Far

Recently, I discovered the wonder of the Slate Daily Podcasts. Although my usual interest in politics was what caused me to find the podcasts initially, but since I've been listening to the various pop culture and sports related programs as well.

The Slate sports podcast is titled "Shut Up and Listen" and it gives a very accessible viewpoint of sports, which I appreciate; sports talk radio can be pretty interesting to listen to, but the problems are various:

1) Homers annoy the hell out of me. If your sports radio show continually assesses that their team is either the stupidest or the best team when neither is clearly true, you're probably going to lose me.
2) Even though I listen regularly to Ron and Fez, whose callers aren't exactly stellar, sports radio callers (outside the occasional gem) are complete idiots.
3) The seeming unwillingness to argue both sides of a point; one-sided arguments tend to get me heated just because they're incomplete and don't tell the whole story.

That said, Shut Up and Listen is a very well-put-together show. It has the cadence of an NPR politics program, though the topic just happens to be sports. And that brings me to the purpose of this post. Every week, Shut Up and Listen presents a trivia question for listeners to ponder. Being the data-obsessed nerd I am, the question this week was of particular interest:

"What countries of the world have stadiums which can hold at least 1.5% of the population of said country?"

And off we go!

First, we need good data on the populations of the 195 countries in the world. Pretty easy, in the advent of a world with Wikipedia. Anyway, I won't list them all here, but that's my source. Countries have a wide range, with the Vatican City coming in at 800 people and Nauru at 10,000 people; on the other side of things are China and India, with 1,340,120,000 and 1,189,070,000 respectively.

I utilized Wikipedia for data on stadium capacities, as well as the World Stadiums website to find the largest capacity in the country. Because of the nature of the data (stadiums found ranged from Vanuatu's 1,500 person capacity Vaiaku Stadium to the North Korean Rungrade May Day Stadium, holding 150,000, literally a hundred-fold larger), some of it can be imprecise. I couldn't find data on a Vatican City stadium, so I threw that data away. If you can find stadiums with capacities larger than those listed, by all means let me know!

Anyway, I matched stadiums up with countries and did the number crunching. Here are some random facts before the presentation of the data.

• Predictably, the largest countries had the smallest percentages in terms of how much of the population could fit in a single stadium. With populations above one billion, India and China run up the rear when it comes to this metric; China can hold 0.006% of its population in the Guangdong Olympic Stadium, and India can hold 0.0101% of its population in its Salt Lake Stadium.
• The top ten percentages, predictably, are nations which are populated by less than 110,000 inhabitants. It's pretty easy to fit 10% of your population in a stadium if you've got 75,000 people; stadiums are expensive, but small ones aren't prohibitively so for small nations.
• The median percentage of the population that could fit in a country's largest stadium is 0.4643%.
• If you took the largest stadium from each country and pooled the space, you could fit approximately 0.1128% of the world's 6,862,077,107 people in them. The largest stadiums from each country could hold 7,740,214 people total.

And now, the top ten countries for the metric:

1. Monaco's Stade Louis II holds 18,500 people in a nation of 33,000. This means that over half of the people in Monaco could pack into the stadium; about 56%. The stadium was built during the 1980s and primarily hosts football and track and field events.
2. Nauru's Meneng Stadium holds 3,500 people, a tiny stadium on international standards. As aforementioned, Nauru is the smallest nation with an actual stadium. Approximately 35% of the country's populace can pack into the stadium, which is mostly just a big empty field. From 2001 to 2007, Australian government officials detained refugees from various countries, including Afghanistan and Iraq, in the stadium after intercepting them from crossing into New Zealand or Australia.
3. San Marino has a population of 31,794, its Stadium Olimpico seating 7,000. It holds about 22% of the population of San Marino and mainly hosts football games. It serves as the national stadium of the country.
4. A second small, island nation in the middle of the South Pacific called Palau is home to 20,000 people. Its National Stadium holds 4,000 people, or 20% of the local population. National Stadium hosts primarily football and track and field events in the city of Koror.
5. The first North American nation on the list is Grenada, a small island nation northeast of Venezuela. Its Queen's Park is the largest stadium yet mentioned in this list, holding 20,000 out of a population of 104,000, or about 19.23%. The People's Republic of China funded its construction in 2007. The stadium is used primarily for the sport of cricket.
6. Dominica's Windsor Park clocks in at 17.91% of the country's 67,000 population. The stadium holds 12,000 and hosts primarily cricket matches. Dominica is another small nation in the Caribbean, where cricket is apparently wildly popular.
7. Liechtenstein, a tiny country sandwiched between Austria and Switzerland has a population of only 35,904. Apart from being blessed with the highest per capita GDP of any nation in the world, it's the only country to be completely within the mountain range known as the Alps. Liechtenstein's Rheinpark Stadion can hold 6,127 people for its football matches, about 17.07% of the populace.
   
