Diana's Anti-Blog's new location.

04.12.01
Today, I got my second varsity letter for cross country. That meant that instead of just a very nice certificate signed by Morty, Pete, the athletic director, and the amazing Jenn Campbell and Katie Marsh, I also got an honest-to-goodness "letter," as in a fuzzy Williams "W". Cool!

It is unclear to me why this happened. I am about 30 seconds slower this year than last year (and last year I was already about a minute slower than in high school). I was also about twice as far down on the team as last year, due to (a) my slowness (b) returning runners' improvement and (c) super-fast new runners. Thus, the only conclusion I can come to is that if you get a varsity letter one year, you kind of automatically get one the next year, barring significant injury or the like...? I think I will ask someone about this.

Just a bit about the amazing Jenn Campbell: Four-time All-American in cross country (first Eph harrier to do so), *and* Phi Beta Kappa. Hey, that's cool. Actually, a current 10-time All-American what with winter and spring track seasons, soon to be 12-time, I am sure. When someone says "nobody who gets good grades is a serious athlete" or "serious students don't can't sleep very much," I bring out my trusty reply: Jenn Campbell. (Ha! Jenn Campbell can! See?) And she keeps her room neat. And she's super nice. So Katie gave her a shirt that said "I AM JENN CAMPBELL" because otherwise she'd never say anything about her awesomeness, and no one would ever know. Wow. Honestly.

04.11.21
I am seriously considering switching to an actual Moveable Type blog. We shall see what happens with that.

I have now signed up for the Vermont City Marathon again. The fee was a bit puzzling, though. Last year it was $80, so I figured that this year it would be $80 as well. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it was "only" $65. But then when I was reading the information page, it claimed that registration is $60. The only plausible explanation I can think of is that it costs $5 extra to register online, but come on! It's easier for them to not have to open envelopes and type stuff in; why would there be a surcharge? Hmmm...

04.11.20
An interesting science piece [requires free login] first reported in Nature soon became headline news:

Endurance running, unique to humans among primates and uncommon in all mammals other than dogs, horses and hyenas, apparently evolved at least two million years ago and probably enabled human ancestors to hunt and scavenge for food over large distances. And that, in turn, probably proved decisive in their pursuit of high-protein food for development of larger brains.

Dr. Bramble, a professor of biology and a specialist in the biomechanics of animal locomotion, said, "Running made us human, at least in an anatomical sense," adding that he and Dr. Lieberman were "very confident that strong selection for running was instrumental in the origin of the modern human body form."

Although tissues do not fossilize, traces of muscle and tendon attachment points on bones of early species revealed an extensive network of springy tendons along the back of their legs and feet, including a well-developed Achilles' tendon that anchors the calf muscles to the heel bone. Tendons served to store and release elastic energy during running, but were not needed for ordinary walking.

But running came to early Homo at a cost: the loss of physical traits useful for climbing trees for refuge and food. By this time, other scientists have noted, climate change had diminished the woodlands of East Africa, leaving more open grasslands to run long distances over.

The fact is humans in training can out-distance just about anything. Trained soldiers can keep up a pace, in forced marches, that will kill horses.

And if you're a dork, you may have noticed that I have now archived parts of this blog. You can get to the other parts using the links above.

And the Williams Women's cross country team is national Division III champions!

NCAA DIII Championships Women
1.  Williams College
    3  Jenn Campbell, Sr           21:25.3  
    4  Caroline Cretti, Jr         21:26.5  
   23  Katie Marsh, Sr             22:40.7  
   24  Liz Gleason, Fr             22:43.4  
   56  Kali Moody, Sr              23:10.3  
   74  Maya Kessler, Sr            23:28.3  
  121  Emily Welsh, Sr             24:13.9

1. Phillips Exeter Academy       
   1    2    6   14   15  (19) (23) =    38
   Lauren Brady, Laura Tabor, Ashley Farnsworth, Emily Hiza [C], Amy Schuman, 
   Yuna Sakuma, Allison Pennock [C]

1. Five in the top 15 for three years straight;
2. Laura and Allison join Flora and me as the only people ever to be on three champion teams;
3. Emma becomes the first person ever to be on four championship teams;
4. FIVE IN A ROW! Who would've thought that was possible, eh? The tradition of excellence continues.

2. WILLIAMS COLLEGE
   1    3   15   17   28  (43) (47) =    64
   CAROLINE CRETTI, JENN CAMPBELL, LIZ GLEASON, KATIE MARSH, MAYA KESSLER,
         KALI MOODY, EMILY WELSH

My legs were beginning to really hurt. Up and down the rolling hills I said to myself, this is Nationals, it's supposed to hurt. I kept moving fast... I heard that, on average at Nationals, a runner is passed by two people for every one second he slows down. There is no margin of error. Marcus pulled away from me. With 200 meters to go I swung my arms like mad because my legs had reached full speed and full speed was slow. The pain was gone, there is no pain in the last 200 but I had found the physical limit of my body. The legs are levers and the muscle rubber and they were going nowhere. My head was rolling around my shoulders at this point and I was told later that I was veering, unable to keep a straight line. The agony was watching two other runners pass me by, but I found that white line and crossed it before anyone else got me. I spent two days in shock and astonishment before the joy hit me.

I have now posted the fall's prof quotes in order to submit them to the Mad Cow. You can read them. They're funny. Some of them are really funny. Excerpts:

E.J. Johnson:
This room is not a store in which to buy lettuce.
Architects and curators are natural enemies, like the mongoose and the cobra.
Your feet will turn purple, your teeth will chatter, and you might die, so please dress accordingly.

De Veaux:
Statisticians like to talk about the magic land of asymptopia where everything finally achieves its limit.
Most drawers I've seen have a finite number of socks.

Morgan:
If someone is fat but very very tall, is that person fat? No.
The World Series is not actually a series -- it's a sequence.

Results from this year's NYC marathon: Paula Radcliffe won the women's race, and Scott was 1340th!

                      Place  Gender Place   Age Place   Time:  Clock     Chip      10K     1/2 Mar   20M       Pace/Mile
Scott Davis (39) NH   1340   1212           536                3:17:40   3:17:25   43:26   1:32:38   2:25:34   7:32

04.11.07
For everything that you do, some time that you do it will be the last time.

Some time that you run, it will be the last time that you ever run.
Some time that you talk to your friend, it will be the last time you ever talk to that friend.
Some time that you receive a hug, it will be the last hug you will ever receive.

When it happens, you probably won't know. But you'll never be able to do it, ever again.

Does this thought affect you as much as it affects me? It affects me quite a lot. Think about it.

