The Audition

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The Audition

 

                Last week, we had choir auditions to determine what groups we will be placed in next year.  I have never even done choir before this year, and I started slightly before Christmas, when the choir director, who also happened to be my AP Music Theory teacher, convinced me that I should do it.  I said sure, I’ll try it, and he was very pleased with himself.  Anyway, I was forced to participate in these choir auditions if I wanted to have the option of doing choir again next year. 

                The auditions consisted of a choice between either America the Beautiful or My Country Tis of Thee, and then some other pop song of your choice, until they cut you off.  It was to all take place on Tuesday starting at 3:00 and continuing until about 7:00 or 8:00, or until everyone had finished auditioning.  I will have you know that nothing in the world terrifies me more than singing alone in front of people. Maybe dancing; I don’t know.  Therefore, I was extremely dreading this choir audition.  It also didn’t help that we had a choice when we auditioned, in that we could go in at any time, and all we had to do was write our name down immediately beforehand.  Right after school, I went down there, and there were heaps of people, so I decided I would come back later, and go home first.  I came back around 7:00, and fretted around for an hour before the door lady practically dragged me in.  She had been repeatedly telling the directors for the past thirty or so minutes that I had been waiting outside for four hours, too afraid to go in.  For my first song, I did My Country Tis of Thee, just like mostly everyone else, and then for my second song, I suddenly decided to sing Smoke on the Water.  However, after two or three lines of the song, I forgot what came next, and awkwardly stopped, at which point the main choir director said, “Alright, you’re done!”  Afterwards, everyone asked me how I did, and I basically told everyone that I had been so freaked out that I didn’t even know if I was good or not. 

                Afterwards, I asked myself why singing alone was so frightening for me.  I finally determined that the difference between singing and playing horn is that on horn, I have had private training for years, I know how I’m supposed to sound, and I know that I’m good.  I have developed a great deal of confidence through several high pressure solo situations, in front of professionals who know exactly everything that I’m doing right or wrong.  The difference with singing is that I lack this confidence.  I have never had a private lesson in my life, I’ve never had to perform before, I don’t know how it’s supposed to sound when I sing, and I know that compared to everyone else, I have almost no preparation.  At least, that’s my best explanation.



We're Number One

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We're Number One!!

 

                Apparently, according to the U.S. News and World Report, Kennedy is ranked the number one high school in Iowa for the first time ever.  And, Washington, who has historically been ranked number one for as long as I remember, isn’t even in the top ten.  Something about this seems either rigged, biased, or just a strange way of evaluating the quality of schools.  One of the major ways this report ranks schools is by their participation percentages in AP exams for seniors.  Since I learned this, it makes much more sense to me why Kennedy’s administration pushes the AP classes so hard.  They want their school to look superior to all the rest.

 

                Also factored into the score is percentage of students who take AP exams that pass (get a score of 3 or higher).  From my personal experience, this is a miserable score, and should under no circumstances earn any college credit at any school.  Even a 4 isn’t too hot, and in my opinion, students shouldn’t even have a chance to receive college credit from AP exams unless they score a 5 on the exam.  On most exams, a score of a 3 correlates to about a 40% on the exam.  Many people could walk in, never being trained in the area the exam is testing, and get that score just from using some common sense mixed with intelligent guessing.  In one of my AP courses during my sophomore, I had a pretty sub-par teacher, and wasn’t yet mature enough to learn all of the material on my own.  As a result, I was embarrassingly unprepared for the exam, but I was surprised to see that I scored a 3.  It’s just not that difficult.

                In conclusion, although I am very happy for my school to be ranked number one in the state, I don’t think the U.S. News and World Report’s rankings are totally justified.  In my opinion, Washington is a very slightly better school than Kennedy, and not even including them in the top ten really makes me question this report.  However, if you asked my opinion on a better way to rank schools, I wouldn’t really be able to tell you one.  It’s just a hard thing to measure, and there are so many different factors that should be taken into consideration.  In addition, how to properly weight these different factors makes the whole thing even more complicated.  Ranking schools just isn’t an exact science, and isn’t really as important as it is made out to be in the first place.



Poem "The Game"

The Game by Michael Kegel

My competitive spirit misses no opportunity
Nothing hurts more than defeat
I must always win, even on the academic stage
For I know there’s no one I can’t beat.

I stay up till one, sleep I must fight
I struggle up the stairs; I need to rest
A scream of terror awakes me in the night
Then reads, “4 AM. No wonder I’m the best.”

I would rather be starving in Africa
To lie down and die is my only wish
I begin to see and hear things that aren’t really there
My head silently roars at me in anguish.

Surviving on naps, the days start to run together
But look at my grades, they couldn’t be better!
I’m rising to Heaven as the weekend arrives
Then I realize, it’s better to be alive

Being the best becomes a kind of game
Nothing else makes me feel the same
Think what you want, call me lame
In the future I’ll be the one shrouded in fame

My journey is almost over, I can see the light
I’ve risen to the challenge, I’ve put up the fight
I ask myself why I put myself through all this strife
But then I decide that I really love my life.




​In my poem, I manipulate my diction (choice of words) to cause the lines to rhyme. I do this to give it a sort of rhythm, and I think it makes the words come alive. In the first line of the second stanza, I used the literary technique of inversion (inverted order of words in a sentence, or variation of the subject-verb-object order), because I think it makes the delivery more dramatic. In this second stanza, I am describing my lack of sleep, and I used inversion and rhyming to make it seem almost like a ritualistic chant. I feel that this intensifies the effect what I am describing. In the third line of the second stanza, I used imagery (language which appeals to one of the five senses), “A scream of terror awakes me in the night.” The startling imagery of a scream in the dark of night perfectly represents the feeling of being woken up by an alarm. It is also a metaphor (a comparison in which something is is said to be another, without using like or as), as I call the alarm clock a scream of terror, but in the next line I have hinted enough for the reader to figure out that I am actually talking about the alarm clock.
​In the third stanza, I describe the horrible adverse effects of my sleep loss. In the fourth line, I use a paradox (contradicting ideas used together for description), “silently roaring” to relay the feeling of a voice yelling at you from within your head, but knowing that in reality you are just hallucinating. This is also personification (describing the action of an inanimate object with a human verb), as my head, which shouldn’t be able to talk for itself, is roaring at me, as if it had a mind of its own. In the fourth stanza, I begin to transition into the much happier section of the poem, and in the third line I use a metaphor, “I’m rising to Heaven as the weekend arrives,” to show my intense jubilation that comes when I get a couple of days off from school.
​In the fifth stanza, I used rhyming words at the end of each line, to signal to the reader that I am building up to the dramatic climax of the poem. In the sixth and final stanza, in the second line I use the literary technique of asyndeton, which is the omission of conjunctions between coordinate phrases, used to intensify the content included in the two phrases. I then end the poem with a happy ending, deciding that despite the difficulty of my life, I still like it.

