She’s been bugging me to do something like this for months now. So I finally have. Yes, I know it sucks. ;) But it should hopefully placate her.

Fake Ira Glass

I contend that it is, in fact, the same species. Moreover, I think that it actually makes sense for E.T. to exist within the Star Wars universe. It explains his magic powers, at the very least.

One niggling thought is that Star Wars takes place “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…”; but E.T. takes place on earth in the early 80s. I would have expected E.T.’s species to have evolved considerably by then. But then I realized that there are humans in Star Wars. So obviously, things work differently in the Star Wars universe!

I don’t remember if the E.T. film had any references to the Star Wars franchise (maybe Elliot had a Darth Vader poster on his wall); but if so, I will chalk it up to some ill-defined ancestral memory on the part of earth-based humanity. Obviously, the end of the Old Republic, the rise of the Empire, the Rebellion, and the birth of the New Republic would be something embedded into the midi-chlorians that inhabit all living things in this universe. That’s so obvious, I don’t even need to provide evidence for it.

So, we now know a few things: E.T. and his species (not to mention Elliot and the rest of the humans of the E.T. film) inhabit the same universe as Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, and Chewbacca. We know that E.T. is very force-sensitive: in addition to making the bike fly and entering a Jedi-hibernation-trance-thing (at the end of the film), he actually brought a dead plant back to life. As far as I know, Luke Skywalker never performed resurrections. Given his abilities, I suppose Elliot should be thankful that E.T. is preoccupied with studying plants and making long distance phone calls and doesn’t see any point in conquering Earth.

Now all I’m left to wonder: do Yoda’s and E.T.’s species share any relation? I’ll leave that to someone else.

Update your records accordingly.

I do not believe in any gods. I do not believe in Zeus or Athena or Pluto or Mercury. I do not believe in Odin or Shiva or Bahamut or Thor. I do not believe Allah or Yahweh or Bast or Krishna. I do not believe in a great world spirit or a supreme being. I do not believe in fairies or leprechauns. I do not believe in Samsara or Heaven or Purgatory. I strongly suspect that you also do not believe in most of the things that I do not believe in.

There is quite a lot that I do not believe in. Indeed, I very purposefully and deliberately do not believe in much (which is a post I plan on writing soon). Sometimes, when people find out just how much I don’t believe, it concerns them. They tend to mostly be concerned when they discover that I don’t believe the same things that they believe. In an effort to alleviate some of that concern, I’d like to spend a little time talking about how I stopped believing in so many things. Maybe when they realize that I’ve given such matters a great deal of thought, they’ll at least be content that I have a fairly good idea of what I’m doing and not doing and that no one has tricked me or deceived me.

Bear in mind that I’m not trying to proselytize or convert you to my faithlessness. The world’s a big place and there’s room for all kinds of different ideas and beliefs in it. If everyone were like me, I’d be incredibly bored. (This isn’t to say that I won’t take arms against people wanting to teach silliness in public school science classes or that I think it’s okay for people to murder women for the crime of being raped. My country’s first amendment sets very clear limits on the first and basic morality sets even clearer limits on the second. But as long as you don’t try to ruin things for the rest of us, you and I will get along fine; no matter what you believe.)

So, take this as a story of how and why I came to the place in my life where I currently find myself. It’s not an attempt to bring you here and if you don’t care about me or my story, you shouldn’t read it. For someone who’s not interested in the personality behind this story, it may come off as an argument for why you should be like me. I would hate for it to be taken that way.

Now, with my two paragraph disclaimer out of the way, let us begin. Are you sitting comfortably?

I was raised a Baptist-like Christian with a healthy dose of Pentecostal thrown in for flavor. From the third grade until I graduated high school, I attended an extremely conservative Baptist school. The Bible was the literal word of God. When reality conflicted with the Bible, reality was clearly in error (seriously: anything in the universe that conflicted with the Bible was put their by Satan to trick us or by God to test our faith. I am not making this up.). When the Bible conflicted with the Bible, you were obviously reading it wrong. And God loved everyone, but he wouldn’t hesitate to send someone to Hell for the crime of being born in the wrong country.

