Definition of "falling in love"

If you want my immature opinion I would say that to fall in love means to develop very strong feelings and care for someone. That might seem too simplistic but I think it's correct. I think you could maybe argue that a lot of people have fallen in love but some at very low magnitudes. So I think that whether or not people have fallen in love depends on where you draw the for what level of magnitude of feelings you must have to count as "love." One deep question people like to ask is "do you believe in love in first sight?" If you ask me I'd say that that theoretically might be possible but I think it's shallow. I've defined love as strong feelings as care for someone, I haven't ruled out that possibility of that happening just from viewing someone but I don't think that that's very admirable. I definitely wouldn't say that I have had strong feelings that I've described so I wouldn't say that I've fallen in love.

My problem with Harry Potter

In reality I might have a few problems with Harry Potter but only one of them is on my mind at the moment.

Can Harry Potter coexist with religion?

One thing that sets Harry Potter from other fantasy universes is that the Harry Potter Universe is trying to be our Universe. In The Chronicles of Narnia there is a parallel fantasy universe that is linked to our universe, In The Lord of the Rings there is a fantasy universe that as far as I know is completely parallel to universe.

In the Harry Potter Universe the students at Hogwarts go home twice a year for Christmas and Easter holidays. Going home for Christmas makes sense because Christmas is pretty big on a secular aspect, but wizards and witches going home for Easter just seems weird to me, for what purpose would the Malfoys or the Weesley's have for celebrating Easter. This seems weird to me because it's kind hard for me to imagine God and magic existing in the same realm. I don't have a problem with reading Harry Potter for this reason but it just makes me a little uncomfortable.

How much wood could a woodchuck cuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood

Let me start out by saying that I realize that by even trying to analyze this I am looking way to into this.

Nevertheless, let me say that this is a stupid question that does not deserve any pondering.

Woodchucks do not chuck wood, so there is no way to tell how much wood it could chuck if it could chuck wood. This is like saying, "How many papers could a lava lamp write if a lava lamp could write papers." How in the world are you supposed to figure that out. You can not give lava lamps paper writing abilities any more than you can give woodchucks wood chucking abilities.

But really, I realize that this is just a tongue twister and not a mystery of the universe, but I feel like it's been to long since I posted something here.

Ground Zero

From a legal standpoint I think that peaceful Muslims should be able to build their mosque or recreation center at a location that I believe is actually about two blocks away from ground zero. Any action taken by New York City or New York state to prevent the mosque from being built would probably be a pretty blatant violation of 1st amendment rights.

However whether or not they should be allowed to is a separate from whether or not they should. This is a more tricky question. If the site was on ground zero that would be one thing, but I saw a map in Newsweek Magazine that shows the proposed site about two blocks away from ground zero which as far as I know is as close to ground zero as it could possibly be. Whether or not they should is something I'm not as certain about.

What do I think will happen. From what I've seen the people who oppose the ground zero mosque seem mean, loud, and not too intelligent. I think the mosque will ultimately be built and history teachers will talk about it when teaching about first amendment rights.

My solution to the Merchant of Venice dilemma

Disclaimer: I have not read Merchant of Venice but I have heard of it and read about it.

My understanding of the premise is that Shylock lets Antonio borrow his ships under the condition that Antonio must give Shylock a "pound of flesh" if he can not return the ships. The ships are lost at sea. From what I've heard, what happens next is a judge tries convince Shylock to forgive Antonio's debt for money, the Judge offers large amounts of money but Shylock out of his furry against Antonio declines the offers and says something along the lines of, "the law says I can only take a pound of flesh." (this phrase here is the cornerstone of my argument but it is also the reason for my disclaimer) The judge then traps Shylock with what is called a quibble, the judge says the agreement allows Shylock a pound of flesh but not any blood. I think what happens next is Shylock tries to accept some of the money offers but the judge says something like, "you said that the law said that you could only accept a pound of flesh."