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The Ocean of War

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The Ocean of War

                There are three objects in the room.  The first is the photograph of the distant ancestor, the second is the dated chair, and the third is the missing chess piece.  Each has a wealth of experience and knowledge, but seems to be incapable of communication, at least to any member of the kingdom animalia.  However, more error would be impossible with regards to this thinking.  The lone ant, in its depressed, monotonous existence, began its journey from the small hole in the northeastern corner of the room to the crack under the door on the other side. 

                “Fall, worthless vermin!” called the photograph.

                “Feel the wrath of the cheese!” screeched the chair.

                “Checkmate, my friend,” said the chess piece.

                The ant was lifted from its lowness and flipped at a rapid pace, fifty to sixty times in the air before falling and perishing upon the cold, heartless wooden floor. 

                The photograph’s wisdom was the greatest.  Its sole purpose was not to hang on the wall, as a vague memento of the distant past, most definitely not.  Rather, it was the key, the portal, into the next dimension.  The feeble minds of the humans could not perceive the fifth dimension; this power was beyond the realm of possibility for living things.  The chair’s strength was the greatest.  Its structural stability was unmatched by any standing being in the history of the universe.  Little did anyone, or anything, know, however, for even the photograph was unaware of the power held by the frail chair.  One breath from this chair had intensity sufficient to bring the world to its knees, its spirit spurting out its fingertips to be lost for eternity in the darkness.  The pawn’s courage was the greatest.  Its function far exceeded that of the lowly game of chess, invented by beings unworthy of licking the toes of the oak.  Centuries ago, it had taken down the very best of all, including the regime of the Khan, the earthquake of the oceans, and the plague.  It stared death in the eye, and laughed.  This was the sole creature able to destroy, in its full meaning.  The universe could be wasted with one blink of the eye of the piece.

                Which, then, took the innocent life of the ant?  Which held power greater than that of the Mayans?  Doubtful it seemed.  When all hope was lost, the chime of the clock signaled the end; all could finally rest.

On Top of the Mountain

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On Top of the Mountain 

                It’s always easier and more fun to keep working and pushing yourself to your limits to accomplish a goal when you have someone you’re gunning for.  The excitement of catching them and taking them down provides an extra fuel and boost in motivation and energy that wouldn’t otherwise be there.  For some reason, attaching an enemy or foe to a goal raises your morale.  On the other hand, it is much more difficult to be the person in first place, constantly holding off your opponents coming from below.  One would think that you would have extra confidence, glory and joy from being the best, but in reality, it is a disadvantage.

                Oftentimes, sports coaches will tell their teams, “Play to win; don’t play not to lose!”  What they mean is that people usually perform better when they are aggressively fighting for their goals, instead of trying to prevent others from doing so while you hang on to the top spot.  However, in many situations, this is not possible.  In many circumstances in life, being in first forces you to only be worried about staying in front of your competitors.  I can tell you from experience that it isn’t nearly as fun as having someone you are headhunting.

                When in this situation, instead of actively pursuing your goals, you are just grinding out the work, day by day, week by week, and month by month, seemingly accomplishing nothing more than you already have.  In addition, you are constantly worried about the people below you that want your spot so bad, and you do too, but there is just something so much more energizing about not having it at the present.  Being at the top wears you down.  It’s very lonely at the top.  However, in order to remain successful, you must work past all these disadvantages and psychological depressants and perform at the same level, whether you are currently at the top or not.

                For someone who has been fighting for so long and hard, gunning for the same person to defeat them and take their spot, the initial glory of taking them down is absolutely exhilarating.  The feeling of being the best is momentarily the ultimate jubilation, and seems like it will never subside.  However, after a few minutes, hours or days, this feeling goes away, and we don’t feel any happier than we did before.  Why, then, do we have any incentive to keep working to keep this spot?  The only reason I can think of is the natural competitiveness belonging to people that achieve this greatness.  All extremely successful people will eventually have to deal with this feeling, and overcome it.

My Biggest Fear

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My Biggest Fear

                At this point in my life, I have one single glaring biggest fear, which dwarfs all others.  I’m in the last term of my junior year in high school, and I am going to be in college before I know it.  I’m not scared of actually going to college, however.  I’m greatly conflicted by the major decision I need to make about what I’m going to study in college, which will determine what I do for the rest of my life.  I also have very little idea which college I want to go to.  I think about these two things every single day, and nothing scares me more than thinking that I may choose the wrong thing and the wrong place.

                In the past, and up to as recently as about two years ago, every college had full-ride, 100% scholarships available, to at least a few students.  My whole life, I have planned on going to college for free, but as of the last couple of years, due to the bad economy and large budget cuts in education, a great deal of these scholarships have gone away.  At all the top colleges that I want to go to, they have now adopted a policy of “need-based only” scholarships.  They are in no way based on merit, but only on what they decide you can pay.  Despite manipulating our family’s money around as well as possible to make us look as poor as possible to these schools, we still are somehow “able” to pay $25,000-30,000 per year.  Therefore, these supposedly top schools are becoming less and less of an option for me.  However, I know some people at my school that have terrible parents who don’t pay any child support, and they get to go anywhere they want  for almost free.

                So, in the end, I don’t know what I want to do, I don’t know where I want to go, I don’t know how much I should be willing to pay, and time is quickly running out.  The amount of stress this puts on me is indescribable.  Again, my biggest fear is choosing the wrong thing to study, and choosing the wrong college to go to.  I fear this more than I fear death; I don’t remember anything ever scaring me more.  The only comparable things were when my mom had cancer when I was three years old, and when my grandparents were on the brink of death before they both died in the last year.  They would be some of the first people I would turn to in my current situation.  However, though they are not here, I am confident they are watching over me, and will guide me no matter what decision I make.

Creation vs. Evolution

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Creation vs. Evolution

                Everyone likes to argue about the battle between evolution and creation.  Most people assume that these two views are totally separate, clashing, non-overlapping opinions that each person must choose between.  However, I think both are true, and that they mesh together perfectly.  I think that everything in the Bible can be linked to science, and everything in science can be linked to religion and God.  Alright, maybe you should take a five to ten minute break just to absorb and accept what you think is craziness.  Come back to read the rest of this post whenever you’re ready.

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                Okay, let’s start from the beginning.  The Christian seven-day creation story, and the Big Bang Theory up until now.  First of all, the seven days explained in the Bible are not literal Earth days.  How long has Earth and our specific solar system been around?  Describing time in this strange random sense of our particular system would make no sense.  Therefore, these seven days are very long periods of time, and aren’t even equal amounts of time.

On the first day, God created the earth, Heaven, light and dark.  This directly corresponds to the Big Bang.  Basically, these are two ways of saying the same thing.  The Big Bang was created by God, and it created the earth, Heaven, light and dark.  Easy enough to understand. 

On the second day, God created the sky and the sea.  This corresponds to the ‘scientific’ beginning of our particular planet.  How long ago it happened is irrelevant; it still corresponds.  God created the beginning of our solar system, and created the slow forming of water on the earth and its atmosphere.

On the third day, God created land (earth) and vegetation.  This corresponds to the beginning of life on Earth, and encompasses the evolution of plants and microscopic organisms, arguably in other kingdoms of life, perhaps even the animal kingdom.  However, the Bible is not as strict in its nomenclature, and doesn’t refer to these extremely small animals as ‘animals’ yet.  Anyway, God created life on the third day.

