With four exams over, I only have one more to study for. The past week was rather uneventful. Exams aren't what they used to be. The only thing worth mention was probably that I forgot to study this one particular thing, and ended up spending fifteen minutes imagining cool shapes spinning around in space before I could answer the question.

Anyway, it has recently come to my attention that there is another version of Wikipedia, called the Simple English Wikipedia. It is directed to people who are learning English, or are not very good at the language. This is a good thing, there are many individuals who are attempting to learn the English Language, and receive an education at the same time.

However, there are a few things about the Simple English Wikipedia that I find... humorous. I feel bad when I laugh at it. I just can't help it.

Firstly, the URL is "simple.wikipedia.org". Now, what word comes to your mind when you hear "simple"? You think of "simpleton", and then an accompanying mental image of some Southern person with poor hygiene appears. You know, the kind that go fishing for catfish with their bare hands as a sport.

Big catfish, in muddy rivers... Let's just say that it's not exactly the safest activity ever.


Second of all, the articles are... Interesting. Here, have a look at an excerpt from the "magnetism" article:

"...then the north pole of the magnet will turn and point to the Earth's magnetic north pole (which is an big area of rock in Canada that contains a very big amount of iron in it)."

also, from the Big Bang Theory:

"...Because most things become colder when they become bigger, the universe must have been very hot when it started."

Hee hee hee.


I know, I'm a terrible person.


-Joe

Well, two days after Darwin Day, we celebrate the execution of whom we know now as Saint Valentine. Don’t you think it’s funny that we celebrate his execution, rather than his birth? Or some other interesting thing that he did? Being killed for committing a crime doesn’t sound like the way the guy would want to be remembered.

We also celebrate the decision made by Hallmark to suck fourteen billion dollars out of the world every year, just for this occasion alone.

Anyway, this day brings to mind several things, including chocolates, heart-shaped objects, actual hearts, and prairie voles.

(Because, see, the prairie vole is the only other mammal that can celebrate Valentine’s Day)

While people go around giving each other sweets and plant reproductive organs and such, not many of them think of why they’re doing it. Ask any of them, and they’ll most likely respond with “for love”, or “for friendship”. That’s all good and well, I guess. The Valentine’s Day tradition dates back to even before Hallmark thought about it.

Back when the Roman Empire was still around, the Pagans celebrated a holiday on the fourteenth, in honour of Juno Fructifier, Queen of the Roman Gods. Incidentally, she was also the goddess of marriage. One of the rituals involved every eligible woman writing their names down onto a piece of paper, and casting it into a box, which would then be mixed around. The men would then be required to pick a piece of paper from it. The ritual dictates that the two would have to become a couple for the day, and if they are willing, for the rest of the year.

So it’s sort of like a hybrid between Lotto and a matchmaking service. I wouldn’t be surprised if they still did that today.

Oh, but that’s not all. On the very next day, they celebrated Lupercalia, in honour of Faunus, the god of fertility. Part of the ritual involved men wearing goat-skins and running around, trying to hit women with little flails. Apparently, this was supposed to ensure fertility.

It is not specified what these little flails really are.


Anyway, the story goes that after Saint Valentine (the first, as well as the second and third) did all the stuff we’ve heard in the tales, the emperor of 469AD decided to have February fourteenth become a celebration in honour of Valentine. This pretty much gave the Christians a foothold in how the celebrations were carried out, and it seems that they have reigned supreme on Valentine’s Day.

At least until it was commercialised in the 20th century.

Mmm, chocolate.



-Joe

Well, hello everyone. Who still reads this.

Today is Darwin Day, the day that we commemorate the bicentennial of Darwin’s birth, as well as the sesquicentennial of the publishing of The Origin of Species. We all know about the theory of evolution by now, and it is probably thanks to that, that humanity’s knowledge of biology has advanced as far as it has now. After all, everything we have come up with regarding this wonderful field is based on this theory.

According to a National Geographic article I read recently, Darwin’s famous discoveries on the Galapagos Islands are merely the tip of a metaphorical iceberg that plunges much further into the depths of his journeys. The Galapagos Islands were in fact, near the very end of the HMS Beagle’s voyage.

