Going to a Destination Epic Fail

by   •   Highlights
 

This post is over 15 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

If you’ve been a reader of my blog for the past year, you might possibly remember that I used to have a lot of fails with the bus a long time ago when I first started using public transportation.

For example, on the first day I ever rode a public bus, I failed to be noticed by the bus driver because I was standing at the wrong spot. A few days after that, I stood at a bus stop that was no longer in service because I misinterpreted the schedule and thought that late-night service was active on all days except Friday and Saturday nights, rather than only Friday and Saturday nights.

Today, I had a bus fail that, I believe, outfails all the other bus fails I’ve ever had in my life.

Today is Sunday, which means that the tae kwon do club at UW-Madison meets from 2 PM until 4 PM. Today also happens to be an early Sunday in September, which means that the qualifiers for the Ironman Triathalon is held in Madison, Wisconsin.

For those of you who don’t know, the Ironman Triathalon is an annual event where people swim 2.4 miles (3.86 km), bike 112 miles (180.25 km), and run 26.2 miles (42.195 km). Every year, iron men (and women) come to Madison, Wisconsin to compete in the qualifiers. For this event, there are tons of streets everywhere that are closed, and bus routes are rerouted so they don’t interfere with the participants.

Back to UW TKD. The tae kwon do club meets at the Gymnasium-Natatorium, which is quite a distance away from my apartment (nothing compared to the distance the Ironman competitors travel, but still too far for my walking comfort). So, I ride the bus from the Brogden Psychology Building up to the Gymnasium-Natatorium.

Sometime around 1:30 PM, I boarded the bus to go to the Gym-Nat. As I was riding the bus, I noticed that we were going to places that were not on the standard route. I assumed that it was because of the Ironman Triathalon and didn’t really think much of it, assuming that I would get to the Gym-Nat without a problem.

A while later, I realized that the bus was driving com­pletely around Observatory Dr., which is where the Gym-Nat is located. I became very much more alert to see where I was going, and realized that we were headed towards University Bay and UW Hospital.

After waiting a few minutes longer, I realized that I was now far northwest of the main UW campus and had no idea where I was going. Fortunately, I knew that the bus route I took travels in a circular route, so I knew that eventually I would end up back at a place with which I was familiar. But until then, I was stuck on a bus miles away from both my apartment and my destination.

After sitting on the bus for about 45 minutes and getting a tour of Eagle Heights and Picnic Point, I finally noticed that we were heading back to the main UW campus. As we approached the Brogden Psychology Building, I pulled the stop cable and got off the bus.

So yes, you read that correctly.

I got on the bus at the psychology building, stayed on the bus for 45 minutes, then got off the bus at the psychology building.

And I never made it to the Gym-Nat.

This is the third time in the past week or so that the Madison Metro system has miserably let me down.

 

—§—

 

Social Sciences Copy Shop Epic Fail

by   •   Highlights
 

This post is over 15 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

If you attend the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States and you ever need to buy something from the copy shop in the Sewell Social Sciences building, prepare for one of the most frustrating experiences in your college/university career.

Back on the 6th of this month, I went to the copy shop to buy a reader for my sociological enterprise course. For those who are unfamiliar with university vocabulary, a “reader” is basically a huge collection of documents relevant to the course for which they were made; it’s more or less a replacement for a textbook with materials that the instructor or professor specifically picked out for his or her course.

Being the beginning of the semester, there were a lot of students waiting to purchase their own readers for their own classes, so I had to wait a while in line. Not a big deal, though, and not really frustrating, because I was checking and responding to emails and texting anyway and it didn’t matter that I was doing it while standing in line rather than standing outside the lecture hall for my following class waiting for the previous class to be dismissed.

After waiting about five minutes in line, I look up and notice a sign. It’s a tad bit too far away for me to be able to see it, so I wait another few minutes until I slowly make it closer and closer to the sign as I advance in line. Then I cross the point where I am able to read the sign, and notice that it says that credit or debit cards are not accepted.

I put on my -.- face and step out of line. My reader costs a little bit over $20 and I rarely ever carry over a dollar of cash in my wallet. I walk over to the closest no-charge ATM, which is in the building next door.

And of course, it decides that the 6th of September is an excellent day to break.

I decide that it’s acceptable to wait a few more days to purchase my reader, and add “go to working ATM” to my todo list.

Two days later (which would be two days ago), I grab my keys, iPod Touch, and laptop bag to go to an ATM on my way to class. When I arrive at the ATM, I notice that my wallet is missing. The best part is that when I went to grab my keys, they were sitting right on top of my wallet, but for whatever reason, I decided not to grab my wallet as well.

So I went another day without my reader.

