Blog: Articles from March 2007

Today in chemistry my two friends and I somehow got on the subject of the Muffin Man and his place of residence. Being Mythbusters fans, we agreed that the Mythbusters should test the myth of whether a muffin man does, in fact, reside on Drury Lane.

Meanwhile, the Build Team can see if ogres really do have layers…

And that brings us to a new poll!

Almost a year ago, I blogged about the season 2 finale of Battlestar Galactica.

I was upset then, or shocked would be the term, I guess. I got over it though, and the finale was one of the best episodes thus far. This season’s finale, however, has raised that bar to a whole new level.

In case you haven’t realised yet, this post contains severe spoilers that may blind those who have not seen the episode. If you don’t want the surprise ruined, stop reading right now. I mean it. Don’t you dare peek below this line. If you do, I’ll have to send someone over to your house. That’s right—I know where you live. Want to fight about it? Oh, you do, do you? Eh? Eh?

Anyway.

The music at the end of the episode was awesome, as was the pull back to the entire galaxy and subsequent zoom in on Earth. However, aside from the technical details, the episode itself was … whoa.

I was fairly sure Tigh was a Cylon, since he was hearing the music. Tori surprised me, and Anders too, although in retrospect I can see where the pieces start coming together. I loved this season finale, especially for the part where they realise that they are Cylons and go back to doing their jobs anyway. You know what I can’t wait for? Not for Adama’s reaction to finding out Tigh is a Cylon—no, that will be interesting, but what will be more interesting is the look on Cavil’s face. Realising that he took out the eye of a guy who is another Cylon … this is going to put a crinkle in their plans for humanity.

Frankly, I expected Baltar’s acquittal. It just wouldn’t be Battlestar Galactica without Baltar around as a testament to humanity’s darker side, to its weaknesses. He survived—which is, as Lee pointed out, what this has been about from the beginning. Surviving. Finding Earth. And Starbuck? Yeah, she isn’t dead. But where did she go? Is she really back, or is Lee just hallucinating? The finale brought up a lot of questions. Who is the final Fifth Cylon? Gaeta, with his betrayal of Baltar? Roslin, with her sharing of visions with the known Cylons on the ship? I dunno. I guess we have to wait until January to find out.

Gah! January. I’m kind of disappointed by that, but then again, there isn’t much I can do about it. We do get two hours in between to tide us over, little windows into the BSG universe’s past—flashbacks that apparently set up season four. I don’t know what it’s in store, but it’s good television, so I’ll keep watching.

I found this neat site, GameKnot, where you can play long term chess games against people. This appeals to me, because I can make moves at my convenience instead of setting to side an entire hour block of time or so and committing it to a chess game.

My username is tachyondecay. If you have an account, or you fancy yourself a chess player and want to sign up, challenge me to a game.

If I look out my bedroom window, I can see spring arriving in the pond that used to be my backyard. The snow—which is actually now semi-frozen ice—and the ice proper beneath it is melting, flooding entire portions of my backyard. The end of a little ice age.

Bits of autumnal debris slowly raise themselves up from the muck: leaves and branches, planks of wood. Hey, look, a shovel. The meltwater flows around these objects, pooling at the depressions in the yard. It flows around the garage too, and the wood and barbecue sheds. This microcosmic clash of human urbanity and nature strikes a chord in me, because it demonstrates how much humans have shaped the face of the Earth.

If I look up from the ground, straight ahead, I can see the houses behind mine, the ones across the back lane that face outward to another street. And beyond them, more houses. Two or three storeys high, that’s all. I don’t live in a crowded metropolis like New York, nor a sparsely-populated rural area like Kakabeka. And that makes the subtle distinctions even more refined, because I‘m at that midway point, where we’ve built up our suburbs, but nature is still evident in the carefully manicured boulevards and precisely planted birch trees.