And I believed it. I believed it fully and completely. I was deathly concerned about the eventual end of my soul and everyone else’s. Some dear friends whose opinions I valued greatly at the time (and still do, actually) called me Super Christian. I went to church and Bible study and I prayed without ceasing. Super Christian, indeed. But, eventually I started to feel somewhat disconnected from God. Don’t get me wrong: I still believed in him. I was just convinced that he couldn’t possibly love me. And let me tell you: that thought is sufficient to send someone into a pretty big funk.

So I wandered around in a general malaise for a few years: convinced that the creator of the universe just didn’t like me. And then I met another dear friend who convinced me that not only did God still love me, but that I still had a chance to build a relationship with him. So I did. If I were Super Christian before, I don’t know what I was at this point. Ultra Christian, perhaps? Just about every moment of every day was spent praying or singing hymns or going to church or thinking about Jesus or reading the Bible. I read the Bible like I had never read it before. Which was probably the beginning of the end for Ultra Christian. The more that I really read the Bible, the more I realized the one fundamental truth contained in it: the Christian God is a douchebag.

He starts off by creating a couple of humans. Humans that he knows (via the benefit of omniscience) will do whatever he tells them not to do. And so he tells them not to eat fruit of a tree that he puts right next to them. So of course they do and they and all of their descendants are cursed to hell.

He then spends the next few thousand years committing the most heinous crimes against humanity that I can readily imagine. He orders the deaths of entire peoples. He gives his chosen people free reign to rape any woman they find along the way. He encourages any survivors to be made slaves. He turns poor Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt for having the audacity to look at her home as she flees it (okay; a pillar of salt is creative. But still.). Some kids dared to make fun of a prophet so God sends bears to maul them to death. And the Old Testament just goes on and on with this stuff.

Needless to say, I started to become somewhat uncomfortable about worshiping this guy. Had I committed even one of the atrocities credited to the Christian god, I’d be (rightly) considered one of the more evil men alive. I imagine I’d be executed for war crimes. No one but the mentally unstable and pathologically evil would sing my praises. Yet, once you really learn about him, the idea of praising the Christian god seems like a sin in and of itself.

About this time, I started reading books by Brian Greene, a theoretical physicist who made a name for himself outside of academia by writing books and doing TV shows to popularize physics. Greene does a fantastic job of explaining things like relativity, quantum theory, and cosmology. And he doesn’t do it with an appeal to authority. He doesn’t say “Trust me: this is the way it is.” Instead, he talks about the experiments that have been done. He talks about what they did and what the results were. He talks about the doubts that other scientists had. He talked about what science has gotten wrong over the years. And he included pages and pages of citations so I could go look it all up myself. Not once did he ask me to take his word for it

From Greene, I learned three things that relate to the topic of this post: I learned that a creator for the universe is not necessary. Physics, as we understand it, is perfectly capable of creating a universe all on its own. I learned that we have a great deal of evidence that points to our current theories (the Big Bang and such) being in the right ball park. And I learned the joys of being wrong or saying “I don’t know”.

That last bit is something that has really influenced me. Not knowing something is an amazing opportunity to learn something. But you can’t stop at “I don’t know”. Too often, people of faith stop at “I don’t know. God must’ve done it.” And that’s so unsatisfying! “I don’t know” is a doorway into further exploration. It has to be “I don’t know. Let’s find out!” or you’re not learning anything.

There were some other things too. I had never been happy with the way my religion expected me to think of homosexuals: that they were doing some great big sin just by loving someone. I had basically just ignored that part of my religion for quite some time using an incredibly liberal dose of cognitive dissonance. When Katrina hit, the Christian assholes came out of the woodwork to say that it was just punishment for the sins of the area; I found it odd that only poor black people were considered sinful enough to be punished though. (There was also a great deal of love and help poured into the area from Christians. This just seems like strong evidence that good people will do good things, no matter what they do on Sunday morning.)

I started questioning my faith. By this point, I had a lot to question. I realized that the only reason I believed what I did was because my parents had taught me to. And just like that, I stopped being a Christian. (I think it’s fair to say that I’d stopped believing before that since belief isn’t really something you can turn off and on. It might be more fair to say “And just like that, I gave myself permission to stop being a Christian.”)

At first, I toyed with the idea of other beliefs, but nothing gelled for me. I wasn’t just “not a Christian”; I was “not a person of faith”. I’d become “a person of evidence” instead.