04.11.05
Yesterday I determined that I have taken 12 courses at Williams (including the current semester, excluding WSP) and out of my 15 professors (CSCI 134 was team-taught and ARTH has both lecture and conference professors) I have had 10 tenured professors: Garrity, Tifft, Silva, Savitsky, Murtagh, Morgan, Kirby, De Veaux, E.J. Johnson, Filipczak; and only five untenured professors: Clarke, Kotchen, Grudin, Low, Freund. Thus, 2/3 (67%) of my professors have been tenured. That's pretty good for my first three terms in college, considering I took my share of introductory level courses. (By comparison, the Master of Coin has had only 4 tenured professors out of 11 professors total -- 4/11, or 40.4%. It was 11 because said Master had the same professor twice.)

Now I am going to do some more counting, from sites recommended by Brian "future astronaut" Malley. (Just thought I'd give a little shout-out there to one of the people who actually visits this page. Because people who actually do are VERY VERY cool!")

Ranking by state on various measures:

Average IQ:
2. Massachusetts (111)
6. New Hampshire (105)
12. Vermont (102)
16. Maine (100)
26. Florida (98)
50. Mississippi (85)

Average SAT scores:
New Hampshire (1050)
Vermont (1038)
Massachusetts (1026)
Maine (1026)
Florida (974)
Washington DC (862)

% college degrees:
3. Massachusetts (32.7)
8. New Hampshire (30.1)
10. Vermont (28.8)
37. Florida (22.8)
51. West Virginia (15.3)

Average Income:
4. Massachusetts (39,408)
7. New Hampshire (34,703)
23. Vermont (30,534)
25. Florida (29,972)
31. Maine (29,935)
50. Arkansas (24,296)

The purpose of most of these pages was, incidentally, to prove that smarter states voted for Gore and Kerry, and all the really stupid states voted for Bush.

Humor from the Math/Stat department:

What is ergodic theory?
Suppose a chicken is walking randomly in the Bronfman library. If the behavior of the chicken is really random one would expect it to spend half of the time in half of the library. Also, if the chicken has dirty feet one would expect to see the floor uniformly messed up.
(Silva, from an e-mail to all Real Analysis students)

Licorice, one of the De Veaux family cats, and a weapon of mouse destruction, is missing after dinner.
(De Veaux, from a question on the practice exam)

Actually what you should really visit is the photos page: http://wso.williams.edu/orgs/xc/photos.htm because that is where most of the work goes. And if anyone can tell me why whoever started the xc page decided that .htm was better than .html, let me know. Because I really want to know.

Emily is cool. Just thought I'd point that out.

We had our NESCAC meet, which is the last meet for anyone who is slow, which means me, on Saturday at Colby. (This is when I learned anew that Emily Is Cool.) The dumbest thing happened in the varsity women's race, which is that there was a tie for first place between Williams and Middlebury, who each had 59 points. The officials were making this big deal about how it was a tie, and how it was the first tie in the 20-year history of this meet. But in cross country when you have a tie, you don't actually ever have a tie: you either look at (a) whose sixth runner was ahead, or (b) which team's top five runners have the best average (or total) time, and whoever has the fastest sixth runner or average time wins.

Williams had the best in both of these. But it turns out that the NESCAC has this rule that they can "choose" whether to have a tie or to use a tie-breaker, so they decided to let there be a tie. Even so, there was a plaque that said "Champions" and a plaque that said "Runner-up" and they had to be distributed between Williams and Middlebury, and you'd think that at least the team who would've won both tiebreakers would get the "Champion" trophy, right? But our captians are so darn nice that they let Middlebury have it... weird... but nice, I guess, kind of, but also really stupid... really, really stupid.

04.10.25
I have now, after months of pleading and cajoling, received my very own Gmail account, a lifetime e-mail account run by Google with 1000MB (1GB) of storage, so that you don't ever have to delete e-mail and you can just use the Google search technology to find the message you want, etc etc. I'm sure you've heard it all before. At this point it is unlikely that I can use this account to its full potential since I am using my Williams account exclusively. (I recently re-opened my yahoo account so that if williams.edu e-mail gets blocked again... okay, we won't discuss that right now.) Yay! I have a Gmail address! I am so cool now! If I run out of space on my hard drive, I can use Google's hard drives instead! Wow, that is so amazing! (Just thought I'd throw in a little exuberance on the side.) So keep this in mind for a few months down the road when you decide you can't live without a Gmail account and you are trying to remember which ones of your friends have them so that you can bug them to give you their invitations... So I am dianajdavis (at) Gmail (dot) com!!! Get in early before your name is taken -- with a name like Davis, it'd better be good and soon...

04.10.23
The Williams Record recently published an article about the newly-created Williams College Cricket Club. Excerpts:

Members of the community may have noticed a group of students playing an unfamiliar sport on the sidewalks of the Science Quad and Sawyer Lawn. No, it’s not a stickball revival, or a bunch of confused baseball players. It’s just the Williams College Cricket Club (WCCC) having some fun on the wicket.

With cricket being less than well represented in the United States, those students for whom cricket was a huge part of their family and cultural lives before arriving at Williams felt a large void. Many international students, particularly those from the Indian subcontinent and other commonwealth nations, grew up with cricket coursing through their veins.

Those interested in playing cricket for WCCC should not feel that years of experience are a prerequisite for play. On the contrary, many of the members have either never played cricket before or not since childhood. “We are very receptive to all levels,” Ravda said before adding, “more gals would be welcome.” Burra agreed, saying, “the cricket club is open to all – regardless of experience. We really want to encourage rookies to come out and play.”

The WCCC is also the only place you can go and see lots of Indian (along with some just generally South Asian and some others) men all together in one place. They say things like bowler and wicket and "this innings" and sometimes they shout in cool languages (though for the most part it is entirely English). And occasionally they wear neat clothes, too. But they always use a funny-looking rectanglar bat and tennis balls covered with red tape and they do this very complicated and strenuous thing to pitch (which is known as bowl) the ball. So it is very interesting. I spent multiple hours playing and watching cricket over reading period. It was lots of fun.

04.10.22
I received an e-mail today from someone claiming to have "the original anti-blog." He writes:

I've been running an "anti-blog" since November of 2000. Unfortunately, my ranking has slipped a little since I haven't updated all that consistently (especially recently), but I'm still on the first page of results, which is fine.... It would be satisfying to me to link to a random other person's antiblog -- and, of course, it would instantly add to your credibility if you linked to the original anti-blog.

Actually, though, I planned this site out quite carefully. Here are my axioms:

1. The page takes no time to load. This means it must be all text, with no images that load line by line, pixel by pixel, when you didn't care anyway.

