Month: January 2003

  • uh-oh…i’m long-winded…


    yay for kitty crack!


    ahhh…how I’ve missed the sight of kitties running into walls, falling over, laying around with really really dialated pupils, staring at nothing, in general being even bigger fools than even they typically are…


    where is the people version of a recreational drug with no apparently side-effects? (and such a munchy-crunchy taste!)


    the cats are fully fully recovered from surgery, they’re still pretty belly hairless though, which makes’em look silly, especially as they roll around making silly faces of ecstasy…I figure if they never get to have kitty sex, at least they get kitty highs, I want my kitties to live a wonderful life


    but I also want them to get fat. That part is not going so well. I think they run around too much playing their weird little games. my three favorites: helicopter kitty, sumo kitties and pop goes the cat


    other thoughts of interest…
    Crest white strips work


    REALLY well
    but there is a side-effect that yellow toothed people like me notice. when you have really really bloody white teeth (like I do now), you really see plaque when it builds up! i mean, EWWWW. you look in the mirror and go “YUCK!”
    so…teeth much brushing…three times a day at least, or you really can see the plaque….hrmmm…
    am I really lazy? or do I like having white teeth? (damn you coke and your tooth yellowing ways!)


    school proceeds, with a bit of a break in my experimental failure run, seeing as my prof nearly runs whenever he sees me…he fears me and my disease! though he brings in his share o’ disease, having two kids in elementary school, yeah, he’s a carrier. my regular old typhoid lisle


    home seems better, all the immediate family has recovered from the terror of the stomach flu. the newest members, my neice darcy and my sister’s other baby, the cat Kah-hah-be-booo-lan (I Have NO Idea how it’s spelled, so that’s as phonotic (huh, I dunno how that is spelled either, I need me some spell checking…) as it gets folks!), they call her Hobby for short…they are settlign in admirably. Oddly enough, the cat doesn’t seem to mind the kid, indeed, she seems to derive some pleasure out of the ear gnawing and the tail pulling. Masochist.


    i’m reading a lot. thinking a lot. feel like my brain has been asleep for several months, just working and doing homework and cat-frolicking. and suddenly – my brain has clicked into high gear and i can’t stop thinking long enough to absorb knowledge. it’s hard to learn in class when your brain is whirring so hard about something that you can’t get it to focus…spent my molecular evolution course contemplating probability. see, what i think helped turn my brain back on, albeit slowly, was God’s Debris by Scott Adams (yeah, you know, that guy who wrote dilbert)…good book, quick read…though-stimulating, which indeed is the point of the book…but the question I keep getting stuck on…is this (I’ll direct quote so it’s easier to understand):


    “I meant why does the coin come up heads fifty percent of the time?”
    “I guess that’s because the coin weighs about the same on both sides, so there’s a fifty-fifty chance it will land on one side versus the other.” I tried to avoid sounding condescending. I wasn’t sure I succeeded.
    “You haven’t answered why. You simply listed some facts.”


    I saw waht was going on. The old man pulls this trick question on anyone who come within range. There had to be a punch line or clever answer, so I played along.


    “What’s the anwer?” I asked with all the artificial interest I could muster.
    “The answer,” he said, “is that the question has no why.”
    “You could say that about anything.”
    “No,” he replied, in a manner that seemed suddenly coherent. “Ever other question has an answer to why. Only probability is inexplicable.”


    God’s Debris: A Thought Experiment


    so…is it? is there a why to probability? if there is, what is it? if there isn’t…well what the hell am i doing in a science field? i am on the second read through of the book, still working on this one. if there is no why, is probability no difference than chance, than fate, than luck? if so, then all those scientific papers…wow…they feel pretty iffy, considering a big BIG deal for us is that data are significant to a certain point that the probability that it’s due to chance is very small. but if they’re the same thing, what impact does that have? are we comparing science data to luck?


    so
    what is probability? i asked a friend. her response. “kinda like algebra. or calculus. what are any of those really?” any math people out here who can help me? this is twirling my brain for a loop…


    the rest of the book is also worth reading…also stimulated one other question i’m still stewing on: does omnipotence automatically omniscience? or…do you have to be all-knowing to be all-powerful?


    enough talkies…I’m going to grill me some cheese…

  • I made my flow chart, I’m not entirely satisfied as yet…it’s difficult to read

  • well now, in response to goMetric’s comments (see today’s earlier entry)


    #1 easily incorporates into my theory though it does make it more complicated…and I wouldn’t want to add that onto my personal flowchart


    as for #2…those happy committed people, well…there are exceptions to every rule…hence my “in general” statement…my parents I guess fall into this category…it’s frustrating


    momma’s been giving me that look lately…the “why aren’t you married yet” look…


    I don’t like that look. It will be worse when I tell her that Leslie is engaged and at least one other friend is due to be engaged…


    heck…by this age my mom already been married for nearly three years, had me and my older sister, and had owned two houses…in another 18 months she’d be having baby number 3…egads


    that’s just depressing, grad school sometimes seems so useless in comparison to enlarging the human population and leaving behind wee little baby Kelly’s…

