Gateway is cool. My stepdad called them up to see if we could exchange our speakers (on our 1-year old computer) for some that had a headphone jack. They said yes. So now we’ve got speakers really similar to the old ones, except *much* louder with much better bass and a headphone jack. Word. These things are putting out freakin’ massive sound. All free, too.Only a real sports fan would understand. I’m still pumped about New England winning the SB, but since I don’t live there, it’s not quite the same. If I lived in, say, Chicago and the Cubbies pulled off an upset, I’d be celebrating in the street just like this guy. Wanna hear a funny sports story? I was at the Hill-SE game the other night, and had to sit on the South side during the first half since none of my c-hill buds came (I learned at halftime that Will was over there, but I didn’t see him). So I’m still cheering for hill, of course. And JR Morgan walked by and yelled “You have no game, JR” at him as he was going up the court. The kid is damn good, but I couldn’t believe how much trash he talks during the game, heh. Anyway, I get whacked on the back on the back of my head by someone. And Jessica Sissom goes “You’re gonna get beat up if you keep saying that.” I said “Don’t worry, I’m not scared of anyone at South, except maybe, I dunno, Chris Ware.” She goes “That is Chris Ware.” I turned around and he was scowling at me. This guy is a freakin’ beast, heh. Quite scary.

I got some other cool news yesterday. USC sent a letter and I get to go down there in 3 weeks! I won a quarter-tuition scholarship at least, but they’re going to do an interview and if they like me, I can get a half or full-tuition scholarship. That would be sweet. Quarter-tuition doesn’t sound like much, but 25,000 clams is 25,000 clams. I’ve been getting strange stuff like that all week in my mail. Today, Gillette up and decided to send me a razor (one of the Mach3 ones, pretty nice, though I use electric anyway). It said inside “Happy 18th Birthday!” While I thank Mr. Gillette for remembering, I’m sorta curious as to how they know how old I am, heh.

This guy is one of the smartest guys I’ve ever heard of. He comments on Metafilter and I can’t say I’ve ever found any mistake by him. He’s writing about American “Cultural Hegemony”. Absolutely nailed it here. I know that I talk about it all the time, but it drives me nuts when I hear that “America is forcing our culture on other societies.” Nobody in France eats McD’s because an American is forcing them to. They eat it for the same reason that we do: Because it’s cheap and fast. It’s not supposed to be the height of culinary passion, heh.

How about that wind storm in Eugene yesterday? 70mph winds, totally unexpected. I went to Eyal’s after school and needed to be back in town by 5:30 to make my basketball practice. Tyler hadn’t got back yet and he called at 4:40 to say that the driveway was impassible. Two big trees were lying across the driveway, pummeled by the storm. I guess a ton of people lost power (Travis, among others, won’t have it back until Saturday). We finally got untrapped by walking down the driveway where Robert’s mum was waiting on the other side of the blockades. Trees everywhere. The Quaker church across from where we were playing hoops has a gigantic tree that went straight through the roof. Szalecki’s car had a tree break the windshield. You know those big trees behind my house? With that arbor and the swinging loveseat? Lemme tell you, one of those trees and the whole arbor are smashed to pieces. How crappy is that? That was all handmade and everything. Bleh. Stupid wind!

I’ve been in some pretty bad windstorms in my life, which I was amazed that so much property damage was done here. The problem is that people in Eugene plan Douglas Firs, and the roots are waaaaaaay too short for ground that’s as wet as Eugene’s soil is. Like, I’ve been in two hurricanes (only one that I can remember) and there was nothing like the damage here. Actually, now that I think of it, the second one (Hurricane Hugo, I think, in 1991) happened like a week before I moved from Maine. I lived in a pretty small house with 5 acres out back (that was sweet when you’re seven ^_^). There was a gigantic tree in the front, one of the type with the big thick branches that are really good to climb up. Anyway, the Hurricane took the tree down. It came close enough to the house that it knocked the transformer casing attached to the house right off, but was just an inch short of pulling all the wires out or knocking a nice hole into our house. In Massachusetts, my neighborhood was hit by a Microburst. This is sorta like a tornado in reverse.