8. The largest country in terms of population in the top ten, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines is a group of islands in the Caribbean. Popular sports played at the 18,000-person capacity Arnos Vale Stadium include cricket and football. The stadium can hold 16.51% of the nation's 109,000 citizens.
9. Tuvalu is another nation in the South Pacific. It has roughly the same population as the aforementioned Nauru at 10,000, and is only slightly larger than Nauru at ten square miles. However, its Vaiaku Stadium is less than half the size of Nauru's with a capacity of 1,500, large enough to hold 15% of the nation's populace.
10. Finally is Seychelles, the smallest African nation in terms of population. It's a small island a bit north of Madagascar off Africa's eastern coast, and is home to about 85,000 people. Its Stade Linite holds 10,000 people, about 11.76% of the population. The Stade Linite is home to the Seychelles National Football Team.

Furthermore, the following countries come in at 1.5% of the population or more being able to fit within the single largest stadium in the respective nation:

Antigua and Barbuda (11.24%); Barbados (10.89%); Tonga (9.62%); Samoa (8.38%); Saint Kitts and Nevis (7.69%); Saint Lucia (7.47%); Brunei (7.37%); Maldives (6.96%); Andorra (4.76%); Bahrain (4.34%); Malta (4.32%); Sao Tome and Principe (3.94%); Fiji (3.51%); Suriname (3.44%); Marshall Islands (3.17%); Iceland (3.14%); Qatar (2.95%); Cyprus (2.85%); Montenegro (2.67%); Gabon (2.66%); Bahamas (2.63%); Kiribati (2.5%); Belize (2.33%); Kuwait (2.13%); Bhutan (2.12%); Trinidad and Tobago (2.01%); Luxembourg (1.99%); Guyana (1.97%); Uruguay (1.93%); Solomon Islands (1.87%); Ireland (1.84%); Micronesia (1.80%); Swaziland (1.66%); Armenia (1.58%); Cape Verde (1.56%).

Just missing the cut is New Zealand, with 1.37% of its population being able to squeeze into the 60,000-person capacity Eden Park. In total, there are 45 countries with a stadium capable of accommodating 1.5% or more of their populations.

On the other end of the spectrum, you have the predictable opposite of the countries above. Of the top ten with the largest population to capacity of largest stadium ratio, the smallest is Ethiopia, clocking in at almost 85 million people.

Now, data! I was interested, first, in how the size of the population impacted this little experiment. Obviously, it was much more likely for a small nation to build a stadium which could fit a larger percentage of its populace. This is likely due to the fact that massively large stadiums have an exponentially increasing cost and engineering complexity as they go up in size. The largest stadium I found was North Korea, with a capacity of 150,000 people. The Rungrado May Day Stadium is eight stories tall and hosts athletic events, dance performance, and even the occasional and gruesome public execution. Countries have less of a constraint when it comes to their population; land area is the biggest one, but also the ability of nations to keep themselves entirely sovereign is an important factor.

Below is a graph depicting the populations of each of the 194 included countries (in logarithmic scale) versus the capacity of their largest stadium:


Notable outliers are highlighted on the chart, along with the United States. 105 countries are above the trendline and 89 are below. Using the above equation, it can be determined which countries have particularly small largest stadiums for their size and those which have remarkably large ones. First, the top five undersized stadiums:

1. Comoros; expected capacity = 15,247, actual capacity = 2,000
2. Vanuatu; expected capacity = 10,885, actual capacity = 2,000
3. Micronesia; expected capacity = 8,396, actual capacity = 2,000
4. Equatorial Guinea; expected capacity = 15,262, actual capacity = 4,000
5. East Timor; expected capacity = 18,111, actual capacity = 5,000

And the top five oversized stadiums:

1. Monaco; expected capacity = 5,651, actual capacity = 18,500
2. North Korea; expected capacity = 48,515, actual capacity = 150,000
3. Ireland; expected capacity = 28,041, actual capacity = 82,300
4. Kuwait; expected capacity = 24,754, actual capacity = 65,000
5. Uruguay; expected capacity = 25,575, actual capacity = 65,000

And as food for thought, the average per capita GDP of the undersized stadium countries is $8,451 (median $2,521) and for the oversized stadium countries $32,048 (median $38,984). Pretty telling, actually, and logical. Rich countries have bigger stadiums!

As for population density, the top ten countries with undersized stadium countries have an average population density of 502 people per square mile (median 386.45). The oversized stadium countries have an average density of 4,653 people per square mile (median 473.8). However, if Monaco is thrown out (highest population density in the world at 39,217 per square mile), that average drops to 813. Thus, it doesn't really seem that population density and stadium size correlate.

Finally, another little graph, showing population of countries versus the percentage of that population which will fit in its largest stadium. Are we finally done with this statistical analysis? For now!


