End 2014

2014: The end is here.

It's the end of another year. 2014 was the first full year in which I operated two blogs, this place and Fleex's Lab (for technical details and programming journals). As a result of taking the daily development logs to another place, I think the density of interesting information here rose significantly. In this year-terminating entry, I'd like to go over the best posts of 2014, from earliest to latest.

• I started the year marveling at the complexity of these tiny chunks of crystalline ice called snowflakes.
• Turning from wonderment to morbidity, I laid out a plan for disseminating information to the people I knew if I were to die suddenly. Death messages are like a Will+.
• Then jumping off the deep end into completely insane speculative not-even-anything-resembling-science, I wrote about the possible existence of a plane of existence - sentient superspace - home to special particles that are responsible for all things mental.
• That theory was extended with the ideas of shadows and de-energized psi particles.
• Moving back to actual science, I reminded overzealous macroevolution advocates that common origin does not equal common ancestry.
• Somehow keeping my hold on the real world, I explained why too much hand sanitizer can be a very bad thing.
• After getting infected with the Conduit malware, I yelled at application developers who bundle adware in their installers.
• I went on a trip to Chinatown with some of my classmates!
• After last academic year's finals finished, I pondered the immense amount of historical details we've lost.
• Returning to speculative pseudoscience, I guessed that being stressed with new things outside of one's proximal development zone brings back memories of older times.
• Thinking back to the school play, I proposed a simple system for simulating others' minds.
• After an interesting dinner conversation, I drew up an organization sketch for ministry organizations, based not on a single chain of command, but on two that converge in a central but lower Juncture Council.
• While reading about quantum circuitry and finding it very interesting, I set forth a method to learn advanced skills with recursive research.
• After experiencing the insanity that is The Prisoner episode Fall Out, I realized that meaning is not ubiquitous.
• I stumbled upon a really silly philosophy-of-time opinion on the Internet and was so shocked that I had to write a rebuttal.
• Annoyed with periodic metacognition assignments in school, I wondered about the causality of good habits and intelligence/success.
• As a member of my school's National Honor Society, I delivered Christmas gifts to refugee families in my area, which turned out to be a very crosscultural experience.

I may do something like this post for Fleex's Lab tomorrow. It's been a good year for me, and it was certainly fun going back through my life this year through this blog. Happy new year, everyone!

End 2014.

Delivering World Relief Christmas Gifts

Rivermont Collegiate's chapter of the National Honor Society partnered with World Relief to get Christmas gifts to refugee families. We set up a place where students and parents could donate gifts (we told them the gender and age of the child and they donated an appropriate gift), which we would then get to the families. I was responsible for the logistics of the whole thing and delivery to a zone containing two recipient families.

Gifts loaded, my dad and I went driving around a nearby city to locate the houses. They were both in apartment complexes in a somewhat run-down part of town. At the first house, it took a little while to find which apartment the gifts were supposed to go to - I didn't have the names of the people and several entrances didn't have apartment IDs. The one we tried first was fortunately correct. The family was Vietnamese (maybe?) and spoke no English. It took a bit of friendly-facing and motions of offering the wrapped package, but they accepted it and we left.

For the second family, we had several gifts, since they had several children. We knocked on the door of the apartment we had written down, and it was answered by an older gentlemen who, upon seeing the wrapped gifts in my hand, said "no" and led us down to another apartment. I think his family occupied two apartments and the other one was used by the children. (He also seemed to be understanding what was going on.) After some language-based confusion, they accepted the set of presents and we left.

I don't know whether either family understood any of what we were saying. I hope they understand the whole cultural thing of Christmas gift giving.

Proficiency Exam

Tomorrow morning, I will be taking the final exam for NETW 170, "Introduction to Network Security." I have not taken the class; I am attempting to test out of it to gain entrance to NETW 274, a more advanced security course that is also a CompTIA Security+ preparation course.

I didn't know I was going to be taking the exam tomorrow; I was expecting to have a little more time. It should be alright; I've been studying the book for a while and most of it is knowledge I've picked up from my own research and experimentation. It has more of an emphasis on the networking equipment than I expected, but an hour or so of rapid reading tomorrow morning should get me through it.

All I need to get credit for the course is an 80% or higher; it is graded on a pass/fail basis. It's multiple choice, so that makes it a little easier.

Another Semester Ends

Yesterday, I took the final exam for SPEC 175, "Intercultural Communication." Only the computer-scored portion is graded so far, but if I somehow got a zero on all the teacher-scored (free response) questions, I would still pass the class with a 93%.

One of the course textbooks for Intercultural Communication says that there are four stages of intercultural competence.

1. Unconscious incompetence (blissful ignorance of cultural differences)
2. Conscious incompetence (troubling ignorance of how to communicate crossculturally)
3. Conscious competence (deliberate, careful, "walk-on-eggshells" consideration)
4. Unconscious competence (smooth, practiced, automatic integration of the other culture)

I would say that, before this course, I was at Stage 2, aware that there are differences between cultures but without any idea of how to navigate them or how they differ. I believe I am now entering Stage 3; I know many of the social dimensions on which cultures vary and I know how to navigate some of them.

Let's Play Go

Today, I played a good game of chess with my Spanish teacher, and he recommended I try to learn Go as well. Go, from my understanding, is a Japanese or other east Asian strategic board game, simpler in rules than chess but immensely more computationally expensive.

I looked up some learning resources online, and came up with the following good tutorials:

• Online Go Server's "Learn to play Go"
• "The Interactive Way to Go"

I picked up the rules fairly quick and I think I have a decent grip on beginner-level strategery after going through The Interactive Way to Go. I managed to obliterate the "easy mode" computer on the Online Go Server, but I haven't taken the time to find a stronger computer or real person yet.

Doing Business

I just placed an order on Amazon for a Dell Inspiron N7110 replacement screen, using my own credit card. Besides the initialization fee, that was the first purchase I ever made directly. I suppose this marks the beginning of my presence in the world of business, as I will soon be repaid for this after installing it in the broken laptop I am fixing for a client.

"The Actor Games" Play Performance

Rivermont's high school theater class has been rehearsing our fall play, The Actor Games. It's a one-act comedy, a parody of the popular book/movie series The Hunger Games. Ten actors, one from each "district", are competing to be the next big star. They must go through a series of "grueling drama activities", constantly facing the danger of elimination and the Fallback Wheel, which doles out their "punishments" like having to be a cook for 50 years.

In our performance, I play the role of the Host, a sort-of narrator, sort-of emcee. (Maybe like a game show host?) Basically, I announce what's about to go on and then announce the results - who got eliminated. I also get to yell a lot, which is also fun.

Tonight was opening night! The performance was pretty good, with only a couple hiccups. There was much laughter from the audience and a good deal of spontaneous applause. It should go even better tomorrow night!

Student Hunger Drive Loading Day

Today marks the end of the 2014 Student Hunger Drive. Loading Day is the day in which all donated items must be boxed, delivered to the food bank, and unloaded onto their palettes. So, it's a pretty big day for the people operating each school's drive, in Rivermont's case my NHS chapter.

Loading Day is an all-day event. We started immediately after morning meeting making the final collection of all the school's donations. My job was to weigh the boxes and write down their weights attributed to the proper grade and house. Meanwhile, the others transferred partial boxes' contents into new boxes, folded them up, and taped them. (The tape was necessary because they had issues with boxes' bottoms falling out last year.)

As the U-Haul truck drove to the various locations we had stashed previous filled boxes, we carried them out and into the back of the truck. I then rode with the development director, along with several other NHS members, to the food bank. There, we box-brigaded the donations onto their palettes. While the food bank weighed those to get our official stats, the food bank staff quizzed us on the history of the Student Hunger Drive, which - thanks to our correct answers - earned us a bonus 100 pounds.

