The Water-Float Test

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Picture of the Day

The Water-Float Test

The Water-Float Test

Women in the 15th century suspected of witchcraft were put to the water-float test.

If you float, you’re a witch and you’re executed. If you sink, you’re not a witch … but you drown and die anyway.

#aLittleFlawed

(Taken with an Apple iPod Touch 4th Generation)

 

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Topic #160: What would cause you to protest or riot for something?

Background: Last night riots broke out in Vancouver, after their hockey team lost in the NHL finals. Many people have criticized the people and the city for being so destructive over a sport. But people are very passionate about sports. What are you passionate enough to participate in a protest? Or a riot? Or is there nothing at all?

I think that anyone who riots as a result of a sport is stupid, especially those who riot in happiness because their local team won. It’s not like all these people are a part of the sport team anyway, and it’s not like they’re getting much out of their local team winning. If anything, they have to pay to purchase tickets to watch the game, and if the team were to win, the fans don’t get their money back or anything. The most anyone could get out of a victory is saying “my city’s team won” – which isn’t much of a big deal anyway.

I definitely would never riot because of a sport, but I’m sure that there are some things that would prompt me to riot (but I haven’t come across them yet). Most of the time I try to resolve issues in a non-destructive manner, but if the agent I was rioting against was being destructive to me or those allied with me, I would probably retaliate destructively (but only in their territory – I’m not stupid enough to riot in my own home town and set fire to anything I see, like the residents of Vancouver).

 

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I’m Not Dead Either

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My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

 

What I’m Watching

Continuing my trend from last summer of watching movies starring Kristen Bell, I watched a 2010 movie titled You Again.

Kristen Bell plays the role of Marni, a young woman who is successful now but had a terrorizing high school career. She was the acne-faced girl with braces who everyone liked to make fun of. Years after leaving high school, she finds out that her older brother is planning on marrying the girl who bullied her the most during high school, and retaliates to help her brother find out what kind of person his future wife really is.

Although this movie wasn’t as attention-holding or thought-provoking as other movies I’ve watched, it was still a good laid-back comedy. It reminded me of the antics of high school and gave a humorous representation of both the bully and the victim’s side of the conflict. As the movie progresses, we find out that Marni isn’t the only woman who has had problems with the family of her older brother’s fiancée, which is where the title You Again comes from.

 

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Topic #155: If you knew you were going to die in 20 days, what would change?

Quite obviously, if I knew I was going to die in a specific short period of time, I would no longer live to prepare for the future and instead start living to prepare for my death. I would make sure that everything under my responsibility would end up having a smooth transition to someone else after my departure.

On a slightly related note, I actually don’t really like being asked what I would do if I was going to die in a specific amount of time. I’ve been asked this question so much that I already know exactly what I would do if something like this were ever to happen. In addition, thinking about this is quite an unoptimistic way to live – and that’s coming from someone who takes a relatively pessimistic approach to everything in general. I think that thinking excessively about your own death or demise will distract and impair you from achieving what you could or what you want to do.

 

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You Creepy People

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Thank you to the creepy anonymous person who emailed me today reminding me to pay my summer college tuition. Those payments were actually automatic, but either way, I’m quite impressed that you found out on which date the payment would be charged, and even concluded that because the regular payment date was on a weekend, the charge would occur on the following business day. Now please stop stalking me that closely.

In other news, one of my textbooks for one of my summer courses arrived in the mail today. It’s a used book, and it sort of smells like dirty gym shoes.

 

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Topic #150: See how long you can sit in silence. Before you start, check the clock and guess at how long you can do it for. Then when you’re done: how close was your guess? Surprised? What did you experience while siting? Was it pleasant or frustrating?

This topic is a little silly to me beacuse I sit in silence consecutively for hours a day out of my own free will because I don’t find the need to say anything.

I’m normally a very peaceful person when I’m alone, and I usually attempt to place myself into situations where I will be alone. I don’t think I can remain silent on the Internet because I’m always communicating in one form or another, but I actually prefer to be silent in real life rather than speak randomly with those around me.

Depending on the day, if I’m in my studio on my university campus on a weekend with no plans, I can stay silent for the entire day without a problem. So, if I were to guess how long I could stay silent, I would say about 32 hours – that’s two nights and one full day of not speaking.

I can’t really test that right now because I’m back at home and I’m frequently communicating with my parents, but if I remember this blog post when I’m back at university, I’ll try to test it out.

 

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How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer

by   •   Daily Post, What I'm Reading
 

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My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

 

What I’m Reading

Earlier today, I finished reading How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer, a book mainly about economic psy­chology, but also about the general concept of how we decide what to do on a moment-to-moment and day-to-day basis.

Most of us think that the best decisions are the ones we think through slowly, thoroughly, and carefully. Most of us believe that the more information we have about the elements of a choice we could make, the better our choice becomes. Even great philosophers like Socrates and Decartes believed this as well – that the way someone can live a near-perfect life is to supress impulses and think through every decision completely.

How We Decide argues that rational thought is not actually the best way to think through the decisions we make, and contrary to popular belief, impulses and emotional urges are extremely important when it comes to making some sorts of choices. Lehrer states that some choices are best thought through, like math problems, but other choices, like selecting what type of strawberry jam we want, are best left to our emotional minds. He states that if we think too analytically about things like picking strawberry jam or selecting a piece of artwork that we like, we’ll overanalyze unimportant details and end up making the wrong cohice.

I’ve read a lot about how important our emotions are if we interpret them properly, but How We Decide put together all the important points and supported them with great evidence to illustrate a complete and detailed picture. Lehrer cites what seems like hundreds of different sources of different experiments conducted by psychologists, sociologists, and economists that prove the point Lehrer is making.