On the fourth day, God created the lights.  The sun was created to govern the day, and the moon was created to govern the night, and the stars were around always, but only visible at night.   Our solar system came into existence.  It’s still all the same thing.  The heat from the sun enabled a much wider range of life to grow than before.

On the fifth day, God created creatures of the sea and sky.  There were great sea monsters and giant winged birds under the sky.  This corresponds with the evolution of previously microscopic life into large organisms that are colloquially called ‘animals.’ 

On the sixth day, God created every kind of land animal, tame animal, and all animals that crawl the ground.  This corresponds with the period of time in which some sea animals came onto the land and eventually adapted into land animals.  Not a big deal; no controversy.  Then God created humans, who had dominion over everything.  Clearly, we do today.  Man gave names to every species of animal and plant, and it took a very long time.  We have named pretty much every plant and animal we know of, have we not? 

On the seventh day, God looked at everything he had created, and found it very good, and decided to have a day of rest.  Has anything happened since then that hasn’t really been mentioned in the creation story? No.  Is it currently the sixth or seventh day?  Nobody really knows; it might be both; what difference does it make?

                Yes, all this was explained very briefly, and without specifics, but I assure you:  No matter what degree of specifics I use, everything will still go together perfectly, because that’s how it is.  I hope that I have maybe enlightened you a bit, or started you on your way.

Finally, Pokemon on iPhone

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Finally, Pokemon on iPhone

                A few days ago, on Monday, February 4^th, a Jailbreaking team called Evad3rs developed my much coveted untethered jailbreak for iOS 6.  Their website is www.evasi0n.com, for anyone interested.  I planned to wait a few days to make sure they can make any tweaks before I Jailbreak, monitoring CNET to get all the updates.  Between its release on the 4^th until two days ago, the 8^th, Evad3rs reported that 7 million users had used their new Jailbreak.  Anyway, I held out until yesterday, the 9^th, and it was pretty easy to actually Jailbreak the phone.  I just plugged in my iPhone, went to the website, downloaded the software, and followed the instructions.  The whole process took maybe five minutes.  Afterwards, I had Cydia, and everything seemed totally fine. 

                As my primary, if not my only, reason for Jailbreaking was for the ability to play Gameboy Pokemon games on my phone, I immediately searched the internet for how to do this.  This process proved to be MUCH more difficult, particularly because I was interested in a fake game called Pokemon Chaos Black.  It was created by hackers who got into the code for Pokemon Fire Red, and changed a few things to make it more interesting.  First, I had to get a GBA emulator, and the most well-known and well-regarded seemed to be gpSPhone, so I downloaded it.  The toughest thing was that I now needed to find ROMs, which are the actual games that I wanted to play.  Basically, I had the game system, but I needed the games to play.

                Since I was dead set on Chaos Black, I looked all around for it, and couldn’t find a legitimate provider.  All the people on the internet said to use a source called 123Locker, but their ROMs lead to a HTTP 404 Error, meaning that they have been removed, blocked, or just somehow don’t work anymore.  Today, I finally just broke down and downloaded Fire Red to see if that would even work, and I used a different ROM-providing website and got it to work.  Now, I can successfully play Pokemon Fire Red on my iPhone.  Basically, my desire to play Pokemon on my phone has been fulfilled.  However, what I still really want is Pokemon Chaos Black because that’s the only game that I want to play that I can’t obtain any other way.  I will probably just keep trying, and I’ll blog about it if I ever get it to work.

Unavoidable Unfairness

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Unavoidable Unfairness

                Sometimes, there’s just no way to make it right, no way to achieve fairness.  For example, take the Super Bowl played tonight.  The Ravens were up huge, 28-6, and absolutely coasting, ready to crap all over the 49ers.  But suddenly, the lights went out.  The game was delayed for 35 minutes, and America waited for these technical difficulties to be fixed, watching their beloved commercials.  When the lights finally came back on, play resumed.  However, the Ravens’ momentum was totally lost.  San Francisco came roaring back, eventually closing in on a two-point gap, 31-29.  Baltimore scored a field goal, thus raising their lead to five.  They had possession in the closing minute of the game, and on fourth down had their punter catch the ball and just run around to burn as much time as possible before allowing himself to be tackled down in the endzone for a safety with four seconds to play.

                The Ravens kicked off, and tackled the receiver, winning the game.  However, they were a whisper away from blowing their 22-point lead before the power outage.  Would the same thing have happened if the lights had never gone out?  Probably not.  Almost definitely not.  Probably, the 49ers would have done a little better for the rest of the game, but the Ravens would have still won in a quite lopsided victory.  I’m happy that the Ravens still ended up winning the game, and I will admit that I wanted them to win anyway.  But, the bigger and more important reason is because if they had lost, it probably would have been because of the power outage during the third quarter.  As unfair as that would have been, would there have been any better way to restore the exact amount of momentum and the exact conditions that were present 35 minutes before?  No, there wouldn’t have. 

                Sometimes, these kinds of situations occur.  Random things happen, and they disrupt events enough to change the outcome.  But, these situations cannot be reversed, and there is absolutely no possible way to return the situation to its former condition.  Therefore, it is very easy to argue that these types of things must be prevented as well as possible, but there is no way to prevent against everything.  What should we do when something like this happens?  There isn’t really a fair thing to do, except to just continue where the situation left off.  And that’s exactly what they did.  It could also be argued that if the Ravens couldn’t have overcome the 49ers’ comeback, then they didn’t deserve to win the Super Bowl.  Sometimes, there’s just no way to make it right.

Meme Extreme

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Meme Extreme

                Memes are great.  The first time I really encountered memes in volume in what I call the ‘meme-era’ was on a Facebook page called “Hello, welcome to the Pokemon Centre!” - *rapes A button*.  Basically, the title of the page is a hilarious matter that everyone who plays Pokemon games can relate to.  The guy who runs the page is a student of some sort, and often apologizes for his lack of posts due to being very busy lately with his studies.  Anyway, he uses pictures from in-game scenes or from the show, and puts words, usually something sarcastic that only someone who plays or played the game understands, and then puts it on the page.  He also uses material that he gets from people that like his page, who send this material to him, and he posts it, giving them credit.  Click here for an example of a meme from the page.

                The first time I looked at this page, I went through every single post on it, and was falling out of my chair laughing at every single one.  They all made sense to me, and I could appreciate all the humor, as I was an avid Pokemon player when I was younger.  Heck, I still play once in a while.  I loved these photos dubbed “memes,” and soon afterwards I saw them being posted by all kinds of pages all over Facebook, and then all over Google, and then all over the entire internet.  The concept is great, and memes are really funny.  However, the rate at which they are produced and shown is obscene.  In fact, nowadays when I see a meme, I understand and appreciate it, but I don’t laugh, because they are just too common.  Now, the very best ones will only make me smile.  Nothing near as funny as that day that I stumbled upon that amazing Pokemon page.