But please understand me: I might be wrong. There might be some great spirit or god or higher power or supreme being hiding out there. I can’t disprove it. And all it would take to convince me is a little bit of evidence. A burning bush or fire from the heavens would likely convince me. However, in absence of such evidence, I’ll not believe in god anymore than I believe in unicorns or honest politicians.

I didn’t reach this conclusions lightly. I’ve thought over all of the arguments like Pascal’s wager and the argument of incredulity. And I still read a lot: both from secular philosophers, scientists, and theists. I haven’t tuned out of the world of the faithful just because I’m no longer a part of it.

After all, I might learn something.

Over the course of a couple of days, I conducted an informal survey consisting of begging twitterers to send me their ages. I promised to keep direct message responses anonymous.

Eventually, I got bored with the whole thing and decided to wrap it up. Below, I present an analysis of the data. There’s a very strict caveat here: I know nothing about statistics. So please don’t try to draw any actual conclusions from this.

27 people responded to my survey. I follow 159 people and have 201 follow me. So my sample represents 17% and 13% of the populations I’m interested in. It’s estimated that twitter will have 1000000 users by the end of the month so my sample is .003% of that. I haven’t bothered computing confidence intervals for all of this (because, frankly, I don’t remember how), but I imagine that “statistically insignificant” would probably be a phrase that would come up. Since I’m not trying to call a major national election, I’ll reiterate that you shouldn’t trust these numbers.

It’s actually even worse than that. My sample was self-selected as the “type of people that will respond to a random guy on the Internet asking their age” group. I don’t know how this affects the results, but I bet it does: in my experience people in a certain age range tend to not broadcast their ages to the world. So ultimately, my data represents People on twitter who James finds entertaining and who also find James entertaining enough to follow, and they’re willing to share their age with James (someone who they have likely never met); and also speak English because James only follows people who mostly speak in English

I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s something of a narrow demographic. Still, I’m armed with a spreadsheet so I will press on.

The minimum age in my sample was 21 and the maximum was 24. The median age was 20 and the mean was 30.3. The standard deviation was 6.89. At 25, I am .769 standard deviations from the mean.

Looking at a graph of the distribution, I do not feel confident saying that the data represents a bell curve; but it might if I had a bigger sample size. Obviously, it’s hard to say. To me, the most interesting thing is that it looks like the age distribution would eventually demonstrate a long tail with a bunch of people clustered at the younger end of the graph (which is to be expected on the Internet, I think) and then a lot of older people who don’t share ages in common. Or, maybe that’s the sort of thing any sociologist would expect…but it surprised me.

Another thing that surprised me is the large age range of the people I’m friends with on twitter. I’m fairly young and still not used to being an adult: that I can have things to talk about with a 21 year old and a 46 year old at the same time is amazing. That the 46 year old isn’t already annoyed with me is nothing short of miraculous.

I was also a little disappointed at the lack of response. A quick “@willia4 I’m 25″ doesn’t exactly take long. I guess not everyone finds collecting data as much fun as I do. Ah well. ;)

I live in a townhouse in an area that has city trash pickup. The guy I bought the house from, for some reason, painted his (now my) house number on his trashcan. It’s the only trashcan in my area that has the house number painted on it, but whatever. The trash collectors tend to just throw all of the empty trashcans into a pile so the number made it easy to pick my trashcan out from the sea of other trashcans. Having the same trashcan every day isn’t particularly important to me, but it’s a nice-to-have…I guess.

Anyway, I’ve recently started coming home from work pretty late so I’m usually the last person to take my empty trashcan back around. Actually, I’ve started coming home after dark and, because it’s REALLY dark back walking around behind the townhouses, I’ll usually just wait until Thursday morning to walk it back around. No big deal.

Sometimes, I don’t get my trashcan (the one with my house number painted on it). Since no other trashcans have numbers on them, it makes sense that other people aren’t checking and just grab one. Perfectly reasonable. Indeed, the trashcan I’ve been using this week hasn’t been mine.

But I don’t think it’s my trashcan anymore. My neighbors, two doors down, had set my trashcan out this morning. In red spray paint, they had crossed out my house number (though it’s still legible) and filled the side with multiple copies of their house number.