Finally, yesterday, I grabbed both my keys as well as my wallet before going to class to stop by the ATM. I successfully withdrew $25 from the ATM. After attending my morning classes, I went to the copy shop in the social sciences building during my lunch break to finally purchase my reader.

I arrive and it’s closed.

Resisting the urge to just hop over the counter, find my reader, and process the transaction myself, I read the sheet of paper stuck to the wall to discover that the copy shop is closed every day during lunch hours.

Whoever decided it’s a good idea to close during lunch hours when everyone has free time to stop by and purchase their readers should get fired.

Yes, I did eventually manage to buy my reader a few hours later.

To top off the frustration, it’s not even three-hole punched so I can’t even put it in my binder without hole punching a couple hundred pages myself eight sheets at a time with a hand-operated three-hole puncher.

 

—§—

 

Lavender Town Syndrome

by   •   Highlights, Pokémon
 

This post is over 15 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

Earlier today, my friend Benjamin Chow told me about an interesting disorder he ran into called Lavender Town Syndrome. For those of you who don’t know, I have a pretty solid knowledge of the fundamentals of Pokémon and psychology, and Benjamin thought I would be a good candidate to ask for more information about this syndrome. Unfortunately, I had not heard of it before today, so I went online and did some research about Lavender Town Syndrome to find out what it was and make a judgment of if it is real or not.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Pokémon, Lavender Town is a small town from the original first generation Pokémon game series that contained the Pokémon Tower, which is a tall building that housed the graves of dead Pokémon. The environment in this town is down and depressing, and the music that plays in the background is haunting and eerie.

Lavender Town made its first appearance in Japan in the Pokémon Red and Green versions on February 27, 1996. Supposedly, shortly afterwards, there was a peak in the number of deaths of children aged 8-12, which is the target audience of Pokémon games. These deaths were generally suicides by young children, and the suicides were preceeded by headaches, migranes, irritability, and violence. After some investigation, people started claiming that the cause of these deaths was the music found in Lavender Town.

If you want more detailed information about Lavender Town Syndrome, you can Google it and read it from other websites.

http://google.com/search?q=Lavender+Town+Syndrome

The main proposal of those claiming Lavender Town Syndrome is real is that the creators of the Lavender Town music encoded a special sound wave in the track that only undeveloped ears can hear. When young individuals hear this, they would be driven crazy and start doing things they would normally not do. Adults would not be able to hear this special sound wave because they have fully developed ears. Basically, what they are attempting to say is that there were binaural beats encoded into the Lavender Town music and it caused children to act unnaturally.

Going off of just this information, I can disprove that binaural beats, or anything that children can hear that adults cannot, affected the children.

First, the only way something can be heard by children and not heard by adults is if the pitch of the sound is extremely high. On average, those who are 18 years of age or higher cannot hear anything higher-pitched than 17 kilohertz. Thus, if children were to be affected by something that adults cannot hear, it must be something that is greater than about 17 kilohertz.

Next, by definition, binaural beats are two different sound waves, one fed into each ear, that have different wave lengths, causing beating sounds which affect brain waves to stimulate or relax the mind. To have any effect on the brain, the sound waves that create the binaural beats must have a frequency of 1 kilohertz or less. Thus, if the sound waves are greater than 1 kilohertz, they would not have any subliminal effect on the brain.

On a side note, there is no evidence that proves (or even suggests) that you lose your ability to hear low-frequency sounds as you get older. Thus, any low sound has an equal probability of being heard by both adults and children.

Putting this all together, if binaural beats were what was causing children to exhibit violent and/or suicidal behavior, adults would have been affected as well. However, the discoverers of Lavender Town Syndrome explicitly state that individuals with fully developed ears cannot hear what is causing these behaviors. In conclusion, the two proposals ([1] the cause of this behavior can be heard by underdeveloped ears but not by fully developed ears, and [2] the cause of this behavior is binaural beats) are contradictory and inconsistent.

In case that’s not enough to convince you that Lavender Town Syndrome is fake, I found an interesting discrepancy in the evidence the discoverers of Lavender Town Syndrome provide.

Supposedly, on April 12, 1996, an eleven-year-old child named 京极 勝女 (those are Asian characters and might not render properly on all machines or devices) died after showing obstructive sleep apnea (ceasing to breathe while sleeping), severe migranes, otorrhagia (bleeding from the external auditory canal of the ear), and tinnitus (auditory hallucinations). That seems normal until you take a closer look at the name. The first, third, and fourth characters in the name, as expected, are in Japanese because this occured when the game was only available in Japan. However, someone who is Chinese, Japanese, or is familiar with Asian characters will immediately notice that the second character is not like the others. That’s because the second character in the name is in Chinese.

