I met a couple people here who run Boston, one who's run it 6 times (also was part of 214 mile relay, ouch) and another who is one of those people who kind of have a permanent scowl on their face. One lecture the professor stopped and asked her if she understood the concept she was explaining, extolling, living vicariously through, lobbying for, loving, living, and pushing on those whose direction and ease of passion is directed elsewhere. She replied with a deadpan "No, that's just my face." Very very good. Quick turnaround, to boot.

What is funny? What defines humor? Humor in a nutshell: go. Humor in 10 words or less. That which makes you laugh? Unsatisfyingly broad. Any takers?

Also, is grammar important? Is it something we should pay attention to? Be mindful of? (prepositions at ends of sentences)

I intend to follow up on these questions.

The plastic bag was a bad invention. Here we are some 50 years later or whatever, and we find ourselves eschewing the need for the plastic bag due to environmental concerns. Now we say, "no thanks I don't need a bag", I'll carry it without. Why didn't we do that from the beginning? Stupid. We ran in a circle on that one. Think about it. We spend all this time putting groceries into bags, then we get home and have to take them out. Why not just pick up your shit and put it into a cart and unload it into your car and save yourself steps. Plastic bags don't get you anywhere, especially if the consensus is that they are wasteful as well.

How long would you walk if you were rewarded $100 each hour and you had to keep some minimum speed? You could have anything you wanted during that time as long as you kept your velocity quota: hamburgers, gatorade, TV mounted on following truck, etc. Would you walk till you dropped? How many days could you walk given unlimited resources? I'd walk until my debt was gone but I prolly wouldn't make it, physically. Another analagous question I had was how long could you survive on a diet of water, beer, chips, and salsa?? Email me if you want to try.

I'm hungover right now and it sucks. I hate hangovers mostly because they depress your brain and force you to endure a day full of wishing that day was a different day. And yet, if we didn't have hangovers many of us would die a lot younger. So they are in a sense a sort of built-in preserving buffer. A harassing one. (Or is it an harassing one?)

I'm pro-inflation so the current economic depression is a good thing for me. Helps my debt. Also helps my argument that the penny should be done away with. 1 cent is simply useless. I throw all of my pennies away as if they were the trash that they actually are. Which helps inflation because it forces the government to print more, which only makes the penny even more useless, driving the senseless closer to their senses, and sooner to the discontinuation of this laughable metal mixture. We should align taxes and sales to nickel increments, facilitating the assumption of the penny to its rightful place in the annals of history.

Intellectualization is a Freudian defense mechanism, rated "neurotic" and Level III by George Vaillant (Level IV is optimal or mature), that many people use to rationalize or justify emotionally distressing events in their lives. I actually think I can cite a specific example of the use of intellectualization in almost every single person I know. How then can it be labelled neurotic? Certainly we are all "neurotic" to a certain extent and in certain circumstances, but if most people rationalize then why not label it "normal"?

Y.E. Yang won the PGA championship today, the first man to defeat Tiger Woods in 15 tries when Tiger has led going into Sunday and, more importantly, the first Asian-born man to win a major golf championship. After China's successful bid to host the Olympics last year and the resounding success of the games themselves (minus the pollution biz), China's burgeoning world economy, Japan's monopoly on visual entertainment of many kinds (seriously, especially with younger people), are we seeing the milestones and harbingers of the Eastern rise and consequently the Western fall? Should we prepare for an invasion of Calilfornia in the 2060s? Should I learn Chinese?

Various people, fields in general, and employed strategies share a method of categorizing and classifying in life. Psychiatrists diagnose, taxonomists create detailed trees, and astrologists demarcate a fixed number of types of people. Why do we do this when we know that life is too complicated to fix into a particular shape? Surely to craft meanings but should we embrace a methodology we know is somewhat futile?

Central to the question is the value of derived generalizations. Should we impose generalized lessons backed by empirical evidence knowing very will the limitations of both generalizations themselves and study parameters? Or should we rely on ourselves individually, taking more of a figure life out for yourself approach? As yet I don't have a position on this question, I just know that social scientists prefer the former and Emerson and Thoreau the latter.

Another drought in the blog, this time because of a road trip out West.

At Bryce and Zion foreign tourists swamped the place like Americans swamp Europe. In fact, it felt more like a European destination than any place in America. Most of the people at the major centers were not speaking English (mostly French, out to see the wild wild west). It makes me think that, contrary to what some people say, Americanization is not synonymous with globalization. This is an example in microcosm of what you actually find in the world.

I've been fucking busy and vice versa!

Yesterday eve Cass and I went to Specs after months of waiting and bought an assortment of specialty beers. After spending an hour perusing the beer aisles accomplishing nothing save increased levels of bewildered excitement, an employee approached with information and recommendations. After a few minutes with him, he went into the back (of a specialty store, remember) and produced the sole possessed bottle of the Great Divide's Chocolate Oak Aged Yeti Stout, which I'm understandably excited about.

Speaking about excitement, Hobgoblins! It's all in the name - Hobgoblin Dark English Ale. Evocations of fantasy, wildness, magic, mischief, you know, all the good things in life. Wychwood has cool graphics on their labels too. So I'm christening or coining (interesting terms etymologically) new slang: a hobgoblin - something you get excited about.