Meanwhile, the Hy-Vee with which we had a bulk purchasing deal delivered over 7000 pounds for us - which we fortunately did not have to transport. The food bank gave us our official numbers: Rivermont Collegiate donated 13384 pounds to the Student Hunger Drive, at least 2000 above last year. On the way back to school, we stopped at Dairy Queen and it was delicious.

I totaled up the class data to determine whether the upper school or middle school donated more. It was the upper school, and out of them, my class. The lower school, however, obliterated us both.

Credit Card

Several weeks ago, I went to the bank to set up a checking account and a debit card attached to it. The card came a couple of days ago!

This is going to make my IT business a lot easier - I'll be able to actually purchase parts and software. Previously, I had to ask other people to purchase things online for me and then deal with cash to pay them back. Now, I'll just be able to enter my details and order stuff.

They also got me registered for paper statements (which I don't want), so I'll have to talk to the bank to disable those. (They cost $3 for each statement, plus tax!)

Illowa Fall Classic 2014

Today held the Illowa Bi-State Chess Club's annual Fall Classic tournament. As in the past, it was a four-round Swiss tournament with 65 minutes and 5 second delay time control. Since there are four rounds and each game can last more than two hours, this tournament was an all-day event. Since my rating is a little under the cutoff for the U1400 section, I played in the Reserve.

I arrived early in the morning to help set up. My first game was against a 1000-rated player (about 350 below me), but it was surprisingly tough. I violated the four opening principles with wild abandon, and got into trouble in the middlegame as a result. I did manage to castle while there was a lull in the action, and things started looking up from there. I gained a pawn or two, then went on to win a king-and-pawn endgame.

The second game, after lunch, was against an unrated player. He blundered a piece away in the opening, but played a pretty solid game after that. I was much more careful to play a decent opening, so I got into a good position and stayed there. I don't remember much about the game, but it was easy and didn't last too long. (I got to finish my calculus homework!)

At the beginning of the third round, I was the only one with two points. I was paired against one of the few people with 1.5, and as is usual in the Swiss, the second-to-last round's game is the most important. This opponent's rating was actually a little above mine. He played the French, but since I know nothing about the French, I just played what seemed tactically sound. That went fairly well, and I established a strong position for a strong game. I gained a pawn along the way, but the game was very difficult. In the endgame, when each of us had a rook and a knight (plus miscellaneous pawns), he blundered and let me fork his king and rook with my knight. He resigned when I was about to promote a pawn.

The last game's opening did not go so well. My opponent - 200 points below me - played the King's Gambit, about which I know even less than I do the French. That made my development a total disaster, and I could never get my rooks connected. Though I didn't go down in material, my position was absolutely awful. At this time, we had been at the chess club for more than 6 hours, and everyone was tired. I offered a draw after I eeked out a somewhat equal-looking position, and by some small miracle he accepted.

With 3.5 out of 4 points, I won the Reserve section, the following nice trophy, and $102.

From left to right: winner of the Open section, the TD, me

The End of Crosscountry

Though this school day was an early release, I certainly did not get any more time at home. After the short school day ended, I boarded a bus with the crosscountry team over to the last meet of the season, a big state qualifier.

It was a cool, cloudy day - perfect for running, in my opinion. My race was three miles long, the same as always. Fortunately, the course was very flat, but it did take us through a muddy forest. I felt pretty good through the race; I didn't have to stop to walk or anything like that. I don't know my time, but I do know I finished below the 50th percentile. I finished second of the four people in my team who ran that race, which is my usual position.

Though I am clearly not a stellar runner, I do feel pretty good about my performance this season. Today marks the end of this season of races, and very possibly the end of my crosscountry experience forever. (Athletic graduation requirement: complete!)

Investment Dinner

The financial planning firm used by my family hosted an educational dinner tonight. The subject of the talks was investment and retirement planning. I'm not anywhere close to retirement, but I came along to the dinner.

It was a fascinating time. It opened with a short talk about stocks and bonds which discussed their differences and how they work. Another presenter gave a talk on the principles of investing. Specifically, he talked about how one's investment plan should not change unless one's financial goals have changed. Dramatic world events almost never merit a change in investments.

Finally, the main presenter talked about retirement and the goals of financial planning. Surprisingly, the talk looked at retirement planning from a very non-financial perspective. Instead, it focused on the personal aspects, e.g. building a social network (which is more important in determining happiness than amassed wealth), establishing a procedure for transitioning into retirement, and house/neighborhood consideration.

This is a very short summary, but the presentations were fascinating. I got a folder containing additional resources, which I will go through soon.

PSAT

My high school requires all juniors to take the PSAT (Prelimary SAT (Standard Achievement Test?)) examination in the fall, plus the actual SAT and ACT in the spring. I am not a junior, but they permit sophomores to take the PSAT as well, despite that it cannot be used for entrance into the National Merit Scholarship program as a sophomore.

Well, I chose to take it. The exam lasted almost three hours. It's just a bunch of multiple choice questions with a few grid-the-number math questions. There are only three sections - critical reading, mathematics, and writing skills - but they are cut up into five blocks.

I obviously can't discuss individual questions, but I think I did fairly well. It seemed easier than the ACT and was definitely much easier than any math test. My scores won't count for anything, but it will be interesting to see them.

On My Feet

Today, I was on my feet constantly. As a result, I am totally exhausted now, so this post might have spelling, grammar, or coherency issues.

First, I got up in the morning and went to my normal high school, which was hosting a crosscountry meet. This was a shorter one (just 2.5 miles as opposed to the usual 3), but the campus has lots of hills. There were only two other schools at the meet, probably thanks to the out-of-season cold (there was supposed to be at least another one in attendance). I was actually really confused about the course directions, but fortunately I was able to just follow the people in front of me. I finished behind a bunch of other schools' people, but first out of my school.

After taking a shower, I changed into normal clothes and went over to be a counselor for a nearby Boy Scouts merit badge clinic as a chess coach. My father was there while I was running in the crosscountry meet, but there were over 20 students, so having an extra counselor there was a very good thing. The morning session ended shortly after I arrived, but we also taught the afternoon session. Many of the Scouts took very well to chess and we got quite a few requirements (for the merit badge) signed off on their blue cards.

After packing up all the chess things from the classroom, I went to church and changed into nicer clothes. Following the service, I went to my school's homecoming dance for three hours. That was a really exciting time and I ate a lot more candy than is good for me. My legs were already hurting at the start of that, but afterward, I needed to sit down in the car immediately.

I am now home, sitting comfortably in my main office chair, finishing writing this post, and about to go to bed and sleep for a very long time.

Student Hunger Drive Kickoff 2014

Tonight was the official kickoff of the Quad Cities Student Hunger Drive. The Student Hunger Drive is an organization founded quite a few years ago in which students help feed the hungry in our area, gain a sense of volunteerism and leadership, and manage the collection of canned foods from their school.

The kickoff ceremony officially starts the six-week drive. Each participating school gets to present a one-minute skit, which is judged by various prominent members of the community. The winning school of the skit contest receives a 2,000-pound head start, donated by Hy-Vee.

My school, Rivermont Collegiate, won the skit contest! Despite technical details at the beginning, our performance was very well received by the audience and apparently the judges too.

Spanish UI Challenge

I have been taking Spanish for over four years now, and I think it's time to make a real effort to increase my vocabulary. I have quite a handle on grammar, but I simply can't remember all the words from classroom exercises. This severely limits my capabilities in using the language.

So I'm going to force myself to learn more words.