WTF? They stole my trashcan? Really? I mean…why? I don’t care about the trashcan (they’re welcome to have it if they really want it that badly); but now I’m incredibly curious about the people themselves. What was wrong with their existing trashcan? Did they go buy the paint just for this or did they have it lying around? Why did they do such a bad job of painting it? Did they want to steal a trashcan but not put any effort into it? Were they maybe trying to make a point that I shouldn’t have my house number stenciled on my trashcan? I’d buy that, but I’m not the one who did it; and they must know this since I moved in well after they did.

The whole thing just seems bizarre and weird. And I’m slightly scared that I’m going to start having some odd passive aggressive war with these guys. It started with the trashcan? What’s next? Personally, I want to live a quiet, non-confrontational life. So I’ll let them make the next move if they decide it’s necessary.

But if they really do want some strange suburban sitcom-style war, I’ll win. I hope it doesn’t come to that.

Because my birthday and my cousin’s birthday fall so close to each other (a day between them), we often had family birthday parties together. More than anything, it provided an excuse for the family to get together and eat. This year, my parents were hosting just such a party at their house.

While my parents were downstairs getting everything ready, I was hiding up in my bedroom surfing the web and watching one of the 24-hour news channels (probably CNN). I don’t normally watch the news, but that day was special: the space shuttle Columbia was coming home from her latest mission. As a huge space geek, I try not to miss opportunities to watch the shuttle land.

But it didn’t happen. Controllers on the ground lost contact with the shuttle and never regained it. As the minutes slowly passed, the newscasters started using the phrase “broke up”. Next came the eyewitness accounts and the amateur video: the shuttle had broken up over Texas. There was a number to call if you found debris in your back yard. There was very little hope for survivors.

And of course, with the possible exception of some experiment spiders, there were no survivors. One doesn’t really expect to survive when your spaceship disintegrates.

I went downstairs and in a rather quiet voice said, “The space shuttle blew up”. My parents weren’t particularly concerned. They cared but they didn’t seem to share the same shock and sadness that I did. Maybe it’s because they aren’t space geeks. Who knows?

The Columbia disaster means more to me than the Challenger does. I suspect this is because I’m old enough to have watched the Columbia on TV (I was not even three when the Challenger exploded). I can remember seeing the Columbia memorials. I can remember the flags being at half mast. And, perhaps most importantly, I can still see the effects of that day on the United States’ manned space program (something I feel very strongly about).

Today, I remember those men and women who died. I think of humanity’s destiny and I wonder if it can possibly lie in the stars. I think about sacrifice and risk and honor and courage. I think about our fragile blue home and how cold and lonely it is when we are away from it. I think about beauty and all the glorious wonders that human eyes may never see.

Today, I raise a glass to Rick Husband, William McCool, Michael Anderson, Ilan Ramon, Kalpana Chawla, David Brown, and Laurel Clark. I raise a glass to Francis Scobee, Michael Smith, Judith Resnik, Ellison Onizuka, Ron McNair, Gregory Jarvis, and Sharon McAuliffe. I raise a glass to Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. I raise a glass to Vladimir Komarov, Georgi Dobrovolsky, Viktor Patsayev, and Vladislav Volkov.

I raise a glass to every man and woman who has ridden on that column of fire because they can’t bear to be so far away from the stars. I raise a glass to every engineer and scientist who spend long, sleepless nights so that we can do the impossible. I raise a glass to every teacher who inspires their students. And I salute every child who, like I did, stares up at the brilliant night sky and walks away with a head full of dreams.

I will probably never walk on an alien world. I will probably never look down upon this globe with my own eyes. I will probably never escape of the confines of my birth planet.

But humanity will. Because we must. Because we’re human. And when we choose to be, we’re amazing.

For reasons that I can’t entirely understand, I’ve started building a little two-dimensional pyramid out of the 20oz bottle caps. It’s a monument to my decadence and consumerism, I guess.

The other day, I started wondering how many bottle caps were actually in the pyramid. And sure, I could just count them: but the math-minor in my thought that it would be trivial to figure out. This is where the story gets a little embarrassing.

I couldn’t do it. The best I could do was write a recursive algorithm to produce the count; and while that may be fine for a computer, it wouldn’t be any more fun for me than just counting the things. Since my math chops weren’t up to the task, I turned to technology.