Much longer before then, when Darwin could hardly have been considered a naturalist, the ship visited a variety of places along South America, where they encountered a number of fossil sites. Some of these, including a giant prehistoric armadillo and what could possibly have been a fearsome, eight-foot-tall sloth, were even named after Darwin himself. It was here that he noted some dissimilarities between different types of rhea(which were caught and eaten regularly by the crew) and possibly the time and place that some of his ideas of evolution-then called “transmutation”- began to take form.

Of course, never having really been a professional scientist of any kind, he could not have been able to make sense of what he saw. So he sent samples back to an ornithologist.


I’ve always found it funny that up until Watson and Crick, few of the major discoveries and revelations in biology have been made by actual scientists. Truth be told, I can only think of Fleming here. I’m sure there are more, but I’m not educated enough.

First we have Darwin, originally a clergyman, who finally put the theory of evolution into a book. Then, we have Mendel, who lived as a monk, who came up with the idea of “factors” that influenced an organism’s phenotype. I suppose all his free time and love for gardening were the main contributing factors to this discovery.

It’s too bad I’ll never discover any new genetic algorithms while playing video games.

Anyway, there is a surprising link between Charles Darwin and Francis Crick. Shortly before Darwin died, he was sent a sample of a tiny freshwater clam attached to a water beetle, and he actually wrote a short paper on it. The sender of the clam was named Walter Drawbridge Crick, who turns out to be Francis Crick’s grandfather.

The guy who dreamt up the structure of DNA while on LSD, was the grandson of a man who corroborated with Darwin. I found that to be quite an interesting coincidence.




-Joe

If there's anything that modern computer and internet usage should have by now, it is common address book formats for different email clients.

Quite recently, I realised how much more efficient Google Mail was compared to Windows Live Mail, which I am using now. I didn't need all the fancy graphics and other stuff that Windows Live offered, and Gmail is directly compatible with Mozilla's own email client: Thunderbird.

Thunderbird looks very similar to the older versions of Microsoft Outlook. It's small, fast, and doesn't have unnecessary fancy stuff. Also, having both Firefox and Thunderbird on my computer makes me feel like some awesome Pokémon trainer.

However, Thunderbird was where all my troubles began.

First, I had some trouble configuring Thunderbird for my Hotmail account. After some internet research, I learned that only a paid Hotmail account can be used on Thunderbird. So I had to scrap that idea.

Then, I noticed that I could use Gmail on Thunderbird, without going out of my way to put in all the email data things. Since I already had a Gmail account, I decided to just use that. Unfortunately, I ran into yet another problem. Thunderbird didn't seem to be downloading messages from my Gmail account. Messages were there on the browser-based Gmail, but not on Thunderbird.

I found this most strange, as I could send emails perfectly fine using Thunderbird. I just couldn't receive any. Because of this, I spent roughly three hours scouring the Google and Mozilla forums looking for a solution. Eventually, I think I found one that worked, because somehow Thunderbird began to receive new emails.

So, problem one was solved. Problem two: Switching to Gmail.

The main issue here was letting everyone know that I was going to start using a new email address. In order to do this, I needed some way to inform everyone. I figured that the easiest way to carry this out was to transfer my contact list to Thunderbird, and then send out an email telling everyone that this was my new email address.

Sounds simple, right? Well, I certainly thought so. That was, until I realised that in order for me to import a contact list to Thunderbird, I needed Windows Live Mail to export a contact list to a file on my desktop. It was working fine, until I found out that somewhere during the export-import procedure, the contact information and the fields they were under somehow got totally mixed up. I ended up getting contact information with email addresses under the "name" field, and other crap.

So then, after tweaking the settings around a bit, I sort of managed to get the names and email addresses under the right fields. After which, I realised that only about a quarter of my contacts made it over to Thunderbird, for some reason.

I later concluded that this was because I was only exporting instant messaging contacts. I was wrong. The real problem lay in that the CSV file was having trouble, due to that a lot of my contact information wasn't filled in. Some people had no name, for example.