I have decided to change my Windows display language to Spanish for at least a week. Webpages will still be in English, but Microsoft application text (e.g. Explorer special folder names, Office captions, Control Panel items) and the text of other applications that notice and respect the system language (e.g. Chrome) will appear in Spanish.

I was planning on using the Spanish keyboard so that I could type in Spanish, but my physical keyboard is not marked for Spanish, so all the non-alphanumeric keys produce the wrong symbols. I had to change the keyboard layout back to US English, but the Language Bar makes it easy to switch if I ever need to.

So far, I have been challenged by the different sort orders created by the different names of icons. In Control Panel (el Panel de control) especially, everything is in a totally different place than I expected. I find myself relying a lot on icons.

Also, some applications (e.g. Paint) change their shortcuts depending on your language. For example, it seems the standard "save" shortcut in Spanish is Ctrl+G, for "guardar." Unfortunately, some applications forget to localize all their shortcuts and therefore end up with conflicts. Paint, for one, actually displays the grid when I press Ctrl+G instead of saving like the ToolTip says.

This entire experience should improve my Spanish abilities, especially technical vocabulary. (It might also decrease the spelling quality on my blogs - I had to disable Chrome spellcheck because it checks everything as Spanish!)

Neither Shall There Anymore Be a Flood to Destroy the Earth

Time for some more partially-researched theological speculations!

With all the talk about global warming happening nowadays, a particular Bible verse caught my attention as I skimmed it.

Genesis 9:11 ERV "And I will establish my covenant with you; neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of the flood; neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth."

This verse appears to guarantee that the earth will not be subjected to a water-induced catastrophe as projected by global warming activists. Of course, global warming is a very real thing, and the oceans are so far rising. So, what can one say about this apparent contradiction?

The Rapture and ensuing end times will occur before humans manage to mess everything up.

It makes some sense if you think about it. The earth has finite resources, but the human population is multiplying alarmingly fast and consuming resources even faster. The only way to not wreck everything is to revert to a sustainable agrarian society - but nobody wants to do that. Natural resources are a clock ticking towards the end of humanity's stay on this little speck in the universe.

It's the human nature to invent and progress upwards with technology. I can understand why God might choose to give us a fixed time to do all our stuff instead of letting us experience the pinnacle of civilization and then being forced back down to the Bronze Age. When our time is up here, it's onto the next segment of eternity.

Disclaimer: I am not a theologian; I have no training and no credentials. Take with all the salt.

Manitowish 2014

Starting tomorrow and extending into Saturday, I will be away up at Camp Manitowish. Manitowish is a teamwork/leadership training and outdoor activity camp for high schoolers, which my high school (Rivermont Collegiate) sends us on once every year.

I will be away from all electronic communications, so blog articles have been pre-written and scheduled. Issues of Abiathar Confidential, the column-like publication explaining historical details of Abiathar, will appear each day on Fleex's Lab.

First Crosscountry Race

Just a couple of hours ago, I ran in the first crosscountry meet of the local season. Only four people from my school, including myself, participated: three guys, one girl. The guys' race was a little more than a half hour after the girls', so there was a little more time for us to warm up and stretch, and for the weather to cool down. (It was pretty hot anyway.)

My team was definitely the smallest out of all the teams; it wouldn't surprise me if some of the other local schools' crosscountry teams were bigger than my high school student body.

We took our positions at the edge of the starting line. When the starting gun fired, I took a slow, maintainable pace because I do not have a lot of endurance. In the next ten minutes or so, I steadily gained positions; apparently a lot of people had burst out with an untenable pace at the beginning. The track was 4 kilometers long, taking us through a lot of forest. (That was nice, because it was mostly shaded.) Near the end, I was very tired, but I never had to drop to a walk. At the very end stretch, I lost a few positions as people used final bursts of speed because I didn't have any strength left to match them.

I finished about 10 seconds behind the first runner on my team and about 30 seconds ahead of the previous. I don't remember my position/percentile in the total pool of racers, but I think it might have been close to the 40th percentile.

I was very tired after the entire thing. Going home and taking a shower was excellent.

Causality and Good Habits in Education

Some classes at my school require the students to periodically produce a meta-cognitive exercise, which consists of answering several questions about how you are doing, what you can improve on, and what your goals are.

They do this allegedly because very successful people can think about how they are thinking, and so I suppose the reasoning behind having us do this is "oh, let's have them do this thing successful people do and then they will be successful."

Random grammar note! If you follow my other blog, Fleex's Lab, you'll notice that over there I always place punctuation outside quotation marks. I do that because it is more logical, unambiguous, and looks more like programming, which is the subject of that blog. Over here I'll make some minimal effort to adhere to formal writing standards, as demonstrated by this random and totally unrelated tangent which has dragged on for a while now.

Anyway, just because successful people do something doesn't mean that you will be successful if you do it. The causality might be the other way around: people who are successful do it because they are successful, and they are successful because their mind works in this way. Look at it another way: many successful people are arrogant and rich. Should we cultivate arrogance and give lots of money to students in order to make them successful? No! That would be silly, because the cause-and-effect relationship doesn't allow that to work.

It might be entirely true that trying to use metacognition will tune your brain to make you think more effectively, or maybe you can't do anything about it. I'd like to see a study sometime; I will look it up soonish.

2014's First Full Day of School

Yesterday was a short half-day dedicated to introducing the year, the school policies, and the school itself. Today was a full day - the first full day - and dedicated to the start of actual classes. The class sessions for today were mostly introductions in themselves, with the teachers giving out course syllabi, schedules, and general feels of welcomedness to the class.

In history, we actually started doing things. After getting class policies out of the way, we compiled a list of issues facing the United States today. We will use that list in our study of history to see if and how it was handled before, and maybe understand more of the dilemmas.

In theater, we did some acting exercises and individually wrote down what role we hope to have in the play we will produce.

My study halls were used for reading and continuing to negotiate the finer details of my use of the school-issued laptop.

Start of the School Year, 2014

Today marks the beginning of my 2014-15 academic year, this time in the sophomore class. I am actually looking forward to starting this year, and I don't know exactly why. I suppose there are a lot of exciting changes, I'll see my classmates again, and it should be a vacation compared to my college work over the summer.

There are lots of new faculty, including a new IT Director who has experience in web design and mobile app development. A new mathematics teacher also has a background in computer programming in addition to (obviously) mathematics.

The upper school is also moving to a college-style schedule, so the daily schedule's time allocation is dramatically different between {Monday Wednesday Friday} and {Tuesday Thursday}. Tuesday and Thursday have just two or three extremely long class periods each. The most interesting feature of this new schedule is the presence of teacher "office hours" for half a period length at the end of the day.

And, of course, laptops! This deal has yet to be worked out; I am considering buying my own. We shall see.

Anyway, today was a nice orientation to the new policies and a great start to the '14-15 school year.

Economics Test Incoming

I will be taking the final exam for ECON 270 (international business) on Wednesday, two days away. There wasn't a midterm for this course, so I really have no idea what to expect. All I know about it is that it's pencil-and-paper; whether it's multiple choice or essay I do not know. The instructor did publish the learning objectives for the book, of which there are almost 70 total. The final will be one hour long, so if it does cover all those objectives, it'd have to be multiple-choice. Otherwise, it's probably a sprinkling of material from each chapter (maybe the last learning objective?) for an essay each. I am not extremely confident going into this.