They happen during thunderstorms. I mean…*real* thunderstorms, like that one last fall here in Eugene (remember, the one where they cancelled the football and there was freakin’ huge lightning strikes). Cold air forms near the rain then rushes to the ground, creating winds strong enough that we couldn’t open the door when it happened. Here’s the radar image of that day (it’s under “Training Thunderstorms” about halfway down). My town, apparently, got 3.19 inches of rain in that one day (This is about 7% of how much Oregon gets in a *year*, so it was a helluva lot). Across the street was a forest, and when we walked in it the next day, there was a line like a tornado of complete devastation. It was cool cuz me and my neighbor got to be on the front page of the paper cuz they took our picture standing in front of the destruction. At my house proper, a giant limb from a tree flew off and landed about 10 feet from a giant 2-story glass window at our house. Pretty freaky.

I have a new argument technique, heh. I dunno why, but whenever there’s a discussion and I haven’t thought about the topic enough to know one way or another and the verdict could be argued either way, I’ll usually take the side that most people aren’t taking. Clearly, the number of people who think an idea is true has no bearing on that idea’s truth. You know, I’m one of those guys that believes that, Yes, everything has a truth, but many times it’s impossible to know what that truth is. Basically, anything not a priori, like 2+2=4, can never be truly “known”. Sometimes it makes me jump to conclusions that probably aren’t right, even though it does have the advantage of forcing people to explain their reasoning for the side I don’t support. Without anything to back it up, ideas have no weight as far as their validity. Anyway, I’ve decided that I’m not even going to comment in discussions unless *I* have my own examples to back up my ideas. Wierd, eh? Maybe I’ll not argue with Hammons as much anymore =).

Heh, speaking about Hammons, we read some old TOK papers in class. One that I read on what can be known through Mathematics was written by someone who was clearly very, very smart. I didn’t agree with her conclusions (that math can never be ‘proven’…I think that mathematics is one of those things whose very presence is objective and not subjective, so in that way 1+1 can be proven true). She also didn’t mention Godel in her paper (his Incompleteness Theorem is the most important mathematical concept ever, and it supports her thesis…I’ll talk about him in a sec). But her paper was very, very good. Heh, I give all my respect to people who have obviously thought something over, even if I disagree with them. I know that *I’m* wrong a lot, simply because it is an “impossible goal” (i.e., you’ll never achieve it, but it’s worth trying anyway) to be right all the time. Same goes for everybody. That intro was sorta off track, because what stood out as much as her being brilliant was her incredible feminism. In her entire 4-page paper, she used “she” or “her” to refer to the impersonal third person. Now, there’s nothing wrong with intermixing “he” and “she”; I do it in every paper I write. I don’t see a problem with just using “he”, because that word has the original meaning of male or female, and there’s nothing in English for a gender-neutral third-person (like se corre for he/she runs in Spanish). But using only “she” takes away from her argument, since it directs attention away from her point and is just as sexist as what she’s subtly protesting. Bleh. Even smart people can be stupid sometimes, heh.

Since I mentioned Godel, I’ll talk about him, since he’s very interesting. I don’t know why we teach mathematics the way we do in the US. For instance, in most countries, logic, truth tables and theory are taught just as much as solving equations. Godel’s theory is that, in every mathematical system, one must “leave” that system in order to find some answers. The only example I know that’s easy to understand goes like this. A prisoner is sentenced on Monday to death for such a heinous crime that the judge says “You will be sent to death by next Sunday and I want it to be a total surprise when the execution takes place so that you can’t prepare.” So the prisoner is a thinkin’-man, you see, and he goes, “Well, it looks like I won’t be killed on Sunday then!” He’d figured out that if he lasts till Sunday, it won’t be a surprise anymore, since he has to be killed by Sunday. So then he figures out, since Sunday’s out of the question, he can’t be killed on Saturday, since that wouldn’t be a surprise either. Back and back his logic flowed, until he realized that on none of the seven days could he be killed and still have it as a surprise.