Now this was really annoying, so I turned to the browser-based Windows Live Mail, hoping that the export function there would work properly. As it turns out, it doesn't even work. I click "export", and I get sent to a blank screen. There's nothing there.

Now, this sort of defeated me. I couldn't think of any way to do this without manually editing everything. I decided to handle the problem of letting everyone know that I was changing my email address first.

This brought along an entire new set of problems. I couldn't find a function to mail everyone, so I stuck every contact into a mailing list. Then, when trying to mail to that list, Windows Live Mail told me that there were some contacts in there with no email addresses!

Naturally, this made me feel like kicking a puppy, and then lighting it on fire.

Fortunately(or unfortunately), I neither had a puppy nor a large volume of flammable substance nearby. As such, I gave up and decided to handle this another time.

Which is now.


-Joe

I am the lord of Tetris! Tetrominos all bow at my feet. They cower in fear as I slot them into each other, regardless of their configuration. And then they go explodey, allowing me to slot yet more 4-blocks into their quivering piles.

Facebook Tetris is fun. The colours of the L pieces are different from what I am used to though.


I should probably not have been playing Tetris, given that I have not even come close to finishing my revision. I do have an entire week off next week though. Still, knowing myself, I won't use that week very well.

However, you can't fault me. I have reasons. First reason is that on the 12th, it is Darwin Day, when people commemorate the naturalist's bicentennial. I think. So, as a supporter of teaching evolution in schools, I am taking that day off to demonstrate natural selection. This will be done by slacking around and making myself appear to be a poor reproductive partner, thus lowering my chances of having progeny for the day.

Not that I have a very high chance of having progeny on regular days.

Or maybe, I will spend the day imagining how it would be like if I could segregate and breed humans in different manners, hopefully one day creating a race of super-human, who are smarter, faster, and are able to tell jokes without laughing uncontrollably themselves.

Hmm. Maybe those two activities could be performed at once.



Unfortunately, it is far more likely that I will spend the day lolling around in a metaphorical tar-pit of boredom. It is also likely that I will spend some time imagining what it would be like to be a wizard.

See, the whole problem with wizards in the movies is that they never use the full extent of their powers. Gandalf is a very good example of this. Gandalf, a Maiar of Valinor, possessing the ring of power Narya, is supposed to have god-like wisdom and magical prowess. He does slightly more magic in the novel, but the only key instance that I remember clearly was when he set a forest on fire to scare away some wolfy beast things.

You'd think that a wizard of such power could have done something else, less destructive and more useful. Like maybe make a dinner of wolf meat.

The problem lies in that an all-powerful, nigh invulnerable adventurer makes for an extremely dull story. It would be fun at first(at least for RPG mage fans) to watch a wizard blow stuff up with relative ease. But then he will just stroll along smiting bad guys and saves the day, without any proper climax or risk of an apocalyptic event coming to pass.

However, people like their heroes to be powerful. So, the story-writers try to fulfill this requirement without turning the plot into an ass-kissing tale about the protagonist. When your main character is an unstoppable force, your bad guy needs to be an immovable object. Enter Superman and kryptonite.

I have a theory. Lex Luthor is not the main villain of Superman. The villain is really kryptonite. Lex Luthor is just an enterprising businessman, who happened to see the value of the green meteor rock. The fact that he does villainy things like stealing cakes is irrelevant. You can say that the kryptonite business made him so rich that he was bored enough to do things like that.

My point is, that whenever Superman faces Lex Luthor, Lex just throws a glowing green rock at him and the actual fight happens between Superman and the kryptonite. They don't actually show it on the screen, but I'll bet that there is some intense mental battle between Clark Kent and the green crystal.

Ultimately, Superman always loses, until some other event occurs that breaks up the fight between him and kryptonite. Even though Superman loses, he never dies. Thus, it can be said that the battle between Superman and kryptonite is ultimately never resolved either. There you go: Unstoppable force and Immovable Object.


...man, what am I talking about?


-Joe