Downtime

Lately, it has been really difficult for me to produce any video or code of any kind. This is due to college classes finishing up. Economics especially is difficult, especially because the teacher does not give any information at all concerning what will be on the final (there was no midterm). I'm working on econ assignments pretty much all day, doing some tinkering but really making no progress on my programming projects, and generally idling my mind when not doing such things. In other words, I am just really tired and I think I need to sleep more. Once classes get over, I'll have a lot more time to put into interesting programming things and YouTube videos.

The End of SPEC 101

Just a few hours ago, I gave the last of three speeches for SPEC 101, Introduction to Speech Communication. It was a persuasive speaking assignment, and I chose the topic of persuading people to learn/study the excellent constructed language Lojban. It went well, but (as always) I went over the time limit.

This marks the end of SPEC 101, or at least the major part of it. There are actually two more assignments left to do, but they are very small. There's the self-review for this speech and the last unit test, both of which are very easy; it is almost certain that I will get perfect scores on them, thereby securing an A in yet another course.

Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition

While researching for an upcoming speech, I discovered a fascinating linguistic anthropology paper called "Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Piraha." The writer, a Berkeley professor, stayed in a Piraha village for years, studying their language and culture. What he discovered is that their way of life doesn't necessitate a complex language, so their small language constrains their grammar, expression, and thought.

A salient example from the paper is that the Piraha people do not refer to their fingers as distinct things. Instead of pointing with one finger, they wave their entire hand. There is not even a word for finger; the people would call them "hand-sticks", and only when pressed to identify them as a separate thing from the hand.

I suggest you go read the paper (PDF) - it's fascinating.

Blitz Chess DRR

Ugh, I am really tired. I just participated in a three-and-a-half-hour long double round robin blitz chess tournament. It was originally going to only be a single round robin - there were 12 people and we were playing G/5 sudden death games - but some people really wanted it to be a double.

Of the 22 possible points, I came out with 17, which is way better than I expected. This has been the second blitz tournament in which I have played; it should positively affect my rating.

News Flash: Time Exists

Source: XKCD (Randall Munroe)

As I wrote in "Meaning is not Ubiquitous", people like to find "meaning" and correlations in things where there really isn't any. At the other end of the spectrum, some people like to take basic - very real - things and turn them into some sort of human construction. Not only is this egocentric, it goes against everything that is known about physics. I found this on the Internet today:

"Will time end? Time is an abstract concept created by humans. It doesn't exist and therefore never started, so it cannot end." (It's been modified slightly from its original form to protect the guilty.)

Let's start with the first postulate there: that time isn't real, that it is a human construct. Physics is essentially based on functions that take the time coordinate as an input (and some other things) and produce a position or some attribute as an output. If time isn't real, physics breaks down and there is no universe. No universe? No humans to create the system. Everything about science is based on time flowing in one direction (at least in the unrolled dimension) and the absence of cycles in time. Animals and tiny organisms, extant long before humans came to be on the earth, had to do things at certain times to stay alive. It is quite safe to say that animals such as bears change their behavior based on the time (e.g. hibernating).

Now, let's take on the proposition that time never started. Big-bang cosmology, the accepted theory in its field, depends quite heavily on there being a zero point in time (the bang). We can use super-telescopes to look far out and far back to see how matter became more advanced as time moved away from that one creation moment. The WMAP image, possibly the most important image in science, by existing proves that the Big Bang happened and that time has a beginning.

Finally, the declaration that time cannot end. The "reasoning" behind it is empty, but it's not necessarily wrong. Space is expanding (out from one beginning point), and time seems to be continuing. For time to end, spacetime would have to stop expanding or be destroyed, which may or may not be possible. We shall see, or rather the universe will see - we will most likely be long gone.

Meaning is not Ubiquitous

A few days ago, I saw the last episode of The Prisoner, called "Fall Out." In it, a whole bunch of crazy stuff happened that didn't resolve the plot at all. I tried to figure it out for a while, and eventually turned to the Internet for help. Though I found a few fascinating fan pages, nobody could solidly say what it was supposed to mean. Even the best one I could find had some critical holes.

Then it hit me: it doesn't mean anything. This might sound a little postmodern, but people think that everything has meaning when in reality a lot of occurrences are truly coincidences, simple white noise. It is known that the writer of Fall Out wanted to be done with the series (he had received a lot of evidently annoying fan mail already) and therefore probably destroyed the plot in a blazing glob of nonsense, basically saying "ha, here's what it all means!" and presenting total insanity.

Another thought I had was that logic was somehow distorted to make this all work. (Perhaps some kind of meta-logic?) Then I realized that such an idea is just taking the arbitrary nature up another level and that allowing the rules of logic to be bent takes it out of the real world and makes it all pointless.

Side note: I would be very happy to play a puzzle game in which meta-logic and postulate distortion happen, assuming it was well thought out.

So, in short, Fall Out means nothing and there isn't guaranteed to be meaning in any given place. It's possible and quite easy to produce total nonsense from mental fluctuation, and trying to interpret it according to the real world is a waste of time.

I Can See!

I went to the optometrist to pick up my new glasses today. I haven't worn glasses, contacts, or optical correction of any kind for almost a year now; they had stopped helping. I guess I had just gotten used to the world being hard to see. I was pretty much unable to read text more than five feet in front of me (allowing, of course, for larger font sizes).

Now that I have glasses, it's really amazing what I was missing. The world has so much detail! My back will no longer cause pain when I sit far forward to read at my computer. Oh, the things you miss when you get used to not having them!

The Real End of Driver's Ed

Today, I did the last behind-the-wheel and observational driving lessons necessary to get a driver's license. I now will never have to see anybody involved in driver's ed again, which is actually kind of sad because I liked a lot of the people in my class.

Anyway, now all I have to do to get my license is turn 16 (in 6 months 3 days) and have 50 total hours of driving logged on my permit. These are both achievable goals.

I did a lot of other, far more interesting things today, but I probably shouldn't talk about them because HIPAA!

The End of Driver's Ed Class

Today was the last meeting of my driver's education class. We did very little; it was just a celebratory pizza-eating day. However, today does mark the end of an important (but short) passage in my life.

Driving is a great freedom; it will allow me to expand my teaching/coaching business by getting around to more clients. Of course, I can't actually get my license until a few months after I turn 16, so I do need an adult with a driver's license to be in the car with me while I drive.

I am well on my way to the necessary 50 hours. Driving home from the chess club is an excellent source of night driving. I'm guessing I have maybe 1 hour of night driving done and almost 5 hours total.

Summer Classes Begin

Since I want to always have things to do, I'll be taking two online classes at Black Hawk College this summer. In fact, they have already started - just today.

Speech 101 (Principles of Speech Communication) is required to graduate, but that's not why I'm taking it. I just finished freshman year at Rivermont Collegiate, which included Speech I. Since Speech II is receiving the Ax of New Headmaster's Executive Decision, I wanted to continue my speaking education because it's very important to communicate verbally with customers, business associates, and people in general. My experience doing YouTube should help here.

Economics 270 (International Business and Communication) is an elective I'm taking to continue the studies I started in ECON 222. It seems to focus less on actual economics and more on business negotiations with people around the world. I'm taking this mainly because I took Chinese at Rivermont this year and learned a lot about the difference in culture. These should turn out to be useful skills; China and Japan are super important world figures.

Driver's ed is wrapping up, so these fit together perfectly to usurp my summer vacation!

Let He Who Has Understanding

Last night, I read the passage in the Revelation in which reference is made to "he who has understanding." It states that only that person/entity is able to calculate who the "beast" (the Antichrist) is based on a number, 666 (sometimes rendered 616). One way to turn names into numbers is gematria, Hebrew numerology, the forms of which are so numerous and generally so entropical that they could be used to "prove" anything.