                I think that in today’s world of instantaneous interaction through technology, things are totally blown out of proportion, everybody talks about it, and there is simply no time for the whole process of the material’s growth to occur.  It’s like for every story that I hear on the news or on the internet, I am so ridiculously tired of it after a couple days that I can’t stand hearing about it anymore.  I think that memes, an ingenious, novel innovation of creativity, have been slighted by this new rate of technology.  They don’t have nearly the effect that they would have had even a couple of years ago.  It really disappoints me.  I wish I could still fall out of my chair laughing every time I see a good meme.

Freezing Rain Straight from Heaven

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Freezing Rain Straight from Heaven

                Last night, we had a considerable amount of freezing rain, with the temperature today hanging right around 32°F (0°C) so that the rainwater keeps freezing and melting to form a slick, flat ice layer covering everything from the sidewalk, the driveway, the grass and the streets.  All the adults hate these kinds of conditions, as their brains are fully developed and they can accurately judge the amount of danger created for driving.  However, children and teenagers like me love these conditions, because we like driving in them, and there is a possibility of a two-hour delay or no school.

                As I normally start school at 7:00 AM, a two-hour delay would be absolutely delightful, because I stay up too late as it is and thus don’t get enough sleep.  Two extra hours of sleep would be absolutely invigorating, and I would be totally ready for the day.  Also, two-hour delays have some advantages over snow days, because we don’t have to make them up.  If we are going to get to wake up later anyway, then we might as well just have a shortened day, because the worst part of school by far is just waking up so early in the morning.

                Some people whine about snow days because we will probably have to make them up at the end of the school year in June.  However, I disagree with this poor attitude, because time is relative, and one extra day on the end of the year will have virtually no effect on us, and we won’t notice it.  On the other hand, being able to sleep in and screw around all day on a random day in the middle of the year because of bad weather is a well-needed break, so I am all for snow days, whether we need to make them up at the end of the year or not.

                We’ve only had one snow day this year, and it was on a day that I was missing school anyway, so it’s kind of depressing.  We were originally scheduled to make up that snow day on last Monday, but as the superintendent overlooked the fact that it was Martin Luther King Day and as a result received many disapproving phone calls from the NAACP and the Black community, it was moved to some random other in-service day in February.  Needless to say, I am really looking forward to a two-hour delay or school cancellation tomorrow, but I’m not too optimistic, so I have already done most of my homework that’s due tomorrow.

Latest Waste of Time...

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Latest Waste of Time...

                These games on my phone….I just don’t know what to do anymore.  The first one was Bike Race, a totally useless game that, at best, was good for my touch in future video games.  My new gaming obsession on my iPhone is Ruzzle.  It is basically Boggle, if you know what that is, and it’s like scrabble, where different letters are worth different amounts of points.  There is a 4x4 grid of 16 letters, and you drag your finger whatever which way to form words and score points.  There are also sometimes double or triple letter or word multipliers, which an experienced player will use to his advantage.

                You play this game with your Facebook friends, or you can have it make a tweet on your Twitter asking people to challenge you with your username.  Each round is two minutes long in which you rack up as many points as you can, and an entire match is three rounds, with your total score being the sum of your three rounds.  If this total is higher than the person’s that you are playing against, then you win.  They will have the exact same boards that you had for each of the three rounds so that it is totally fair.

                From the start, I was extremely good at this game, and win probably about 95% of my games.  After a couple of weeks of nonstop hardcore Ruzzling, I am just now starting to question whether it is a waste of my time and for how much longer I will continue playing.  I reason that this is ten times as valuable of a game as Bike Race, because I am actually forced to use my brain a little bit, but I would probably be better off just thinking up random thoughts and daydreaming.  However, it also has a disadvantage to Bike Race, as in Bike Race, each race only takes about fifteen seconds, while each match of Ruzzle takes six minutes.  This calls for a lot more time that you must be willing to burn.

                The other thing that is quite annoying is that you can play up for four or five games with the same person at the same time, and the last few mornings I have woken up to twenty matches that I have to play.  Also, I dominate everyone so badly, that I feel like I have nothing left to accomplish.  I feel like Michael Jordan; I have nothing left to do, so I think I might just switch to baseball.

My Complaints of Miss Representation

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My Complaints of Miss Representation

 

                For the past couple weeks, we have been watching Miss Representation in my AP Language & Composition class.  This film attempts to persuade viewers of the prejudice and inequality towards women, in all aspects of life, all across the world.  We watched this film as part of our current subject of study, argument and persuasion.  While watching, I questioned many of the statistics used as evidence in the film, and I decided to investigate.

                I also happen to be taking AP Statistics this year, in which I have learned the correct methods for scientific experiments and gathering information properly representing a population.  I found Miss Representation’s website, and then quickly found the page on which they show the sources for some of their statistics.  Information on the rest of the statistics will be “coming soon.”  I looked at many of these sources, and was overall unimpressed.  I will explain my complaints on one of these sources, just as one example.

                This film states that “65% of American women and girls have disordered eating behavior.”  The link to the source for this statistic was right below on the website’s source page, and it sent me to an article by ABC News on April 26, 2008.  The beginning of the article reads as follows: 

“Nearly two-thirds (65 percent) of young American women report disordered eating behaviors, and 10 percent report symptoms of eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia nervosa or binge eating disorder, a new survey finds.  The findings -- from an online poll of more than 4,000 women between the ages of 25 and 45 -- found that 75 percent eat, think and behave abnormally around food. The survey was conducted by SELF magazine in partnership with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.”

                The problem with this statistic is that Miss Representation generalizes it to the entire population of women and girls in America, which is not appropriate.  This is because this statistic is from an online poll, which used no method of random sampling, but rather convenience sampling.  This means that results weren’t taken from a randomly selected sample of people, but rather from people who clicked on a survey.  This creates response bias, which is a situation in which some of the population in systematically excluded from the survey as a result of the method of sampling. 

                The reason this is a problem is because this survey systematically excluded all people who don’t use a computer, go online less often, are too young to use the internet, didn’t see the survey, chose not to do the survey…the list goes on and on.  It also favored respondents who have little to do, or enjoy participating in online surveys, want to report their problem, or in my teacher Mr. Neff’s words, are really “Gun ho!” about this particular subject.  In the end, the people in this survey create a very poor and very biased representation of the population to which it is generalized.  It is not appropriate to claim that results from this survey apply to all women and girls in America.

                This is just one example of poor statistics used by Miss Representation, and I can honestly say that I saw similar problems with over half of the ones I looked at.  I agree with the claim’s idea that women are still discriminated against, and I don’t need all of these exaggerated statistical claims to convince me.  The numbers just aren’t correct.

Hurry Up, Hackas!!

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Hurry Up, Hackas!!