Check out my quick and dirty Excel spreadsheet action here.

A Concise Inventory of Upcoming Events

Just to keep things straight, here's a few things I'm planning on doing over the next few weeks.

Monday, October 11, 4:00pm onward - heading up to North Jersey to see the Vikings take on the Jets. Special thanks to Kevin for having friends with season tickets who couldn't go.

Tuesday morning, October 12 - My shift at Wallops Island starts at about four in the afternoon, so I should be leaving pretty early to get to Virginia by 1-2 in the afternoon. Staying from Tuesday until Friday before driving back up.

Saturday, October 23 - New York Record Fair with Dana. It goes from 10am to 7pm on Saturday and Sunday.

Friday, October 29 - Driving down to Silver Spring, Maryland to stay in a hotel outside of DC. The next day is the Colbert/Stewart rally, which will hopefully be amazingly fun. The hotel I booked is about half a mile from a Metro station, so it should make everything easy.

I'll append this as I find more things to put on it. Wheeee.

Better Know a District

So the elections are roughly a month away, and I've been doing research here and there, but I figure I'd better square some stuff away. May as well do it in writing so that no one else can be helped by it, right? I DIGRESS.

Anyway, I'll start with my current home district: New Jersey's Third Congressional. Two years ago, John Adler defeated Chris Myers for the seat, and this time he's up against former NFL player Jon Runyan. Here's a quick list of the platforms of the two.

Republican John Runyan

• Various federal tax cuts, the vast majority being across the board. A deep cut of 15% recommended for all income tax brackets and a lowering of the corporate taxation to 25%, an effective slash of about 29%. Also in favor of lowering capital gains taxation.
  
• Several ideas for balancing the federal budget, including requiring a supermajority to raise taxes. Takes a big dig at career politicians for "being unwilling or unable" to balance the budget without naming any names. Well, he does namedrop Reagan when suggesting a "Red Ink Task Force" which would identify inefficiencies in budgets, then letting Congress vote on each one.
• Congressional term limits. Specifically, Runyan states that he will limit himself to no more than four terms or eight years in Congress.
• Desire to allow cross-state health care plans.
• Promise to protect New Jersey coastline and beaches with money secured from the federal government.
• Stresses the importance of taking care of returning veterans with a few platitudes, but makes no specific promises regarding health care or financial support.
• Pro-civil unions but against marriage equality.
• Seems to be completely pro-Israel, including continuing economic and military aid in order to defend "a tiny beacon of democracy surrounded by authoritarian regimes."
• Against privatization of Medicare/Social Security.

Basically boiler-plate Republican, essentially, right down to the I-don't-like-it-but-it's-popular-and-old-people-vote position of keeping Medicare and Social Security publicly funded and secured and the "we should respect our returning veterans" without really detailing how. Anyway, figure I'll make some responses in no particular order:

• The first two sort of go together; lower taxes means you have to drastically lower spending in order to still balance the budget. Remember, everybody: raising taxes and cutting programs have the same effect on the deficit. I'm entirely for a clause of neutral spending - that the government cannot spend more than it has on hand. Unfortunately, tax cuts make this harder, and we'll find out why:

This is a chart showing the 2010 Congressional Budget. The blue bar on the left is revenue and the red bar is spending. As you can pretty clearly see, "Mandatory" spending (Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, Interest on the National Debt, welfare, unemployment, etc.) has risen to an estimated cost of $2.184 trillion. That's about 92% of the total revenue for the government. Runyan supports these programs, and thus nothing can be done about this cost.

Although Runyan states no specifics on whether or not military spending should be increased or decreased, the Department of Defense spending is also a point that the Republicans hammer home. As can be seen above, Defense spending for 2010 is pegged at $664 billion, or about 30% of the revenues collected. So, even if you cut funding to absolutely every Department other than Defense:

Mandatory + Defense = $2,184 billion + $664 billion = $2,848 billion, or about 20% higher than the revenue. Obviously, you could cut some Medicare and welfare spending, but there's such a huge deficit now that you could barely dent the national debt at this point without some major reforms.

It's unfortunate that the United States has fallen so behind when it comes to national debt. We were doing so well in the late nineties.

• Term limits, in general, are a good thing. A lot of money and effort go into running re-election campaigns for incumbent politicians, when said politicians should be concentrating on their constituencies and the issues at hand. That said, this is generally simply a talking point for politicians; Runyan for example claims he'll only be serving at most four terms in the House. John Adler kicked off his campaign in roughly March this year, and thus campaign season is roughly 30% of his term. However, I don't think a promise to serve any more than one term would be productive; if Runyan theoretically did serve eight years in the House, and assuming a roughly seven-month campaign season, he'd still be spending 22% of his time campaigning. This isn't to mention that much of the time, these promises are simply not held to.
  