Shylock's downfall was not that he was holding a grudge, but that he did not pick his choice of words carefully. If not mistaken what he said was "I can only accept a pound of flesh," what he should of said was "your offer is not big enough," or even "I will only accept of pound of flesh."Although I think his poor word choice was the product of his lust for revenge, so I guess this book still does teach not to hold a grudge but not in the way it thinks.

This is a solution to how a pound of flesh could've been drawn without any blood being spilt.

1. Put Antonio in the sun.
2. Wait for Antonio's sunburns to recover.
3. Once his skin is starting to be flakey; lightly tear it off.
4. Repeat steps 1-3 as necessary.

Even if a little blood was spilt would that necessarily be illegal, I think the Judge's ruling was that the smallest amount of blood would've screwed Shylock, but I think that is unreasonable, after-all how bad is a paper-cut.

Dollar under a pyramid

In Malcom Gladwell's book Blink he talks about a challange where a 100 dollar bill is under an upside-down pyramid that is perfectly balanced in such a way that the slightest movement will cause the pyramid to tip over and the challange is to remove the bill from under neath the pyramid.

When I read this challange my answer was you just grab the dollar because even though it's under a pyramid the challange does not say that it's under the tip of the pyramid, however my answer was wrong, if it was a riddle about how someone had solved this dilema and the point was to figure out how my answer would've worked however this was different.

The "correct" answer is to destroy the 100 dollar bill by either tearing it or burning, the point of this riddle is that it shows us we are assumeing that we want to keep the 100 dollar bill to spend, but still I think my answer works better and I explain why.

What makes this challangeing is that the slightest most infintesimal force will tip the pyramid over, but under this condition neither answer would work. Tearing the dollar means applying force to the dollar which consequentially means applying force to the pyramid, and you could never destroy the whole dollar this way because the thickness of your finger would get in the way of getting to close to the tip. Lighting the dollar on fire doesn't really work either because the smoke from the dollar burning is also a slight movement that would tip the pyramid.

Which came first; the chicken or the egg?

I think it's time to blow another deep philosophical question out of the water.

This question surrounds the reality that all chickens come from eggs, and that all chicken eggs come from chickens. So which came first, well let me answer that by asking you this.

Do you believe that dinosaurs once existed.

• If yes, continue reading
• If no, this post will just make you mad and I think it would be pointless for you read further and I don't anticipate you will be persuaded by me.

So if you do believe in Dinosaurs does seems logical that chickens and dinosaurs would've existed at the same time, I would say no.

So my conclusion is that there is not really an answer to this question, the chicken simply evolved from some other bird or lizard or something, and eventually that animal became the chicken over time.

If a tree falls in the forest

The other day somebody told me that they enjoy my opinions and asked what I thought about the question "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it; does it make a sound?" At first I said yes and my reasoning was that the existence of sound doesn't depend on whether or not there is a ear around, however someone pointed out that sound doesn't really exist until the sound waves are picked up.

The thing about this question is that it hinges on what you mean when you say the word "sound," if by sound you mean the creation of sound waves than of course it makes a sound. If by sound you mean the perception of sound waves that of course the tree does not make a sound. But if this question hinges out what you mean when you say a certain word than I don't think it's really worth very much philosophical or scientific reasoning.

Facebook privacy: The Hologram Card

At my school whenever there was something that needed to be done with every student (such as school pictures, or fliers for parent teacher conferences) it was done via the English classes because in theory every student has and English class. Do I have a problem with that? No, but there was one thing they passed out that I found interesting.

They passed out hologram cards. From one perspective you saw a friendly looking teenage Asian girl with glasses and a caption that said "You think it's her," the other perspective showed a Caucasian man in his 40's with a black shirt, a light beard, some awesome leopard hair, and a caption that said "but it's really him. On the back side of this card the were two bullet point columns, one of them said "Online Resources," the other said "Online Threats."

