Politically Incorrect


You are Fascist

What: Fascism
Where: At the distant bottom-right of the political spectrum

How: Fascism supports total civil oppression, particularly for minorities, who were prosecuted. However, it does open up to a free market. It has been attempted and failed in countries including Italy, and socialist version of it called Nazism was tried in Germany.
What political extremity are you?


Ah, crap, there goes all hope I had of being somewhat liberally minded and a political free-spirit.

Why I Don’t Use Standard IM Clients

Wired posts this article about the instant-message wars. Let me just say that this is exactly why I use Cerulean Studios Trillian and the open-source IM client Gaim (both Windows and Linux versions) to access all my IM accounts.

Advertising is annoying. AOL Today is annoying. In fact, anything that pops up without your consent in an IM client is annoying. Fine, so Trillian and Gaim don’t have all the bells and whistles, but I don’t care about flashy crap, I care about functionality, ease of use, and accessibility. Ironically, these two clients actually have much better functionality in some cases than their rival IM clients distributed by America Online, ICQ, Microsoft Network, and others. It depends on what you look for. All I want to do is talk to people. Screw the rest of it.

When It Just Won’t Make Sense

“Suddenly, the idea of expected value doesn’t make sense to me.”

The second I heard that out of the mouth of our discrete mathematics faculty, who is supposed to know what expected value is and how to explain it, I got just a little worried. He did manage to explain it, but it was still quite odd to hear someone who carries a Ph.D in Mathematics admit that such a “simple” concept in combinatorics didn’t make sense.

(For those wondering, the expected value is more akin to the average value of an outcome — that is, it’s an expression of the value most likely to occur. At least, that’s my understanding of it. An example — if you roll two dice, you can calculate the expected value that the two die will land with a sum of seven.)

So, yeah. Watch out for Ph.D’s who suddenly admit that basic concepts make no sense to them.

Truth in Magnetic Poetry

“Be ugly though fast as tongues.”

Thus spake the magnetic poetry muses as I fiddled with the magnetic poetry set we have up in the Writing Center this afternoon. For some reason, I found this to have a very faint glimmer of truth, depending on how you interpret it. You can interpret it as being an ugly person, yet being able to run fast. This isn’t really the one I was thinking of. No, the interpretation I like is being ugly as in being truthful, yet being quick enough to realize the power of your words and work accordingly.

Okay, this may seem as if it is quite a stretch to some, but think about it. Words have a power over us that is undeniable — if used in the right way, they wield an enormous amount of influence. The issue at hand is not tact, but rather, honesty: we should be honest enough to say what we think, but careful enough to make sure we also say what we mean. This is a lesson a lot of people never truly learn.

To me, it is a valuable lesson, and guides my tutoring work at the Writing Center. I tutor knowing that honesty is the best policy, and I’m unafraid to tell someone that their work has problems or to discuss those problems within the framework of the piece. The trick is to do it in such a way that it comes across as an impression about the writer’s work, rather than a criticism.

My two cents about the work I do.

Programming Doom and Chaos

If you’ve never done any programming whatsoever in an imperative language such as Java, C, C++, and the like, this post will likely make very little sense and will not be funny in the least. I assure you, humor is intended.

An online friend of mine, Sean Paul-Rees, came up with this coding gem:

if(doom)
chaos();

He made an interesting point — “doom” is a very subjective thing. Now, the way I see it, since doom is necessarily boolean according to its format in the if statement, you could select doom based on a switch statement on a specific constant value.

However, doom is subjective, so such a structure is relatively impractical. Nested if/else statements would seem to be the key, since we’re looking for particular conditions.

Now, what conditions do we test…? Well, we’d have to assume a specific definition for what “doom” means before we started defining the code. Do we see doom as something akin to Armageddon (in which case testing is extremely complex) or simpler (in which case testing is still extremely complex)? I suppose it depends on your political slant, religious beliefs, and whether you think simple things can be equated with doom. The example Sean gives is that simply doing homework can be attributed as doom, but my reply to that is that it depends on what you’re doing in life — not everyone does homework all the time, every moment in their lives…

An aside: for those wondering, Sean points out that the coding of the chaos() function is easy in a UNIX/Linux environment; just delink /dev/null. My two cents — it’s even easier in a Windows environment (I’ll leave the question of how to your imaginations).

