A little insight
Mood:  chatty
Topic: Summer General
When I was in high school I used to joke with my friends whenever they would get sick that the best way to get rid of their illness was to have sex. This was more of an inside joke because I knew that these particular friends of mine [and I] were indeed opposed to having sex at that time in their lives and so we used to have a good laugh about it. However, now that I think about it and match it with what I've been learning recently, I think that this may be true.

Assuming that you have a healthy sex life, in other words you have a partner (ideally a husband or wife) that you don't have to be vulnerable with, and you partake in sex that doesn't involve violence, then this is true. Sex releases endorphins into the blood which boost up the immune system. Additionally, just feeling good and happy and loved release additional endorphins. That's why the sex has to be with someone that you can be happy with and not afraid. (As an aside, this is one of the reasons why casual sex is actually more harmful than just getting sexual diseases and why sex should be reserved for married individuals) So, you know what to do next time you get a sniffle....just don't kiss them q;o)

Energy
Mood:  chatty
Topic: Summer General
I came to a realization a few days ago. As I know from taking 3 semesters of physics at Cornell, [at the macro level] every type of energy is conserved. I mean EVERY type! Light, mechanical, electrical, etc So I realized, if it applies to every type of energy then it must apply to positive and negative energy in humans. Therefore, since energy is conserved and never created or distroyed there is only a certain amount of it availble for emotions. The more positive energy there is, therefore, the less negative energy there must be. Thus, by doing nice things for people you are decreasing the negative energy of the world. This is supported by the theory of TM that if enough of the world was meditating and thus channeling positive energy that there would no longer be wars, strife, etc

However, just like everything else, you have to take entropy into account. Everything always tends towards chaos if you don't maintain it. Tires wear out, marriages fail, etc if you don't work at maintaining it. Therefore, we can't just have one massive day of nice-ness and then assume that all of our troubles will be gone. It's something we have to make a part of our lives and practice all the time.

And really, that's the point of what Christians call "living as Jesus did". If everyone in the world were to do that then it's pretty obvious to see that there would be no crime, rape, murder, etc because that's definitely not anything WWJD, you know? Obviously, it's an impossibility for EVERYONE to do this because we can't even get people to agree on toppings for a pizza. However, the larger the amount of people who are practicing the art of being/feeling/acting positively, then by conservation of energy, the less amount of negative energy there is to go around.

Many of today's holy men (ie the Moses, Mohammads, etc of today) have suggested that if they were put in charge of the middle east conflict and, in an ideal world, could do whatever they wanted, would arrange for a few hundred thousand people to simply meditate around the perimeter of the middle east. This would, theoretically snuff out the violence there much in the way that removing oxygen from a fire would cause it to suddenly turn off. This wouldn't solve the problems, but would finally allow the countries to get at the root cause of their differences and solve them. It's easy to make excuses not to work with someone when your can always point to the latest atrocity (ie suicide bombing or tank raid) and say that the other side is being non-cooperative. Therefore, by eliminating that, they can finally talk to each other.

Wow, I had intended for this to be a two or three sentence post. Sometimes once I get flowing it's hard to stop.

Join The Army: See the World, Save your country, get larger breasts
Mood:  incredulous
Topic: News
According to a story I saw on the news a couple of days ago, the Army (or some arm of the armed forces) is offering women free cosmetic surgery in exchange for service. Don't think it'd work? One woman serving in Iraq resigned when her time in Iraq was over because she hadn't received her breast augmentation yet and would lose the free procedure if she dropped out. They've already done 62 procedures this year. So what? We need people, right?

Well, everyone is complaining that the troops don't have an adequate supply of bullets or kevlar vests. What would 62 inplants cost? Let's assume a low amount so $50 000 per breast for the procedure. Then that would be $6 200 000! I'm sure that could buy a LOT of supplies!

So it's a give and take. Do we want better equipped troops or a larger number of troops?