Seeing this card inspired me to post one of my best facebook statuses to date, I said something along the lines of, "I wonder if the girl they photographed for that online protection hologram card has a facebook account." When I post facebook statuses I see it as a challenge to see how many "likes" and comment I can get, this got a small handful which makes me happy. The thing about this card was that facebook was totally what this card was getting at but it wouldn't be upfront about it because whatever committee developed that card knew that if the card directly attacked facebook the card wouldn't be taken seriously, although nevertheless I don't think it was taken seriously and I'll explain why.

Under the online resources column there were five bullet points that said, (now that I think about I'll reproduce it)

• Brainteasers
• Math Games
• Art Games
• Pioneer Library
• Homework Help

If some committee formed by the state legislature thinks that Art Games or Math Games are going to help people withstand the temptation of using identity theft world or the cyberbullying world that is facebook then they are what I call superficial.

Although I must be fair and admit shouldn't be entirely laughed at, today I was my school's website and there was a link to participate in an event and it asked for my username and password, I wasn't sure if I should put that down so I didn't, later I started writing this blog post and I saw under the Online threats column there was a bullet point that said 'Phishing Scams," I didn't know what that was so I used the ctrl + t function, went to google, typed in "phishing scams" went to wikipedia (I probably should've just skipped google and gone straight to wikipedia) and it said that a phishing scam is when a website that looks trusting asks for personal information, I then thought, "wow, that kind of happened to me today," although to be honest, I'm 99.97% sure that the website was legit and I was just being paranoid. I think the origin of this card was the state legislature felt the had to do something about a kid in the state being cyberbullied. This card felt like the product of some old out-of-touch men living in the world of 2003.

What American Idol needs for it's next judge

Name recognition? Ideally I don't think Simon Cowell's replacement should necessarily need to be somebody you've heard of; I wouldn't know who he or any of the other judges were if it weren't for their role as judges but at this point the show is so big that if they got some lesser known producer people might react by saying "what?" What's important is not how well known they are but how intelligently and creatively they critique. I think the biggest mistake the producers can make is trying to find somebody who's very similar to Simon, in fact if it were my decision I might rule out anybody that does have a british accent. I think what's important is that they are like Simon in the sense that they are not like the other judges and I also hope they find somebody who is just as honest. I once heard on a radio program the Simon does the show a big service because he's the only person who will tell horrible auditioners that they're terrible, I think the next judge needs to be like Simon in that sence but if people get the sense that it's a copycat the rating are going to go down even further.

If I were producer for American Idol and the current judges were all retireing and I needed to find a new panel this is the criteria I have.

• 3 Judges
• 2 male and one female
• One white judge but no more than that, especially not two white men
• A music producer, an artist, and a music critic
• Between the producer and the critic I would want one to be from the Rock spectrum, and the other to be from either somethine like pop, hip-hop, or rap.

Writing Assesment

Every year the school district I'm from gives it's students a writing assesment, the PWA. In the students English class the teacher will show them two (generally unpopular) prompts. The student then has to write a "five paragraph essay" which introduces the prompt at hand, three paragraphs that provide a reason for the student's stance, three sub reasons withing each of those paragraphs, and a closing paragraph that's supposed to say something like, "In conclusion ___ is so because [reason 1], [reason 2] [reason 3].

I heard a story about one year where the prompt said something like "argue whether the world is getting better or worse," and some took the side of 'worse' and one of his three reasons was the way we do these writing assesment, what would really make my day is if I found out that he wasn't even trying to be funny.

If you look at Newsweek or other publications; persuasive writing is very common, but it's nothing like this. The opening paragraph will try to grab your attention, the closing paragraph will try feel conclusive, and throughout the text the authur will give reasons as well as support for those reasons, but the writer isn't going to be held to a mechanical format where his or her three -No more no less- paragraphs necesaraly begin with "another reason..." or "in addition..." And the thing that really bugs me is a legit writer would never close by saying, "in case you didn't read my article or get my point let me tell you what I said all over again."