I highly recommend everyone to read this book, even if psychology or economics might not be a point of interest. The information covered in this book can be applied to everyone’s life and could potentially help them change the way they make decisions for the better. Even just the vast amount of research and intriguing experiment results presented in this book makes it worth reading.

 

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Topic #149: Do you believe in life on other planets? Why or why not? Why do you think most alien races in most movies are so dangerous rather than friendly?

I don’t necessarily specifically believe in life on other planets, but I do think that there is life somewhere other than Earth.

Based on specific science only, I think that it’s very possible that we have not yet discovered an area that has an environment fit enough for some sort of life. In addition, this other life could be of a completely different type, which might actually thrive in cold, desolate places rather than vegetative, sunny places like Earth.

From the fourth dimension point of view (which is my scientific alternative to religion), there are different worlds owned by different four-dimensional creators that we have not yet been able to find because of time and dimensional restrictions. This life could be completely different than what we think of as life, but it would still be considered life if the four-dimensional creator chose to call it life.

I think that the media depicts aliens as hostile and dangerous beings because we have the impression that aliens might be intelligent enough to take over our planet. In order to defend ourselves, we see aliens as dangerous and malicious to justify our motivation to protect our land.

 

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Insurance Finally Canceled

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First of all, thanks to everyone who reminded me to call in to Allstate and cancel my renter’s insurance for my Madison property that will be unoccupied for the summer. I finally got a hold of an agent and got it done.

I also finally got in touch with an adviser at my local community college to get my schedule for this summer’s courses finalized. All my exemptions from my standardized testing and completed courses from my regular university were finally recorded into their system. For those of you who were wondering, I will be taking a physical science course online, and a psychology course (PSY 275) and a literature course (ENG 240) in-building on Mondays and Wednesdays from 9:00 AM to 11:50 PM and 1:00 PM to 3:50 PM. Although highly unlikely, if you’re enrolled in the same courses as I am, let me know.

In other news, you may or may not have noticed the change with GMail’s AIM function. I actually don’t use the in-GMail chat so I didn’t realize it until someone told me about it, but you can no longer sign in to your AIM account through GMail. Instead, you have to import your contacts into your GChat buddy list.

Be very careful when doing this if you use a client like Pidgin that combines multiple protocols into one buddy list. I accidentally imported my AIM buddy list into my GChat buddy list today without thinking, and had to manually remove duplicates of my couple hundred AIM contacts from my Pidgin buddy list.

 

The Badger Herald, Summer 2011 Projects

Thanks to everyone who helped me find out all the bugs in my document submission form (read yesterday’s blog post if you don’t know what I’m referring to).

A bug that a lot of people easily found was a file size check error. I forgot to set a minimum, so people were able to submit empty files or not even select any files at all and successfully submit the form. I also set the maximum wrong; I intended the maximum file size to be 20 MB, but accidentally set it to 20 KB.

Something many people thought was a bug but actually is not is the fact that you are able to submit .exe (executable) files. Although that’s a virus threat, all submitted files will be run through me before anyone else gets a hold of them, so I decided not to place any restrictions on the types of files one can submit. Either way, if someone submits a suspicious file, I’m most likely going to delete it on the spot anyway without even downloading it to see what it is.

 

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Topic #147: Whose responsibility is it to change the world? And what will be your contribution?

I think everyone has the responsibility to help change the world in some way, though, it may be helpful if those with bad intentions pass on their responsibilities to others with good intentions.

I don’t think that claiming to be stupid or incapable is a valid excuse not to contribute to improving the world somehow because each individual has some ability to do something, even if it’s something that wouldn’t be considered something significant by many people.

I’m not completely sure what my ultimate contribution to the world will be. I realize that it’s important to set a life goal for yourself – a goal that will act as a sentence describing your best accomplishment – but I don’t think I’m ready to set one yet. Most of my goals right now are self-centered as I try to secure a good position in society. Of course, I’ve made small contributions already, both by making sure that the world maintains its order and by not doing anything harmful, but I think I’ll need to wait after I find a stable occupation to truly decide what my real contribution will be.

 

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Life in 2021 and Hard Drives

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Topic #124: Make a prediction about life in 2021. Look back at life in 2001 and what you remember thinking 2011 would be like. Compare it to what actually happened. Use that to help you think about predicting something about 2021.

Back in 2001, I was a third grader in elementary school and I don’t think I even thought about what life would be like at all. Of course, I thought about what I would be like, and I was curious if I would get accepted into a good university and get good grades, but I didn’t really think about how my environment would influence me.

I think that in 2021, the exponential rise in developing technology will have reached such a high point that most people will be employed as people either maintaining machinery or attempting to create better machinery. There will most likely be such a lack of available job openings that the unemployment rate will soar. In an attempt to become more competent, people will probably stay in school longer and put more effort into expanding their knowledge, but they will not have enough opportunities to put their learned knowledge to use.

 

Auto-Correct Fail of the Day

I don’t even remember taking this screenshot, but I found it saved in my iPod Touch so I decided to put it up here.

 

Keeping Track

I mentioned a while back that I was going to stop doing my “So Far in 2011” section and create a new “Keeping Track” section. I asked my readers to submit suggestions for what I should keep track of in my blog, and my favorite and the most realistic suggestion I got was to keep track of the amount of space I’m using on my hard drives.

If you have any additional suggestions, feel free to send them to me via email or by using the contact form on my website.

Local Drive: 48.5 of 402 GB
External Hard Drive: 71.2 of 931 GB

 

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