Freezing Rain Straight from Heaven

425

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...

421

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

575

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!!

444

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

454

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

554

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

473

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

432

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

428

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!

416

                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

443

                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

421

                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!