I don't think I'd say I'm 100% against it. It might be a bad way to write but it still might be a sufficient way of measuring how well a student can write. But a student has to write a persuasive essay for a practical purpose, such as a college application, and they think they must do the 'five paragraph format' then the schools' teaching of writing is almost counter productive.

Weezer's Represent

First I must say that my prediction for American Idol was correct. So I guess I'm on my way to being a legit music critic.

Yesterday I was shopping on iTunes and under the free section there was a song by Weezer that is either trying to promote the world cup or taking advantage of the world cup. Usually the free songs on iTunes are kind of lame but this one was by a song by a group that's been around for a while and I'm familiar with, so I downloaded it.

One things that bugged my about the song was the cheering and narration at the beginning. I don't think narration in songs works very well, this is what went wrong with Green Day's song Holiday. That song had a great groove to it but it slowed down and then said, "a Representative from California has the floor." I would've taken this section out if it were my decision. My problem with narrations is that they usually are distracting and they abruptly change the mood of the song.

But anyway, after the cheering the song started sounding kind of cool. I guess my problem with the song was the lyrics. The lyrics are too upfront and the message is a little to blatant. I couldn't find the actual text of the song but it says "it doesn't matter what ______ thinks" or "you represent ______." Imagine if some love song just implicitly said things like, "I love you" or "you're attractive." There are zillions of love songs but none would express feelings buy saying those things exactly as written above. I didn't hate the song and since I got it for free I can't feel ripped off but it is pretty low quality; it feels like some people were trying to produce a rock song but they had writers block or they were in a rush. I think I possibly could have written a song with the same level of quality as this one. To be honest I have a hard time imagining people who like mainstream popular music because it's mainstream and popular liking this Weezer song. So I guess sporting events should stick with Queen's We Will Rock You.

Why Lee will win American Idol. At least on paper.

Since season 6 of American Idol there has been a test that so far has predicted who will win American Idol, or at least who will not win.

The front runner doesn't win, at least, not the initial front runner. In season 6 Melinda was consistently great but she only got 3rd. In season 7 David Archuleta came out a front runner at least a few weeks before David Cook. Last year it's hard to say whether the front runner was Danny or Adam, but neither of them won. But with this season I'd say that Crystal was the initial front runner but not by that large or a margin, so I'm not sure my test will hold this year. I think Crystal should win but I think it will depend a lot on tonight's performances. As American Idol gets closer to the end of season the voting becomes more cumulative but I don't think you can say that either contestant is that much better than the other.

Some people think American Idol is going or has gone downhill. I think they just got a bad draw of contestants. The only way it's popularity can go down is for undiscovered talent to lose interest in auditioning and that certainly is possible. There probably are bad decisions that the producers could make that would ruin it's reputation but for first season it had no reputation and they ultimately got Kelly Clarkson, one of their most successful contestant. Even if it's popularity is going down it will most likely be quite a while before the producers decide to cancel it.

Super Mario Galaxy

Yesterday Lost ended and Super Mario Galaxy 2 was released. It's metacritic score was 98, the original scored 97, super mario 64 scored 94, and super mario sunshine scored 92. I haven't heard much of SMG2 but I don't agree super mario galaxy should've outscored either Super Mario 64 or Super Mario Sunshine for a few reasons. One reason is that the SMG homeworld is so bland. It only takes about 10 seconds to walk from one end to the other. All it really does is glow in the dark; I think the Super Nintendo homeworlds were more exciting, and those were just maps. SM64 had the castle that had all sorts of places to explore and find secrets, but it is a little lonely. The SMS homeworld is also much better; it's an entire village. Each of those homeworlds had secret levels hidden around, with SMG not really. Another reason is the levels seemed so much more straight forward than the other ones. The other games had levels were you would walk all over the place. In SMG it seemed that a lot of levels were just about about getting from point A to point B and it was often nighttime. I admit that it's possible that I feel this way because when I played SMG I was older than when I played the other games.

