So, I got paid today…and got an extra $600 ’cause they’ve been taking money out when they shouldn’t have been…
…now…what kind of amp should I buy? 😉
P.S. To make an already perfect day even more spectactular…I saw a 1993 Nissan Altima with a duck-shaped hood ornament…it was rather amusing…hehehehe…
…so now that I’m living in St. Louis, I’m listening to radio quite a bit more than I was able to over the past few years. Therefore, I’m now getting exposed to Howard Stern on weekday mornings as I drive to class. As many of you may know, Stern’s show draws a great deal of FCC criticism (among others…) and, thus, he’s leaving “terrestrial radio” and heading to Sirius satellite radio beginning in early January. Therefore, he’s being replaced by a few different personalities depending on the listening region (Adam Carolla and David Lee Roth, among others).
Stern, in the past few weeks, has been really laying it on thick for how glad he is to be moving to satellite, and how much easier it will be to do his own thing, keeping the FCC and conservative groups off his back, etc. All this discussion has gotten me thinking about my thoughts on the subject, generally relating to free speech…which also spills over to video games and TV, I think.
In my opinion, which is generally correct, Stern shouldn’t be censored as much as he is. He’s being censored because the FCC and various groups don’t want children listening to his program. Stern’s show is (primarily…I think…) a morning show, beginning at 7:00 or 8:00 and going to 10:00. When will children listen to it? They’re supposed to be in school! And if they aren’t in school, they’re supposed to be supervised by an adult! During summer is the only time I could think when children would listen to the stuff…and even then, I’m pretty sure that kids would either a). not be awake yet or b). would (read: should) be under supervision of an adult.
Of course, the same thing goes for video games and TV. If you aren’t willing to raise your own kids and keep an eye on them, then you shouldn’t be complaining. If kids are “exposed” to such things, it’s (more often than not) the fault of the parents, not the fault of the person broadcasting/producing the game).
I listen to Stern ’cause there isn’t much else on. There are many times when I’ll switch to something else since I’m not being entertained anymore… There are times when it’s funny and there are times when it isn’t so funny… Stern is a very arrogant person and it shows almost every minute of the show. There are people who love the show and listen to it religiously, and I have no problem with that. But I believe that he has a right to say what he wants if he wants to under the First Ammendment to our Constitution, just like the rest of us. I can write anything I want here and not be regulated. I can actually type out everything that he says and not be regulated. It’s very easy to access…arguably more accessible since a website can be viewed from anywhere in the world, while Stern can only be heard on the radio in certain venues. The fact that he’s moving to satellite is bad not because I like his radio, but because the man is giving up and laying down before The Man. Granted, he put up a good fight over the years, but it’s finally coming to this. The FCC will only begin to regulate satellite radio as it becomes more prevalent. They’ll continue to regulate the internet and censor it. They’ll continue to regulate TV. They’re currently trying to regulate video games as well. This isn’t stopping anytime soon. Mark my words, by the time I’m 40, the face of broadcast television, radio, etc. will change dramatically to the proverbial “right” and our children will be so “protected” that they won’t be able to think for themselves. These kids will be mindless and void of creativity. Just like everything else, there need to be liberals and conservatives, good vs evil, Spider-Man vs Green Goblin… You can’t have one without the other. Howard Stern is a “necessary evil,” of sorts, to allow for the rest of us to think for ourselves and to put ideas out there that cause contention and debate.
Reading over this, I realize I’m not making a whole lot of sense, but I think the basic idea has been presented. I summarize with a good quote from a great movie: “Damn the Man.”
So yeah, any thoughts?
Yeah, went to Kirksville…had a great time, needless to say. I met Brett and Syd at P.F. Chang’s here in St. Louis for dinner Friday night (good stuff…highly recommend it…the first Chinese non-buffet I’ve ever had…). I drove them to Columbia and then visited with Mom and Dad for a bit, so that was good. Anyway, I left Saturday morning with Stu and Angela for Homecoming activities at Truman…got to see little cousin Hans while watching the parade. We saw the ribbon cutting and dedication for the new Magruder Hall…and it looks pretty tight… Then we went to the football game (my first one at Truman ever…figures, eh?)…and left after they were down 31-7 at the half (hehehehe…still figures…).
Anyway, Stu, Angela and I went by a few restaurants in town (where they hadn’t been before, for the most part…) and met up with Steve and Jeremy…then Stu and Angela left and Jeremy, Steve and I started to play some poker before Steve’s ABC Party shenanigans were set to begin. Got to see Amy, Paige, and their respective friends (who were all visiting the same weekend), so that was lovely…Nathan showed up later in the night…and Matt and Josh finally showed up as Jeremy and I were leaving for the party…oh well…
So yeah, this ABC Party…which stands for “anything but clothes”…was really, really crazy… I saw more homemade thongs on guys than I ever wish to see again…not that I wanted to in the first place… Regardless, Steve wore a shirt (for most of the night…) and a blow-up doll. And that was mostly it. There was another guy with a phone book covering his ass. It was pretty disgusting. But… Relatively amusing, all the same…
There are pictures of the weekend in the Photos section of the website…you may want to check them out, if anything, to witness some crazy ABC party go-ers…
Anyway, it was great to make it up to K-town again and I had a great time. It really was just like I got to go back and pick up where I left off, and that’s always a welcome feeling.