                I swear, when one of the guys (or girls?) figures out an iOS 6 UNtethered Jailbreak, I am going to flip crap.  Every once in a while, I think I’m about to just break down and get the tethered one, but then I think about what would happen if my phone died and I couldn’t get to my computer for awhile.  If nothing else, my parents would be quite pissed, I do reckon, and it would most likely cause some kind of problem.  If you are unfamiliar with Jailbreaking and/or some of its terminology, you can go to my blog posts about it here:  Jailbreaking, Part I and Jailbreaking, Part II

                When this thing finally comes out, I will get it two days later (to avoid what happened last time), and then I will get all kinds of Jailbreaking goodies, most importantly Pokemon games, and will shortly after blog about it like there is no tomorrow, so please revisit my blog occasionally to have access!!  It has been months since iOS 6 came out; it came out right about the same time as the iPhone 5, which is when I got my iPhone 4 for free.  And goodness gracious, I refuse to EVER update my iOS again until it is untethered-ly Jailbroken.  I know it’s tough stuff, Jailbreaking iDevices, but seriously people, could you maybe spend a bit bigger fraction of your waking hours on it?  Millions of people are waiting to praise you eternally! 

                And, like I said in my other blog posts, I will definitely not be doing anything illegal or immoral with my device, but rather simply using it to its full potential, and getting apps that Apple doesn’t approve for business reasons, such as the previously unavailable Google Maps.  I can’t wait.  And trust me, I will tell you all about it once it happens.  Sometimes, I wonder if the real hacker is someone within the Apple company, knowing how to Jailbreak the devices from the start, but just waiting for an opportunity to seize his destiny.  Crazier things have happened.

Too Bad To Be True

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Too Bad To Be True

                This week in AP Lang, we watched a video called Miss Representation, which highlighted the agony of girls’ and women’s lives pertaining to achieving the perfect look created by society to attract men’s attentions.  Our teacher’s reason for having us watch the video was not so much just for fun or entertainment, but rather for us to evaluate its methods of argument and persuasion.  She frequently paused the video to alert us to something important coming up, or to ask us what just happened.

               What I remember the most is one time when she stopped the video, telling us what was about to happen next in it.  She explained that they were going to show us a few women on TV in positive actions or circumstances in normal time, and then show an incredible number of women in negative actions or circumstances, flashing by very quickly in a couple tenths of a second, to make it seem like TV’s portrayal of women is overwhelmingly negative.  However, many of my classmates and I noticed that many of these negative clips and images came from the same movies, and we quickly caught on that the makers of the video had manipulated that aspect in order influence us more effectively.

                There were abundant images and clips of sexual scenes, drugs, abuse towards women, and all kinds of other terrible things, and some of my classmates felt so uncomfortable, whether because of their faith or any other reason, that they needed to leave the room during parts of the movie.  Needless to say, the video was very effective in achieving its purpose.  To someone watching this video just out of curiosity or interest, I’m certain they would be extremely influenced.  The video also makes innumerable claims and shows statistics at a very quick pace, to the point that many of my classmates, including myself, thought that they probably weren’t all totally true.  We never really saw any credits, either because there wasn’t time, or there weren’t any, but we doubted that all those statistics and claims could be accounted for by reliable sources.

                However, to people like us that were primed to watch this video from an impartial, critical viewpoint, the video wasn’t as effective and influential.  Don’t get me wrong; I think the ideas presented in the video were important, and I agreed with them, and I am horrified by the way society abuses women.  But, the video did a good job making it seem even worse.  For many of their statistics, I don’t even know how an accurate sample could realistically be taken.  As most viewers aren’t watching with the critical view that we were, many of their logical fallacies and exaggerated statistics could be overlooked.

                For further information on the film, its website can be found here.

Ingenious Math Trick? Not Exactly

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Ingenious Math Trick?  Not Exactly

                I was dinking around on Blogger, and clicked on this ‘Google Reader’ thing.  What I stumbled upon were heaps (and I mean HEAPS) of blog posts by someone named Melanie Pinola.  All of her posts look extremely interesting, but being the math god that I am, I couldn’t help but look at one called Quickly Multiply Big Numbers the Japanese Way.  I was taught math by Indians (I’m white and live in the United States), so I looked at this alternative way of doing things. 

                Pinola basically explains that one draws lines corresponding to the numbers in the problem, crossing the lines of the two numbers being multiplied.  Then, the number of intersections is counted for each digit of the number, and the answer is reached, seemingly with no mathematical skill required.  You can get to the page and watch the video by clicking here.  She says, “I don't know how or why this works. But it's a pretty amazing trick and might make you wonder why we don't teach math the way Japanese teachers do.”

                I’ll tell you why.  First of all, in the video, the biggest digit in any of the problems is a 3.  With only numbers 0-3, this method looks ingenious.  But try it with 789 x 985.  If you want to count 45, 40, 35, 72, 64, 56, 81, 72 and 63 intersections, and then add those up in their respective places in the answer, then be my guest.  I will be solving this problem the normal, ‘hard’ way, in roughly one hundredth of the amount of time you will take.  That’s why.  But, I’m just getting started.

                What Melanie Pinola doesn’t notice is that conceptually, this ‘voodoo/magical’ method of multiplication is conceptually identical to the traditional way to perform vertical multiplication.  The only difference is that instead of using your multiplication tables, you are literally counting each intersection to calculate that 9 x 5 = 45.  At first, this magical Japanese trick seems easier, especially when this video presents it under the best possible mathematical circumstances, but it will usually lead to slowness, and perhaps even confusion.

                Finally, my only other objection to this method is perfectly outlined in Pinola’s quote above.  “I don’t know how or why this works!”  Believe me, from my observations collected over my short seventeen years of life, this almost never leads to success in math.  If you don’t know what the heck you are doing, your doom awaits; the end is near.  What I always tell people is that the reason I am so good at math, not to mention so fast, is that I know what is going on, and why the method I am using to solve it works.  You shouldn’t blindly learn how to do things using strange algorithms that are blowing by you in an abstract blur.  If this is what they are teaching in Japanese schools, then mark my words; it is going to lead to their demise.

                I don’t mean any offense to you, Melanie, for most of your posts look very good from the front pages, and I’m sure you have a wealth of information to offer, but I just couldn’t let this go by.  Please try to understand what you are posting before you post it; you will receive much less backlash.

Larger Than Life Itself

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Larger Than Life Itself

                I often daydream about being in space.  One of the things that I want more than anything is to be on the moon, jumping up and down six times as high as I could on earth, looking at the earth from where I am standing.  I would run around as fast as I could, jumping up and doing triple flips, and writing my name in footprints to leave my permanent mark on the moon.  I want to go to Mars, a world without an atmosphere, where we could maybe one day live.  I would go to Mars’s tallest volcano, which is three or four times taller than Mount Everest.  And from there, I would look at the earth, and at the moon, at the rest of the planets, and at the sun. 

                I want to go to Venus in some kind of spacesuit in which I could survive the 900°F heat.  I would like to look up and see the thicker-than-hell atmosphere, walking around in the hottest, foggiest place I can imagine.  And for my death, right before I would otherwise die naturally or however, I want to go to Jupiter, and just be sucked in, looking at the earth and the sun in the other direction as the supreme gravitational force rips me apart.  I want to stand on Pluto, looking at the sun, as a very tiny ball billions of miles away, watching my breath fall to the ground as ice as I exhale. 