Lost Finale

Tommorrow the last episode of Lost will be broadcast. According to the fansite wiki Lostpedia there are about 116 Solved mysteries, 16 partially solved mysteries, and 13 unsolved mysteries, and 1 canonically explained. 5 of these unsolved mysteries were brought up during this recent season. It seems unrealistic that all 29 remaining mysteries will be answered but keep in mind that some mysteries such as Adam and Eve, the Origin and nature of the smoke monster, and the whipsers have been addressed, but not with out bringing up a few quesitons in the process. I think the problem with unanswered questions is that the producers honestly planed to answer a lot of them but then they thought of some way to make the show wacky and they got so excited that they ran out of time. Some of the unsolved mysteries include the Hurley bird, the supply drop, the sunken island. Walt's been one of the biggest mysteries since season 1 and I'd be surprised to see him in the finale at all tommorrow. Something silly about Lost is is that some mysteries should be answered. In season 4 or 5 Locke visits Walt after shcool in New York and all they did was say hi. Wouldn't Locke want to know why he saw him in the Season 3 finale when he was in a pit; wouldn't Walt want to know how Locke got of the island. A simillar thing happened in this season when Kate and Claire were together and Kate didn't ask why Claire walked off that one night leaving Aaron. It's unrealistic that asking these questions would not have occured to the characters but in reality the characters say what the screenwriters want them to say. They might actaully be able to solve quite a few mysteries by simply stating or implying the the smoke monster (whose name we may or may not lear) is the solution. But a lot of mysteries will have to wait a few years untill Lindelof and Cuse are at Comic Con or in an interview about their next project.

Battle of the sexes.

Every year at Timpview we have a men's week and a girl's week. For the past few years men's week and girl's week have been endangered of being canceled. For this year they were very close to being canceled but luckily the administration decided to have a combined week. Today the video announcements showed our elected men's and girl's president telling the students what the dress up days were and telling people what rules they needed to follow in order to prevent it from being canceled. I was pretty happy that our administration was telling us what we need to do in order to not have our gender pride week canceled. Often we feel that our administration keeps us in the dark until it's to late to start a petition. But there was a problem with this video. one of the rules that we needed to follow is that we can't have any "unauthorized gatherings." To me this seems like a 1st amendment violation. Although, now that I write about it I'm not so sure about myself. I guess writing about something makes you think about it a lot more and learn more. I was thinking that they can't punish us for gathering but now that I write more about it as long as they don't suspend us or anything it might be constitutional for them not to have gender weeks next week. After all, they're not obligated to sponsor gender pride weeks at all. I can understand that there would be a lot of complaints about men's and girl's weeks. I guess that they definitely should be able to punish students for some gathering. The 1st amendment doesn't give people the right to invade a classroom or gym. My problem with men's week is that they'll usually be a pajama day when there's a late start day. Boys will sleep on the outside of the school overnight and the next morning they will boo all the females that walk by. My problem with this is that I think I once saw a woman with a 4 year old walking to the school. She probably needed to talk to her child's teacher or counselor and some stupid boys were yelling at her for being female, I find this morally un-defendable. Although I don't see any reason the girls can't do this as well. The first day of battle of the sexes week is a blood drive competition. I think this is morally questionable because you're not supposed to give your blood because you were pressured into it. I think gender pride week don't have a favorable chance of happening next year because competition between the sexes is endorsed it becomes more controversial for the same reasons the original separate weeks were controversial.

Why the U.S.A did not deserve to win the hockey game

When I was in elementary school we had gym class 2 or 3 days a week. Sometimes we would play hockey. Every time we played hockey our gym teacher would put her index finger and her thumb really close together and say that the school was this close to banning hockey. Canada losing Hockey to the U.S. would be kind of like most nations on the earth losing at soccer to the U.S. Or if the U.S. had an american football team that lost to some other country's team.