• In terms of protecting the New Jersey shoreline, I agree wholeheartedly. This is precisely the kind of funding that the government is there for - providing money and support to protect, rekindle, and promote resources. As a Representative, Jon Runyan would be entirely correct in bringing home this kind of pork to his state. That's what politicians are there for - to fight for their home constituencies and bring home the bacon.
• Obviously, I'm for marriage equality when it comes to gay and lesbian couples. I honestly think, though, that somewhere between 40 and 60% of Republicans simply tow the party line here because it's convenient and helps them get elected.
• Finally, material support for Israel ended in 2007, but it's hard to see why the United States should remain as the main benefactor for the country. Obviously, Israel has the ability to fend for itself. Palestinians within Israel suffer great injustice, as well, with laws being passed at times specifically making Palestinian life utterly miserable. The main reason that it's so easy to expand Israeli settlements into Palestinian land is that laws are passed by the Israelis that essentially make Palestinians violate the law every second of every day. They broke the rules, so they get evicted.

Since I'm much more likely to agree with Adler, I'll color the positions I agree with or disagree with accordingly:

Democrat John Adler

• Adler is pro-Israel. I think both parties are forced to be such, considering the demographics in New Jersey. Pandering will never die.
• Strongly opposes the privatization of Medicare and Social Security.
• Advocates middle class tax cuts and is for a deficit-neutral requirement on all federal spending.
• Advocates and agrees with the phased troop withdrawal from Iraq and continuation of the war in Afghanistan. I'm not quite sure withdrawal from Afghanistan is really tenable at the moment, so I'm fairly neutral on that.
• Offshore-drilling being opened up on New Jersey shores. This would certainly decrease the dependence on foreign oil, but by a very small amount, and would not decrease dependence on oil period.
• The New GI Bill and better health care to veterans. Veterans of foreign wars deserve nothing but the best health care and opportunities for education for their sacrifices.
• Though not truly part of his platform, Adler is rated as one of the top ten most "centrist" Congresspeople. I think this is a good thing, as I believe that the Third District is a very "in the middle" one and, thus, its constituents deserve a centrist candidate.
  

Anyway, I think I've rambled enough on this post. Hopefully this is helpful; it certainly was for me deciding what I liked or didn't like about both the candidates.

Schedule for Week Ending 10/11

Monday - 09:00 to 21:00 (12 hours)
Tuesday - 10:00 to 18:00 (20 hours)
Wednesday - 04:00 to 16:00 (32 hours)
Thursday into Friday - 20:00 to 04:00 (40 hours)

Four shifts for the week? Yay.

Schedule for Week Ending 10/3

Monday - 8 hours PI (eye aaaagh) (PI = 8)
Tuesday - 3 hours PI for Doctor's appointment and 13:00 to 18:00 (PI = 11, B = 5)
Wednesday - 08:30 to 11:30 (B = 8), 11:30 to 16:00 (C = 4.5 hours), 17:30 to 20:00 (A = 2.5 hours)
Thursday - 10:00 to 15:00 (B = 13), 15:00 to 20:00 (C = 9.5 hours)
Friday - 09:00 to 13:00 (B = 17)

PI + A + B + C = 11 + 2.5 + 17 + 9.5 = 40 hours.

Schedule for Week Ending 9/26

Monday - 12:00 to 22:00 (10 hours)
Tuesday - 10:00 to 12:00 and 15:00 to 19:00 (16 hours)
Wednesday - 9:00 to 16:00 (23 hours)
Thursday - 11:00 to 20:00 (31 hours)
Friday - 9:00 to 18:00 (40 hours)

Schedule for Week Ending 9/19

Monday - 12:00 to 15:00 (B = 3), 15:00 to 23:30 (A = 8.5)
Tuesday - 11:00 to 20:00 (A = 15.5, C = 2)
Wednesday - 08:00 to 13:00 (C = 7)
Thursday - 12:00 to 18:00 (B = 9), 18:00 to 22:00 (A = 19.5)
Friday - 12:00 to 18:00 (B = 15)

A + B + C = 19.5 + 15 + 7 = 41.5 hours.

Schedule for Week Ending 9/12

Barf.

Monday - Labor Day (H = 8)
Tuesday - 11:00 to 21:00 (B = 4, A = 6)
Wednesday - 12:00 to 18:00 (B = 10)
Thursday - 04:00 to 08:00 (C = 4) and 08:00 to 16:00 (A = 14)
Friday - 12:00 to 16:00 (A = 18) and 16:00 to 21:00 (C = 9)

A + B + C + H = 18 + 10 + 9 + 8 = 45 hours.

Schedule for Week Ending 9/5

September already. WHAT WHAT.

Monday - 11:00 to 18:00 (A = 7)
Tuesday - 09:30 to 15:30 (A = 13) then Dentist, boo.
Wednesday - 04:00 to 16:00 (A = 17, B = 8)
Thursday - 09:00 to 17:00 (A = 22, B = 11)
Friday - 10:00 to 17:00 (B = 18)

Total, forty hours.