2. Readability. Comic Sans MS is my all-time favorite font, and I believe that it is very easy to read, so I use it for everything past line 4. The date is in a consistent location, and in bold so it stands out from the rest of the text. My four lines of heading are only four lines, so you don't have to scroll down forever to get to the beginning of the text that you're actually interested in. In all printed text I prefer the polished look of justified margins, but on the Internet where you often resize the page, that's really annoying -- plus using a non-default margin setting means that you can't use the < p > tag; you have to use < br >< br > which is very unhandy, and leads to my third point:

3. No excessive formatting and precise organization. If you right-click and select "View Source," you will find that everything is very logically organized. Every paragraph has exactly one line; there is a line of space between posts. (The text image below is the single exception... hmmm.) And I use very few tags: b (bold), p (paragraph break), a (hyperlink), b (line break), blockquote (to offset quotations), and occasionally u (underline). I have no tr, td, & nbsp;, table, cellpadding, or anything else of this sort -- not even hr (horizontal line), which is quite dear to my heart.

4. Correct English and good ideas. Otherwise, I won't write anything worth reading.

04.10.21
The following snippet is from the profile of a loyal fan at MIT:

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SUC: SUCK  :SUCKKSU  .SUCKSUC
S.    SUCK. :SUCKK  :SUC    K
SU,    SUCK  SUCK: ,SUC   :KK
SUCK  S.. S,  UU. .UCK:  .SUK
SUCK  SUC.:    .:  SUCK   SUC
SUCK  ,SUCK;     SUCKK   SUCK
SUCK  ;SUCKKK    :SUCK.  SUCK
SUCK  SUCKSUC   SU .CK,  SUCK
SUC   SUCKKKK   SUCK...  .SUC
SU:  ,SUCKKKK   SUCKK:    SUC
S.   SUCKSUCK   SUCCCKK    ,S
U   ,UCSUCKK;   SUCKSUC,    K

04.10.20
Exciting announcement of the day: I have updated my Web page (here) for the first time in almost a month!!! And there was much rejoicing. New things as of less than an hour ago:

Pictures of the crew boat model I made over the summer. If you suffered through my paragraphs of extensive detail, you might as well see how it looks in real life. As I note at the bottom of the page, this is not the latest view -- there are other cool aspects I added after taking the photos -- but these pictures give you a pretty good idea. Yeah. It's a big object.

Pictures of my grandma's chrysanthemums in front of her house. Her neighbor forced her to go stand beside them since she thought they were so very beautiful. Honestly, such lovely chrysanthemums in (a) Nebraska, (b) October, (c) the garden of an 89-year-old woman who (d) is related to me. Wow.

Retired people taking college classes and getting a lot out of them ask why education is wasted on the young. I was actually wondering, why is travel wasted on the young? And I know the answer very well: because it's cheaper. And it gives you a great taste of the world -- albeit not a global perspective, but the next best thing -- for the rest of your formative years. Just thought I'd clear that up.

04.10.19
WHY IS EDUCATION WASTED ON THE YOUNG???

As I take this Art History course, I am repeatedly saddened to think that I actually saw these great works of art at one time in my life, and I did not know enough to adequately appreciate them!

For instance, I have been to the Musée d'Orsay in Paris three times, at ages seven, eight, and 15. The first two times I was with a group of kids sketching a sculpture while the adults were off viewing the great works of art. It was a little better at age 15 because April Xin and I went there together and actually tried to look at the works of art (rather than glancing at the label, snapping a photo, and moving on, as many tourists are wont to do) but I simply did not have enough background in art history to know what to look for or what I was looking at. For instance, I now know that Rodin's "Age of Bronze" and "Walking Man" and "Gates of Hell" are all there, along with, if I am not mistaken as to the work on the wall behind the Walking Man, the painting of Bathsheba by Rembrandt. Rodin and Rembrandt in the same room, and I didn't even know enough to notice!!!

I do recall seeing Donatello's Bronze David when we went to Florence. This is a good thing. However, I am sure that we would have seen the building called Or San Michele with so many important sculptures in the niches, and I do not remember this. Naturally, I remember Michaelangelo's David, but this is mostly because I (and my parents too) read The Agony and the Ecstacy by Irving Stone, which is essentially a biography (more like historical realistic fiction) of Michaelangelo. So I felt like I knew all about how his whole life had gone, learning to carve in the Medici sculpture garden, the whole thing with Lorenzo the Magnificent -- and this overwhelmingly improved my experience of Michaelangelo's works. I actually remember seeing all of the half-finished slaves in the hallway by the David, and the tombs of Lorenzo and Giuliano with Dusk and Night and Day, respectively. This is good. But I wish I had taken this course before seeing all these things that I now know much much more about!

I guess I'll just have to go back to Europe someday, but paying my own way this time...

[Note: Hyperlinks removed from this entry because I am getting astronomical numbers of Google image referrals, for no apparent reason.]

04.10.17
Here are revised facebook links for the below: obviously and facebook me. Those should work even without a login, I hope. Let me know if it's otherwise.

I had quite a nice race yesterday. It was a 4k at home, and we were instructed to go out fast, so I went out fast, kept going fast, and passed people throughout the whole race (except when going uphill). I was also able to sprint at the end and out-kick some people. Comparison with last year's results indicates that I was 27 seconds slower this year than last year. Darn. Must work on that. Note to self.

As an aside, somehow my preferences changed for my computer such that the screen resolution and everything normal is the same size, but the scrollbars and top-right-corner buttons and Quick Launch icons and Taskbar icons are all about 1.5 times as big as they used to be. Try as I might, I cannot find an option (Display, Accessibility... what else?) to fix this. It is quite annoying. I wish I could fix it back.

People used to ask me where all my friends went to college, since they obviously weren't going to Williams. "Well, there are a couple at Harvard, and some at MIT, and then there's Northwestern and BYU and Cornell and Brown and..." and it was hard for me to answer because honestly, they scattered all over the place. But now my aforementioned handy college tool tells me exactly how many friends I have in each location, so I can answer: Harvard (8); Columbia, Cornell, MIT, and Stanford (7); UChicago (5); Brown, Princeton, and Yale (4); and three or fewer at a lot of schools... plus now I have lots of friends at Williams (32) anyway. Yes, this can be an addictive sport. I just think of it as pumping up a fellow Exonian's ego.

04.10.14
Today I am going to discuss two chalkings in particular.

1. "Did you choose who to love?"
(Outside of Bryant Living Room, quad side, Greylock Quad)

This one grabs me because I it forces me to realize that no, I didn't purposefully decide, "wow, X is such a great person, I think I'll start loving X." Such things happen naturally. It's actually a biological adaptation, but I won't go into that. So no, I did not actively decide who I would love, and it's neat to realize that.

On the other hand, though, who I am dictates who I will love. Over the course of my life my experiences and interactions, and my subsequent thoughts about them, have made me into the person I am. If I love someone, it will be because of the person I am, and I actually have some power over that. So although I did not actively decide to love whoever I love, I did play a (significant) role in forming myself as a person, and it is my formation as a person that makes me love someone. So it's not exactly out of my hands.

