Fun News Tidbits
Mood:  chatty
Now Playing: "A little less conversation" - JXL
Topic: News
An interesting and slightly controversial study was published last week. The conclusion of the study, whose purpose was to try and find factors that contributed to successful countries, was that countries that have a belief in the afterlife, specifically a belief in punishment for your life's sins were the more successful countries. So basically, one differentiation between first and third world countries is that in the first world countries people believe that if they are evil they will go to Hell. According to the study 75% of United States residents believe in Hell.

So why would they have concluded this? There are two possibilities. First of all, this could be a result of the fact that most of the old world was Christian or Muslim and nearly all of the new world was colonized by Christians. Therefore, of course the successful countries would believe in Hell because it's a fundamental belief of the Christians. The second possibility could be that only people who believe that they will be punished for their misdeeds will tend to do less unethical things. After all, is eternity in Hell worth stealing, killing, etc? But this paragraph represents my own postulations, the story I saw didn't reveal the explanations of the study.

Every time you think that the politicians understand how political correctness works and how to avoid trouble, they go and surprise you. There's a new subway poster in NY that entices the riders to have a more comfortable ride by exhorting, "Don't eat smelly food on the subway." So what, right? Well, they decided to accompany the words with a picture of a fat Italian chef and sausages and other traditionally Italian foods. Italian Americans are all up in a tizzy about it. I think they should have had examples of food without the Italian guy and include other foods like Indian food. When will they learn?

I learned today that it is illegal to eat food in the DC subway area. A woman was trying to bypass this because she had a candy bar. So she stuck the last piece into her mouth, threw the wrapper away, and was chewing the piece when she got to the bottom of the stairs. Cops arrested her saying that "chewing is eating" and she was fined. Hmm...let the terrorists, drug dealers, and muderers get away, but thank you SOOO much for keeping people from chewing candy bars on the train.

a useful new feature
Mood:  chatty
Topic: Site Info
Tripod has this cool new feature that allows me to select the date in which my post will appear. This will allow me to both put stuff into the past and into the future. I wouldn't ever put something in the past because I believe in chronological integrity. That's why I got mad a few weeks ago when the dates dissapeared from my blog. However, the post-dating could be useful for weekends so that I can have blogs every day of the week instead of having a bunch at once. In order to test it, I'm going to put this one for 2 august. I want to see if it will come at the time I wrote it - around 10pm or right at midnight. Here's to experimentation!

Oops....they hit the wrong button again
Mood:  chatty
Topic: News
This is a little late as far as being newsworthy, but I've been busy. Additonally, this is not a news blog, I don't pretend to be the first harbinger of news; I just like discussing my opinions of the news, as loyal readers will already know. Well, on with the actual point of the post - Are all these "accidental" postings of the alleged Kobe Bryant victim really an accident?

I don't think that they are. I mean, let's take a look at what happened most recently. A court clerk accidentally emailed the victim's sexual history to all of the major news organizations. The news made it sound as if this was something that was entirely probable. Anyone who's ever used email knows that it's not quite that easy. If you're in MS Word typing up the proceedings for you to actually send an email of what you're doing requires for you to perform a menu command, open up your email program, accidentally type in the email addresses of the news agencies and then (still not realizing what's going on) hitting send in your email program. Then suddenly coming to terms with what you've done.

No, I don't think it was an accident at all. Now, I have no idea what motives the clerk could have had, but it's pretty clear that he wanted to get this info out.

Of course his actions required a judge to order that the information be destroyed or else he would hold the newspapers in contempt. They, of course, cried about first amendmant rights being broken. However, since they were not supposed to be in possession of that information and since the only thing that could happen if it were released would be harm to the victim and the undermining of the judicial system, I don't think they have much of a case. I think that the media is full of itself and thinks that it's a great deal more important as a protectorate of civil rights than it really is. Nowadays I don't understand how high profile cases can be expected to have a fair trial with the media sputting all kinds of nonsense about the trials.

Latest Quotes
Mood:  chatty
Topic: Quotes
"All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others" - Animal Farm, George Orwell

"oh no man, ithaca is a wonderful town" - Matt Nagowski

"I look at Kerry and say, if you're happy tell your face!" - Chris Matthews

"Being the world's landlord means you have to fix the world's broken toilets" - Keith Olberman

Why you should always pay attention
Mood:  incredulous
Topic: Summer General
This was distributed at work to get people to make sure that they pay attention to their surroundings. Apparently not doing that is the largest cause of accidents at the plant. "Enjoy"


Pay Attention!

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Note 1: It's 1 MB file so only download on broadband or if you have nothing to if you're on dialup
Note 2: I had to watch this a few times to really get that it was real and not acting

Artistic Side
Mood:  celebratory
Topic: Artwork
I have a new art gallery up with a few dozen new pieces. You can check it out at the usual spot: http://art.ericsbinaryworld.com and then click on Gallery 3. There are a lot more non-photoshopped folder this time around so it should be a refreshing look at some of the other things I like to photograph.

How to know when outsourcing has gone too far
Mood:  chatty
Topic: News
A McDonald's franchisee in Cape Giorado, Missouri outsourced drivethrough operations on his 3 McDonald's to a Colorado call center. That's right, when you talk to the drive through at his McDs you're actually talking to people in Colorado. They take your order and then send the info back to the McDs. This is relatively easy with current technology and it turns out to be cheaper and more efficient for the owner. Additionally, there are less order mistakes since the people taking the orders don't have to bother with the other things going on in the store. The news comentator joked that this could end up being an interesting reversal, "Perhaps one day an American in Colorado will be taking an order for a Punjabi."

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.