Creation vs Evolution

Ah, the seemingly endless debate of whether we came into existence via a singularity known as the Big Bang, or a single voice stating, "Let there be light" (1). It is the epic battle between those who follow science and those who follow religion. Each side seems to be completely blind to the other's assertions, passing them off as baseless, twisted accounts of the facts, fairy tales, or altogether ignoring the other's claims. Neither the Creationists nor the Darwinists can give ground without their very foundations being rebuilt; they are mutually exclusive (2).

Culling the Rampancy Inducing Thoughts

Is Junk Food Really Cheaper?

After reading that piece from the NY Times, which was very interesting, I thought of what initially seemed like a good idea: buffet style restaurant where you cook your own food, but it has more of the raw materials available than the cook-it-yourself places I know of. Like a supermarket where you can sit down, cook, eat, and all the other things you would normally do when you cook with friends.

Meh, the idea would have novelty appeal at first, then fizzle out as customers realized they were paying a premium to do exactly what they could do at home. Long-term appeal would come from the convenience of having everything in stock and not having to buy a large package of something when the customer would never use such a large amount of that food.

Whatever the appeal, need, or niche that could be carved out for such a restaurant, I don't have enough of the next topic to pursue the idea even if I had enough enthusiasm for it.

Time
Just had the thought that I would be quite okay with 48-hour days. I'm not talking about merely adjusting the coefficient on time—that would be silly and pointless. Thinking about this as I write, it makes more sense to ask for sleep to be required less. That would sidestep all the issues with the world rotating less and the innumerable side effects that would entail.

There never seems to be enough time. The root is more likely my schedule than amount of time; nonetheless, it would be nice to have more time to do things. Many, many things are rushing by my mind's eye related to this issue: sleep, karate, job, school, romance, friends, this blog, programming projects, and many more. While some of those items do not have entries on my calendar at the moment, I do not see how they would fit in if they needed a slot.

I've often wanted to "pause" life, or at least slow it down considerably, to learn more about a subject. To focus on nothing except that particular subject. Not every minute of every day, mind you, but have no other pressing items. Of course, I would want to return to where I was to begin with, with no adverse effects on other aspects of life (friends, and other things).

Spell Checker
I wrote most of this post on my tablet and then edited from my desktop. When using the tablet, I used common acronyms such as "atm" with the intention to change those to proper English. When doing the final cleanup passes, I realized that Chrome's spellchecker does not flag "atm" in certain circumstances. Unbelievable.

Pay Walls
Lately, I have come across several technical articles about many different topics linking to papers published in scientific journals. However, to access these papers you must have a subscription to the journal, which usually costs quite a bit. My school offers many of the journals for free, but the articles are delayed one year—much too long to be of any use to me.

I don't fault the journals for trying to make some money, but I wonder how a student such as myself is supposed to learn about the latest technology if I can't access the scientific papers.

Crazy Few Weeks

The question isn't so much what has happened since the last post, more on the lines of what hasn't happened. In reverse-order, I've had to play catch-up with school, TKD tournament in PCB, prepare for TKD tournament, get school things sorted out for the tournament, etc. Oh, and I received a sweet new tablet from my grandpa. Now, sorted by my whim, here is the exposition on those topics.

Half-posts, character limits

I frequently find myself wanting to post some thought or something, but it isn't nearly long enough for a full post on RI or I don't have the time, energy, or enthusiasm to post about it. This could be helped if I do "half-posts," yet I don't want to clutter up the posts on here. I've thought about using another platform to publish these smaller thoughts, however, I have yet to find one I like.

First Week of School

Tired, busy, bored, along with anticipating a ramp up later, this is how I feel about school after a week. Well, technically a week, but with school starting with a half week it doesn't quite mean as much as a week would normally entail. Why not start on a Monday? I have no idea. While it doesn't make much sense to me, there's probably a decent reason for it, though.

Frustrated

Frustrated. In a word, that is my feeling towards this blog at the moment. I start a post, get anywhere from just the outline of what I want to write about, to almost fully writing out, sometimes even proofreading to prepare for publication, and, nearly without fail, I run across some article that utterly eradicates my entire logic foundation. Of course, this probably reflects on the quality of my research, but this has happened on even my very well researched articles.

The issue is that I do not have enough time, or, at least, I don't allocate enough, to research as much as I want or need to do what I consider adequate. As I already mentioned, I read a lot, but not focused research—to be honest, the reading I do daily is more entertainment to me than education. THERE. If I had held back that particular post until I realized that my reading is entertainment for me, I might have never published it.

About now is about when I sputter out and have no more points or content to put in the post. Two paragraphs, they feel so unsubstantiated, and so lonely. Perhaps that is all I should strive for, two paragraphs.

I started this blog as a way to... hmm, I'm not entirely sure on that. I suppose it was to have a platform to showcase my programming and math work, but neither have been producing results like I want. Perhaps I merely need to post more often—a more constant stream of smaller posts.

To finish positively, Rampant Intelligence has allowed me to practice writing, so that will help me when writing essays for school. Speaking of school, I need to go to bed; 8am comes quickly and I have a long day ahead of me. Perhaps with the start of school I will have enough downtime between classes to effect an uptick of posting on here.

Google Reader

"I recently read an article that said..."

That is an oft-used phrase of mine that you'll no doubt hear when passing time with me. I normally read for at least an hour a day, frequently in the range of two to three hours. My RSS feed reader, Google Reader, says I've read nearly 5,000 items over the one and a half years I've been using it. Of course, those 5k items do not include the in-line links in the article's text, nor the tangent subjects I read about because the article happened to mention it, which usually results in a lengthy visit to Wikipedia. Tangent: I wish I had statistics on the Wikipedia articles I've read—they would probably be quite interesting.

Other than my edification, I don't directly benefit from this reading; it is just something I do. You might have heard about those people who get 100% of their news from the Internet. I'm one of them. Here's how I do it and keep track of what I've read and what I haven't.