My biggest gripe with this, though, is that it sounds like whining. "Did you choose who to love? No? Well, neither did I! It's not my fault that I love women! It's just the way I am! I can't help it!" And this is the worst part. On the one hand this is a good statement that reminds us that all people are created differently and love different people and different kinds of people, and we should not discriminate them for being different from the way we are. On the other hand it is the familiar refrain: "But I couldn't help it!" Ouch. Not exactly something that helps with gay acceptance.

2. "Love me for who I am."
(Concrete sidewalk from Bronfman to Perry, near Bronfman)

First of all, this contradicts the previous chalking. If people don't actively go out and decide who to love, why are you asking them to love you? The only way to induce someone to love you is to be a lovable person, according to the who the other person is. In this sense, the only way we ever love anyone is for who they are -- or at least, who we think they are or imagine them to be.

Secondly, this chalking seems to be saying, "Love me for my mind, not for my sexual preference." But isn't your sexual preference part of who you are? If you love a person, then you really know that person. One of the most important parts of knowing a person is knowing what they want in life, and who they love. You can tell an awful lot about a person if you know what they want in life and who they love. If one of the things they want is a (homosexual) relationship with some(same-sex)one they love, then isn't that an important thing to know about them? So if you "love me for who I am," then you are loving me for what I want in life and who I love, and how can you keep sexuality out of that? I don't think you can.

Postulate that "love me for my mind, not for my sexuality" does not mean "love me for what I want in life and who I love." Suppose it means "love me for how insightfully I analyze poetry and how articulate I am about current events." Poems are full of sexual references, so your sexuality will play a role in your understanding of them. And gay rights are all over the news, so for anyone who's gay or religious or pretty much has a stand on any issue, their sexuality is going to play a significant role in their opinion on that. Instead of poetry and news, choose whatever else you think would make someone "love you for your mind." It's going to come into that, somewhere. (Plus, our premise for this was wrong anyway; "love me for my mind" is intrinsically tied up in "love me for what I want in life and who I love.")

I guess that's all I have to say about the chalkings for today.
[Note: I know that a lot of my uses of "who" should actually be "whom," but I think that would bog down the reader.]

04.10.13
Notes on Coming Out Week: I kind of look forward to this week (does it happen in the fall and the spring? I think so. So, "these weeks") because of the very clever chalkings that spring up everywhere. Some of them are just making statements, like "Gay <----> Straight: Where are you?" and "Don't legislate your religion;" some are probably just wrong, as in "10% » 200 Williams students;" but some are, as I indicated, quite clever. The first time I heard this one, I was quite impressed: "It was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve." Granted, that was a pro-heterosexual argument, but Coming Out Week uses it as: "Adam and Eve, or Adam and Steve?" which is the same idea but with slightly less punch, I find. And then there is "Jane's not the only one who likes Dick anymore," which is truly clever, but a little risqué for my taste.

Yeah, I don't believe that 10% thing anymore. I used to. Last year's chalking said something about "I've heard as high as 20%," or one in five, and I think that's really quite high. Though I have never been in the GSA/QSU, I have had a lot of friends who were, and they were all straight. They had heterosexual relationships with a girlfriend/boyfriend. So I really don't think that 10% of the population of the world is gay. If that's true, there have been astounding numbers of unfulfilled people over the previous eons, before the invention of homosexuality. How likely is that? But of course there are a lot of gay people, and I fully support gay marraige, civil unions, equal benefits, etc., and I oppose the Protection of Marraige Amendment. Duh.

With the advent of thefacebook, it is now easier than ever to find out if a friend of yours is looking for a special friend, because there is a whole section on whether you are single or in a relationship, what kind of a relationship you're looking for ("random play" is one of the options... hmmm...) and whether they're looking for a man or a woman. I actually just found out that someone I knew was gay and I didn't know that, and in another case I knew my friend was gay and then he was linked to the guy he is going out with, which is cool. I am not gay, obviously.

In related news, someone I have never heard of has written quite a good blog entry on this and other similar subjects. An excerpt, with which I agree:

Now, as for marriage being primarily about procreation, here are my thoughts. People who know me well are aware that I do not want to have children. "Oh, you'll change you're mind," my numerous relatives, neighbors, parents' friends, and my own friends have been quick to reply. Maybe. Maybe when I'm in a lifelong relationship with someone I love unconditionally, I'll feel differently and want to create another human being with that person. Maybe when I turn 35 I'll hear my biological clock ticking and decide it's time to get a move on. But maybe I won't. In the meantime, it's frustrating to have my carefully-thought-out life plans swept aside by a well-meaning but patronizing assumption that EVERYONE wants to have kids, even if they don't know it yet. I realize that having children is universally thought of as the most meaningful life decision a person can make, and I wholeheartedly respect that. Furthermore, I'm really glad my parents decided that they wanted to have a child. But I don't think it's fair to assume that a life cannot be complete without children, or that everyone should want to have them, or that marriage, which is about love between two adults, cannot exist without plans to create new life.

Oh yeah, and if you want, you can facebook me too.

04.10.12
My absentee ballot had this little logo on it that said "Official election mail authorized by the U.S. Postal Service" (or something very similar). So I was wondering why on earth it would be there. I mean, it's an envelope. Granted, it does have "TO THE TOWN CLERK OF ________" as the first line for the address, and it's a little undersized so that they could send it to me in a regular envelope. But otherwise, it was definitely a normal envelope, so I wondered why it was explicitly "authorized by the U.S. Postal Service." I thought maybe it meant that it's free to mail it, because after all, 37¢ could be a prohibitive cost for some voters... after rationalizing this all out to myself, I took my envelope down to the post office and asked them, and do you know what? It required the stamp. Bah. So I asked the post man at the desk why on earth it had that "authorized" thing on it, and he said maybe it had to be notarized by the Postmaster. Well, I was not about to get another set of notarizing on my ballot -- I already made this nice lady write her signature and the date her certification expired in about four places on my application for the ballot -- so I just sent off my ballot, and I hope they'll count it.

04.10.11
And so I am back into the groove of forgetting national holidays again. I knew that the campus had somewhat curtailed operations since it's reading period, but I figured that the rest of the world was moving along as usual -- wrong! It's Columbus Day. Who knew? That is perhaps the dumbest holiday, because he didn't even find this country. Leave Columbus Day for the Costa Ricans, who love him so much that they named their currency after him (colones). It seems, then, that I shall have to wait until tomorrow to post my absentee ballot and Holden's (11th?) birthday present.

04.10.10
I would like to express my sincere appreciation to whoever invented the mnemonic device Big Hairy Crew Girls. That is honestly the only way that I ever remember the buildings in the Greylock quad, and it is the only hope I ever have of knowing which is which (Bryant, Hopkins, Carter, Gladden, in that order). I think it is a wonderful thing, albeit a bit condescending to the athletes in question...

04.10.09
Today I filled out my absentee ballot. I voted for President, Governor, United States Senate and Representative, State Representative, Treasurer and a bunch of other things with only one candidate, and a state constitutional amendment question. That's pretty cool. I hope my candidates win.