Incidentally, the women don't get the surgery until after their time is servced. If you know anyone who's ever had the procedure done (a friend of mine in HS did) you can't do any running or physical labor for a few months. That's definitely not someone useful to the army. Then there's the consideration of whether we want people with implants fighting. Isn't there a larger chance that the implant will burst during all of fighting and poisen the soldier from the inside?

Personally, I think it's cruel and playing on fragile women's vanities. I think this is just the kind of trickery depicted in Michael Moore's 9/11, which, although full of one-sidedness, does demonstrate that this type of stuff is always going on.

God Jokes
Mood:  happy
Topic: General Religion
Sometimes I get something in my head and then I just can't rest until I get it done. This is what happened today. For some reason that I can't remember, I really wanted to find a particularly funny article I read back in high school about God programming the world on a computer. After dozens of search strings and finding various takes on this, but not the exact on that I wanted, I finally found it! I will reproduce it here along with some of the other things I found along the way. The important thing to remember is that God has a sense of humour - after all, he created everything, including humour. Also, I don't think that any of these are sooooo bad as to be considered the kind of blasphemy that makes people think they have damned themselves. At any rate, enjoy!
---------
The genesis.log from God's Unix System

#In the beginning was the computer. And God said
:Let there be light!
#You have not signed on
:God.
#Enter user password.
:Omniscient.
#Password Incorrect. Try again!
:Omnipotent.
#Password Incorrect. Try again!
:Technocrat.
#And God signed on 12:01 a.m., Sunday, March 1.
:Let there be light!
#Unrecognizable command. Try again!
:Create light.
#Done.
:Run heaven and earth.
#And God created Day and Night. And God saw there were 0 errors.
#And God signed off at 12:02 a.m., Sunday, March 1.
#And God signed on at 12:00 a.m., Monday, March 2.
:Let there be firmament in the midst of the water and
#Unrecognizable command! Try again!
:Create firmament.
#Done.
:Run firmament.
#And God divided the waters. And God saw there were 0 errors.
#And God signed off at 12:01 a.m., Monday, March 2.
#And God signed on at 12:00 a.m., Tuesday, March 3.
:Let the waters under heaven be gathered together unto one place and let the dry land appear and
#Too many characters in string specification! Try again.
:Create dryland.
#Done!
:Run dryland.
#And God created Earth and Seas. And God saw there were 0 errors.
#And God signed off at 12:01 a.m., Tuesday, March 3.
#And God signed on at 12:00 a.m., Wednesday, March 4.
:Create lights in the firmament to divide the day from the night.
#Unspecified type. Try again!
:Create sunmoonstars.
#And God created Sun, Moon, Stars. And God saw there were 0 errors.
#And God signed off at 12:01 a.m., Wednesday, March 4.
#And God signed on at 12:00 a.m., Thursday, March 5.
:Create fish.
#Done.
:Create fowl.
#Done.
:Run fish'nfowl.
#And God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that creepeth wherewith the waters swarmed after its kind and every winged fowl after its kind.
0 errors.
#And God signed off at 12:01 a.m., Thursday, March 5.
#And God signed on at 12:00 a.m., Friday, March 6.
:Create cattle.
#Done.
:Create creepy things.
#Done.
:Now let us make man in our image.
#Unspecified type! Try again.
:Create man.
#Done.
:Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over of the fowl of the air and over every living thing that creepeth upon the earth.
#Too many command operands! Try again.
:Run multiplication.
#Execution terminated. 6 errors.
:Insert breath.
#O.K.
:Run multiplication.
#Execution terminated. 5 errors.
:Move man to Garden of Eden.
#File Garden of Eden does not exist.
:Create Gard.En.
#Done.
:Move man to Gard.En.
#O.K.
:Run multiplication.
#Execution terminated. 4 errors.
:Copy woman from man.
#O.K.
:Run multiplication.
#Execution terminated. 3 errors.
:Insert woman into man.
#Illegal parameters. Try again!
:Insert man into woman.
#O.K.
:Run multiplication.
#Execution terminated. 2 errors.
:Create desire.
#Done.
:Run multiplication.
#And God saw man'nwoman being fruitful and multiplying in the Gard.En.
#Warning: No time limit on this run. 1 errors.
:Create freewill.
#Done.
:Run freewill.
#And God saw man'nwoman being fruitful and multiplying in the Gard.En.
#Warning: No time limit on this run. 1 errors.
:Undo desire.
#Desire cannot be undone once freewill is created.
:Destroy freewill.
#Freewill is an inaccessible file and cannot be destroyed.
#Enter replacement, cancel, or ask for help.
:Help!
#Desire cannot be undone once freewill is created.
#Freewill is an inaccessible file and cannot be destroyed.
#Enter replacement, cancel, or ask for help.
:Create Treeofknowledge.
#And God saw man'nwoman being fruitful and multiplying in the Gard.En.
#Warning: No time limit on this run. 1 errors.
:Create good'nevil.
#Done.
:Activate evil.
#And God saw he had created shame.
#Warning: System error in sector E95. Man'nwoman not in Gard.En.
#1 errors.
:Scan Gard.En. for man'nwoman.
#Man'nwoman cannot be located. Try again!
:Search Gard.En. for man'nwoman.
#Search failed.
:Delete shame.
#Shame cannot be deleted once evil has been activated.
:Destroy freewill.
#Freewill an inaccessible file and cannot be destroyed.
:Stop!
#Unrecognizable command. Try again.
:Break
:Break
:Break
#ATTENTION ALL USERS: SERVER GOING DOWN IN 5 MINS FOR REGULAR
DAY OF MAINTENANCE AND REST. PLEASE SIGN OFF NOW.
:Create new world.
#You have exceeded your allotted file space. You must destroy old files
before new ones can be created.
:Destroy earth.
#Destroy earth. Please confirm.
#SERVER SHUTTING DOWN. SERVICES WILL RESUME ON SUNDAY MARCH 8
AT 6:00 A.M. YOU MUST SIGN OFF NOW!
#And God signed off at 11:59 p.m., Friday, March 6.
----------
And now some of the extra things I found
-----------
God Creates Universe in Seven Days,
Perl Gods Not Impressed
By Brian Briggs

