various and sundry things

wow, i've been slacking lately. but it's been slow at work as well, so i've had a bit of time to peruse the BBC website for news... here are a few things i thought were interesting.

1) obama has already managed to piss off al-qaeda, so he can't be all bad. it was definitely in poor taste for al-zawahiri to refer to obama as a "house-slave" though. regardless of what may have brought the insult on, basing it on his skin color--which he has no control over--is pretty lame.

2) gays in california are still pissed about proposition 8; apparently "majority rule should not set the law." which, who really wants that messy democracy stuff anyways? they may actually have a pretty good case; if the courts deem this a revision to the state constitution instead of an amendment, it would have required a 2/3 vote in the legislature before being passed on to the voters. which brings us back to the majority thing; the gay rights folks got a majority of judges to agree to hear an argument that the proponents should have got a supermajority to vote in favor of prop 8 before the regular majority got to vote in favor of it. so apparently majorities are okay, as long as they agree with the gay rights people. personally, i'm going to side with sir elton john on this one. i don't remember the exact wording, but it was something along the lines of "marriages are for straight people, civil unions are for gay people... if you're getting the same basic rights, why should you care what it's called?" one is a relationship between two people of opposite sexes, and one is a relationship between two people of the same sex; they are, in fact, two different things.

3) philosophical questions for the day: number 1 is the only one i actually came up with an answer for, so i'm going to go ahead and post the whole thing and then give my answer and reasoning.

1. SHOULD WE KILL HEALTHY PEOPLE FOR THEIR ORGANS?

Suppose Bill is a healthy man without family or loved ones. Would it be ok painlessly to kill him if his organs would save five people, one of whom needs a heart, another a kidney, and so on? If not, why not?

Consider another case: you and six others are kidnapped, and the kidnapper somehow persuades you that if you shoot dead one of the other hostages, he will set the remaining five free, whereas if you do not, he will shoot all six. (Either way, he'll release you.)

If in this case you should kill one to save five, why not in the previous, organs case? If in this case too you have qualms, consider yet another: you're in the cab of a runaway tram and see five people tied to the track ahead. You have the option of sending the tram on to the track forking off to the left, on which only one person is tied. Surely you should send the tram left, killing one to save five.

But then why not kill Bill?

no, we don't kill bill. in both situations given, at least one person is going to die regardless of what happens. in the original question, if we don't "harvest" bill, he continues living his happy, healthy life. besides which, we really don't know if his organs will actually save the people they're intended for. they could be rejected by the host, or the doctor could screw up the operation, and there are probably several other things that could go wrong as well. also, back to the first example they give... if the hostage taker gives me a gun to shoot one of the other hostages dead, the first thing i'm going to do is shoot the guy that took us hostage, and we're all free. the end.

random question

believe it or not, i made it through my entire school "career"--high school, community college, and real college--without taking a single chemistry class. so i've got a chemistry-type question that randomly popped into my head the other day.

what happens if you drop an oxygen absorber into a glass of water? assuming there's actually enough to absorb all of the oxygen in the water, are you left with liquid hydrogen or hydrogen gas, or does something else entirely happen?

bummer dude

congratulations, mr. obama. i really hope that i was horribly wrong about you.

question of the day...

amd or intel? i want a quad-core cpu, and hope to be rocking dual graphics cards in sli/crossfire as well. any recommendations are welcome.

more on the bailout

which i was actually planning to write a few weeks back, but got lazy. go figure. in my defense, my original link broke, and i had to track down a new one... all the .pdf versions are coming up no good.

my favorite section, which i hope i'm reading/interpreting wrong, is 112, which states (emphasis mine):

The Secretary shall coordinate, as appropriate, with foreign financial authorities and central banks to work toward the establishment of similar programs by such authorities and central banks. To the extent that such foreign financial authorities or banks hold troubled assets as a result of extending financing to financial institutions that have failed or defaulted on such financing, such troubled assets qualify for purchase under section 101.

that same section 101 that tells us the treasury secretary can purchase troubled assets "from any financial institution, on such terms and conditions as are determined by the Secretary, and in accordance with this Act and the policies and procedures developed and published by the Secretary."

so on top of wasting money to cover the stupid financial institutions in our own country, we're going to be covering for the mistakes made by other countries as well? i think we should focus on our own problems first and foremost.

speaking of focusing... president bush's original proposal was 3 pages long. the finished bill was 451 pages, and roughly 330 of those (i think it was actually a few more, but don't remember the exact page number) had absolutely nothing to do with the economic crisis. 75% of this bill was just addons to get enough of the senators to abandon any common sense they might have had and vote yes. to make it "good" enough for people to go along with, they had to turn it into a very bad bill indeed.

so, there are my two cents. i may have a bit more later... at work i get a copy of the banc investment daily; most of it is way over my head (or "above my pay grade"), but they've had some good things to say about the bailout.

entrepreneuer of the week

and the award goes to.... sarah's smash shack. good to see that at least someone should be doing well in these troubled times.

h/t wp

with a grain of salt

that's the best way to view any poll results.