I built a table with a few (Height, Count) values like (0, 0), (1, 1), (2, 3), (3, 6), etc. I actually used the recursive function I came up with and wrote a little C program to make the table for me so I could easily have one with about a hundred values or so. I then put the numbers into Excel and graphed them as a scatter plot. Using Excel’s “Add Trendline” function, I got an equation for the data that looked something like:

y = .50000000017x^2 + .50000000017x + 1E-19

I rounded this down and simplified it to .5(x^2+x). And this was great. It fit my data, but I couldn’t understand it. I tried and tried and couldn’t figure out why this would describe the number of bottle caps in my pyramid. Eventually I gave up and contented myself with proving that (x^2+x) will always be even and can therefore always be divided by 2 with no remainder. I thought I was done.

A few days later, though, I was adding yet another bottle cap to my pyramid of failure and I realized something that should have been immediately obvious from the start. Indeed, it’s so obvious that you have probably been wondering why I’m writing all of this down. And it’s this: every time you add a level to the pyramid, you add the same number of caps. In other words, when I add the 11th level to the pyramid, I’ve added 11 more caps to it.

So if my pyramid is 11 levels high, it has 11 + 10 + 9 + 8 + 7 + 6 + 5 + 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 caps in it. Wait a minute…that looks a lot like factorials, but with addition instead of multiplication. I spent a couple of minutes on Wikipedia and found that the addition equivalent of factorials is called…(wait for it)… triangular numbers.

And, it turns out, that the closed form of triangular numbers is (1/2)(n^2+n). It’s also (n+1)-choose-2 which I should have remembered from my days at college. Where I took a lot of math classes.

In conclusion: math is everywhere. It’s even sitting on my desk right now in the form of a pyramid of sadness (a triangular pyramid of sadness). Also: I’ve forgotten a lot about math and I’m just not very good at it anymore. It makes me wonder about all the time and energy I spent doing math homework. What was for? I know it was worth it, but right now, I can’t put words to that worth. Am I just fooling myself? Ah well. With the exception of my senior-level discrete math class, I really enjoyed it. If nothing else, that made it worthwhile.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to use induction to prove that the closed form of triangular numbers really is (1/2)(n^2+n). Just to prove that I still know how.

Hello, ladies! Are you tired of having a great boyfriend? Are you bored with always being satisfied in bed? Do you wish that you could be the attractive one when you go out? Are your friends jealous of your good fortune (and your good taste)?

Congratulations! You may have just stumbled upon the answer to all of these problems!

Yes, James Williams is single and on the market! James is a true American man. Indeed, he’s two hundred and sixty pounds of American, meeting or beating all major national statistics on obesity. But just because he’s 2.5 times the size of your last boyfriend, don’t think that he will be 2.5 times more useful around the house. Because he has proven useless at all traditional “man jobs”: everything from fixing leaky faucets to killing spiders has been too formidable a task for James at one time or another. You’ll need not fear being trapped in traditional gender roles as long as he’s around!

Perhaps you’ve grown weary of your boyfriend being the life of every party while you take a back seat. Those days are long over! Should James even manage to make it to a party, he’ll spend the entire time staring at the floor. The limelight will finally be yours!

And of course you like having your picture taken! James is rarely far from his camera and he will take shots of you in everyday situations from every angle and at every conceivable exposure setting. Don’t bother asking him to stop: he knows you don’t really mean it!

Don’t be fooled by this laundry-list of fantastic qualities, however. Nothing is perfect and neither is James. Should you choose to make him yours, you’ll need to deal with several unfortunate flaws:

If Jerry Springer has taught us anything, it’s that women love a good cat-fight over “their man”. You may noticed the long line of eager ladies at his door, but be assured that most of them just want to sell him magazine subscriptions. It’s a profitable method of fundraising.

While James has a good job with a decent income, he loves giving presents to those he cares for. You will often find yourself lavished with useless trinkets of affection and may become irate when James insists on paying for dinner.

James’ family is crazy in ways that are different from your family’s crazy. This may take some adjustments on your part.

Above, James used the first “crazy” as an adjective and the second as a noun just to confuse readers. He thinks jokes about syntax and grammar are hi-freaking-larious.

James uses words like “hi-freaking-larious” in completely non-ironic ways.

James is not nearly as funny as he thinks he is.

As you have undoubtedly realized by now, James has a lot of options and must be very discriminating in selecting his special lady friend. To ensure quality, the following test will be administered to all applicants.

Test:

1) Complete the following sentences or phrases:

1a) “All your base…”

1b) “Help me Obi-wan Kinobi…”

1c) “We few, we happy few…”

1d) “Out. For. A. Walk. _____.”