I’ll be back again on November 18th…let’s hope for a repeat…but not of the ABC part… 😉
So, I got to see “Doom” tonight…and no, it wasn’t all that terrible. Of course, I was expecting the movie to be one of the worst I’ve seen all year, so anything better than “terrible” is relatively good.
Overall, the flick was pretty slow in the beginning…some kinda jumpy moments persisted throughout, but there wasn’t as much action as I’d hope early on. Anyway, everything picked up in the second half, so that was helpful.
A few other points… The acting was mostly terrible, but that was to be expected. The special effects were pretty good, overall. There were a few real plusses to the movie: a). there were a few surprising twists and turns toward the end, and b). the “first-person shooter” camera style (as in, you watch the action through the eyes of the protagonist) only happened one time and not for the entire movie (which I was afraid of).
So yeah, in the end, it’s worth seeing, especially if you’re a video game fan. The scenes, etc. seemed to be right out of “Doom III,” which was refreshing. I don’t think I’ll be buying the DVD, but it was still a decent movie…certainly a lot better than I expected going in…
“Doom is like some kid came over and is using your computer and won’t let you play.”
— Roger Ebert; Chicago Sun-Times
“The phrase ‘worse than Super Mario Brothers‘ should not be tossed around lightly when it comes to feature film adaptations of popular video games.”
— Dan Fienberg; ZAP2IT.COM
“…aspires to be more than just a gory shoot em’ up–though it’d still be a stretch to call it a thinking man’s action movie.”
— Robert K. Elder; Chicago Tribune
“No plot, no surprises. If you’ve played the game, you’ve already had more fun.”
— Tom Hallman; Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“…basically a deadly dull rehash of Resident Evil, which in turn was a third-generation clone of Aliens.”
— Lou Lumenick; New York Post
…dude…when I get back here on Sunday…I’m so seeing “Doom“… 😉
So, sitting in class today learning about the biochemical machinery that leads to transcription via RNA Polymerase…I wondered the following: What if the world were populated by robots instead of humans? Now, these are robots with robot humanoids, robotic animals, robotic plants, etc… I mean, we know practically nothing about how or why things work in our bodies…but when we think of machines, we designed them, so we know how they work and why. So if these machines did not have knowledge of their creator, or if they simply arose on their own somehow, would they find it just as difficult to figure out how and why they work? …even though, inherently (since we designed them), they “work” on a less sophisticated level than our organic bodies? Would these robots have the same questions about their origin as we do? Would they have to learn about how they function, or would they care?
…I gotta get out of here…
I’ve got my second exam tomorrow…and I really haven’t studied all that much for it… Honestly, I could very well get burned on this one, but it’s hard to see how…and at the same time it is… We’ve been learning about basic genetics and replication/repair mechanisms for DNA…which, again, are all things I’ve seen before (some of it as early as 10th grade…). At the same time, it isn’t necessarily the easiest stuff in the world, frequently involving somewhat complicated probability calculations. So yeah, I’m unsure as to whether I’m supposed to be really worried or not. Since it’s graded on a curve, as long as I stay where I am right now (i.e. in the middle), I’m completely golden for keeping above a “B” average. Therefore, I’m spending today in full-speed cramming mode to get all this stuff back in my head…since a great deal of it was there a few years ago already…
Other than that, I’m trying to decide whether to go to Kirksville next weekend. Brooke is working, so she can’t go…but Stu/Angela are going (it’s Homecoming…geez, I’m a dork…) and I wouldn’t mind seeing the new science building in completion…let alone a few folks that I haven’t seen in awhile (i.e. since the wedding, in some cases). Besides that, I’m looking forward to two things this week:
1). “The Colbert Report” premieres on Comedy Central this Monday after “The Daily Show“… The latter is a show of complete genius, so I’m hoping the new one lives up to the standard. Stephen Colbert is a damned funny guy, so I don’t think it can suck too much…
2). Oh, it’s baseball season again…and the NLCS/ALCS are both going on strong. I never really follow baseball at all, but it’s always fun to watch games this time of year. Going for the Astros, anyone? 😉
…I guess I’m also looking forward to this test being done…but let’s take one thing at a time, shall we?
P.S. La Russa and Edmonds have both been thrown out of game 4 in the NLCS…I’m highlyamused…
So, traditionally, I hate math. Always have. I still don’t know all my multiplication tables and I’m getting a Ph.D. in a physical science… I do, however, like to hear about the crazy math stuff that can be applied. For example, I liked “A Beautiful Mind” and I regularly watch “Numb3rs” on Fridays…but I hated “Pi” (mainly because it was as boring as almost every Stanley Kubrick movie ever made…yes, I fell asleep in “The Shining”…deal with it…).