An interesting observation was made in a discussion of this verse: If it requires understanding to do the calculations, then it shouldn't be terribly obvious who it is referring to. Some might use this as an excuse to go crazy with obscure gematria, but I have another idea. Gematria and hashes in general are irreversible (in that you can't be sure you got the original value even with a collision), but there's one computational basis in which any operation can be reversed: quantum physics.

It would certainly require quite a bit of understanding to break a hash using a quantum computer. I have no idea what the input would be or what hash "666" is an output of, but that could be brute-forced too, with things like Grover's quantum search algorithm and quantum parallelism a la Deutsch. The universe keeps uncountable numbers - vast complex matrices - as a "scratch pad" when advancing time, inaccessible to us. There could be a wealth of knowledge about the universe and the destiny of the human soul bound in these stealthy numbers.

The Real End of the School Year

Here it is: the real end of the full school year. Today, I attended and ushered at the seniors' commencement, the ceremony of which also included some school and department awards.

In my understanding, a school award is something that the entire, well, school considers while a department award is fully determined by people inside the department it deals with. School awards are more than just mastery of whatever field they are mostly related to; they require application of that knowledge to improve the moral climate of the institution.

Now, two days ago, there was the promotion ceremony, at which one technology award was presented. It did not go to me, as it was specifically marked to go to a junior. (The IT director tried to give it to me anyway, but that's another (very hilarious) story.) I did not know there were other awards, but in fact there were two more presented today. The first one was a school award, the Dr. Michael A. Novello Technology Award, named after a former head of the school. This was for "leadership in integration of technology", which I probably served by helping teachers set up things and fix information security issues. The second, which I was not expecting to receive at all, was the Computer Science department award, which is simply to recognize excellence in the CS field.

Holding both certificates and the plaque newly engraved with my name

Holding both certificates, with 100% more IT director

Congratulations to the graduates!

Learning Advanced Skills with Recursive Research

I recently determined that quantum circuitry is extremely interesting and that I would like to learn as much as I can about it. Unfortunately, every introductory paper I can discover on the subject contains a lot of words I don't know, like "unitary matrix" or "eigenspace." Wikipedia tends to use more complicated math to explain any math concept, so that doesn't help a lot. Instead of trying to crush all this information into my brain, I believe I need to step back from quantum mechanics and get the linear algebra skills first.

Thus came a system for pushing out the zone of proximal development. Pick a length representative publication of some field or skill you want to learn more about and start trying to read it. As you read, create a list of things that it mentions that you don't know about, probably specific words/phrases but optimally concepts. Find a short paper or lesson on the new concept and try to read it. If you succeed and fully understand it, apply your understanding and continue reading the original document. If it mentions more concepts you don't understand, repeat the process and research the additional challenging concepts. It may take quite a while (maybe even years if you really know nothing to start), but you will eventually learn enough to get through the paper and learn the skills. After completing one document, you may find it helpful to find more, rounding out your knowledge in the field.

Personally, I would like to see this strategy used in high school education. Have each student pick an advanced topic and start researching it. Let this process branch out over a year (or more) and watch as students learn all the things. The result: a class of experts, far above their grade level, in many fields.

The Most Interesting People

I like to talk (quite a bit, as you know if you watch me on YouTube), but I also like to listen, especially to things that I only know a little bit about but am mildly interested in. I can, and occasionally do, start talking about a subject I know a lot about, then - as I mention something that needs to be understood to understand the original concept - drill down in the information.

I think I could learn a lot by listening to such streams of information. One problem: people who are willing to talk so much and know things that are interesting to me or useful in the real world are very hard to find. That's very unfortunate, because I consider such people the most interesting in the world.

What I'd like is to find such a person, sit down, and listen to him/her talk for as long as both of us can stand it. I would learn so much, even if I didn't catch all the details; it could open entirely new fields of study for me to consider.

The First Drive

With my new learner's permit, I am permitted to drive around with adult supervision. I started doing that today, keeping a log of my hours as directed in the GDE book.

My father and I used the Toyota Highlander to drive around the farm to introduce the way of driving and practice techniques like turning around. We also went on the (generally empty) highway to get the feel of driving on major roads. This went on for an hour and helped me quite a bit in understanding what generally needs to happen to operate such a vehicle.

Me, with key and permit

In car

To celebrate this milestone, my family invited me to drive to the Pizza Hut in a town about 16 miles away. I did so, both ways. My hands were sweating the entire time, but the entire experience was very relaxing (for me at least, I can't say the same for my parents). I'm most comfortable driving at 40 MPH, but my speed tends to creep up gradually. One challenging thing, especially on highways, is that I can't always tell where I am in my lane and therefore am unsure if I need to adjust my position.

This is very exciting! I've already logged about two hours of driving, including some at night (on the way back). 50 hours should be easy to do in 9 months.

The Juncture Council: A Ministry Organization Layout

I recently thought up the following company structure for a nonprofit organization and presented it at a meeting for a forming ministry a few hours ago.

Most organizations today follow a simple "command hierarchy", if you will, from the board of directors to the executive director through a bunch of people down to the people who actually do work. In nonprofit organizations, especially those with a vision, the visionary is typically not the type of person who wants to deal with all the implementation/facilitation details like law or finance.

Therefore, I propose a new structure, one that clearly separates the roles of chief visionary and executive director, also being sure to prevent the animosity between the types of people that produces tension or fallout in an organization. Instead of placing one chief from each "side" in a superior/inferior relationship, place each of them at the top of their own hierarchy. The chief visionary's subordinates include PR, spiritual leadership, outreach opportunities, and other things that generally don't involve a lot of hard real-world facilitation. Things under the executive director include administrative assistant, treasurer, legal counsel, and whatever other objective and non-interesting (at least to the visionary) jobs need to be done to implement the ministry.

The unique feature of this structure is the juncture council: the coming together of the vision and the implementation hierarchies. It is, in essence, a board made up of people who want to make all the amazing things from the visionary side happen in the real world, compromising if necessary to meet with real-world requirements, as assessed by the implementation side. Then, all the actual doing of things and action committees are placed under the combined authority of the juncture council. When problems arise or progress needs to be reported, the juncture council also acts as a router to inform the appropriate top director as to the situation.

The job of the chief visionary, once everything has been set up, is to hand down assessments of the effectiveness of the vision implementation to the juncture council and maybe also look for new areas to expand into. The executive director's continuing job is to facilitate the ministry's operation by navigating the hierarchies, cutting red tape, and getting stuff out of the way of people who know how to do their job.

I hope this idea will help you in some way. Be aware that information and command often flow in totally different paths, so be ready to create a different organizational chart for resources.

Level Up

Today is an important day for me! I took the last final, thereby ending the academic year, in which I received all A's, at least for the normal year. (We shall see how I did on the finals, but that doesn't have a huge weight, not as much as people make it out to be.) Also, I went to the DMV to apply for a learner's permit.

The only final I had to take today was the Spanish one. I thought it started at 9:00 and therefore arrived at 8:30 to be prepared. It actually started at 8:30, so I had 15 fewer minutes by the time I went up to sit in the exam room at 8:45. Fortunately, it was a fairly easy test and I had plenty of time to complete it. I also, as I wrote about yesterday, reset and turned in my iPad.

After a failed attempt to go to Coldstone Creamery with some friends (they were closed), I went instead to the DMV. After a wait, they had me take an eye exam, which I barely passed; apparently, my right eye is considerably weak. Then came the actually interesting part: taking the computerized traffic law test. After getting the practice question wrong, I went on to get a perfect score on the real test, skipping one strangely-worded question about buses. I can drive now, kind of!

I feel like this day is important; I've survived my first year of high school and have started the driver's licensing program.