2) How many lights are there?

3) From which movie did James take the phrase “special lady friend”?

4) Diagram the following sentence: “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.”

5) Which well-known linguist famously noted the beauty of the phrase “cellar door”?

6) Where did the title for this post come from?

7) Would you seriously consider dating someone who can answer all these questions (and more!)?

For your convenience, an answer key has been provided.

Answer key:

1a) “…are belong to us.”

1b) “…you’re my only hope.”

1c) “…we band of brothers.” “…we band of buggered.” is also acceptable.

1d) “Bitch.”

2) There are four lights.

3) The Big Lewbowski

4) See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Buffalosentencediagram.svg with a reasonably advanced browser.

5) J.R.R. Tolkien

6) Mahir

7) Yes. (Note: To ease James’ workload, this is the only answer that will be graded.)

I learned that I need to use my flash more. Since I’ve started taking pictures, I’ve really tried to not use the flash. The built-in flash on my 350D is pretty bad and I had convinced myself that it was useless.

I was wrong: something I again learned from PJ. The built-in flash may suck, but sometimes it’s better than the alternative. Fortunately, I wasn’t so stubborn on this one and I did actually use the flash some on the trip (mostly towards the end). This saved a lot of pictures.

I’m thinking of trying to get a flash out of my birthday that’s coming up in a couple of months. So maybe this lesson won’t apply for much longer. :) That’d be nice!

Over the course of the week, I took about 3800 pictures. I’d like to think that I learned a few things while doing it too; mostly about how I tend to take pictures and what I need to work on.

Just for fun, I’m going to talk about it here. If you want to follow along, some of my better pictures are available on Flickr.

Since I bought my cheap 50mm f/1.8, it’s basically stayed on my camera. My 70-200mm telephoto isn’t useful in hand-held situations and I’m not a huge fan of the kit lens (EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6) because of its sharpness issues. Also, I’ve read enough Really Good photogs saying that the 50mm is a great way to learn discipline and develop composition skills and such that I just use the 50mm all the time. And that was certainly true on this trip. With the exception of a few shots as we pulled out of Port Canaveral where I used PJ’s 70-300mm for a few shots, I rocked the 50mm the whole time.

I shoot on a Canon Digital Rebel XT (350D) and its sensor size yields a 1.6 crop factor on non-EF-S lenses. This makes the 50mm a slight telephoto lens on my camera. This caused almost all of the pictures I took of people to be close-up head shots. And, because I was often shooting indoors with the aperture wide open at 1.8, the backgrounds tend to be blurry. So while I took some good portraits of my friends last week (if I do say so myself), there’s very little evidence that any of them are on a cruise. The backgrounds tend to be blurry enough that they could’ve been taken anywhere (or in front of any cheesy backdrop at Sears). I think this was a huge disservice to my friends. Before I travel anywhere again, I’ll buy a wider lens. Fortunately, PJ wasn’t afraid to use the much wider kit lens and he picked up the slack in this area. He even told me I should switch lenses, but I was much too stubborn to listen. Sorry, PJ!

Another thing I noticed is that a lot of pictures were very impromptu and of the nature of “Hey, Eddie! Take a picture of me now!” When the person giving the order was in front of a bright window or sunny beach, I’d usually forget to compensate on the exposure. I ended up with a lot of great silhouettes of unrecognizable people. Oops. I’ll have to remember to put more conscious thought into every picture I take from now on before I snap the shot and not after.

I’m not very good at taking pictures of people in ball caps. I either need to figure that out or make people take off their hats. The shadows from the bills on the cap were usually bad enough to ruin the picture instead of complement it.

I discovered that my friend Josh is very easy to take a picture of. He tends to walk more slowly than everyone else so he ends up at the back of the group: so there’s no one standing between him and me. He’s the type of guy who’ll pose as long as you point a camera at him without getting too impatient. And he’s a good looking guy and very photogenic. Because of all this, he’s well over-represented in my Aperture project than everyone else.

I’ve discovered that it’s incredibly easy to take beautiful pictures where you’re in the Caribbean. Point your camera anywhere and snap and it’s going to be great. It may not be the picture you had in mind, but it’ll be great. Whether it’s sunsets or clouds or mountains or clear, blue ocean water…there’s nothing ugly out there (as long as you don’t point your camera at fat men in speedos). If you need to build your photographer’s ego, take a cruise to the Caribbean. You’ll come home with a memory card full of fantastic shots regardless of your talent level.