This weekend, it is Nicholas's 21^st birthday. So I wrote him a little song:

Happy birthday to you,
Now your wish has come true:
You're legal to buy alcohol...
But please don't, 'cause that's fou.

And Ephblog sure does keep track of individual people's goings-on...

04.10.08
Tuesday's E-mail Of the Day:

Hi Diana,

Very cool web pages...you seem super creative...would you be interested in working on a foot site? Do you really like feet? Foot fetishism is the most popular fetish in the world and we're looking for people who like feet and are interested in earning some money! Are you interested in amateur girl/girl foot fetish work? We're looking for women who are actually ATTRACTED TO other women's soles...I totally understand if it's not your cup of tea, but if it is we'd love to work with you.

I hope you're interested in working together. If so, please e-mail us today and we can begin to set something up. If not, I sincerely wish you happiness and the best of luck in your career! Thanks again for your time...I hope you're interested in female feet! If not, we're sorry we bothered you! Talk to ya later!

Best,
The FootsieFun Gang
E-mail: footsie@spamcop.net

ORIGINAL (http://www.ddavis.8m.net/diana/room_east.html#Anchor-FEET):
Feet. I like feet. Don't you? I think this is a car ad, but I'm not sure of the connection.

In other news, I have finally consolidated two of my site meters. I set them up with one for my main page and one for all of my other pages, but I decided to put them together, under the site meter for all of the other pages (which together get about five times as many hits as my main page). Not that anyone cares. In case you did, my most-visited pages are my Running Quotes page, my Ode to Harvard, and my Running Quotations page. Every so often my distance calculator and my running calculators get little spikes, too.

04.10.04
Exeter has this new Spam filter called the Barracuda Spam Filter. It kept rejecting my e-mail and then not even copying it in the rejection notice, so I had to type the whole thing out again. Eventually I just called, and so they whitelisted my address. It turns out that what was making the spam filter block my e-mail was my signature: I have a link to http://ddavis.8m.net in my signature, and 8m.net is a known spammer, so the filter rejects anything with a link to 8m.net. Argh.

My parents' 20^th wedding anniversary is on Wednesday. I'm shocked. I'm quite surprised. But in any case, yay, them!

Howard Dean came to Williams the other week. I was the third person in Chapin Hall. It filled up 45 minutes before his talk even started, and they had to turn people away. I think it's pretty cool that I shook the hand of the guy I voted for for president in the primary. Too bad he didn't win. I guess I'll just hold out for Kerry now.

What is the equation for the sawtooth function? This is the subject of my minute talk at the math review dinner tomorrow.

04.10.01
Happy birthday. You know who you are. And now you're old.

Kerry is actually intelligent, and Bush is still the same silly little monkey. I hope everyone watched that. It was extremely amusing. And as Brian points out, "Kerry went to St. Paul's, Bush went to Andover, and both chose graduates of Phillips Exeter to help them prepare for the debate." What does that tell you, indeed. And if you haven't already, watch the This Land movie on JibJab. It is a really funny parody of the two presidential candidates.

04.09.30
As I am taking two stats courses this semester (STAT 201 and PSYC 201), I have become much more attuned to the riduculous use of statistics in studies that are published by the general media. Consider today's example of inane extrapolation:

Women could be faster 100-metre sprinters than men by the 2156 Olympics, according to a study. ... If projections by scientists at Oxford University are correct, women will close the gender gap by clocking 8.079 seconds in the 100 metres, ahead of the best male time of 8.098 seconds. The current world record stands at 9.78 seconds. [...]

By extending current trends to the 2008 Olympics, they estimate women could win the 100 metres in 10.57 and the men in 9.73. Their calculations, which are published in the science journal Nature, show clear linear trends up to 2252.

It's especially crazy when you realize that indeed women do get closer to men in one racing distance, and that is the ULTRAMARATHON. If you compare the percentage difference between men's and women's records, it is greatest for the sprints, less for mid-distance (mile, 5K), even less for long-distance (marathon), and they get pretty darn close if you look at 50- and 100-mile races. That's where women might surpass men eventually -- but certainly not at the other end of the spectrum! And Oxford, no less! I thought the researches at Oxford, at least, would have higher standards than this...

04.09.27
First of all, check out Students Against Bush 2004, set up by Steven Hunter, my friend at Williams. He is from Maine, and he has set up a very good site there, highly worth checking out, and a highly worthy cause. I sent in my request for an absentee ballot today; if you have not registered to vote or to get an absentee ballot, please do! More Trees, Less Bush.

So this guy had a friend who died in Vietnam, and while he was researching about his friend, he kept finding stuff about my uncle, because they died within a short time of each other and in similar circumstances. He ended up searching for the family of this John Bischoff fellow, and when he searched for Bischoff and Tecumseh, he found the page I set up for my mother, and eventually made contact with her and asked for pictures, etc. Now, he has put up this site of little audiovisual tributes to the guys who flew F-105 airplanes. (Or at least that is how I understand the flow of events.)

So on this page if you click on JOHN WILLIAM BISCHOFF, which appears in green on the left, you will see a tribute to my uncle, who is my mother's brother. When I saw his, I thought they were probably all cookie-cutter flash things where he just changed the picture and the name/death information, but actually all the introductory text is unique to his tribute, and the other pilots have different ones. A nice touch.

There is also a site called the Virtual Wall with snippets of information about each person whose name is on the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, DC, and you can see John's here. They have this feature called a digital name rubbing, which I think is incredibly tacky and not even well done, because it doesn't look authentic. Ugh. To its favor, though, it includes the diamond, which means killed (to differentiate from MIA or whatever other classifications you can have.) And the blue links that go to searches seem to be identical to those of thefacebook.com, which is a little odd. But it's nice that they put these things up, I think.

Hence my second post about death.

As a diversion, you can see the Principal Tingley Screensaver, a product of our free time in the techie room at the Exeter Math Conference. Please share the link with your friends, but my superior requests that it not become a major campus thing because that wouldn't be so nice to Mr. Tingley, now would it? Some kid in an intro CompSci class at Exeter created the flash thing, and one of my co-techies turned it into a screensaver (both people will remain anonymous.) Select Run (as opposed to Save), and then select Run (despite the unknown publisher) again, and wait for the black screen to run its course. Just don't move your mouse / touch your touchpad while viewing it, because as it is a screensaver, that will make it stop playing.

04.09.25
Today, I actually had a good race. I started off fast and picked people off the whole way, which is how I like to do it. Unfortunately the results are only for the top 25, which I was not, either last year or this year, so I don't know if my time improved. I highly doubt it. But I felt a hundred times better today than last week, so that's wonderful.