                I want to look at our galaxy from the outside, seeing the spinning spiral, and somehow be able to move at several light years per second, to go anywhere within the galaxy or outside that I want, in my ever-protective spacesuit, of course.  I would go to one of the various other planets, wherever they may be, that have life like ours.  I’m not talking bacteria.  I’m talking bugs, animals, humans.  Or something crazier.  I know they’re out there.  Anyone who doesn’t believe that is absolutely ridiculous, as far as I’m concerned.  Do you ever think that they may find us first?  Who knows?  You might assume that they are mentally and physically inferior to us, but why?  There must be several planets upon which there are beings far superior to humans, mentally and physically.  Someone is going to reach the others eventually; it is just destined to happen.  It may be a year; it may be centuries; it may be billions more years.  In terms of how old the universe is, that’s seconds in our lifetime. 

                How does this make you feel?  Maybe it takes a little bit of the stress off, because you can see that you’re just a very, very, VERY small part of everything.  Nothing is really a big deal.  It’s not like anything you do could be the end of the universe.

The Only Variable

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The Only Variable

                Last Wednesday (11 days ago) we took the cats to my aunt’s house, where they would stay until today, while we repainted and re-floored the entire second floor of our house.  We joked the whole time about how they would probably think that that was their new house, and would be totally shocked when they came back home.  First of all, the new smells from the fresh paint and floors would probably overwhelm them, but then the change from the carpet to wood floors would force them to get used to a whole new feeling under their feet.  Also, all of our furniture is currently stuffed into my mom’s and dad’s room, and the other three bedrooms are completely empty. 

                We made sure to put all the blinds back on the windows, prepare the litter box, and set up food for them today in preparation for their return.  In addition, my mom and I went to Applebee’s for dinner, and I brought back one bite of my steak for the kitties to enjoy.  I hoped that maybe it would assuage their severe trauma of new smells and changes in their home.  We brought them home tonight, and they immediately ran all around the house, smelling everything and rubbing their paws everywhere to remark their territory.  After that, they ran upstairs, and stopped at the top of the stairs, confounded by the new paint smell and the hardwood floors. 

                It caused me to wonder how it would feel to be so frightened every time I went in the car, not knowing where my next destination was, whether it was home, the vet, or those “other people’s” house.  It would be very nerve-racking to arrive at a new place and not know how long you were going to stay there, and knowing that you could be randomly picked up and moved somewhere else any day.  And then, like today, you may one day come home only to see that everything has changed, and that you would have to get accustomed to the new features of your house.  It would be absolutely traumatizing!   I really feel quite bad for my cats.  But on the other hand, I don’t.  They get to lounge around all day, not having to work for anything, and knowing that they would be provided for by their generous people.  It must be a very boring life.  But that is why this unpredictability is so great.  Maybe they look forward to it; maybe it’s what makes them wake up every day.  It’s the one thing in their lives that they don’t know.

My New Years' Resolution

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My New Years' Resolution

 

                LOL definitely kidding!  I don’t believe in New Years’ resolutions at all, mostly because they have become the big joke of the New Year in America, maybe even the whole world.  One of the most common New Years’ resolutions is to lose weight.  This turns out to be very annoying for me, because I enjoy going to the rec center to play basketball and lift weights etc.  However, at this time of year it is very clogged there, because all these obese people are there for their New Years’ resolution, even though there are barely any exercises cream-puffed enough for them that they can scrape together to call a workout.

                Besides annoying obstacles like this, there are more reasons why I dislike New Years’ resolutions.  First of all, I think that a good, quality person should try to be their best and improve themself every day of the year, not just at the beginning, and quit when the first thing gets a little hard.  Sure, it’s fine to set a good goal for yourself, but why do you have to limit yourself to doing this once a year?  How many people do you see walking around in March or later that are still fulfilling their New Years’ resolution?  Not many.  You only hear about them for a couple weeks in January, and then most people stop.  If you do really want to do a New Years’ resolution, then okay, no one is stopping you, but make sure you really commit to it.  Then, in December, tell me about how you’re about to complete it.  

                There is nothing magical about New Years’ resolutions.  They aren’t going to get accomplished by themselves just because you made them around January 1st.  If you feel like you need some extra magic to accomplish your goals, it would probably be better to go to a Church, Mosque, Synagogue, or anywhere else to ask God to give you a little help.  He will listen and help you any minute of any day.  

                So, in conclusion, what I’m telling you is don’t make a New Years’ resolution.  Instead, try to make yourself better every day, maybe try to go a whole day without making any mistakes.  It’s something few people have done.  The way to start is to get up early, start being ridiculously generous to all people around you, and focus on what you can be doing to make yourself better and make the world a better place.  String a few days like this together, and you’ll never need a New Years’ resolution again!!



Happy Haircut!

Happy Haircut!

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                Getting a haircut is one of my favorite things.  I have really thick hair, so it gets really hot, especially when it starts getting long.  My haircut lady person says that I have more hair every time I come there.  A way to describe the feeling I have right after a haircut is that it feels like Heaven on my head.  I can just feel the breeze on my head; I feel free.  Sometimes I wonder how great it would feel to have a buzz cut, but I don’t really see myself ever doing that.  My head is kind of shaped like a football, and I’m not sure how great it would look.  Being totally bald would also be cool, but I think I might wait for that until I’m really old and I have no choice.

                The only real downside to getting a haircut is that right afterwards, I always get tons of the little hair clippings going down my shirt, and I always feel the need to take a shower as soon as I get home because the itching is just unbearable.  I’m not sure if that’s how it is for everyone, or if maybe it’s just my haircut lady being lazy.  Whatever, not that big of a deal.  I definitely have many bigger problems in my life.

                One of the other major benefits to getting a haircut is that my hair doesn’t go whack as easily.  I have a ridiculous amount of colics on my head, going in every which direction, so unless my hair is really short, it sticks up in random places all over the place and looks really funky.  However, for about a week after getting my haircut, this isn’t really a problem, and I can save my worrying for other things.  It’s really quite marvelous.  Something I commonly think of is whether this problem would go away altogether if I let my hair get long enough that its sheer weight kept it down.  Like maybe old school Justin Bieber style.  Oh my lord, I’m kidding.  But my mom wouldn’t let me do that anyway; she has total control of this whole matter.  She thinks that guys having long hair is absolutely repugnant, so even if I wanted to, she wouldn’t be having it. 

                Right now, my hair is at one of its record all-time longest, as I haven’t had a haircut for like five weeks.  My mom just told me that I’m getting a haircut tomorrow.  I can’t wait!

China Swag

China Swag

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                I noticed the other day that I have two pageviews from China.  This means one of two things.  Either someone viewed my blog from Hong Kong or Macau, or else someone hacked the government censorship and looked at my blog.  Since there are fewer than 10 million in Hong Kong and Macau combined, and there are over 1.35 billion people in the rest of China, I’m going to assume that someone hacked the system and is looking at PRC-blocked websites, at their own serious peril.