Unless Japanese people started randomly putting Chinese characters in their name for a short period of time (which I’m sure they did not), 京极 勝女 is not a real person, but rather a made-up name by someone who didn’t quite check his/her sources and simply put together some characters to form a name. (For those of you who do not understand the oddity of something like this, think of it this way: if you are American, would you randomly put a Russian character in your name simply because the inhabitants of both the United States of America and Russia are light-skinned and look aesthetically similar?)

If the discoverers of this syndrome are so desperate for people to believe them that they create false evidence like this, then I think we can all rest assured that Lavender Town Syndrome is just a myth and we can continue playing Pokémon without any concerns.

 

—§—

 

“North is that-a way.”

by   •   Five Minutes in My Head, Highlights
 

This post is over 16 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

At 01:30 PM today, I finished the last portion of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Student Orien­tation Advising and Registration process by completing my enrollment in classes for the first semester of my freshman year in college.

As I was heading out of the building, I lost my way to the front exit and took a side door exit, stepping into the rain. After being unable to find my place on the map I was using, I started walking toward where I saw a bunch of cars driving by and started spinning my map around to try to orient it to the direction in which I was walking.

A short distance away, an old man with a cane standing at the corner of an intersection asked me if I needed any help. I told him that I was fine and thanked him for the offer, but he helped me out anyway and reached for my map. After staring closely at it for a few seconds, he returned my map and pointed behind me, proudly declaring, "North is that-a way." I had a strong feeling that he was pointing south and that north was in front of me, but the old man insisted that north was behind me. He cited that he has lived in this area for decades, and he knows it like "the back of [his] palm." I thanked him for his (unwelcome) help, turned to my left, and started walking east (east according to the old man, at least).

I walked and walked but couldn’t find the street I was looking for. I looked on my map for the streets I was walking past, but I couldn’t find any of them. After about a mile and a half of walking, I concluded that I had walked outside of the range of my one-page map printout, and decided to retrace my steps.

After another one and a half miles or so of walking, I made it back to the spot where I found the old man, and surprisingly, he was still there, standing in the rain. I confronted him again, pointed south, and said, "You said that that was north!" The old man pointed behind me and said, "No, I said that north was behind you!"

The thing is, when I first conversed with the old man, I was facing the real north and the old man was facing the real south. However, during the second conversation with the old man, I was facing the real south and he was facing the real north, effectively making the direction behind me north. Basically, we had switched spots during the second conversation, so his "North is behind you" statement was false during the first conversation, but actually true during the second conversation. I tried to explain this to him, but he responded by asking me if I was under the influence of chemical substances. I decided to leave him there to continue getting drenched in the rain and proceeded on my way back to my dor­mitory.

By the time I reached my dormitory, I had more or less taken a shower in rainwater and my hair was dripping wet. I checked the time, and it was 2:18 PM. A walk from the registration site to my dormitory that should have taken ten minutes or so ended up taking 48 minutes.

The moral of the story: buy a compass.

 

—§—

 

Going to Buffalo Wild Wings Fail

by   •   Five Minutes in My Head, Highlights
 

This post is over 16 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

After taking my AP Spanish final exam (which happens to be my last final exam of high school), I went out to eat lunch with two of my college buddies (who will now be referred to by their names, Roger and Garret) that graduated high school last year. We decided to go to Buffalo Wild Wings.

After I finished my exam, Roger came to pick me up, and we headed over to Buffalo Wild Wings. Meanwhile, Garret was driving on his own, and we planned to meet up at the restaurant.

Upon arriving, Roger and I noticed that Garret wasn’t there yet, so we sat in the car and waited. After a while, I called Garret to check and see where he was. After overcoming a few technical difficulties, we managed to communicate with each other that we were both sitting in the parking lot facing a Jimmy John’s. Roger and I left the car.

We started slowly walking toward the Buffalo Wild Wings building when we noticed that Garret was still nowhere in sight. After a minute or two, we got a call from Garret. He said that he was also in front of the Buffalo Wild Wings building, and could not see us.

Then we made a revolutionary discovery. Roger and I were standing in front of the Buffalo Wild Wings in Crystal Lake. Garret was standing in front of the Buffalo Wild Wings in Algonquin, about five miles away. The most interesting part is that there also happens to be a Jimmy John’s situated near the Buffalo Wild Wings in Algonquin as well as the one in Crystal Lake.

After realizing this, Roger made a :facepalm: expression without the actual facepalm.

 

—§—

 

Omegle Fail

by   •   Five Minutes in My Head, Highlights
 

This post is over 16 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

Chatting on Omegle gives me confidence in the future of humanity.

     

You’re now chatting with a random stranger. Say hi!

Stranger: Hey

You: I have a gun in my hand and am about to shoot myself in the head. Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t commit suicide right now.

Your conversational partner has disconnected.

Start a new conversation or send us feedback.

Was this conversation great? Share the log on Facebook or download it!

 

—§—