Internet Taxes and Bus Service

Oy, not again. Why is it we just can’t seem to get it right on the issue of Internet taxes? Either pass a law banning them or enact them already.

Anyway, not all that much else to report. Spent the entire day watching more movies (is that really a shock?) and mostly just sat around. Stargate SG-1 rocks, yo. Someday, I’ll pick up Season 6 and do my normal, watch-a-disc-a-day routine. I’ll probably do the same with West Wing Season 2, Law & Order – The Second Year, C.S.I. Season 3, and, potentially, all five seasons of Babylon 5. Someday.

It’s odd, I’m not really the type that likes to get off campus. I don’t know, I suppose I’m more of a homebody. Not sure why I’m so adverse to getting off campus (which I will admit is incredibly ironic given that I’m looking to live off campus next year). I suppose it’s just that I don’t like being bothered to wait to do things. I’d rather be able to do them without taking a half hour or more on the bus on weekends to go the equivalent of about ten miles to get to Capitol Mall. Why Intercity Transit cuts service to the College via Route 48 during the weekends, I will never, ever understand — that’s when most students on campus want to get to Capitol Mall and surrounding area. Instead, to get there, you catch Route 41, either out of the Housing bus loop or the main campus bus loop and ride about 15 minutes to Harrison and Division, which Route 48 runs along during the weekends. See, it’s not that Route 48 stops entirely; no, it merely stops serving the college.

Gripe of the day.

Technology, Google, Aliens, Dictators, and Proliferous Links

To sum it up: OpenOffice works better than PowerPoint, Microsoft finally clued in to the open source initiative, and Hell froze over and pigs flew (see the April 7th entry in this link entitled “Runway clear for takeoff”). Okay, so I’m a little behind in catching this stuff, but it’s still noteworthy. Isn’t technology just cool?

Oh, and Google might finally be filing for an IPO (after how long…?)

Well, err, none of that really impacts my personal life. My girlfriend surprised me with a visit this weekend; swore she was going up to Bellingham but came down here instead. One of my good friends came over, and we ended up watching Alien and Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, filmed in 1940.

Anyone else noticed my propensity to link proliferously in this blog so far..? :)

TESC Student Governance

For those who don’t know, I attend The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. There’s been a big movement on campus lately to create a student governance system — for reasons unknown, a college well-known for being liberal and having opinions about everything has never had one.

I do support this movement, but I’d just like to say that I urge caution. There seems to be a propensity for completely misrepresenting the movement; to think that we can affect anything but policy by doing this is just plain dumb (and misleading, besides). We, as students, have been quiet for a long time regarding having a voice in things around here, and my belief is that suddenly being very loud will simply make the administration not want to listen. Small steps.

Hydrogen in California

In California, Governor Schwarzenegger issued Executive Order S-7-04 on April 20, establishing a California Hydrogen Highways Network. It’s been reasonably well known since the Governor took office that he would be big on environmental issues (the clue was his conversion of his Hummer to hydrogen fuel, not to mention that it was a campaign pledge), but is this too big of a leap?

Hybrid gas/electric cars are all the rage at the moment (my particular favorite is the Toyota Prius 2004, highly rated by Consumer Reports, though the Honda Civic Hybrid is also very interesting). Hydrogen, however, has some concerns, such as reliability, accessibility, and safety (specifically, some concerns I seem to remember reading about surrounding the volatility of hydrogen causing highly inconvenient explosions — I could be wrong). Oh — not to mention cost issues. In fact, there was a story by Reuters in March of last year that suggests that hybrids are far more efficient in the long run.

The Governor has taken the first step to help the infrastructure of possible hydrogen-based transportation; the question in my mind: is this a waste of time and money?

An Introduction

Yay! First entry in a new blog!

So, for those who don’t know me, my name’s Peter. I’ll use this space mostly for my own random thoughts, ideas, discussions, and whatnot — think of it as a creative space and a place where I will work out ideas and thoughts, with the added benefit of an audience.

I make no assurances as to whether this will be kept up-to-date or not; this is another attempt at blogging in the hopes that it works out better the second time than it did the first.

Want to find out a little bit about me? Check out Apeiron: Systematic Expansion.