The Case for Taxes

Hey there. I was pretty curious, so I thought I'd summon up a few facts and figures to check something out. I'm just wondering what effect a flat percentage taxation system would have on the incomes of what most would consider the working class.

In 2009, the United States government collected $2.1 trillion (that's $2,100,000,000,000) in revenues from taxation, as a whole. To compensate for this, I'll use the 2004 figure: $1.88 trillion. The average income (average, not median, keep in mind) was $60,528 in 2004, when there were 113,146,000 households, approximately. This means that the product of the two, $6.85 trillion, is the income of all said households together. Thus, 30.66% of the income earned by households in the United States goes to the government in taxes.

Presuming you'd want to keep the revenue relatively stable, here is the tax money spent at each graduation level of the US tax bracket system (in 2004), along with the median income. Note that these are the single filer status incomes; I'm using the numbers just because they're convenient numbers.

$7,150 -> $2,192
$29,050 -> $8,907
$44,389 -> $13,610
$70,350 -> $21,569
$146,750 -> $44,994
$319,100 -> $97,836

Going by the same brackets in the 2004 tax code, a person earning each of the above would pay this in taxation:

$7,150 -> $715 (effective rate = 10.0%)
$29,050 -> $4,000 (effective rate = 13.8%)
$44,389 -> $7,835 (effective rate = 17.7%)
$70,350 -> $14,325 (effective rate = 20.4%)
$146,750 -> $35,717 (effective rate = 24.3%)
$319,100 -> $92,593 (effective rate = 29.0%)

Interesting. So for each of the figures, the increase is:

$7,150 -> 206.6% increase
$29,050 -> 122.6% increase
$44,389 -> 73.7% increase
$70,350 -> 50.6% increase
$146,750 -> 26.0% increase
$319,100 -> 5.7% increase

The pivot point in this case would be at:

92,593 + 0.35(x - 319,100) = 0.3066x
92,593 - 111685 = -0.0434x
0.0434x = 19,092
x = $439,908

So essentially, if you're a single filer, your taxation would be higher if and only if you made equal-to or more-than that figure, $439,908.

Schedule for Week Ending 8/29

Even though I don't follow these much anymore, it's useful.

Monday - 11:00 to 19:00 (A = 8 hours)
Tuesday - 10:00 to 16:00 (B = 6 hours)
Wednesday - 10:00 to 18:00 (A = 16 hours)
Thursday - 04:00 to 16:00 (C = 4 hours, B = 14 hours)
Friday - 11:00 to 20:00 (A = 25 hours)

25 + 14 + 4 = 43 hours.

Schedule for Week Ending 8/22

Should probably keep my thoughts a bit more organized...

Monday - 11:00 to 20:00 (A = 9, total = 9)
Tuesday - 09:00 to 19:00 (B = 10, total = 19)
Wednesday - 09:00 to 19:00 (B = 20, total = 29)
Thursday - 11:00 to 20:00 (A = 18, total = 38)
Friday - 11:00 to 18:00 (A = 25, total = 45)

Schedule for Week Ending 8/1

Monday - 14:30 to 24:00 (A = 9.5)
Tuesday - 00:00 to 01:30 (A = 11), 12:00 to 16:00 (B = 4), and 16:00 to 20:00 (C = 4)
Wednesday - 10:00 to 18:00 (B = 12)
Thursday - 08:00 to 12:00 (B = 16) and 12:00 to 16:00 (A = 15)
Friday - 12:00 to 16:00 (B = 20)

Last week before vacation, woop.

Schedule for Week Ending 7/25

I'm working multiple programs now, which is going to be pretty confusing. For my own benefit I'm going to designate them "A", "B", and "C" so I can total up time on each.

Monday - 11:00 to 13:00 (C = 2) and 13:00 to 17:00 (B = 4)
Tuesday - 08:30 to 18:30 (A = 10)
Wednesday - 04:00 to 11:00 (C = 9) and 11:00 to 16:00 (B = 9)
Thursday - 04:00 to 08:00 (C = 13) and 08:00 to 14:00 (B = 15)
Friday - 08:00 to 12:00 (A = 14) and 12:00 to 16:00 (B = 19)

Saturday - 12:00 to 16:00 (A = 18)

Total hours:
A -> 18 hours
B -> 19 hours
C -> 13 hours

Things to do in Minnesota

So, in light of the upcoming trip back to Minnesota in just over a month, I figured I should compile a nice list of great (and really, moronically stupid) things to do. Mostly daytrips and whatnot, since it'll be hard to have a car the whole week. See if you can guess the ones I'm really excited about.