Turning in the iPad

As I may have mentioned before, my school has been issuing iPads to high schoolers to augment traditional classroom teaching with technology. Tomorrow, they are taking them back; we are switching to real computers (Lenovo laptops) next year.

In my and many other people's opinion's, the iPad program was not helpful. In fact, I think the things were more distracting than useful. We only used them in biology to connect to sensors, and that could have been done with actual computers, probably with fewer issues than we had with iPads. Some web sites like to serve stripped-down "mobile" versions and recommend that mobile users get an app. This is really terrible because [1] I can't use the website like I wanted to, [2] I have to go through the annoyance of downloading an app, which [3] almost never (fully never in my experience) has the advanced capabilities of the actual web site. I'm looking at you, YouTube, Blogger, SpanishDict, and also kind of Wolfram|Alpha because the app costs $5 while the real website is free and fully functional on real computers.

So, I am very happy that real laptops will be issued. I might actually be productive while sitting around in a class after the teacher says "you can do whatever you need to." And, of course, I will actually for the first time have a modern laptop.

Simulating Other People's Minds

I think I've figured out the secret to acting, at least in the sense of character philosophy. (Emotions are hard to simulate, especially if you don't have a lot of them.) Basically, you can act as or predict the actions of somebody if you can understand two things: philosophical postulates and the logic engine.

Philosophical postulates are things we hold to be the basics of how the world works. They are generally moral ideals or balances, like "some lives are more important than others." Different postulates will obviously produce a different person.

The logic engine is what takes the postulates, considers the current state, and makes a decision. Though I would love to use my own logic core, which I believe is very logical should be usable to compute from any set of postulates, some people allow emotions or "heat of the moment" to override the general postulates. This is distinct from those postulates because people starting with the same postulate set but different logic engines may factor physical state into different areas of computation.

I believe this technique is very useful both for actors and people who want to predict the actions of others. It shouldn't require psychoanalysis, but you may want to talk to the person you're trying to simulate first, for better results. Of course, if you have a record of that person's past decisions, make sure your interpretation of these components produces decisions consistent with what actually happened.

Testing Too Early

After getting a perfect score on a practice test on the material we've covered so far in driver's ed, I am apparently allowed to go to the DMV and get my learner's permit. This alarmed me somewhat. Basically, they gave me two pieces of formal paperwork, told me things to write on them, and said I could take them to the DMV whenever I wanted to take the real test for a LP.

I do not believe this should be possible. I have absolutely no documented behind-the-wheel training, and suddenly I can take a simple test that will allow me to actually operate cars? Even if I somehow fail (which is unlikely given my experience with farm equipment), I've been given the opportunity to handle a vehicle in a test - which assumes I know things - without ever studying. A driver's license is such an important thing; more (read: any) experience and training should be required.

Driver's Education

It has begun! Less than an hour ago, I left the driving school that will lead me to (hopefully) get my driver's license. The first half-hour was comprised of waiting in line to process some paperwork and choose some dates for driving tests. Once all that was done and the line behind me finished, we had 31 students in the class.

The other teacher (not the one I gave paperwork to) instructed us to read the first six chapters of the Rules of the Road book on our desks. Since I had already started reading it while waiting for the rest of the line to be processed, I finished the assigned reading quickly and started reading ahead. The last few minutes of the two-hour class were the most interesting: actually summarizing the reading. He said that the other classes will involve much less silent reading, which should be more interesting. We shall see.

Elasticity of Proximal Development

It's time for another theory of questionable plausibility!

A few months ago, I was extremely busy and extremely stressed. School was overloading me with all the things and I wasn't sure if I was going to make it through one particular week. It was around that time when I started to get back into ye olde DOS games that had taken up so much of my time a few years ago. It was this rediscovered joy that led me to rewrite FleexCore and, later, create Abiathar.

Remembering this sequence of events led me to a theory: pushing the proximal development envelope causes an elastic-like shift backwards in interests. If this is true, it may be useful in some sort of weird psychotherapy research environment to access the emotional stability, logic engine (something I'll write about another day), or just interests of the past.

This one is way more likely than the sentient superspace, but still on the untestable/ridiculous side.

The Immense Lost Details of History

In this world of information overload, it's fairly easy for people (and especially the government) to keep a very detailed record of other people's lives, who they interacted with, what small things they did, and generally everything most strangers don't care about.

While I was thinking about this, I began to comprehend the massive amount of history that has been lost to us. Since information recording and transmission (or retrieval, depending on your point of view) gets rarer/harder the farther back we go, it's impossible to know the fine detail of important historical figures' lives. They may have had all kinds of less interesting events going on that influenced decisions we think were made rashly or randomly.

If we just had access to the equivalent of the massive volumes of information the NSA (allegedly) has, we could have entire lives or disciplines dedicated to studying one mildly important person - or their interactions with other important people. Imagine: there could be a college class for the interactions between Albert Einstein and one of his teachers.

Who knows? Maybe the NSA will turn into a historical preservation and research information.

"Mystery and Victory" Concert

Just a little while ago, I came back home from viewing an album announcement concert at the local church. Its worship band just finished all the new songs for it and have made it purchasable, which I did. The church had been redecorated in a blue theme, matching the CD cover. After some of the songs, the color scheme in the lights switched to an intense orange, then later back to blue.

The entire experience was very good; it's very generous of them to provide the concert for free. It was called a "night of worship", but wow, that was amazing and definitely could have made some money.

Thanks to hbcd_worship for a great night!

The banner

Finals Intensify

Today I learned that the final exam for Spanish contains more parts than I thought. In addition to the normal one-hour reading/writing test, there are listening and speaking components as well. We took the listening part today in class; it was pretty easy. Tomorrow will be the speaking examination. It's actually very similar to what we did for Chinese: prepare a Spanish dialog with another person and perform it in class for the teacher to judge. I also took a non-final history test, which is the last one before we start reviewing the semester in class.

NHS Treasurer

Today in an NHS meeting, I said some things somewhat related to economics. As a result, they elected me treasurer. I will be holding that position starting immediately and continuing until next year's (2015) elections. I don't think the NHS chapter has complicated financial concerns, but if they do, I'm probably one of the most qualified to deal with them. We shall see.

Final Exams Engage

With the end of my first high school year coming up, final exams are things that I need to be thinking about. In fact, I have already finished the equivalent of a final exam for two classes, world literature and Chinese, both of which have something more like a final project.

In world literature, we each were assigned an area of folklore to research and do a paper and presentation on. I chose/received Greek and Roman mythology, which are essentially the same thing. I've fully finished the four-page paper, which is considerably less than I had expected the assignment to mandate. I'm not complaining, though. Presentations will happen later this week; I just need to touch up my PowerPoint draft and I'll be ready.

Chinese was a more interesting experience. The assignment was to, with a group,

MID-SENTENCE INTERMISSION: Split infinitive is no longer considered a grammatical error by leading grammarians and scholars.

create a dialog between people speaking Chinese and also write down the PinYin and traditional character representations. Each of us three students will play one role in the situation, in which one person introduces another to the last and they proceed to have a conversation. This conversation contains words and ideas from all the chapters we covered throughout the year, thus making the assessment suitable for a final exam. I just finished this a matter of minutes ago.

The classes I actually have to take real tests for are biology, history (world history), math (pre-calc), and Spanish.

Mother's Day

Yesterday at Chinatown, looking through the shops, I was searching for a gift for my mother, as today is Mother's Day. I came upon a tea pot of the type used by the Three Happiness Restaurant, which I visited yesterday and my mother visited the last time she was in Chinatown.