Boulder, CO - Self proclaimed Perl God Merrill Wallman says he is unimpressed by God's feat of creating the universe in seven days. "That's nothing I once coded a custom Apache module over a weekend, but I didn't rest on Sunday like that slacker, God. I haven't had seven days to complete a project in years, and God got one day of rest? What a lazy ass. He didn't even have to give status reports."

Wallman also noted that "God obviously didn't debug, hasn't done any maintenance, and no documentation can be found. Truly amateur work."

Other Perl deities like Chris Kosman were also unimpressed, "I've seen nothing of God's work that compares to the Schwartzian Transform. And the simplicity of the Fisher-Yates shuffle is unequalled. God could have saved a day or two if he'd just used some simple OOP and recursive functions. I mean, who really writes procedural-oriented stuff these days anyhow?"

Kosman continued, "And 'Hey, God!?' there's a MODULE for assembling nucleic proteins and amino acids. Try 'Use Biology::DNA'. These amateurs always try to re-invent the wheel. And that platypus... could only be the result of unorganized spaghetti code. Next time try running your code with '-w' and 'use strict'. Then that sort of stuff won't happen. I could go on for days."

God was not available for comment but did release this statement through a spokesperson:

I'm not sure who those Perl 'bozos' are but they better watch it. It was my first project and I think I did pretty well given my experience. And yes, I turned on 'taint mode', when I created woman from that rib. Will you people ever give it up?

--------

If God Were a Programmer

Some important theological questions can best be answered by thinking of God as a computer programmer:

Q: Did God really create the world in seven days?
A: He did it in six days and nights while living on cola and candy bars. On the seventh day he went home and found out his girlfriend had left him.