1) Of course, the only real reason to visit Minnesota is the MALL OF AMERICA (44.85N, 93.24W):

Featuring something like sixteen thousand GAP stores, forty Hooters restaurants and the largest population density of motorized carts in the world, it's the happiest place on earth. There's also a theme park that used to be called Camp Snoopy in the middle of the whole thing, but now it's something like Spooky Joe's Rollercoaster Emporium or something. I can never keep track.

It used to be a fun daytrip to drive up to the Mall of America, but then I lived in the Twin Cities and it became one of the two malls I would visit when I needed a specialty product, or whenever Andrew needed to pick up soap (sensitive skin?). The magic kind of drained out of it at that point, but that's okay. It's still fun to take people there who've never been before, considering it's probably one of the things the Twin Cities are most known for. That's really sad.

2) Darwin, Minnesota's famous LARGEST BALL OF TWINE IN THE WORLD (45.10N, 94.41W):

I've never seen this, but it looks pretty great. I mean, I know a lot of people are twine fans out there, but it takes some dedication and determination to create the largest ball of it in the world. Or not. A machine probably made it or something. Anyway it's a good representation of the good ol' America tourist trap, and there's nothing about that I can't endorse or support.

3) The Famed Austin SPAM Museum (43.68N, 92.98W):

If there's one thing southern Minnesota is known for, it's SPAM. Hormel Foods Corp has long been rooted in Austin, MN and about seventy years ago invented the canned, precooked "meat product". Over seven billion cans of SPAM have been sold, and remarkably, all SPAM sold in the Americas and Australia is made either in Minnesota or Nebraska. Gross.

Anyway, I've never been to this one, either. I really want a SPAM t-shirt or trucker hat.

4) The University of Minnesota Campus (44.97N, 93.24W)

The place that was my home for four years and that, stupidly enough, granted me a Bachelor's Degree. There's a new stadium that I haven't even seen (but I paid for and am still paying for) that would be neat to at least see, especially since it's within spitting distance of my old apartment building. Dana will need to tolerate eating at the best Burger King and Chipotle ever, and grabbing a smoothie from Jamba Juice in Coffman Union.

5) Lark Toys (44.30N, 92.00W)

One of my favorite toy stores in the world, and the former workplace of my grandma. The place has a plethora of current and old-school toys all over the place. It was pretty fun when I was a kid, but I'm sure it'd be even better now considering I have money. Also home to one of the best carousels in the world, every piece hand-carved by a local artisan guy.

6) The world's second largest thermometer in International Falls, MN (48.60N, 93.41W)

I've never been nearly this far north, but International Falls, Minnesota is considered the coldest city in the continental United States, and has the country's second-largest thermometer to prove it. The largest is actually in the hottest place in the continental US - Death Valley, California. It's far away, but hey, it'd be cool to be this close to Canada. Or something.

More later.

Schedule for Week Ending 6/26

Monday - 15:00 to 24:00 (9 hours)

Tuesday - 11:30 to 24:00 (21.5 hours)

Wednesday - 12:30 to 24:00 (33 hours)

Thursday - OFF (Daily Show!)

Friday - 10:00 to 20:00 (43 hours)

Schedule for Week Ending 6/13

Monday - 15:30 to 24:00 (8.5 hours)
Tuesday - 19:30 to 24:00 (13 hours)
Wednesday - 00:00 to 05:00 and 15:00 to 17:30 and 23:00 to 24:00 (23.5 hours)
Thursday - 00:00 to 02:30 and 14:30 to 18:00 (29.5 hours)
Friday - 11:30 to 16:00 (34 hours)

Schedule for Week Ending 5/16

Last full week before vacation! Let's get this over with:

Monday - OFF
Tuesday - 08:00 to 12:00 and 20:00 to 24:00 (8 hours)
Wednesday - 00:00 to 08:00 (16 hours)
Thursday - 00:00 to 12:00 (28 hours)
Friday - 00:00 to 08:00 (36 hours)

I'll find four hours here and there, I'm sure.

Schedule for Week Ending 5/9

Monday - 08:00 to 12:00 + 1 (5 hours)
Tuesday - 11:30 to 20:00 (13.5 hours)
Wednesday - 11:30 to 20:00 (22 hours)
Thursday - 16:00 to 20:00 (26 hours)
Friday - 16:00 to 20:00 (30 hours)
Saturday - 08:00 to 18:00 (40 hours)
Sunday - OFF

Schedule for Week Ending 4/25

Monday - 10:30 to 14:30 and 16:30 to 19:30 (7 hours)
Tuesday - 11:30 to 24:00 (19.5 hours)
Wednesday - 23:00 to 24:00 (20.5 hours)
Thursday - 00:00 to 08:00 (28.5 hours)
Friday - 11:30 to 15:00 (32 hours)
Saturday - 08:00 to 16:00 (40 hours)

I'll cut wherever I wanna if I work more tonight. Yarr.