NPR (National Public Radio) is great. Usually the music is good, the discussions on "All Things Considered" are always well articulated on interesting topics, and the humor is on. I'm leaving it on full time in the car from hence forward. Is this post merely an endorsement of NPR, is this what you get for waiting all week? Yes. So long from Lake Wobegon, where the women are strong, the men are good-looking, and the children are above average.

Polyphasic sleep! Remember this awesome craze? I do...and it was awesome. IT IS AWESOME! Many phases of sleep, like a baby, sleeping in intervals ad nauseum. Cult blogger Steve Pavlina popularized the idea of adults returning to this sleep schedule as it would allegedly provide more total waking hours with the same amount of restfulness - all resting on the explanation of increased sleeping efficiency. The general idea is to have six 30 minute naps every four hours for a total of 3 sleeping hours, or, alternatively, 21 waking hours each day. Pavlina tantalized readers with the new lifestyle's perks: picking up new hobbies, engaging in activities that time constraints had hitherto precluded, having more social time during the day, working left for late night hours, having increased funds resulting from more total hours worked (self-employed), etc. Ultimately Pavlina returned to a normal monophasic sleep schedule as the detrimental social and family effects began to outweigh the benefits. Putting aside the paucity of long term effects research and the ability of a person to successfully transition to the schedule itself (supposedly a real bear), are there not some people who could benefit from polyphasic sleep?

John and nicotine R.I.P. July 15, 2009. I've quit for good. Well, for a long time. I won't say I'll never smoke another cigarette cuz that would kind of suck. But I've smoked around a cigarette a day for the past year and that is something I am stopping. Nicotine is addictive for sure and I understand what the addiction feels like, where exactly it gets you. But we're done now. Force of will always prevails IF the desire to execute the will actually matches. I'm confident enough that I will a hang potential public ignominious reputation in the balance (so many readers of this blog!). Or maybe by declaring my will to the public thousands I embolden said will? No, seriously, it's the former.

The problem with psychology is lack of specificity. The discipline really could be split and absorbed into both philosophy and biology, but the intersection is important and certainly interesting, thus the field. Nevertheless it suffers from this wishy washiness, either ending in abstract conclusions that could be reached philosophically or in concrete conclusions that could be reached biologically (history actually also suffers from this problem, that it could be subsumed into other disciplines, history of politics in politics, history of theology in theology). Of course, life is wishy washy itself and to a certain extent, results direct and consistent may or may not provide salient insights into the question at hand, and surely psychological inquiries often fit this mold - indeed results that encapsulate the flux and inconsistency of life may be psychology's greatest value.

Lack of specificity in psychology often emerges in the form of experimental data. You can find experimental results that both refute and support a psychological hypothesis and the solution of narrowing the hypothesis has the lackluster effect of producing hypotheses of less and less interest or import. The bane of psychology may simply be that its field hovers over the mind which is the least understood, least quantifiable, and possibly most abstract thing to attempt to subject to science. We should by no means abandon psychology, rather we should further encourage the pursuit of psychological questions and the field itself, but psychology does suffer from this lack of specificity, and as such, must further become a highly interdisciplinary, interdependent field.

Blue Planet is so exciting and good.

I've neglected posting for a while because I've been busy travelling. On the 4th Cass and I went up to the Eagle's Nest, a secluded alcove of a spot high high high up in the Bavarian Alps. Martin Bormann conceived of the idea as a 50th birthday gift for Hitler. The mountain that it's built on had no previous structures; it's a gorgeous area, untraversable during winter, prone to sudden fog and showers, with fleeting sunlight, all which gives the whole place an ephemeral atmosphere. Hitler used it for official occasions, entertaining/impressing ambassadors and diplomats, etc., a grand total of 14 times, with perhaps as many private visits. The inflation adjusted cost of the project - $150 million, which means his visits cost somewhere around $5-6 million each. I wonder if Bormann thought about this five years later when Hitler was encouraging Berliners to cut basic supplies to support the then failing war effort. When Bormann told him about the project initially Hitler said, "Oh well, I probably won't use it much," which was true.

Punting.

Tonight I observed for the second time in a new variety a simple way to scam people of their money. You use a 50 point bill to attract people in hopes of winning it by gambiling. You scramble three covers of some sort over a single ball and you do it quickly. The rig comes with having the player step on one of the covers before they choose which they think the ball is under. Somehow this eliminates the ball under that cover and produces a different ball under the other (it must happen this way, or some version of that). The allure comes with possibly winning the 50 point bill with your bet of a 5, 10, or 20. Sometimes you pick the cover with the ball under and take the 50 point bill. But the guy doesn't care who wins and who loses, as long as more people lose their smaller point bills (which he pockets) during more games in which those losses add greater than 50 than a winner takes one of the 50 point bills. He can even produce new 50 point bills when somebody wins as long as he rigs the game enough times to make up for it, with successive losses for the betters losing smaller point bills. Saw it first with soccer balls in Paris and second here in Barcelona with marbles.

My mom and James came to Oxford last week and we all went on a road trip cept Tim cuz he had finals through northern Wales, Scotland, and much of England. We went to London as well and saw a bunch of shit. I don't want to report the whole itinerary so I'll just say it was really fun and York is a cooler city than New York cuz it's surrounded by a wall. One of Tim's friends told me during poker that in Barcelona (where I am now) I should find this place that sells Cava y hamburguesas for 5 euro. So that's what we're gonna do.