At the Mayan Ruins in Tulum, I think they planted the palm trees to purposefully provide neat, if somewhat clichéd, ways to frame pictures of the ruins. I wholeheartedly approve of this.

Indeed, almost every picture I took was a cliché. But, I think I’m getting better and better at the clichés. I hope that I’m starting to really master the basics and will one day soon be able to move on to more interesting and artistic picture-taking.

It was a wonderful trip and I wish I were there today (though I’d try to buy a wider lens if I could).

I was at work, downstairs in the cafeteria. I had my laptop with me and I was getting some work done. It must’ve been a MacBook Pro (as opposed to the Powerbook I actually own) because I was running Windows on it.

So while I was working, some beautiful women came and sat down beside me. Each of them had her husband with her.

I think this sets me apart from most “normal” people. Most people’s brains use dreams to let them explore fantastical situations which could never arise in real life. My brain said, “Whoa now! I already gave you a MacBook Pro! What more do you want?” and instead of providing beautiful, nubile ladies gives me beautiful, married “let’s be friends!” girls.

Ah well. I can’t really complain.

The MacBook Pro sure was nice! And it’s downright obtainable which is a lot more than I can say for the other.

The APOD write-up emphasizes how strange Iapetus is and how much we still don’t know about its formation and history.

Every time I come across things that we don’t know, I get excited. And we know so little about the universe that there’s a lot to be excited about!

As something of a space geek, I’ve been thinking about Sputnik all morning. NPR had an interview with Boris Chertok, the deputy to the principle designer of the satellite. He said, “…it took us four or five days to realize that from then on, the history of civilization could be divided into before the launch and after.” Does anyone but me still believe this?

The exact same problems we had 51 years ago still plague us today. People still starve to death. There are still wars and famines. People live, work, and die in squalid sweatshops around the globe. There are vicious wars over which imaginary friend is telling people to things. We still live in a world where “genocide” is a word that regularly appears in the news and not just in history books. It seems that the biggest difference between then and now is this: “Then”, Congress eagerly funded space exploration. “Now”, every mission has to fight for the rest of the government’s table scraps.

I honestly and truly don’t understand this. We did something great. We turned weapons research into a shining star in the night sky. We sent men to the moon. We created space stations where men and women could live for the first time un-tethered from our pale blue dot. We turned our eyes to the heavens and saw just how small we were in a universe that defies imagination.

I see all of this and my first response is amazement. Every time, my response is amazement. I still haven’t grown used to the idea that we sent men to the moon, even though it happened decades before I was born. My second response is, “Ok. It’s time for everyone to band together, get over our petty bickering, and realize that the only way we’re going to make it in this universe is to realize that we’re all humans. Our similarities outweigh our differences so completely that we might as well be the same. So let’s just all get along, okay?”

Of course, that doesn’t happen. We’re the only known species that’s able to recognize its own evolution and, in so recognizing it, better itself in ways that natural selection never could…but we can’t get past our tribalism. My country is better than your country because I was born in this one. My religion is better than your religion because I was born into it. All religions are better than no religion because we were born into it. I’d really like that guy if he just weren’t so different.

Look at the launch of Sputnik. In my country, whatever awe we felt at the achievement was quickly replaced with, “We can’t let the Russians be better than we are.” Only in the minds of science fiction writers did anyone even consider a better world for all mankind. As a quick trip through international headlines will demonstrate, that better world has basically stayed fiction, too.

In case you’re curious, here’s a list of visible stars that are within 50 light years of our planet. That page says that there are 2000 stars that we know about within that distance. Today, if anyone out there is listening (probably not) and has very sensitive equipment (almost certainly not), they’ll hear a very quiet “beep…beep…beep…”. It was us. We sent that little satellite up and announced to the universe, “We’re here.”

And perhaps, just perhaps, that alien listener will look up from his equipment and say, “A new species has awoken in our galaxy. Let us go see what they are like.” When they get here, what will they find?

I’ll put money on it. They’ll find people starving to death. They’ll find wars and famine. They’ll find people living, working, and dying in squalid sweatshops around the globe. They’ll find religious wars and genocide. They’ll find a species that decided it’s better to stay in our sandbox than to meet the rest of existence head on. On that day, I’ll be ashamed to be human.