The Plan

Over the last week, vacation plans have all solidified it seems. Itinerary is as follows:

May 18 - plane ride to San Francisco with Dana and her mother. Staying with Dana's aunt and rollicking around the Bay Area. Also a boat!
May 25 - pick up my sweet rental ride from the SFO airport. Drive down the Pacific Coast Highway and stop off at the Monterey Aquarium. Arrive at the Lucia Lodge and stay in our cabin. Take in the sights!
May 26 - figure out some daytrip to take from our comfy home base. Maybe Jade Beach or possibly a little bit of hiking.
May 27 - depart from the lodge and finish the drive down to LA. Rendezvous with Scott and chill at his place.
June 1 - head back up to San Francisco, return the car by noon.
June 2 - flight back to Philadelphia.

Hopefully everything'll be as great as it seems like it'll be.

Schedule for Week Ending 4/18

Monday - 05:00 to 12:00 (7 hours)
Tuesday - 08:00 to 17:00 (16 hours)
Wednesday - 00:00 to 12:00 09:00 (25 hours)
Thursday - 04:00 08:00 to 16:00 (33 hours)
Friday - 08:00 04:00 to 16:00 (45 hours)
Saturday - OFF
Sunday - 08:00 to 20:00

Fun filled final week of ET&E!

I'll be missing a total of twelve CSEDS shots.

Schedule for Week Ending 4/11

Monday - 08:00 to 20:00 (12 hours)
Tuesday - 08:00 to 16:00 (20 hours)
Wednesday - 04:00 to 16:00 (32 hours)
Thursday - 12:00 to 20:00 (40 hours)
Friday - 04:00 to 16:00 (40 hours)
Saturday - OFF
Sunday - 12:00 to 20:00 (48 hours)

What.

Schedule for Week Ending 4/4

Ugh. This one's a doozy.

Monday - 08:00 to 16:00 (8 hours)
Tuesday - 12:00 to 24:00 (20 hours)
Wednesday - 16:00 to 24:00 (28 hours)
Thursday - 00:00 to 04:00 and 20:00 to 24:00 (36 hours)
Friday - 00:00 to 04:00 and 16:00 to 24:00 (48 hours)
Saturday - 00:00 to 04:00 (52 hours)
Sunday - OFF

In the immortal words of Link, OH BOY.

Quote of the Week?

Here's something new. Maybe I'll keep up with it, maybe I won't, but I feel like doing it regardless.

"Le mystère de l'amour est plus grand que le mystère de la mort."
- Oscar Wilde

One of my favorites, actually.

Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1854, during the Late Victorian Era. He was a prolific writer of plays, poetry, journalism, and novels. Wilde was known for his flamboyance in dress and speaking, famous for his impeccably sharp wit and conversational abilities. He helped to popularize the concept of aestheticism, or "art for art's sake". He made it clear that he preferred art to nature in many ways, exalting the creativity and decadence of mankind's artistic tendencies. It states that morality and art are two separate entities, that art not only doesn't have to be useful but that true art should not be useful in any sentimental or moral way. Art should be designed to be a pleasure to the senses over all else.

The quote, from Wilde's play Salome, is French for "the mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death." I interpret it as the comparison between the within and without in all of our humanity - love is "within," an internal feeling that we produce inside ourselves, contrasted with death being the "without," an external actor that affects every living thing. Using this logic, Wilde seems to suggest that introspection is the key to discovering ourselves and pushing ourselves closer to the "wholeness" we all subconsciously strive toward.

It is not to say that the mystery of death is wholly unimportant. External forces acting upon humanity and its collective psyche are important simply because they act. Perhaps we will never find out why death exists, or what universal forces (entropy?) make it necessary. But really, it's the same logic and rationale that people have when it comes to space travel - why should we go out looking for more puzzles when we have plenty to solve right here? Why should we venture out into the cold reaches of inhumane death when inside each and every one of us is carrying around a massive amount of secrets if we'd only look inward?

In a less romantic view, love and death are simply different states in what amounts to a finite state machine of a brain. Different chemical configurations flooding neurons with what we interpret as a "feeling," or lack of one in the second case. Are we simply the sum of our parts or have we become more? It's hard to argue that we're not more, in my opinion, with the sentience we've achieved, the art we create, and the constant need for more we're compelled to feel as living things. Though until we figure that out, it's also pretty easy to argue that we're simply the sum of our parts. With drugs available that can make us feel a specific way, flood us with dopamine and seratonin, happiness seems truly like "just another state of mind."

Schedule for Week Ending 3/28

Eegahhhhh.

I can't embed this. Damn.

Monday - Nahsing.
Tuesday - 00:00 to 04:00 and 16:00 to 24:00 (12 hours)
Wednesday - 08:00 to 20:00 (24 hours)
Thursday - 04:00 to 12:00 (32 hours)
Friday - 12:00 to 20:00 (40 hours)
Saturday - 16:00 to 20:00 (44 hours)
Sunday - OFF?