                Anyway, in case these people ever read my blog again, I would just like to say that I am greatly honored to know that you are possibly risking your lives to read my blog, and to seek information outside your government’s restrictions.  I am very interested in ‘Old China,’ and Chinese culture intrigues me.  I take Chinese at my high school, which happens to be one of two schools in my state (equivalent to your provinces) that even offers Chinese to students.

                I sometimes fantasize about living in Ancient or pre-1949 China, especially during the Han or Tang Dynasties, and being a prosperous man in one of the greatest civilizations ever to walk the earth.  In the future, if I have time, I would like to extensively study Chinese history.  I also plan to go to China within the next few years, possibly even as soon as this summer.  I would also like to eventually learn enough Cantonese (广东话) to travel to Hong Kong and the rest of Guangdong.  In the end, I really respect your culture, and I am very excited to have people in China reading my blog.  I am also very excited that there are some bold individuals in China that fight against the Communists’ control.  I hope that one day Old China will be restored, through the efforts of these strong individuals.  For this reason, I have a powerful respect for all the young people that died in the Tiananmen Square (天安门广场) massacre in 1989.

                If any of my Chinese readers have blogs, please comment on mine so I can read yours; even if it’s in Chinese I can read it fine.  In case you can’t read any English at all, I’ll put a little Chinese here so you can know what in the hell I’m even saying!

                您们好！请不断读我的博客，谢谢你！请在我的博客上写有的事，所以我可以读你的呢！你让我很高兴。

                

Sawdust

Sawdust

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                At my house, we are in the process of putting wood floors in on the top floor.  The workers have already completed my mom’s and dad’s bathroom and bedroom and most of the hallway.  What remains are my room, my sister’s room, my old room, and the bathroom.  The worst part about the whole process is how dirty and dusty it is.  First, they physically tear out the carpet, and the padded stuff underneath which I didn’t even know existed, to get to the wood.  Then, they had to put down some more thin wood because the surface must be ‘especially flat.’  They used a roaring chainsaw to cut these wood squares into the correct shapes for our house.  There is sawdust all over the upper floor, and actually a lot of it has migrated down to the first floor.

                After all this, they finally proceed to put the real wood floor down that you can actually see when it’s done.  However, during the first couple sections that they have completed, I have slept in my room upstairs, shrouded in sawdust and the smell that comes along with it.  Also, I almost forgot to mention that all the furniture from the rooms they have completed is in mine, my sister’s, and my old room, and there is literally no room to walk around.  I have to jump from outside of my room, through the door, and about four to five more feet onto my elevated bed.  And tonight, I have to assist my parents (really just my dad, as my mom watches) with moving all these furniture and dressers and such out of these four rooms and into the already-completed rooms, so the worker guys can do the flooring in the rest of the rooms over the next…God knows how many days, probably two or three, and then there is going to be new carpet on the stairs.

                My house is twenty years old, and we are just now replacing the carpet on the stairs and on the entire upper floor for the first time.  It doesn’t seem like a long time to me, because this is all I’ve ever known, but apparently that is a relatively long time to have carpet without replacing it.  As they already took the carpet off one of the steps, I saw how beaten down the under-padding stuff is, and I can see that we definitely needed to do this.  Anyway, wish me luck with my allergies and everything for the rest of the time!

Is Your Addiction Fooling You?

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Is Your Addiction Fooling You?

                Sometimes, addictions are almost unshakable; they are deeply wired into one’s brain and take serious willpower and dedication to be broken.  Some examples would be smoking tobacco, doing marijuana, cocaine, heroine, opium, methamphetamine, or any other drugs, biting fingernails, video games, the internet, just to name a few.  However, I recently shook an addiction, just over a week ago, and frankly, it was easier than hell.  I believe that some addictions are like this; they are bad habits and consume a lot of our time, but all it would take to quit was to just say, “No!”

                My recent addiction was to Bike Race, a stupid, worthless game on my iPhone.  However, despite its uselessness, I was engulfed by it, and I played almost two thousand multiplayer games in the course of a month to a month and a half.  One day near the end of this addiction, I sat down and calculated how much total time I have wasted from my life on this game, and how much I was wasting every week, and every day.  It came out to be about eleven to twelve hours a week, and I was very aware that many days I spent two hours playing.  I simply decided that this would have to stop soon, and a couple days later, I literally just stopped completely.  I went from playing well over an hour one day to absolutely none the next, and for the past week. 

                I’m not sure why it was so easy, but I think it’s because I just stopped thinking about it, and just thinking about returning to Bike Race is quite repulsive to me.  I’ll be honest, over the last week I have played maybe five games because they were with people I just really wanted to play with, but they only take an average of ten to fifteen seconds each, so that adds up to about a minute of total play.  This is how much I should be playing this game.  But really, I am reluctant to play even this much.  I have totally lost interest in the game after quitting it, and I am proud to say that it won’t waste any more of my life.

                I think that a lot of people’s bad habits and addictions are similar to my situation.  They just don’t know how easy it would be for them to stop easily at will, because they are constantly engaged in their habit.  However, if they just mustered up the courage to say, “No!” one time, then they could be done forever, and it would be as easy as that.  I hope that just one person will read this post, and then be able to easily and relatively painlessly stop a bad habit.  That would make it worth the effort from me.

Jailbreaking, Part II

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Jailbreaking, Part II

                In my opinion, Jailbreaking should be legal, and the owner of a device should be able to do anything they want with it, as long as it doesn’t break any laws or harm anyone.  This doesn’t have anything to do with piracy, because I am talking only about the act of Jailbreaking.  For this reason, I am glad that the Supreme Court agrees with my view.  However, I believe that the issue of piracy and such has a very fine line, and I think that some things are clearly very illegal, or at least immoral.  For example, getting a game for free after Jailbreaking because you don’t want to buy it from the App Store or anywhere else isn’t right; that is stealing, and stealing is wrong.  However, in the event that one wants to play Pokemon on their iPod and already has the game purchased for Gameboy Advanced, I think they should be able to download it for free, because they have already paid for it, and it really doesn’t even exist on iPod.  Therefore, this person isn’t stealing, because there isn’t even a way to pay for the game on his/her iPod.  Legality aside, I don’t think this is immoral.  Therefore, I wouldn’t look down upon anyone that does it; I think it should be allowed.

                There are several different ‘companies,’ for lack of a better name (they don’t make you pay for it), which offer their own Jailbreaking software which will navigate around Apple’s restrictions and then remove them totally.  Some examples of these groups are Redsn0w, Absinthe from Greenpois0n, Sn0wbreeze, and Jailbreakme.com.  After Jailbreaking, there are two main ‘replacement app stores,’ Cydia and Installer, which allow Apps not approved by the Apple App Store.  Usually, once one group finds a Jailbreak for a certain iOS version, it quickly gets leaked out to the others, and they all start offering it.  These groups don’t really care, because most offer their Jailbreaks free of charge. 