Who knew that the ECAC (Eastern Collegiate Athletic Conference) had an Award of Valor? Well, Rebecca has won it this year:

While fighting the cancer, she also battled to become a top student-athlete. A mathematics major, she sustained a 3.8 cumulative grade point average. She worked a part-time job, tutored elementary and preschool aged children all the while undergoing daily radiation treatments and practices.

Also, this article is very funny, because it purports to reveal a causal association between low birth weight and eventual suicide, which is ludicrous. It's pretty funny when people try to show ludicrous things with statistics. In other news, my class is currently collecting data on a psych study that includes a piece of my lovely writing involving UN inspectors searching warehouses for WMD in Iraq, an Iraqi officer who slams the door in their face shouting things about hating Americans, and the UN inspectors running out of time to search because the American invasion was beginning. It's like my own little version of tongue-in-cheek humor. We had to cut out the latter two bits, though. And Professor Kirby thought of the third. I think I like this class.

04.09.20
As of Sunday, September 19, I have run 555.5 miles since Tuesday, May 25. Isn't that a rather nice number, 555.5? Of course it is not so precisely accurate; I keep track of my daily mileage to the nearest half-mile; but it is a nice-looking number nonetheless.

So far, I have made $3 finding errors in my Real Analysis text. We have a reading-packet-type bound prototype of Professor Morgan's future book, so every time we find an error, he wants to know about it, and so he gives out a dollar for each error found that he hadn't yet marked in his version. So far I found a missing parantheses, a bunch of un-factored-out c's in a convergence theorem, and an un-bolded R intended to represent the set of real numbers (plus two errors that had already been pointed out.) I am learning lots of things about how to prove, and what to look for in bunches of numbers to figure out whether something is true (and thus finding the basis for the proof thereof) or false (and finding a counterexample). I am a loyal attendant to TA sessions for the first time in any class. Interesting. Professor Morgan says it will keep getting harder. Hmmm...

Here is how my day went:

(1) Stats class. Pretty neat. Professor De Veaux wondered aloud why the quadrants are labeled in a counter-clockwise fashion, and I explained it to him. (All math goes counter-clockwise -- cf. the trigonometric functions or the Sentry Theorem.) Also a remarkably apt comparison between writing down a derivation that the professor is doing on the board and swimming: mostly your head is down, but every so often you come up for air. Ha.

(2) I got a seat in the front of Real Analysis class! I run (literally) from Stats to Real Analysis, and always end up with one of the (many) left-handed desks in the back of the room. But today there was a left-handed desk in the front row, which everyone had avoided, so I could sit in the front! It was amazing. And Professor Morgan finally explained what a ball is, an explanation that had been severely lacking from the last class. Now if we could just get a good explanation of "accumulation point," or better yet, "the set of all accumulation points," I'd be all set.

(3) Between Real Analysis and Art History, I sprinted (not just ran) to Goodrich to try to get Grab 'n' Go between classes. At 11:57 I decided that there was no way I would get to the front of the 40-person line, grab my sandwich and water, and get to Brooks-Rogers by 12:00. So I went to Art History with no lunch. That was fine; I was dehydrated, so I was not hungry. But then we had a very not-so-good guest lecturer, who showed us all of these random Greek (and Roman and Egyptian) statues, throwing in the mythological stories that went with them. I am pretty sure it would look fine on paper, but it was very hard to follow. THEN, she kept us until 12:58. "Don't pack up yet; I have a 1:10 class, too," she reassured us. 1:10, sure, but what about those of us who want to go to the 1:00 math colloquium? And the kids who have 1:00 lab? It was torturous. Ugh.

(4) For all the rushing to get there (late, as it turned out), the colloquium was not so good. This very elderly man with hand-written overheads was explaining covering and packing in Zⁿ. At first, he was standing between the overhead and the wall, so his shadow obscured what was supposed to be projected. And it didn't really improve much from there; I basically learned that there are some unanswered problems on this topic, and I have some understanding of what they are. Well, okay.

(5) Yay for Greylock. It is truly the superior lunch destination. I arrived at approximately 1:55, and they didn't say, "Sorry, we close at 2:00; you're too late" -- they let me in and I got yummy food, too! Some lovely spiced turkey with cranberry sauce in a pita. What a lovely lunch, after being thwarted in my pursuit thereof twice already today. So I thank those that invented Greylock and those that let me come in, plus those that made the wonderful chocolate-chip cookies. Yum.

Millionaire executive Martha Stewart announced Wednesday that she decided to begin her prison sentence for lying about a stock trade as soon as possible. "I must reclaim my good life," she said, adding she hoped to be home in time to plant a spring garden.
[...]
"I would like to be back as early in March as possible to plant a spring garden and to truly get things growing again," she said, adding that she would miss her pets, including two dogs and seven cats.

Over the summer I was thinking about the problems of overeating, being overweight, and obesity in this country. The outwardly perplexing thing is that lower-income Americans seem to have a higher incidence of being overweight. This is perplexing because historically, poor people didn't have enough to eat, and tended to be skinny, while rich people with extra income could afford to eat a lot. The conclusion that presents itself to me is that (a) rich people have more time to exercise, and (b) healthful foods are more expensive, and junk food is cheap.

That's all well and good philosophically, but here is what I, as a mathematical person, am wondering: what is the cheapest source of calories? I have seen some recipes from WWII-era cookbooks that give the cost per serving ("the cost of 47 cents per serving is a bit of a splurge, but you will find this meal well worth every penny...") so I am wondering about this. My guess is that the most calorie-dense foods are also the cheapest. For instance, a head of Romaine lettuce costs about $1.50 and has about 30 calories in the whole thing, so that's 5 cents per calorie. A Twinkie in the gas station is about 75 cents for about 300 calories, meaning only 1/4 penny per calorie! Drinking pure store-brand vegetable oil is an extreme example of this kind of thing, but you get the idea. If you find anything you think is a contendor for the cheapest food per calorie award, please let me know.

04.09.14
Yesterday, I had a book out from the library that was due yesterday, so I decided to return it. I was working from 10pm - midnight, so after that ended, I went over to the library, book in hand. But then I realized: it was due on Monday, and my job ended at midnight, meaning that no matter how much I felt like it was still Monday, technically it was Tuesday, so the computer system would say it was Tuesday and the book was thus overdue. But do you know what? To my surprise, the library considers it to be whatever day it has been all day, until the library closes! So it is Monday until 3:00 AM on Tuesday! I am amazed that the library can actually convince the system that it is still Monday for three hours -- THREE HOURS -- into Tuesday. Wow.

As I hinted, I now have a job at the resource center. I think this will be a most excellent job, because I had my first shift last night and enjoyed it quite a lot. I just sat there in the room, and every time someone came in with a question about math 105 or 106 (or in one case 104... my how I am overworked) I helped them out with it. I was talking about math and scribbling equations and cartesian planes on the board, holding pieces of paper and pencils against the chalkboard and suspended in the air, drawing on the table with chalk... it was a grand old time.