Q: What causes God to intervene in earthly affairs?
A: If a critical error occurs, the system pages him automatically and he logs on from home to try to bring it up. Otherwise, things can wait until tomorrow.

Q: How come the Age of Miracles ended?
A: That was the development phase of the project. Now we're in the maintenance phase.

Q: Who is Satan?
A: Satan is an MIS director who takes credit for more powers than he actually possesses, so nonprogrammers become scared of him. God thinks he's irritating but irrelevant.

Q: Why does God allow evil to happen?
A: God thought he eliminated evil in one of the earlier revs.

Q: How can I protect myself from evil?
A: Change your password every month and don't make it a name, a common word, or a date like your birthday.

Q: If I pray to God, will he listen?
A: You can waste his time telling him what to do, or you can just get off his back and let him program.

Q: Some people claim they hear the voice of God. Is this true?
A: They are much more likely to receive email.

-------------

Jesus and Satan have an argument as to who is the better programmer. This goes on for a few hours until they agree to hold a contest with God as the judge.
They set themselves before their computers and begin. They type furiously for several lines of code streaming up the screen. Seconds before the end of the competition, a bolt of lightning strikes, taking out the electricity.

Moments later, the power is restored, and God announces that the contest is over.

He asks Satan to show what he had come up with.

Satan is visibly upset, and cries, "I have nothing! I lost it all when the power went out."

"Very well, then," says God, "let us see it Jesus fared any better."

Jesus enters a command, and the screen comes to life in vivid display, the voices of an angelic choir pour forth from the speakers.

Satan is astonished. and stutters, "But how?! I lost everything, yet Jesus' program is intact! How did he do it?"

God chuckles, "Jesus saves."

------------

And here's something a little more serious, but in keeping with the same theme as the jokes. You can access it here The Bible through the eyes of a Programmer: Part 1

Quotes - they're back!
Mood:  chatty
Topic: Quotes
"K was impressed. It seemed as if human beings were put on earth for the sole purpose of creating gods"
"Because this was his first time creating a god, he thought an all-knowing, all-powerful being might be a little too ambitious. A project for the advanced student, clearly."
-Mazelife, Japanese book

"In the search for something witty to say, disasters can sometimes result" - Eric Mesa

"Daffy Duck was a black man" - Rap Lyrics

"My wife likes to see me walk naked on the beach
so if you see me walking naked on the beach and take pictures please don't sell it to the Enquirer. You owe me 15% on the picture" - Shaq

Flash Cartoon
Mood:  chatty
Topic: News
I saw this flash cartoon on Countdown with Keith Olberman and I think it's great. It attacks both presidential candidates and is hilarious.

You can find it here http://www.jibjab.com

Enjoy! It's hilarious!
---
Edit
I forgot to say a couple of things. 1) There is some profanity so you have been warned - it's only 1-3 words, but that can be too many for some people
2) if the server is still down you have to click on the "atom" link.
---

What's in a name and other fun little tidbits from the news
Mood:  chatty
Topic: News
I couldn't make this up if I tried.

A republican senator from Jersey is named Kerry Edwards. Actually, I did change one thing to make it funnier, his first name is actually spelled Carrey. Still, this is just as funny as the democratic fundraiser who's last name was Gobush.

Those who were calling for Bush to dump Cheney on his ticket have a new reason to worry. He's a horrible campaigner! Apparently his temper flare a few weeks ago where he told some guy on the senate floor to eff off wasn't an isolated incident. He didn't cuss this time, but Cheney yelled at some supporters who wouldn't stop cheering for him, "do you want to hear this speech or not?!?" I don't know, but that certainly wouldn't gain my vote.