next step, retention

i learned something again today: when in doubt, just keep your mouth shut. i've lost track of how many times that would have been a good idea, but i'm hoping that one of these times--preferably this one--the lesson will stick.

the good, the bad, and the ugly

the good
senator cantwell (D)
rep. hastings (R)
rep. inslee (D)
rep. mcdermott (D)
rep. mcmorris (R)
rep. reichert (R)

the bad
senator murray (D)
rep. baird (D)
rep. larsen (D)
rep. smith (D)
rep. dicks (D)

the ugly
h.r. 1424, on which i'll have more to say later

boo

looks like the senate overwhelmingly passed a new version of the bailout package. they also managed to tack even more spending onto it--apparently to make it palatable to the majority of senators--in the form of what appears to be a rather odd set of earmarks, including funds for (or tax cuts for... it's hard to tell) virgin island and peurto rican rum, race tracks, and wool research. wtf do those have to do with credit problems, mate?

it sounds like the house will be voting on this (and probably tacking more crap onto it) on friday... hopefully they've got the good sense to shoot it down again.

ouch

so, i made it to my first cougar football game this weekend. and man, did i ever pick a bad weekend for it. oregon walked all over them, and the clock finally put an end to our misery with the score 63-14. i'm hoping to make it down for a basketball game as well... hopefully they stay pretty good

son of the year

the award goes jim richardson, who managed to track down and buy the m1 garand that his father had used in korea, and presented it to him for his 79th birthday.

h/t wp

bats!

found this little bugger hanging off the side of the bank today, and got right up in his grill for some pictures. hopefully he'll (or she... hard to tell with bats) still be there tomorrow, and i'll get some more.

you know what's really awesome?

spending a good chunk of your day cleaning up messes that you didn't create, so that you can keep the auditors happy, so they can keep upper management happy. on the downside, once you get all that fixed, nobody notices that half of your workforce is not so much helping things as actively making them more difficult, even if unintentionally.

random thought

obama '08: hope. change. hopechange. and with that, a side of vice presidential candidate who's been in the senate for over half his life... since nixon was president, mccain was still a "guest" at the hanoi hilton, and obama was 12 years old.

obama '08: hope? maybe. change? not so much.

there's gotta be a better word for that

it's probably unnecessary, but i get pissed when people (usually PETA, but a few others as well) talk about the humane (or inhumane) treatment of animals. they seem to be missing the key part of that word: human. the royal humane society, for example, was originally founded to rescue/resuscitate drowning people, and they still give awards for doing so; i saw no mention of the treatment of animals on their site.

animals shouldn't be treated humanely, because they're not human. that's not to say they shouldn't be treated well; just that we need to come up with a better term for doing so. "animalane" just doesn't sound right, so i'm open to suggestion.

dale soden is the man

i enjoyed most of his classes (even dale couldn't do anything with "ideas about history"), and just got to play pool with him a few months ago.

man, i am freaking lazy

that's the only excuse i can come up with for such light posting. in my defense... no, i really have no defense. i've pretty much been reading, playing WoW and another game i just discovered, and hanging out with the only friend i've got in the area before she heads back to pullman. and work, of course, but i think that's part of what leads to the laziness. unless it's a friday and i stay up fairly late, i spend more of my waking hours at or traveling to/from work than i do at home.

i am hoping to pick up writing again at some point. not just the blog, but actual writing as well. i recently finished reading a book that was written by a girl i went to school with. while not the best writing i've ever seen (though mine is far from perfect), it was a good story, and i'm looking forward to the sequel. she went through authorhouse to publish it, which is something i'll definitely look into. i've started and dropped more stories than i can count... usually i just don't have the motivation to keep going on them, or once i actually started writing they didn't come out quite like i expected. i do have a pretty decent outline for one that i liked floating around somewhere, which i'm going to try digging up again one of these days.

other than that, not a whole heck of a lot going on. i'm hoping to build a new computer sometime this fall or winter. my current machine (just hit 3 years with it) does everything i need it to and then some, but it doesn't do everything i want it to anymore. but then, this is something i was thinking about last summer as well, and nothing came of that, so maybe i'll just hold onto my money a bit longer. i'm setting some aside every month so that hopefully in the next year or two i'll be able to make a lump payment and no longer owe the government anything on my student loans. which really just means i get to start paying my parents more for the ones they took out, but it will still feel good.

on which note, i need to go to sleep, so i can wake up and go to work, so i can come home and not do anything productive tomorrow, but possibly avoid writing run-on sentences, even though this one was semi-intentional, just to piss off all those english majors out there.

bride to be?

iliza shlesinger, will you marry me? it would be great!
*you're incredibly attractive, i'm not bad looking; we'll call that one a wash
*you're a standup comic, i'm a sitcomedian; we'd complete each other! except not in those words, because that sounds cheesy
*we're both winners: you won last comic standing, i won an election

that's all i've got for now, unfortunately, but it's a start

candidate nicknames

i'm sure there are some out there that are more clever, but to me, the election this november looks to be a contest between BO and Old Spice.