The few, the proud, the sane

It occurred to me recently that sanity is actually quite a rare and coveted commodity. If you look around at our community (or at least mine, in a small town just south of San Francisco), insanity has taken up a lasting residence here. Prop 8 passed a while ago, outlawing gay marriage. I myself am not gay, but I know people who are, and outlawing a certain type of marriage is Insanity. Crazy Crazy Crazy.

Look around your own community. I'm sure you can find insanity in all forms. Persecution. That annoying person ahead of you who's driving 20 mph in a 60mph zone. (If that applies to you right now, please turn off the phone and keep your eyes on the road.) The restaurant which uses canned food when it would be cheaper to make their own.

And there are the ones who are sane. To name a few, Albert Einstein, Al Gore, Abraham Lincoln, Eliezer Yudkowsky (look him up), and several others. If I were to inventory the sane people in this world, I'm guessing the number would be staggeringly low, Like around 5,000.

If you want to find out if you're sane, take the following quiz.

 

Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey, the world's leading questionnaire tool.

If you answered a on the first question, b on the second question, and b on the third question, you are sane. Probably.

3 fears I used to have

This is a follow-up to the previous post of "My five greatest fears". I hinted I would be doing this, but I could only think of three fears, not five. So this will be shorter than M5GF (I think you know what that stands for).

1. The light at the end of the hallway. At the end of the hallway there is a little box set on the wall that was part of the alarm system (it's no longer in use). The box has a red LED inside of a plastic window that lights up when it detects movement. Being young(er), I was quite afraid that that box was...I'm not sure really. Maybe I thought it was a robot. Or a Transformer. That remains a mystery to me.

2. The painting at the other end of the hallway. I don't know what it was about that hallway, but for me there were terrors at either end. At one end there was the light. And at the other was a painting. It was a painting of a black man, but at the time I thought it more of a monster of the evil depths. Or maybe a slightly sinister guitar. (It was NOT AT ALL in the form of a person. The only humanoid features are the eyes [actually just circles next to each other]. I don't have anything against black people. That is insanity. Actually, I am part black.) Wherever I went, it seemed that the demon/guitar was watching me. If you could see it, you would understand.

3. Moths. This may seem strange, but when I was little, I saw a moth fly close to my eyes. Those antennae with the weird protrusions just sent shivers down my spine. They still kind of creep me out. Anyone with me on this?

For those who wish it, the email is rainydaysat340@gmail.com.

My five greatest fears

(I realize that some readers [who have a very good taste in literature] may notice this topic in a book by Scott Adams. Full credit for the idea goes to him. Although I could claim that it's different because he wrote about TEN fears, not five. So really, I'm doing him a favor.)

1. Fire, earthquake, bombings, hurricanes, the Rapture, the Sun exploding, tidal waves, and all disasters which I have no control over. When I lie in bed at night and find myself excruciatingly bored but for some reason unable to go to sleep, I often find the slightest noise such as the incessant ticking of the clock to sound exactly like someone yelling at me about some sort of tidal wave/bombing/fire/earthquake that is occurring right this instant. This is most likely the most evil, annoying, and (although it hurts my pride) frightening thing that I have ever encountered.

2. Giant spiders. This is going to take some explaining. When I was young, around five or six years old, I suddenly developed an irrational fear of the "enormous daddy long-legs" sitting just beyond the shower curtain, waiting to pounce. noticing the action of smaller spiders when suddenly exposed to light, I always turned on the light for the bathroom AND the light for the shower. This, I reasoned, would scare the spider away. It developed into a bad habit, a habit I carry to this day.

3. My cat. One night a while back, I got up to refill my water bottle and go to the bathroom (the two were probably linked somehow), I tripped over a huge furry lump and had several heart attacks and a stroke before I realized that it was just my cat, Ginger. Ginger was quite thin when we got her from the shelter, but now she is pushing the size of the Chrysler Building (hyperbole). Ever since, I open the door very slowly at night to make sure she isn't waiting right outside. I also spend the minimum amount of time in the 2-and-a-half-foot stretch between my bedroom and the bathroom. That requires me cutting down on my time worrying about giant spiders.