                There are two main types of Jailbreaks: tethered and untethered.  Basically, the difference is that a device Jailbroken with a tethered Jailbreak must be connected to the Jailbreak software every time it is turned on, but with the untethered, the device only needs to be connected to the software one time.  In short, untethered is always preferred over tethered.  There are currently no untethered Jailbreaks discovered for the latest version of iOS, iOS 6.  This means that any device with this most up-to-date version cannot obtain an untethered Jailbreak.  Also, the latest version of Apple devices, including the iPhone 5, doesn’t even have a tethered Jailbreak that has been discovered.  Customers with these devices must simply wait until a group discovers a Jailbreak, and until then, they are out of luck when it comes to Jailbreaking.

Jailbreaking, Part I

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Jailbreaking, Part I

                If you’ve never heard of it before, Jailbreaking Apple devices sounds a lot more evil and immoral than it really is.  Jailbreaking is just the name, but really all that is happening is that one is using some software from the internet to remove restrictions placed on iDevices by Apple.  Apple’s has good intentions, and requires every application on its App Store to be approved by it, in order to protect customers from anything malicious or dangerous in some way.  However, many people think Apple is a bit overprotective, and turn to Jailbreaking to remove all of Apple’s restrictions.

                The main reason people Jailbreak their iPhones, iPods or iPads is because they want to download Apps that aren’t available in the App Store, for whatever reason.  These often include games by other companies, such as Nintendo, which Apple quite obviously will never make a deal with, because Nintendo is one of their direct competitors.  As a result, no Nintendo game will ever be available on the App Store.  The only other major reason for Jailbreaking is because people want to Unlock their iDevices, which means that they can switch cell phone companies at their will, and are no longer restricted to their contracts.  Actually, Unlocked devices are sold to the public in some areas, such as Canada.  However, these aren’t available in most areas, so people turn to Jailbreaking to solve this problem.

                In addition, many Apps that cost money on the App Store can be obtained for free on replacement app stores that become available after Jailbreaking, and for this reason people Jailbreak to participate in piracy.  However, this is usually not the case, but the legality of this issue went all the way to the Supreme Court.  There are two main arguments in this struggle.  The first is that iDevices are Apple products, and therefore Apple has the right to place any kind of restrictions they please onto the devices.  People agreeing with this argument believe that Jailbreaking is using the device in ways that it was not meant to be used, and that this shouldn’t be legal.  The second argument is that one purchased the device, and they fully own it, so they should be able to do anything they want with it.  People agreeing with this argument believe that they are using their device’s full capabilities, and Apple shouldn’t have the right to restrict this.

                The Supreme Court ruled Jailbreaking and Unlocking of devices legal, basically agreeing with the second argument above.  However, this is still a controversial issue, and the issue of piracy is still handled on a case-to-case basis, as the Supreme Court case deals only with the argument between hackers and Apple.  For example, it is generally agreed that downloading a Nintendo game for free after Jailbreaking is piracy.  However, many Jailbreakers argue that this should be allowed, as they own the original Nintendo games on different systems, and these games aren’t even available on the iDevices.  Therefore, they are basically using a game they already own, simply on a different system.  Is this reasonable?  That is the question.

Global Warming? Bring It.

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Global Warming?  Bring It.

                Tomorrow is my birthday, and eight days later is Christmas.  I can only recall one other year in which there was no snow on the ground on my birthday and Christmas.  I don’t remember what year it was, but I would say it was within the last six or seven years, and the only reason I remember it was because I remember thinking about it while walking up to my grandma’s house on either my birthday or Christmas, and seeing the bushes with all their leaves gone, just a bunch of twigs, but there was no snow.  It just doesn’t feel right!  Maybe, by some miracle of God, it will just snow like crazy tonight, or even just sometime between now and Christmas.  Usually, by now, I would have skied with my dad multiple times, but obviously that hasn’t worked out so far this year.  Hopefully the long delay of snow will result in a long delay in the stoppage of snow in April or even May… Anyway, I’m going to check the weather real quick…..

                Well, I guess there won’t be any snow tomorrow, but it looks like we may get 3-6 inches on Wednesday night, December 19.  However, I will be in Chicago then, so hopefully we’ll get some there too.  By the way, for anyone that doesn’t know, I live in Iowa, which is right in the middle of the largest humid temperate climate area in the world.  That means that it gets really hot in the summer, like, in the 100°s, and it gets really cold in the winter, like, -10°, -40° with windchill.  Quite obviously, I’m talking Fahrenheit.  Except for the -40°, that works either way :)

                I’m attributing this alternation of very early and very late snowfalls from year to year to global warming.  Whether global warming and the greenhouse effect is man-made or not, it’s happening, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to stop anytime soon.  In case you don’t know very much about global warming, I’ll educate you a little bit.  First of all, what is going on right now, is that the temperatures all over the world are rising every year, and it’s getting hotter and hotter, which causes all kinds of crazy weather patterns, more violent storms, droughts, and all kinds of other ecological problems and disasters.  You may assume that the earth will just keep getting hotter and hotter, but this is not the case.  After a while, as the ice caps melt, the ocean currents, which are run by temperature, will stop.  After this occurs, there will be no regulation of temperature by the oceans, and we will go into another ice age.  So really, the end effect of global ‘warming’ is another ice age.  I actually think that will be kind of cool.  I’m obviously assuming that it’s going to happen, and since it is, I would kind of like to see it happen within my lifetime.

12/21/2012, Part II

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12/21/2012, Part II

                In all seriousness, though, I really am dreading the events that will be coming this week fueled by the end of the Mayan calendar on Friday.  We’ve already been barraged by the media in response to the events in Connecticut the other day, which I have from the start tried to shield myself from.  I haven’t watched any news about it on TV, I have averted my gaze from any news about it on the internet; the only information I have seen was from Facebook and Twitter.  All my friends, whether in genuine sympathy or not, love to jump on the tragedy bandwagon.  I think that for many of them it’s purely for attention, or to make them look like better people, but whatever, maybe not. 

                Anyway, one of the only things I’ve read in length about it was Morgan Freeman’s statement, because it was on #Discover on Twitter.  One point that he made really made the whole thing worth reading.  It’s not like it was a very long statement, either.  He said that he hates the way that the media blows this kind of thing up, making the shooter or killer seem like a total celebrity.  We will always remember the killer’s names, but not the victims’.  But the major thing was that this just encourages other psychos to try to top this, as some news networks are saying that this is “the worst killing since Virginia Tech.”  I agree with Morgan that none of these tragedies are any worse than any other. 

                I will be going to Chicago on Wednesday, and we will come back Saturday night.  I’m a little scared because this is a BIG place, capable for a BIG attack in precession of the ‘end of the world.’  I just hope that nothing crazy happens in whatever place I happen to be in, at whatever time.  I think that I’ll probably be okay, because I’m going to a huge music event, so a crazy would probably rather go downtown have more targets.  I should probably check out where this thing is before I say that, because there’s a good chance that it is downtown!  Hopefully, with plenty of prayers across the world, nothing too nuts will happen this week, and hopefully no one will try to ‘make it’ the end of the world on Friday.  I could just see a terrorist attack from the Middle East coming right now.  It won’t happen, they probably hate the Mayans.  They took part in beating them down, so how much would they believe this whole prophecy?