She seemed pleased

Story/reminiscing time: My family frequently calls my mom "Mummer" due to a mispronunciation I made when I was about five years old. I was trying to address her, but accidentally combined "mom" and "mother" to make "Mummer." It has remained ever since.

The Chinatown Trip

Today was one of the busiest and most interesting I have had for a long time. As I said yesterday, the Chinese class, some people who were in the Chinese class but no longer are, and a member of the senior class who is actually Chinese went to Chicago's Chinatown for a day of cultural immersion and exploration.

The car ride up (and down) took three hours, all of which I and the other student in the car slept through. Fortunately, neither of us were driving.

The restaurant the teacher had intended us to go to was closed for renovation, so we had to find a similar thing nearby, which fortunately wasn't too difficult - same restaurant type (Three Happiness Restaurant) but smaller. So instead of looking at real dishes, we looked at a menu to decide what types of dim sum to get for our table. Some of the more notable dishes I tried were (pardon the lack of real Chinese words):

• Extremely tough spare ribs
• Super salty ball of shrimp
• Noodle-wrapped chicken
• Sesame seed ball of red bean paste

I was actually fairly successful in using chopsticks. When we were all finished there, I was very full, as were the rest of the students. From there, we went on to peruse some shops. This happened for most of the day. A lot of the shops were very similar, with lots of Buddha statues, glass sculptures, fake swords, and a whole lot of other interesting stuff that I cannot identify with English words. At one such shop, I purchased a teapot, which I will hopefully use for holding tea.

We also went to a Chinese grocery store, which contained all kinds of interesting Chinese (surprise!) foods. I purchased a bag of White Rabbit candy, which is amazing.

There was a little museum of Chinatown history, which mostly contained information panels about Chinese festivals. On the second floor, we saw a short documentary about how Chinese men came to America during a gold rush, to Chicago via the then-newly connected railway system, and later brought their families to create Chinese associations in Chicago, which blossomed into Chinatown.

I didn't take a camera or any electronic device (and many shops prohibited photography), but some of my friends did take pictures, so I may be able to get some up later.

That was a really long and interesting day! Tomorrow, I have all the homework.

To Chinatown

The Chinese class in which I am a student is going to Chicago's Chinatown tomorrow; it's like a field trip but also an application of what we've learned about Chinese language and culture. It should also be a great opportunity to eat some new types of food or buy some unusual souvenirs. We'll be leaving at 8:30 AM and arriving back at the school at 9:30 PM, leaving us almost the entire day to explore Chinatown.

This is pretty exciting for me; I actually get to see some of the culture I've been learning about in the classroom. I'm not really big on shopping sprees and souvenirs, but I might get one to remember this trip.

More details and an account of what happens will appear tomorrow!

Newspaper Feature

Talking to people drains my energy; that's part of being an introvert. But I also really like to be recognized and talk to people about things that excite me, like Lojban or computer science. That's why I was really excited (not to mention surprised) when my school recommended me to be featured on the local newspaper's "student of the week" section.

They sent me a four-question questionnaire with some very vague questions like "what makes you happy?" I wasn't really sure what to talk about, so I did my best to mention Lojban and Abiathar and such as much as possible. With this and my recent entry into NHS, it seems - in the words of Londo Mollari - my star is rising.

The Mile

It seems that my frequent goings-out to run around the moderately large property have turned out to have been very worthwhile. The PE teacher, despite the suddenly warm and humid weather, decided to have my gym class run the mile today; it's one of the five national standard fitness tests. The course was a grassy soccer field, with some odd detours to make it exactly a mile after running around the perimeter four times.

I was not expecting a time any better than 8 minutes. To my shock, when I came in after the fourth lap, my time was 5:51, almost 2 minutes faster than my best. Since school graduation requirements mandate that everyone is involved in a sport in high school, I suppose I'll join crosscountry.

Clinton Chess Tournament, May 2014

Yesterday, I went up to another instance of the Clinton scholastic chess tournaments, in which I provide a simultaneous exhibition - playing all the students at once. The turnout for the tournament was decent, but almost all the players were brought there by my local chess club.

Playing the simul

Of course, I won all ten of the simul games. Some of the parents did hold out very well.

Ice Skating?

Well, I tried something new today.

My high school took all its students to the local ice rink for some skating. I had tried to skate once before, on a similar school trip in 5th grade, and failed miserably. Fortunately, it's been a few years, so I seemed to be a little more in control of my balance.

I managed to stagger over and onto the ice without falling down. Like most of the other people who had never skated before, I used the wall as a crutch and continued to remain upright, though some stumbling did occur. In an uncharacteristically brave moment, I let go of the wall and moved out toward the center of the rink. Of course, within moments, my feet went opposite directions and I fell.

I actually continued a cycle of moving around a little bit followed by falling for quite a while, bringing my total to eight in an hour. Near the end, I was actually able to move around with only some less-than-elegant rebalancing required. Like in most things, I did my best to figure out for myself how skating works, which resulted in a probably very strange version of procedures for such things, but it worked for me.

Like everyone says, trying new things is a good thing. I'll never be a hockey player, but this experience was enjoyable. My elbow still hurts, though.

NHS Induction

I have been inducted into the National Honor Society because I am honorable, and it is proved I am honorable by the fact that I am in an honor society.

Relevant. (Source: xkcd #703)

But anyway, infinite tautological recursion aside, the NHS is an organization that promotes the virtues of scholarship, service, character, and leadership. They apparently liked my essay, which made much of my work on Abiathar, which is a legitimately amazing thing, if you ask me. You can learn more about NHS at their website.

There were 9 inductees for NHS in my school's ceremony this year.

Dramatically lighting my candle

An Open Letter to Bundleware Installers

This might belong better at Fleex's Lab, but whatever; maybe I'll put it in both places. Anyway, it's an open letter to the people who make installers that bundle badware.

Just a few minutes ago I got infected by the Conduit bundleware/adware browser hijacker. It changed my default page in all my browsers and tried to register a bunch of useless extensions. I never would have gotten it out without the help of MalwareBytes Anti-Malware, which is by far the most amazing piece of software ever (made by some really awesome people too). This has happened to me before and is not really a big deal. The problem is that this kind of thing is bundled with some legitimately useful programs.

Why? Why is it necessary to annoy users with exceedingly awful programs that aren't even related to what's being installed? I want to use your software, I really do. But when you start putting in things like Conduit or the Ask Toolbar, you significantly damage my opinion of you. I don't really mind it so much if you give me and easy way to turn it off - yes, you get money probably maybe - but putting this stuff in no matter what I do is just despicable. How would you like every tool you every try to use installing ten toolbars and constantly injecting ads into your browser?

Just stop. Allowing users to be spied on and made vulnerable should end your career as a software developer. When I write a programmer's equivalent of the Hippocratic oath, I will be sure to include a promise to never compromise user's security for a little referral royalty money. I very much regret not consulting the Installer Hall of Shame before using these installers. (I'm not going to name the installers because I used two recently and I'm not entirely sure which one did it. I have a pretty good idea, but I don't want to needlessly damage anyone's public image.)

From now on, I will refuse to support in any way any application whose installer makes it needlessly difficult to avoid getting badware in the computer. I will make do without your services. I will find somebody else who gives me a shred of respect by not wrecking my UX. I call upon every citizen of the Internet to pester the companies who bundle things like Conduit until they remove it or make it clear what will happen.

:(

Brighter Dawns

A speaker from the Brighter Dawns volunteering organization gave a short speech at my school today. Before today, I hadn't heard of them, but they seem to be a good organization. Brighter Dawns establishes water wells, sanitation infrastructure, and some education to a focused region in Bangladesh (which has a high percentage of people without access to good water). Their mission is to help set up the necessary infrastructure, teach the people how to use it, and then let the people maintain it. As I've said, it seems to be A Good Thing.