4. Norovirus. This is time-specific since it is a epidemic at my school which cannot last forever. But at the moment, half the school is out with a extremely violent stomach flu, or as the cautionary fliers say, 'Norovirus'. If you ask me, that makes it sound a lot worse. Like it's not just a stomach bug, but a stomach bug that steals your possessions, eats all your food, replaces you brain and vital organs with clever play-doh models, and scrambles your auto-dial list. I am very lucky not to have been infected yet, and I think that the virus is finally coming to pass. But you never know...

5. Running out of books. Books are basically 50% of my entire life. I live for books. If I ran out of books, 50% of my life would be over. I'd trip over a rock and bleed to death. I have so many books that I recently moved several boxes of books into the garage and I still have books overflowing out of the closets on the floor. I have read at least 80% of them. The others are either books I started and didn't like (15%) , the 0.01% that are books that I have overlooked, and the rest are invisible or utterly and completely destroyed. At some point I'm going to run out of viable books. But by that point I hope to be either a) able to write my own books or b) dead.

That covers it. Another blog post, maybe the next one, will be about five fears I used to have. Lord knows that will be interesting.    

X, Y, Z, and thensome

First off, don’t take this post the wrong way. Math is one of my favorite subjects and I love doing it. But I just think that there are some things that could be improved or added. Sometimes I just have these…epiphanies. And I thought I would write about them. Sometimes I think about long division and think, there must be another way. So I decided that we should just invent a sort of shorthand for all those bothersome, messy symbols. So instead of: 5790÷234 You get: ∀∈ Ehhhhhh, it’s complicated. Just forget I said anything. Another thing is that some new numbers should be added. Like common fractions should have their own symbols. Like 5/6 could be ð, 3/5 could be º, and 1/2 could be Ħ. I think this could improve messiness (that’s a pet peeve of mine) and the symbols could be manipulated to become ratios or percents. Final thing: I want to combine algebra and calculus to make…wait for it… ALCULUS! It could be a 3-year course from high school senior to college sophomore. Imagine these two wonderful sequences combined. (1+x)^n=1+nx/1!+(n(n-1) x^2)/2!+⋯ f(x)=a_0+∑_(n=1)^∞▒(a_n cos⁡〖nπx/L〗+b_n sin⁡〖nπx/L〗 ) Goosebumps. Just imagine what I could do with combinatorics… (P.S. these equations don't show up very well on the blog)

Dilbert

(This was written on my kindle, so please excuse any spelling errors) Dilbert is the name and main character of one of my favorite comic strips. Dilbert is an 'underling' of the PHB, or ppointy haired boss in a large corporate company. He works on fail-filled projects with his coworkers, Wally and Alice. Wally is a decided and experienced work-avoider, having turned it into something of an art form. Alice is a highly trained and talented engineer (Dilbert & co.'s profession) who is constantly being under-appreciated and antagonized by the PHB. And then there's Dilbert's faithful dog Dogbert, whose metaphors and mightier-than-thou spiel add crazieness to Dilbert's personal life. There's Catbert, the evil director of human resources, who strives to create a horrible environment for all employees. Finally, there's Ratbert. The rat in Dilbert's house who won't go away and just wants to be a part of the family. I think that covers everything. BOCTAOE. (Any true Scott Adams fan will know that term. BOCTAOE. Occam's razor. Goodbye.)

The end of the world (and why I don't care)

If you ask me, the end of the world is overrated. It doesn't matter to me if the world ends by the hand of God, tidal wave, hurricane, global warming, or attack by a giant spaghetti monster. Oh, and aliens. Did I mention the aliens? Or better yet! A combination!

It doesn't bother me that the world is probably going to end by 2050. I'm assuming that technology will race ahead to the level where time machines come with the warranties on kid's toys. Then, I can go to back to 2012 and rewrite this blog post. As a test, I have devised this: If there is pi to 30 decimal places on the next line, then I have been back without myself knowing to today and written this without me knowing. The me right now, I mean.

3.141592653589793238462643383279

Ummmm, okay, so that worked. Didn't expect that to happen. Wait, am I writing this or am I writing this? I mean the me whose actually me from the time that I didn't come from...agh! You get the idea.

...Was that me?