Tag Archives: Humor

Pull Back! Pull Back!

Current Music: James Taylor – Hourglass – Boatman

Apologies to people in the area affected by the following humorous e-mail sent to me by a family friend a week ago:

We must pull out!

Every day there are news reports about more deaths.

Every night on TV there are photos of death and destruction. Why are we still there?

We occupied this land, which we had to take by force, but it causes us nothing but trouble. Why are we still there?

Many of our children go there and never come back. Why are we still there?

Their government is unstable, and they have sloppy leadership. Why are we still there?

Many of their people are uncivilized. Why are we still there?

The place is subject to natural disasters, which we are supposed to bale them out of. Why are we still there?

There are more than religious sects which we do not fully understand. Why are we still there?

Their folkways, foods and fads are unfathomable to ordinary Americans. Why are we still there?

We can’t even secure the borders. Why are we still there?

They are billions of dollars in debt and it will cost billions more to rebuild, which we can’t afford. Why are we still there?

It is becoming clear.. WE MUST PULL OUT OF CALIFORNIA!

Science Fairs are Depressing…

Current Music: James Taylor – JT – Secret O’Life

Something worries me when I start reading about high school science fairs turning into security research projects with scholarships awarded by the Department of Homeland Security (New York Times article; membership signup required – link only valid until May 23). Don’t even get me started on the name of the Department itself; just the same old tired observation that it sounds too much like fatherland for my own comfort.

I don’t know, something just strikes me as worrisome when high schoolers start thinking about chaos theory and using it in encryption algorithms. Sure, you can point me to Linus Torvalds, who wrote an entire operating system in college, but that’s another thing altogether – I would expect a college student to do something like that. But high school students?

I needed levity after that. Remember HP and Compaq’s merger – or should I say.. well, I don’t want to give the punchline away.

If you’ve got a lot of free time and more bandwidth and hard drive storage than you know what to do with, perhaps you’d like to try downloading the entire Internet?

A Two-Part Post

Part I: The Annoyance of May 12
Okay, so here’s the thing I’ve been complaining about for at least the last two weeks: tomorrow’s May 12. No, that’s not a problem, really, I like the number 12 (uh.. well, at least, I’m indifferent towards it, which, to me, is the same as not hating it). Evergreen, in some fluke of scheduling I will never understand, scheduled the following items for tomorrow:

>>> Second half of the Board of Trustees Meeting (from about 9AM-12PM)
>>> Seminar II Building Dedication (1-2PM)
>>> Transfer Student Advising Day (1-3:30PM)
>>> Seminar II Building Open House (2-4PM)
>>> Summer/Fall 2004 Academic Fair (4-6PM)

Now, this is a hell of a lot of major events on campus, all on one day. To top it off, Governor Gary Locke is coming to cut the ribbon for Seminar II, which probably spells some sort of nightmare in some form or another, in addition to the overall nightmare of 34,126 things happening on campus at once.

I’m complaining not because I don’t think it’ll be cool to see the dedication and go to the academic fair so I can figure out my class for Fall, but because of the inordinate amount of stress this puts on the already hard-working faculty and staff at Evergreen. Every single staff member here does a stellar job, and this just seems like too much to ask of them. I will admit a side benefit — since my girlfriend is transferring here and she has to come to the advising day, I do get to see her tomorrow. That, however, is unrelated — Evergreen’s scheduling pundits should’ve thought this one out better.

Part II: There’s Something Fruity Here, and It Ain’t the Grapes
“A boy is allowed to choose 2 pieces of fruit from a basket containing a pear, an apple, a banana, a scorpion, a plum, and a watermelon. How many ways are there to choose two pieces of fruit from the basket?”

Well, there are.. err.. wait a minute.. a scorpion? Wow, I didn’t know scorpions were fruit..

Speaking of fruity, that’s what my discrete math faculty put up on the board as an example problem this morning. He must have been trying to make sure we were paying attention. I almost didn’t notice, and wouldn’t have if I wasn’t busily copying into notes… Obscure humor, that.

Politically Incorrect


You are Fascist

What: Fascism
Where: At the distant bottom-right of the political spectrum

How: Fascism supports total civil oppression, particularly for minorities, who were prosecuted. However, it does open up to a free market. It has been attempted and failed in countries including Italy, and socialist version of it called Nazism was tried in Germany.
What political extremity are you?


Ah, crap, there goes all hope I had of being somewhat liberally minded and a political free-spirit.

When It Just Won’t Make Sense

“Suddenly, the idea of expected value doesn’t make sense to me.”

The second I heard that out of the mouth of our discrete mathematics faculty, who is supposed to know what expected value is and how to explain it, I got just a little worried. He did manage to explain it, but it was still quite odd to hear someone who carries a Ph.D in Mathematics admit that such a “simple” concept in combinatorics didn’t make sense.

(For those wondering, the expected value is more akin to the average value of an outcome — that is, it’s an expression of the value most likely to occur. At least, that’s my understanding of it. An example — if you roll two dice, you can calculate the expected value that the two die will land with a sum of seven.)

So, yeah. Watch out for Ph.D’s who suddenly admit that basic concepts make no sense to them.