In what is perhaps my favorite story for this post, Arnold S------eger is under fire for what he called his state's democrats. He said that if they were going to be pushed around by lobbies and special interest groups and not stand up for what they believe that they were "girlie men". I love this for so many reasons. First of all, it's a typical thing for a buff foreign guy to say. Second, it's a great euphemism for the word Cheney might have used that contains a p, y, and is another name for a cat. Democrats are asking for an apology, calling his remarks sexist and homophobic. Sorry guys, but I think you're just trying to dodge the real issues. Plus, it's not the worst thing he can call you, be a man!

This guy in a Minneapolis Airport protesting long lines at airport security dropped his pants at the security line. This wouldn't have been such a big deal except he wasn't wearing underwear. Needless to say, they were not amused. No official word on whether he truly said, "how do you like this wand," or whether it was a "large protest".

While talking about Britney Spears, reporters began to reminisce about her past relationships. Apparently nothing said "I love you" better when she was with Justin Timberlake than a $25 000 gold toilet seats with their names engraved on it. She said, "it was to show him how far we've come since the Mickey Mouse Club." Uhhuh...so many toilet jokes I could make...but I'll let you form your own...

The second most amusing thing I found out today is that tanning can be addictive. They don't just mean in the sense that people want to stay tan so that they look good. Apparently, UV rays produce mild pleasure when they strike the skin. This information comes from a study done (I can't remember where, but it was a university) where they had two tanning beds set up. One had a UV filter and the other didn't. Also, the participants had no idea which one had a filter and it wasn't obvious in any way such that they could figure out which was which. All of the participants had to sample each one (which was the same in every other respect). Then they were told to pick whichever one they liked best. According to the study, 9 times out of 10 they chose the one without the UV filter. While this doesn't 100% prove that the UV is stimulating, I would say that as far as studies can prove anything, I think they've made their point. I only hope they compensated their subjects well for the damage done to their skin.

Martha Stewart Speaks!
Mood:  chatty
Topic: News
I'm not advertising or advocating for CNN because, frankly, I think they are pretty biased in their portrayal of certain issues. That said, Martha is supposedly only doing an interview with Larry King before her sentencing. Catch it tonight at 9 pm EST and it's repeated again some time later, I'd guess 12 am EST so that the Pacific people can see it at the "right" time.

A letter from a conecerned individual
Mood:  chatty
Topic: General Politics
Got this in an email and had to share it
--------

Dear Sir,

I am a senior citizen. During the Clinton Administration I had an extremely good and well paying job. I took numerous vacations and had several vacations homes.

Since President Bush took office, I have watched my entire life change for the worse: I lost my job. I lost my two sons in that terrible Iraqi War. I lost my home. I lost my health insurance. As a matter of fact, I lost virtually everything and became homeless.

Adding insult to injury, when the authorities found me living like an animal, instead of helping me, they arrested me. I will do anything to insure President Bush's defeat in the next election.

I just thought you and your listeners would like to know how one senior citizen views the Bush Administration.

Thank you for taking the time to read my letter.

Sincerely,
SADDAM HUSSEIN

Have a cookie
Mood:  chatty
Topic: Family
One thing that I love about my dad is that he's like The Oracle in The Matrix - he tells us [his sons] what we need to hear. This doesn't mean that he distorts the truth, but, like The Oracle, he tells us the truth in the way that we need to hear it in order to fulfill our destinies. After all, if Neo hadn't been made to come save Morpheus he would never have displayed his true powers.

Of course, my father has it a lot harder than The Oracle because he doesn't know what my destiny is. The Oracle had a rough idea, or, if I don't completely understand The Matrix, a complete idea of what Neo needed to do. My dad, on the other hand, has no idea what my purpose is. Am I to silently contribute to society in the background? Am I supposed to become a world leader? An artist? Cure some disease? Raise a son who will do these things?

Yet, he remains able to do this - it's his gift as a teacher. I see part of this in me and I hope to be able to develop it to the extent that he has.

When I graduate this May I will be the product of my loving parents who each played their respective roles at the right time in my life. Once I leave the nest I hope to be able to continue to gain guidance from both of my parents and therefore avoid the mistakes that they have made.