Why American Idol is like the Hunger Games

During the audition episodes for season 9 of American Idol there was a contestant named Justin Williams. His audition was shown, he got four yeses and than failing at Hollywood week. The previous season he was shown for about 1/2 of a second during the audition episodes, he was shown doing a very successful group day performance (The Jackson 5 Song) with Kris Allen's group and than didn't make it past Hollywood week. I could be wrong but I don't think Season 9 even mentioned him being a contestant from the previous season. The reason he was shown more prominently during season 9 is that he shared his story of surviving cancer.

In The Hunger Games, Peeta is introducing himself to the audience and more importantly sponsors, when he's giving his speech he's telling people about himself and he tells everyone that he is in love with his co-nominee, Katniss. The reason that Peeta does this is that people, especially sponsors, want the games to be interesting. He figures that if tells everyone that he is in love the sponsors will want to keep him in the game and will send him food and weapons.

What I didn't like about American Idol last season is that by the time they got to the top 13 the majority of the contestant had only performed once. I remember that for many weeks whenever Mat Giraud or Kris Allen sung I would think, "wait, who's this guy again." I knew who Adam, Danny, and Lil were because they had already received a lot of attention. However with Adam, his singing was his only back-story at this point, Danny and Lil could both gain sympathy point because Danny had his deceased wife and his friend, Lil had her struggling family.

A lot of fans think it's lame that all they show during the beginning are sappy emotional stories but it's kind of understandable. There is a website called dialidol that predicts American idol by dialing for all contestants and keeping track of how many busy signals they get. For the recent episodes of the top 24 Katie and Andrew scored very high, two other contestants, Casey and Crystal were both second place but much lower, all of the other contestants scored 0 points but dialidol was still able to rank them in descending order. The point I'm getting at is that there needs to be something that people vote on when the music isn't that great, the counter argument is that if Idol showed all of the top 24's auditions as well as well as more hollywood singing instead of drama the show would be more effective in helping the audience get to know the contestants.

This is off topic but it relates to American Idol. Some people think that it's actually better to take 2nd place than to become the winner. The reason is that if you're not under the winner's contract you have more liberty in your music and you can make more money. I think it would be funny if during the audition episodes people said things like, "MY BROTHER'S THE NEXT RUNNER UP FOR AMERICAN IDOL!" or "Who... will be the next runner up."

Conspiracy

The other day I was listening to the radio and I was listening to one those conservative guys who was yacking about how in the next short period of time president Obama's budget will raise the deficit by some large number. It's interesting how there have always claims on how the incumbent president of the opposite party will destroy the economy in the next decade or so, yet the nation is still standing. For example after the President Obama's first State of the Union address Governer Bob McDonnel (R-VA) said the deficit was scheduled to double in some interval of time and triple in another period of time. Some fact checkers that his statement was way off. Anyway, someting this gut on the radio said was that he wasn't into conspiracies such as the theory that the president wasn't born in the U.S. He might have said he wasn't into conspiracies because that makes him seem legit. However, later he said that President Obama's book was written by his friend William Ayers because it's Ayer's style instead of Obama's. If you ask me that statement is a conspiracy.

Bold Blue America

Last night during the opening ceremonies of the olympics they were showing a long parade of the athletes of each participating country. When a country came out of the doorway there was this diamond window on the side that would show a map of of the world and then it would zoom in on the featured country and it would be filled in with blue, but what didn't make sense was that when they showed the world map the United States was always filled in with blue. I wonder why America was always filled in blue, if they were to show Canada filled in with blue that would make sense because they're the host nation but instead it was the U.S., it might've had something to do with NBC being an american company, some people might view this as racist. I thought the rest of what I saw of the opening ceremony was pretty boring. When I was young the opening ceremonies for the Sydney olympics they had people that drink some liquid and then they would breathe fire and I thought it was the awesomest thing ever. This year all I saw was some fiddlers and dancers and some kid pretending to run on this holographic field and then was flying around with some harnesses, it was probably pretty cool from the audience's point of view but it wasn't cinematic at all.