I am also continuing as a TA, this time as a half-time TA for math 103, with the same professor as last semester. I have not yet had a TA session or corrected the quizzes (quizzes! not problem sets! wahoo!) but I expect it will be a fine old time as well.

My other daily distraction, unpaid and perhaps useless but much appreciated by my teammates, is maintaining the cross country page. Over the past week or so I took pictures of the 30+ new first-years and 10 returning runners who wanted new pictures, and did the same for profiles. I have also been madly deleting people from the roster every few days. Soon I will put up pictures from our Coed Relay meet at Middlebury this weekend, but I haven't even uploaded them from the camera yet. In time, all in sweet time...

I have added one page to my repertoire: a new tour of my dorm room and dorm. And I finally have a picture of Ronit that he actually endorses for public dissemination (i.e. it is his facebook picture) which you can see here. Otherwise, my classes are so wonderful that I would rather spend time working and reading for them than typing lots of html. Oh, and the only other new thing is that I am now a full-fledged author for EphBlog, instead of just getting mentioned every few months upon their pages. Okay, that is all for today.

04.09.09
According to popular opinion, young people's operating assumption is that they are immortal, and they never have to face their mortality. This is probably true. But not quite.

One of my classmates from Exeter just died, probably in suicide, perhaps as an accident. Last year, another Exonian in his first year of college committed suicide. Why? Nobody else can really know. When you are born, you get two things: your body and your life. Life is a wonderful thing, the greatest thing we have. I don't agree with the religious people who claim that life is full of suffering. I haven't experienced much suffering in my life, but I think there is a quality to living, to being able to exist and walk around and think and interact and do things, that makes life intrinsically worth living. Some people try to rebel against the spectre of losing that life by glorifying the afterlife -- after all, if death holds something to look forward to, then the pain of dying is lessened. But to lessen the pain of dying is to lessen the glory of living.

Over the summer I was looking at a photo album, and I saw a picture of my freshman year French class at Exeter. There was Jeremy, smiling out of a group of girls and our teacher, vibrantly alive, about to go to practice. Jeremy died last year. This morning I looked up my classmate (I am witholding her name because reading a blog is a horrible way to learn that your friend died) on Thefacebook.com, and found that she is right there, listed with everyone else. It's a little jarring to see the picture of a person I saw daily, looking just as she did when I saw her daily, except that I just learned that she is no longer among us. Life is beautiful. Let's keep living it.

So every day when I go running, I put my ID in my key pocket -- school ID when I'm at school, work ID when I'm at work, driver's license every other time. If I am lost, this will not help me. If I need a ride, this will not help me. The only situation in which ID would help me is if I am attacked, beaten, or killed. Carrying ID will help whoever finds my body to identify it and see if I have health insurance. So I guess I do have my little corner on mortality, just like everyone else.

04.09.08
I am now back in the land of the purple mountains, and I have a lot to say.

I spent the past weekend at cross country camp, at my teammate's summer home on Lake Canandaigua (one of the Finger Lakes of NY). This was one of the hilliest places I have ever visited. For instance, the walk down to the lake was 1/3 mile, with an altitude change equivalent to a 35-story building. That's an average of a 25% grade, and when you take into account the fact that the first 100-200m is virtually flat, well, we're talking super steep. I am sure that portions of the road are over 50% grade -- a very tough climb, either up or down! So they take a Jeep. Now, when I was little, my brother had a Jeep. One time he couldn't get the top up, so he ended up driving my granddad to Christmas dinner at night in December on the highway with no roof. A chilly ride for Granddad, I am sure. Anyway, my view of Jeeps, like my current view of SUVs, was that they are for general day-to-day driving. Now, though, I have newfound respect for the Jeep. Danner drove it over rocks and roots down the steep trail without careening forward, and up the hill without sliding backward. It was amazing. I thought we would die. We didn't. Yay for the Jeep, and for Danner.

When I was the cross country captain, I compiled a list of good quotations about running to hand out to my team, and later I made it into a Web page, which I titled Running Quotations. It was getting a lot of hits, 5-10 a day. But I know that the majority of people would actually search for "Running Quotes," even though that is not a correct use of the English language. ("Quote" is a verb, never a noun, although the incorrect noun usage has become so common that it now is listed as an "informal" usage. Thus, I wondered what would happen if I made a mirror page, exactly the same, and titled it "Running Quotes." So I did -- now I have two identical pages, Running Quotations and Running Quotes, to see which would get more hits. Results of my scientific study: If you search Google for running quotations, my page is the first result. If you search for running quotes, mine is not even on the first page, but it gets three times as many hits. Ha. Funny.

NEWS FLASH! This is the best news of the day, the week, the month -- when I heard it, I grabbed Christi and nearly squeezed her intestines out, and believe me, that's not easy. There is a new women's novice crew coach! IT'S NOT MARSA! Apparently, Marsa went home, and isn't coming back. I don't know what she's doing. I don't know who this new woman is, even what her name is. But Marsa is not here. Marsa is no longer at Williams!!!!! Kinda makes me want to join crew again... but only kinda.

In other news, there is this super-cool thing on the Internet. Apparently it has been in existence for many months -- seven, at this point -- but I just recently learned about it. It is called Thefacebook.com and it is essentially like taking all the facebooks for about 100 colleges, putting them together, with way more kinds of information that you can put on it, and the capacity to search all of those colleges. And it is a really smart facebook. For instance, when I tried to register, it didn't accept 07djd or Diana.J.Davis as my username; I had to be Diana Davis. When I put that I was taking MATH 301, it recognized that this is Real Analysis. It links me to a roster of all the kids registered on Thefacebook that are taking Real Analysis at Williams. Now that I am registered, I keep getting e-mails that so-and-so would like me to confirm that indeed we are friends (neato!). And so on. Thus far, 631 Exonians are registered, which means that I can see all of these cool pictures of my friends, and I can see where everyone is going to college, which is useful, because I forget these things when I have 300 people to remember it for... And yes, this was invented by an Exonian: Mark Zuckerberg '02, currently studying at Harvard. Pretty sweet. Yep, pretty sweet.

04.09.02
I hear that "men usually enjoy Fountainhead more as literature, whereas women seem to prefer Atlas Shrugged," the explanation offered being that "...the 'strong female protagonist' of Dagny Taggart was the reason, as women could identify themselves with her and thus enjoy the book more." Well, I would say that both books have strong female protagonists -- Dagny in Atlas Shrugged and Dominique Francon in The Fountainhead. These females, in fact, are quite similar: they are both slim, attractive businesslike women, who share a similar morality (essentially that of Ayn Rand) as their guiding force, who both incidentally have an odd desire to get "taken" by men whose morals they admire. If a female reader were out looking for a strong female protagonist, I think that either of these women would do just fine, although I would agree that Dagny is a more central character and a more thoroughly successful figure. But I can tell you why women prefer Dagny.