  • so, taking into account copying and saving (which I definitely shall do) I shall attempt to repost what I said before…about men and women


    okay (bear with me, it’s not going to be as pretty as it was I don’t think)


    men and women, there is a division a divide a duality that is … it’s not enough. at least not for humans, as we complicate this matter much like everything else…i more see it as a flow chart


    my mental flow chart looks like this:


    “asshole” guys —–lusted after by—-> “ideal” girls —–lusted after by—-> “nice” guys —-lusted after by—> “nice” girls


    so asshole screws over ideal girl, she runs to her “nice” guy friends, makes them feel special and needed…then asshole decides he wants ideal back or else she finds a new asshole thus abandoning “nice” guy who seeks solace with “nice” girl until the next time that the asshole screws over “ideal” and then the circle starts all over…


    and yet…the circle isn’t enough…(I can’t diagram it here really) because someone’s asshole is someone else’s nice guy and someone’s nice girl is someone else’s ideal girl…so it’s massively complicated by social structure, especially by looks (I don’t care what America pretends, looks do matter, what looks varies from person to person but nearly everyone judges something on looks) and by intelligence, by social position, by money…


    so you put it all together and in my head it makes a big messy chart with all these extenuating circumstances that seem to come out to one overall conclusion:


    In general, humans want what they can’t have.


    easy enough conclusion I guess…perverse too, because once you get what you want, then suddenly, you realize you don’t want it anymore…it’s not enough you’re not happy or satisfied…


    it’s frustrating enough to see your friends do it, to see it done to your friends but when you do it and realize you do it…argh…makes me want to go back in time and kick whoever decided to start this horribly messy civilization mess we have….

  • argh


    I’ve been slacking and xanga has been pissing me off….


    it ate two posts…one of which was good dammit! It was about my own personal views on the men/women dynamic (which isn’t really like that at all)


    but then it got eaten, and then my post about it getting eaten got eaten…how frustrating! must remember to copy and save this post


    anyway…heading back to work today…I wonder if they’ll let me take a nap there…I figure I’ll be out like a light after my first class, with or without their opinion…I’m that easily wiped, I’m also down about 5 or so pounds I think, which wouldn’t be bad except that it’s probably all water weight (which would explain the constant need to drink…)

  • yes, the get-well fairy has stopped by…and my tummy is feeling decidedly better (crossing my fingers as I haven’t yet eaten anything but broth for 36 hours which doesn’t sound like much unless you realize that I typically eat between 4 and 6 meals per day) but now…I am bored. Insanely bored. I typically am cracked out busy all day long and now I am not. I could probably go to work and be okay, but I risk infecting all the people I work with or picking up some other disease while there. So, I will miss my one class today, attempt to eat, probably clean the apartment, maybe unpack the car and in general, be blissfully sloth-like and pretend that I’m okay with not doing ANYTHING all day long.


    I can’t wait until I go back to work tomorrow!

  • ugh…


    home sick…how much does that suck? flu? food poisoning? who knows…


    what I do know is that you cannot vomit, pull your car over and attempt to roll your car’s window down all at the same time…

  • if you know anyone who is a sophmore or junior in college who is a biology/environmentally interested person who is looking for a paid internship for this summer, let me know and I will send out some information I have on an available NSF internship for this coming summer.

  • while on my evening news cruise (currently I hit www.salon.com, www.slate.com, www.motherjones.com, www.cnn.com, and www.nytimes.com ; I am up for any other worthwhile news sites, any recommendations?) the other night, I read that Richard Crenna died.


    This saddens me. I always have remembered him as the army bigwig guy from the Rambo movies (yes, I like Rambo, yes, I own all three…and indeed I have worn out my copy of the first Rambo, before you make judgement calls, the first Rambo is not at all like the stereotyped second and third Rambo movies, indeed Rambo doesn’t actually even kill anyone in the first movie…it is a great deal more about flashbacks and the impact of Vietnam on the veterans of that war…anyway, enough) back to Richard Crenna…I was surprised as hell to find out that he had starred in a lot of things, he was an early radio star as a child and he had been guest starring on Judging Amy…


    I have no idea really where I was going with this post. Just surprised I guess…apparently he also played a cop who was sexually assaulted.


    *shrug* otherwise…I’m cold. Very Cold. Cold with a capital C…I could probably capitalize the whole word and not feel any guilt about hyperbole. Ohio is frozen. They were cancelling and/or delaying all the public schools this morning (-12 I believe with the windchill in the outlying parts of Columbus, closer to -5 in the interior of the city where I live in the ghetto…in the ghetto … sorry, I always have to sing that in my head, I think it’s Elvis…). Today the temperatures continue to fall all the way until late evening…**shiver** However, we do get a bit of a break next week around about Wednesday when it will defrost just enough to rain…and then refreeze again the next day.


    Can it be summer time yet? Heck…even anything other than negative temperatures! I accidentally viewed temperatures in celsius the other day…WOW…I at least feel more optimistic with the farenheit scale…