Learn more about Brighter Dawns at their web site.

Third ACT Score

The official letter from ACT hasn't come in the mail yet, but NUMATS helpfully sent my new act score via e-mail!

35

Wow. That is - to be honest - better than I expected, even though I got a 34 last time. The day of the test, I was extremely tired (from performing the play the previous night). As usual, it seems Reading was my (relatively) weak area.

The Disadvantage of Hand Sanitizers

This is something that makes me a little upset. Throughout schools, public buildings, and most houses can be found an inordinate quantity of hand sanitizing stations, which spritz some strong-smelling stuff onto your hands that allegedly kill some number of germs that has a lot of nines.

Well, killing germs is great - who wants to be sick? But what happens to the 1% or 0.1% that survive and why did they survive? Answer: because they're tougher than the others that got killed. Without the flood of the Hand Sanitizer of Accelerated Natural Selection, the germs would compete for existence in a way that did not involve resistance to antibiotics - probably for space or access to unsuspecting cells.

Also, the human immune system, like the rest of the body, needs to be kept in shape. If I was to sit in my chair all day, my muscles would lose mass because I wasn't using them; the body regulates nutrients to the parts of the body that require them. Similarly, living in a perfectly sterile environment will cause the immune system - which takes a lot of resources - to be shut off. This is why farm kids playing in the dirt all the time tend to be healthier than those who walk through apartment buildings all the time; they're exposed to light attacks that can be easily dealt with, but keep the immune system necessary.

Hand "sanitization" is no substitute for hand washing. Washing the hands with soap and water kills germs and gets them off the body. Quick sanitizers have their place, but they should probably not be nearly as commonplace as they are.

Thanks to my father for first teaching me how things like this work.

Wolfram|Alpha

I spent a few minutes today messing around with Wolfram|Alpha, the well-known computational/knowledge engine. It can tell you more about or calculate interesting things based on almost any input that corresponds to an objective fact (like "birth rate Miami" or "sin x = 2cos x", not "most beautiful painting"). It can do almost computation and has access to insane amounts of information.

From just some English-like text, it puts together a query, the visual structure of which it displays conveniently under the search box. Then, in a matter of seconds, it produces all kinds of information about your query, and of course the solution if it was mathematical.

The Random button produces, well, a random query, presumably that somebody somewhere entered recently. I've received all kinds of interesting things from it, from math to maps to DNS. I could probably spend hours just trying to learn things Wolfram can do.

Relax

With the play over and a large biology project done (all the day before it's due, of course), my life has suddenly become significantly less busy. There's still all the normal classes and a speech coming up in a couple weeks, but for the first time in six months, I can come home from school when classes dismiss instead of being at some meeting for an hour and a half.

The result? Abiathar development will resume and I might get back to doing the YouTube thing. I recently had a really awesome and original idea for an LP series. First, though, I should finish up the LP of the Commander Keen mod I started a few weeks back. Free time is nice though, I don't really have to do any of that. We shall see.

Lights Down

Well, tonight was the second and final performance of the Radium Girls play (by D. W. Gregory). The entire cast, including the non-acting crew, has worked really hard. This performance was probably better than last night's, at least from my perspective. Fewer blocking points were missed, but there were some more issues with enunciation. Overall, though, costume changes were smoother and scene transitions might have been a little faster.

After the performance, much of the cast - including myself - went to a nearby Village Inn for some amazing food. I was intending to get only some dessert, but somehow ended up ordering a very hearty dinner plate involving chicken, mashed potatoes, corn, and a Caesar salad.

Despite the smallness of this post, today was a very eventful day - I even took the ACT (for the third time) in the morning.

"Now, now, Mrs. MacNeil. I'm sure that's not necessary."

Discussing lawsuits with company president & VP

"How can you say that you did not know?"

"Your Honor, we have yet to present our defense!"

Cast & crew group photo

Opening Night

It's the night we've been anticipating for three months: the opening night of the Radium Girls play at my school. As I've mentioned before, I play five roles, three named, two major:

• Edward Markley - lawyer for the US Radium Corporation
• Dr. Von Sochocky - scientist and founder of the radium company
• Dr. Harrison Martland - chief medical examiner of the county
• Store owner
• Salesman

The dress rehearsals last week rushed in big elements like props and costumes, which miraculously worked without a hitch in tonight's production. There were only a few minor slip-ups, essentially all of which were easily dealt with.

Talking about settlements with Raymond Berry (opposing lawyer, center) and Katherine Wiley (spokesperson, left)

Selling Venecine

Looking on in a board room

It was a great success. Tomorrow's performance should be even better!

Common Origins is not Common Ancestry

We're finishing up the evolution unit in biology right now, and of course I'm thinking about the creation versus evolution debate. A PowerPoint presentation displayed the striking genetic similarities between humans and chimpanzees (in addition to a few other related species), and later loudly proclaimed how it conflicted with "traditional views".

Note: this PowerPoint was not created by the teacher; it was borrowed from a teachers' resource collection.

The slides talked about how the genetic similarities - like similar bullet casing grooves at a crime scene - indicate common origins. I'll say right now that I don't take an issue with that. In just a few short words, it equated that with common ancestry. That's a very subtle equivocation; those concepts are quite different.

To have a common origin is to have been produced by the same process or agent. To have common ancestry (in this context) is to have evolved from the same older species back in time. I think the common origins of the similar-looking species do not harm the creationist viewpoint; in fact, they may strengthen it. A God creating all this life on Earth, and later humanity in His image, will keep a consistent "style".

Take, for example, some compiled applications which have inlined their dependency DLLs. If two applications depended on the same class library, they will share that code or at least most of it, depending on things like inheritance. Does that mean the executable files evolved through random chance? No! They were put together by an intelligent agent, in this case the programmer, wanting to re-use code to manage complexity.

Similar analogies could be made to (again programming) classes. If you override some of the methods of a class, you will get a new class with much the same behavior as the old, with some key differences - the changed and added methods.

This doesn't prove the creationist case, but it does correct a fallacy used to apply data to something it may not represent. Watch your wording.

Dress Rehearsal Time

The play Radium Girls will be presented this Friday and Saturday: just four days from now. Therefore, we have started doing extra-long dress rehearsals this week. They are seriously pretty long, going for four hours after school normally ends. A short dinner break is taken a little more than halfway in.

Fortunately, everybody is pretty solid on lines. The costume changes necessary from here on out are going to require some getting used to. I have five characters and therefore a nontrivial amount of changes, two of which can hold up the show if not done quickly. I also need to have accents to help the audience differentiate the characters I play, so there's that complexity as well.

Overall, it looks to be a great show. Technical aspects (lighting and sound) were almost fully worked out today, lines and character development are fairly solid, and we just need to get the props and costumes figured out the rest of this week.

Chess Variants

I just got home from a less-than-formal bughouse tournament at the local chess club. Bughouse is a very unusual variation of chess in which four players are split into two "teams" and one member from each team plays a member of the other team on a board. Pieces cycle through the boards and can be placed (almost) anywhere on the board in lieu of a normal move.

Strategy in bughouse is extremely different from that in normal chess, and though the games are played with the same pieces, chess and bughouse are totally different things. I feel that playing bughouse and other variants too often will corrupt my skill in real chess by subconsciously using tactics from the wrong game to internally generate possible moves.

Perhaps it would be better for everyone's chess skills if different-colored or -sized boards were used for playing bughouse. I suspect there could be some at-least-semi-valid psychological support for such a thing. That way, mental associations would treat the games more differently.