It’s the ice, though, that gets me. The ice melts and flows around our man-made structures. I look across the yard and notice that during the winter it was entirely covered by snow and ice. Patches of brown grass are seeping through now. And I wonder, what would this look like without the buildings? Why, it would be a huge plain of ice, ice covered by snow, snow being blown about by a wind that was free of the interference of tall buildings. Such places, I hear, do exist, for I have seen them on TV.

Humans (at least those of Westernized culture) are quite backward creatures really. We gave Darwin a miss and decided that, instead of adapting ourselves to the environment, we should merely adapt the environment to ourselves. Heck, we can move mountains if they are in our way. The mere existence of the word “cityscape”, (which Firefox does not mark as incorrectly spelled, even though it believes “Firefox” doesn’t exist) emphasises how we’ve shaped the Earth.

I‘m not drawing any real conclusions here, nor are these observations all that original or revolutionary. But it’s good to stop and think about this stuff once and awhile. Again, as a species we‘ve sort of removed ourselves from the environment and created this own, extremely elaborate fictitious universe that we collectively inhabit. It’s only healthy to break way from that fantasy every so often and actually look at the world around us.

If you look on the sidebar of the homepage you may notice a shiny new blue box with a question in it. You Choose the answer to that question.

Yes, it’s a poll. It is my latest pet project. Some of you may have noticed the abundant “ghost options” appearing in my other poll, powered by idioPoll. I was getting tired of this bug, so I decided to write a poll script myself when I got the time. Compared to a blog or a guestbook, a poll isn’t as hard. It certainly took less time overall to code. The project posed some challenges on its own—figuring out how to store and relate the data was a bit of a poser. Overall though, I‘m rather proud of what I’ve accomplished.

If you haven’t voted yet, take a moment to check out my favourite jQuerified feature: those of you with JavaScript enabled can click the “Results” button and instantly see the results before voting. Those of you without JavaScript must suffer through a page reload. Anyway, go ahead and vote—and then you have to wait 24 hours before you can vote again! In that poll, at least. Maybe if I can think of some more poll questions I’ll switch it from one poll to a randomly selected poll. Yes, with You Choose, you can display a random poll!

Why “You Choose”? Well, I had a difficult time coming up with a name, as some of you might recall. Eventually I decided that “___ Poll” was too generic. I wanted something a bit more original than that. So this sort of popped into my head. In hindsight it sounds like I’m ripping off YouTube but … meh. You can’t win ’em all. You can barely break even.

This is all part of my valiant and somewhat vain campaign to rescue my site from the laws of thermodynamics. I’ve also changed the links section to randomly choose 10 links from a table, so that way you get a little refreshment (plus it’s easier for me to maintain). Next I have to fix up some design issues and whatnot.

You Choose is still in beta. I rushed it to completion because I was anxious to have it up and running on this site. Even so, if you want to tinker, feel free to download it and try it out.

If you haven’t seen it already, you need to watch Karl Fisch’s Did You Know? presentation. My history teacher showed us the version by Scott McLeod (which removes the school-specific slides).

You can watch it on YouTube, and I encourage you to do so. It’s quite impactful. At first glance they might seem just like statistics, but take a moment to just consider the ramifications of the statements. We have moved from a local society to a global village in a few hundred years.

The frightening thing is that we are showing no sign of slowing down—as a species, we are continuing to progress at a geometric level. As a graduating student who is about to enter the “real world” of university, employment, and life as an adult, the idea that careers and our level of information exchange may be radically different in ten years is disconcerting, to say the least.

We have also discussed the nature of memory in class as well. Medieval peasants had incredible memories; they couldn’t write down information, so they had to remember it. Nowadays, we can find information through a variety of resources. Of course, the amount of information that we use has vastly increased as well. The presentation’s estimates of our sum total of knowledge, and its increase, is staggering. That’s just for the human species. Imagine how much information comprises the total universe?

Is this a good thing? A bad thing? I don’t know. I think that there’s elements of both to the changes in society. The most important thing is to be aware of these changes, to acknowledge the fact that life isn’t a steady-state universe. And we have to be ready to implement our own change, for better or for worse, if we see something we don’t like.