The judge was between a rock and a mathematical theorem (a hard place…y’know, math is hard…atleast I thought my joke was funny! hmph). So he thinks and thinks, while the prisoner goes smugly back to his cell. Next Tuesday, they lopped the prisoner’s head off, and he totally didn’t expect it. In order to solve this problem like the judge did, you have to *leave* the logical constraints of the original problem. Godel found that there was a lot of math like this (and thus a lot of life, since many solutions are based on logic, which is a mathematical system). Pretty interesting. The implications of this are huge in artificial intelligence. Like, since a computer can only perform mathematical operations (whether in solid-state or quantum processes, the *only* things computers can do is add, multiply, divide and subtract; bizarre that we can do so much with that, eh?), it’s argued that they can’t reach the intelligence of man. I’m not sure how to get around this, but I dunno what gives man the ability to evade this theory. Maybe Godel was wrong somehow (although he’s been proven right since the 30’s when he came up with the theory). Maybe quantum processes that are coming in the new computers, with their ability to perform many operations *at the same time* allow a way around this (since our brain is generally assumed to operate with quantum functioning). Quantum computation is really interesting, btw. Look it up on Google if you’re interested, since I don’t have a good link. Quantum stuff is really really wierd.

Tyler will be happy to know that the value of all the money in Everquest is worth more than many countries. Sad state of affairs, eh?

I talked to a couple of buds for like an hour and a half each this week. This is like bizarro-world, heh. I’m the guy who is the master of the “10 second phone call”. My phone has a time count on it, so I can see how long a convo takes. My record is with Justin, where our three or so work conversation lasted 6 seconds. It’s pretty cool, though. I got to know these peeps quite a bit better.

I’ve got many miles of text to write before I sleep, but I’ve written too much and want to go hang out somewhere, so I’m gonna save the other things I wanted to write about for later. Peace.

MP3 Prime Cut: Faith of the Heart by Rod Stewart
Ok, I’m a total nerd, heh. Not only was I just writing about math, but I’m also listening to a sappy Rod Stewart song that’s the theme song for the new Star Trek show. It’s actually a really good song. “I’ve got faith to believe I can do anything; I’ve got strength of the soul and no one’s gonna bend or break me.” I think I need to go patch up my pocket protectors or something, heh.MP3 Prime Cut Extra: Club Exit 2001 by DJ Tiesto
Byerly told me about this one. Tiesto has a sick, Aphex-Twin on speed song called “Flight 643″ that took off (no pun intended) last year, but this new one is even better. How about the rap from the awesome Beatnuts called “It’s Da Nutz”. I picked up their CD and it’s sweeeeeeet. Beatnuts “Hood Thang” is also sweet: “If you see me drivin’ in my truck and you start to stare cuz you wanna uh-uh-uh-uh-uh, come on over; good a hood thang sitting next to me, complete ecstasy, have some sex with me.” “Se Acabo” by Beatnuts ft/ Proyecto Uno is a sweet bilingual rap. “Over You” by Daddy DJ is a hella-addictive Euro-trance song. Freakin’ awesome. This is probably my favorite new song this month. The remake of a classic happy hardcore song is rockin’ in “Wonderful Days 2001″ by Charly Lownoise and Mental Theo. “Everybody” by Rocco is a trance song with a fucking enormous bass. I barely have my sub on and it’s shaking me as I write this. Holy bejeezus. More trance I’ve been feeling recently (getting ready to make my trance mix, so I’ve been listening to lots of it ^_^): “Babadeng” by Reflex has a swirly bass and an addictive synthline, “Step by Step (Club Mix)” by Hiver and Hammer has a great rolling beat, “Hold You” by ATB is a female-vocaled song that’s harder than most ATB, “Infected” by Barthezz has a wickedly addicting beat, “Wishful Thinking” by Comanova has female vocals and a bass-less roll, “I Like to Move It (Joker Mix)” by Bang Gang has a huge, deep synth line, “Heaven” by DJ Sammy & Yanou ft/ Do is a trance remix of that song that goes “Baby, I find it hard to believe, that you’re lying here in my arms. We’re in heaven.” Finally, “Nightmare (Oakenfold Mix)” by Brain Bug sounds like it’s name, and the “Trouble (Big Beat Remix) by Coldplay is an awesome piano-driven remake.