Dominique has this irrational and bizarre compulsion to force herself to sleep with, and in fact marry, men she despises. This is odd. I do not understand this. She is indeed strong, but she tests her strength by forcing herself to do this very odd thing. An excerpt from Dominique talking to Howard Roark, Rand's "perfect man":

I can't help it. I love you. The contrast is too great. Roark, you won't win, they'll destroy you, but I won't be there to see it happen. I will have destroyed myself first. That's the only gesture of protest open to me. What else could I offer you? The things people sacrifice are so little. I'll give you my marriage to Peter Keating. I'll refuse to permit myself happiness in their world. I'll take suffering. That will be my answer to them, and my gift to you. I shall probably never see you again. I shall try not to. But I will live for you, through every minute and every shameful act I take, I will live for you in my own way, in the only way I can. ...

You could ask, why not kill myself then. Because I love you. ... And since I must be alive to know that you are, I will live in the world as it is, in the manner of life it demands. Not half-way, but completely. Not pleading and running from it, but walking out to meet it, beating it to the pain and the ugliness, being first to choose the worst it can do to me. Not as the wife of some half-decent human being, but as the wife of Peter Keating. And only within my own mind, only where nothing can tough it, kept sacred by the protecting wall of my own degredation, there will be the thought of you and the knowledge of you, and I shall say "Howard Roark" to myself to myself once in a while, and I shall feel that I have deserved to say it."

(Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead, Part Two, Ch. 14. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1994. pp. 362f.)

Dagny, by contrast, has relationships of the heart and mind with the men she most respects: Francisco, Hank Rearden, John Galt. At one point, all three of these men are in love with her, but it is not a serious problem because they are all great moral men. An excerpt from a speech when she is admitting, on public radio, that she had an affair with Rearden:

It was not -- as it is for most of you -- an act of casual indulgence and mutual contempt. It was the ultimate form of our admiration for each other, with full knowledge of the values by which we made our choice. We are those who do not disconnect the values of their minds from the actions of our bodies, who do not leave their values to empty dreams, but bring them into existence, those who give material form to thoughts and reality to values -- those who make steel, railroads and happiness. And to such among you who hate the thought of human joy, who wish to see men's life as chronic suffering and failure, who wish men to apologize for happiness -- or for success, or ability, or achievement, or wealth -- to such among you, I am now saying: I wanted him, I had him, I was happy, I had known joy, a pure, full, guiltless joy...

(Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, Part Three, Ch. 3. New York: Penguin Books USA Inc., 1992. p. 792.)

04.08.23
Reading Ayn Rand is immensely satisfying because some of the characters actually know what is right and what is stupid. Ayn Rand has certain values -- ability is good, being inept is bad; capitalism is good, altruism is bad -- and these values form the basis for the lines she draws between good and bad characters. When I read her work -- first The Fountainhead, now Atlas Shrugged -- I see people who know what they want in life, and who are so invested in their work that they will devote their entire life to it, people who actually get to experience the deep satisfaction of having accomplished something great. I also see people who are clearly wrong, clearly unfit to be in positions of power making decisions, clearly have no sense of what is truly important in life.

It is comforting to see these lines drawn, because they are often difficult to see in real life: Some people seem to obviously have it all wrong, and others who seem to have quite a logical and far-reaching view of life -- but how can anyone really know another's approach to living, if we can never go inside another person's mind? So it is a lovely thing to have the difference so clearly delineated, as follows:

Francisco smiled; it was a smile of radiant mockery. Watching them, Dagny thought suddenly of the difference between Francisco and her brother Jim. Both of them smiled derisively. But Francisco seemed to laugh at things because he saw something much greater. Jim laughed as if he wanted to let nothing remain great.

(Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, Ch. 5. New York: Penguin Books USA Inc., 1992. pp. 95f.)

I have heard that Ayn Rand is "controversial." I have heard that endorsing Ayn Rand is equivalent to saying that 95% of what goes on in this world is stupid. I hear that advocating Objectivism is a great way to alienate yourself from the mainstream, that it is like shouting out that you are not a normal person and don't want to fit in with normal society. [Normal's just a setting on the washing machine.] And it makes sense: She rejects religion, altruism, inability, frivolity, and apathy. Most people are religious; many people adopt the Christian doctrine to live for others; inability is everywhere; people often do and buy frivolous things; half of the US population was apathetic about the last presidential election.

So Rand has the potential to offend a lot of people, as do I when I endorse her ideas. But one thing remains: Her ideas make sense. The characters she creates to embody her values live fullfilling lives, accomplishing great things and having deeply meaningful relationships with other people. I wouldn't say that 95% of what goes on in the world is stupid; I would estimate it around half or three-quarters. But I do think that Ayn Rand has a good vision. So I am endorsing Ayn Rand. Ha.

04.03.12
I think normal blogs have critical flaws. For one, there is way too much excessive auto-formatting. I mean really, do you need all those extra line breaks? Do you need all the automatically added horizontal lines? No. And who actually cares what time somebody posted something? I don't like those things. But apparently they are intrinsic to the definition of a blog, which makes this an antiblog.

And really, nobody really cares about what you write on a blog -- except one person, which is you. Well, and maybe your mom, if she's one of those obsessive people who needs to know what you're up to. Other people just look at it to laugh at you and how you are wasting your time. So this is my forum where I can put things for you to laugh at because you know I am wasting my time.

The date, by the way, is the truly logical way to write a date: year.month.day. This is the only way to write it -- except for writing out all four digits of the year, which is even better -- such that numerical order is also chronological order. Otherwise January 1, 2004 comes before January 2, 2000, and that's just wrong. Why is that wrong? I'm a math major. I know these things. It's wrong.

So now you know that this exists. Yay. If you come back to it, that just means you're really bored, and if I've updated it, that just means I'm really stupid, because there are at least 10 other things that are way more pressing that I need to be doing other than this. Therefore, upon coming to this page, you learn something every time. A lot of blogs can't claim that, can they? No.

I write in html. I have no excessive annoying formatting. If the lack of annoying formatting upsets you, click here to go to a blog with lots of excessive annoying visually distracting formatting and also a lot of excessive and annoying posts. Of course I am just kidding -- that link was just to suck Google into making a higher ranking.

So ends a post. This post is not a blog. A post is an entry on a blog. A blog is a blog, not an entry on a blog. The above blog-writer thinks that people don't know that. Blog-writers are called bloggers. I think it's dumb that there is all this special terminology. If you want to do something, do it. Just don't get your ego caught up in it if it's stupid, that's what I say.

Go make your own blog and put exactly one post on it and call it a blog. Then you can experiment with writing things as you think of them, just as I intend to do. All right; have a good day, today and every day. Because after all, that should be your aim, each day, should it not?

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