Hell, I already am.

Maybe we’ll figure it out in the next fifty years. I’m not holding my breath.

For everyone else, doesn’t it look like that Cyberman is going to upgrade that poor old woman? Such a shame. Such a shame.

Enjoy.

Sincerely, Me

I’m writing this because the copy on the back of the package is completely ridiculous for a product where you boil water and squeeze cheese sauce out of a packet. I’ve reproduced in its entirety, in flagrant violation of several copyright laws.

Delicious. Distinguished. Delightful. That’s Kraft Bistro Deluxe. An indulgence in mouthwatering flavors fit for your distinctive tastes. Enjoy premium Kraft cheeses and pastas made with durum and whole grain wheat. Bistro Deluxe offers a mac and cheese experience of true taste sophistication.

Satisfy your desire for a more grown-up mac and cheese with our delicious Classic Cheddar variety. Made with rich and creamy cheese and ridged elbow pasta to deliver full-flavored taste with every bite.

*Note: I want to point out that this press release suggests pairing this Mac N’ Cheese with a fruity Merlot. Maybe I would’ve enjoyed it more if I’d had that instead of Mountain Dew.

I need to start working on it again. Otherwise, by the time I finish it, it will have been obsoleted by software agents that look like Tom Baker.

And while I want Tom Baker in my computer as much as anyone, I’d like to write something cool on my own first.

I’d also probably keep calling him Doctor. And I bet that would annoy even a virtual Tom Baker.

It’s amazing how easy it is to get sucked into watching crappy television series (like Smallville) or great television series (like The West Wing) instead. To just collapse onto the couch, reach for a remote control, and have entertainment spoon-fed into my mind is…well, easy. And don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with easy entertainment. And certainly, shows like The West Wing or Buffy or Firefly play with big ideas that are worth thinking about. Indeed, those three transcend the bounds of trashy TV entertainment and enter the realm of art. (And then there’s Smallville, which is dumb while still being enjoyable; but I keep wondering what it would have been like if it had been done by Joss Whedon. Among other things, I imagine that Lana would be a much stronger character and not just wait around for Clark to save her all the time.)

But TV lacks something. And I don’t hold with the traditional reasons why books are “better” than television. It’s not about imagination or thinking-skills or superior dramatic presentation or anything like that.

Every episode of The West Wing challenges the viewer to think in some way. Its dramatic presentation is often flawless and simply couldn’t be done without the skills of the actors or directors or cinematographers. It just wouldn’t work in book-form and I’m happier as a person to have seen it (and to own the DVDs so I can watch it over and over again. I just finished season 3 again last night.).

As for imagination: don’t even try to tell me that a world where demons wage war against a small suburban California town and a vampire-with-a-soul is in love with the one woman in the world with both the power and mandate to kill him doesn’t require quite a bit of imagination to deal with. The threshold for the suspension of disbelief is so high that it simply requires one’s imagination to get a workout. Indeed, this is true for any good sci-fi or fantasy. It’s easy to demonstrate too. Just find the online communities of fans and watch how they invent new rules of the fictional universe just to keep individual episodes consistent with one another. And then, of course, there’s fanfic…

Too much TV doesn’t ask the viewer to think (*cough*DayTimeTV*cough*), but I don’t like it when people judge the entire medium based on the flaws of the poorly executed. So there’s that.

The something that TV lacks is the tactile nature of reading: The weight of the book in my hands, the feel of the pages on my finger tips, the smell of the paper, the sound of the turning pages, the elegance of well done typography. These things combine to create an experience that’s completely unreproducible in any other way. Everything else after that (owning the characters in my mind in a way that I’ll never own Buffy or Mal or President Bartlet, creating a world that’s unique to my imagination, etc.) is just gravy.

And that’s why I’m excited to be planning to go home tonight and leave the DVD player off. I’ll turn on my reading light, sit down in a reasonably comfortable char, and hold a good book in my hands. And despite all the turns my life has taken, it will be truly good to be me.

I think people need to make plans to go see it with me, because otherwise, I’m going to a play in Greenville by myself.

(Avenue Q is playing in July of 2008 and I think people should make plans to go see that with me too; but I’m less adamant about it.)