Therefore, “Proof” looked good, but I wasn’t sure how I was going to like it since it centers around mathematicians. Basically, Gweneth Paltrow plays Anthony Hopkins daughter and Jake Gyllenhaal plays Hopkins’ student… Hopkins is a brilliant mathematician and Paltrow follows in his shoes…but Hopkins has slipped into insanity. The primary question of the movie is whether Paltrow is or is not affected like her father. It is frequently mentioned that mathematicians do their best work before the age of 23 (i.e. really young), so if you’re older than that, is it worth trying anymore? If you’re affected by a mental illness like your father, do you still try to make a life for yourself? Or do you just give up?
I’m doing my best not to mention much about the plot, since it’s better not knowing much about it when you see it. Similarly to “A Beautiful Mind,” there are occasions when you think you know what’s going on, but you definitely don’t…the flashbacks work to the story’s advantage such that they switch back and forth and you don’t necessarily know if it’s really happening, or if it’s in Paltrow’s imagination…
Two things that really struck me:
1). The movie is based on a play by David Auburn. Auburn also wrote the screenplay for the movie, so his “vision” for the play largely got translated over to the movie. There were a lot of flashbacks interwoven, so I’m rather curious how the heck he would have made that work in an on-stage situation…in movies, it’s pretty easy, but on a stage? Not so much…
2). Because it is based on a play, it only has 4 main characters: Hopkins, Paltrow, Gyllenhaal, and Hope Davis (Paltrow’s sister in the movie). If I remember right, there were only one or two other speaking parts throughout, so almost all the lines were between those four characters…and they all did excellent jobs. You could tell that a lot of work went in to pushing the emotion from the characters to the audience, much as you would do in a theatrical (i.e. a play) situation.
So, overall, it’s a good movie. You don’t have to see it in theaters (since it’s not exactly on “wide-release”), but it’s well worth renting sometime when it comes out. Paltrow may get another Oscar nomination for this one…
(01:31:07) tsunathanh: Andy. I have to tell you this… a few short hours ago I shaved mikes head.
(01:31:10) tsunathanh: Jerry said
(01:31:31) tsunathanh: ,”Ha! You look like a white Mr. Clean!”
…if anyone sees Jerry…they should a). laugh at him and b). smack him upside the head…if you’re feeling particularly gracious, you should remove him from the gene pool for the rest of us…
😛
So, Dr. Zassenhaus is teaching right now in my lecture class about basic Mendelian genetics. He told us earlier this week that he was making a presentation today in reference to Intelligent Design and Evolution, so I’ve been looking forward to this all week because I haven’t heard much discussion amongst Ph.D. scientists that I know and the sources I’ve read through discussing the subject rarely consult pure molecular biologists and biochemists…and I came away from the presentation with a few interesting points…
First of all, Zassenhaus began the discussion talking about the Kreb’s Cycle. For those who don’t remember, this is a pathway in mitochondria (an organelle in our cells) that converts relatively simple carbon chains into other forms, generating ATP, which is the “currency” that creates energy in our bodies. Since it is a cycle, the products begin in one state, are converted to another state, and are then returned to their original state to start the cycle once again. One of the classic Intelligent Design arguments is that this process is not reducible; one cannot remove a part of this cycle and still have it function, leading them to suppose that an intelligent creator must have created this pathway. The process couldn’t have simply “appeared” on its own, already functioning.
The problem with this assumption, as Zassenhaus further enumerated, is in the fundamental argument for Intelligent Design: that life is too complex to have just happened. The argument, as he states, is the classic “Watchmaker Analogy,” such that if you are walking in a field and see a watch, you know that it didn’t simply appear, but that someone had to make it. The problem is that all of Intelligent Design arguments stem from that one analogy. There is no evidence besides it. The one scientific study he could find that tried finding true evidence was carried out by a mathmetician (Dembski) who said that the chances of such a thing appearing is something like 10^-170 (that’s one time in 1,000,000[continue to 169 “0”s…]), which is unbelievably small…bordering on impossible…
As Zassenhaus concluded, these probabilities outline a huge flaw in the thinking: where Intelligent Design advocates believe such a pathway just sprung into existence, and was created by someone else, biologists for years have viewed the formation of proteins/enzymes/etc. differently, as individual subunits that are added on and removed to provide a different function that wasn’t there originally. Therefore, those statistics don’t apply to the way we know biology to work. Sure, it says that such a thing as the Kreb’s Cycle appearing out of a soup of random amino acids is really small…but the chances of a different protein forming out of that soup is very possible, and then that protein adding on other parts of different proteins is also possible…slowly adding together to form the pathway we know as the Kreb’s Cycle.
In short (’cause I wasn’t, overall…), the moral is: Intelligent Design advocates have yet to produce true, testable, scientific evidence beyond the flawed probability studies. Is Intelligent Design still possible? Of course it is! But, as Zassenhaus said, teaching it alongside Evolution on equal footing as a viable scientific theory is, quite simply, nuts. In that room of 20+ Ph.Ds., there were none that defended Intelligent Design in the way it has been portrayed as a science. They all believe it should be relegated to a philosophy class, not the science classroom. Unfortunately, the “powers that be” refuse to listen to the scientific community on what should be taught and what shouldn’t be.
Figures…
So, in that vein, can anyone give me evidence to the contrary that isn’t based on “evidence by analogy?” I know that Andy S. already gave me information on another theory…hehehehe…