Blorg.

Guiding Light

Impure hearts stumble
In my hands they crumble
Fragile and stripped to the core
I can't hurt you anymore.

Vision Revision: Re-writing History

Of course, this is nothing new from my perspective - actually I've heard this story quite often, but it's hard not to be outraged by it every time it happens. The Texas school board is reviewing their textbook curricula again.

This might not seem like it has much reach, but due to the fact that Texas is and has been the largest consumer of textbooks for several years now, the textbook makers are listening. Essentially, the way Texas sways causes the publishers to sway with them due to this very fact. California, due to budget problems, has been in no position to purchase new books for their students, and thus, the privilege defaults to Texas.

Texas is an overwhelmingly conservative state, obviously, McCain having garnered over 55% of the popular vote in the 2008 presidential race to Obama's sub-44%. The influence over the textbook publishers of America causes the small offices of the school board to be scrutinized year after year with a few of the changes perceived as being biased.

The slew of them this year is just as alarming as before, at least to me. In years past, the alarm was obviously focused on the science curriculum, with demands that Christian Creationism be taught with just as much credibility as the Darwinian concepts of natural selection and evolution. This year, the changes seem to affect the social studies curriculum primarily, which by no means should be any less scary.

First of all, it's important to understand how the board is made up and what issues are important to them. The fifteen-person board is made up of five Democrats and ten Republicans, and often votes on issues directly down party lines. Seven of the ten Republicans are considered to be part of the "conservative bloc," disliking concepts like separation of church and state and favoring a glorification of capitalism.

So what are the issues this team has addressed and/or modifications they've made? Here's a rundown and my take on each:

1) The addition in history texts of information about the civil rights revolution in America primarily during the 1960s. Specifically, the board wishes to add passages relating to the Black Panthers during this time where most textbooks focus only on the efforts of the less-violent Martin Luther King, Jr. and his organization.

In general, this is not such a bad thing in my mind; just as violence was part of the American Revolution, it was indeed a part of the expansion of civil rights to people of color during the midsection of the twentieth century.As long as they show the dualities of the issue - the shootouts with police of the Black Panthers along with the resurgence of the practice of lynching African Americans during the 1960s - I'm more or less fine with this change. The peaceful movement of MLK in parallel with the more subversive and violent tactics of the Black Panthers. In particular, it's important to show that the civil rights revolution and the American Revolution as related in this way - a group of people fighting for their own rights and achieving their end goals.

One thing to note is the fact that the group wishes to stress that the civil rights legislation was passed with Republican support; this is a dangerous lean, in my opinion. As aforementioned, it's particularly important to show that minorities were the impetus of the civil rights changes and not, as Joe Barton (R-TX) puts it:

“Only majorities can expand political rights in America’s constitutional society.”

Yeah, you guys fought hard with protest, but it's only because of the grace of us rich, white men that you have any rights at all!


2) One that particularly upsets me is the degradation of the concept of separation of church and state. Contrary to much of the evidence, the board wishes to convey that the oft-mentioned Founding Fathers were guided by Christian principles when they authored the Constitution, and that America's founding and Christianity are inextricably linked. Actually, they've gone so far as to exclude mention of Thomas Jefferson as an influence on subsequent revolutions, as he was the one who initially coined the term "separation of church and state". Instead they focus more on Aquinas and Calvin.

3) Particularly distressing is the new treatment of Japanese internment during World War II. The board called for a specific statement about Italians and Germans also being interned during the same time period to try and downplay the racist overtones of this internment. Of course racism had nothing to do with it, right? Anyway, it is pretty important to mention German and Italian internment as well, but ensure that the scales are also mentioned. Only 3,000 Italians were arrested an interned during the war, compared to 11,507 Germans and the largest group, the Japanese, with 120,000. Ethnic Japanese were thus almost 90% of those in internment camps. Obviously, there's a huge differential here - the fact that race had something to do with these numbers is not mitigated by the fact that ethnic Japanese were not the sole target.

There are others, such as the additions of Friedman to a list of influential economists and adding more information to the political history of the 80s and 90s that I don't particularly mind as long as they're kept reigned in somewhat.

One final thing, though, is one of the statements made a few years ago by a David Bradley on the treatment of the English curriculum:

In late 2007, the English language arts writing teams, made up mostly of teachers and curriculum planners, turned in the drafts they had been laboring over for more than two years. The ultraconservatives argued that they were too light on basics like grammar and too heavy on reading comprehension and critical thinking. “This critical-thinking stuff is gobbledygook,” grumbled David Bradley, an insurance salesman with no college degree, who often acts as the faction’s enforcer.

Wow. To me, that's particularly chilling.