Issues with starting to teach, as well as who, and what, are we fighting against?

Christmas is over; a new school semester, a new year, and New Year's Resolutions are all starting soon. I never did take much stock in those resolutions since the success rate is so abysmal; besides, if you are going to actually "change" your life, it will take effect when you get the proper motivation—a new year is a normal event, not something to get excited about, and definitely not something that will motivate you. In light of that, I'm making a resolution: teach a Sunday school class (or equivalent) on Biblical Creationism. Ever since I've learned about this subject, I've seen the absolute lack of education on creation and wanted to correct it. It's not the reason I started this blog, but it is the reason I've continued it.

Of night, sleep, and music.

At this point, I usually like to pose a open-ended and rhetorical question. It is not meant to be answered; it perhaps can't be definitively answered. However, I'm struggling to find both answers and questions to what is happening in my life. I am at the point of uncertainty—whether that is a real term or not, I know not; however, it fits very well to my circumstances. You must bear with me as I jump around, this piece is not planned, nor am I intending to do much editing past spelling and grammar. It is a true stream-of-consciousness post.

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.

Visual Studio Express

I had been making good progress on project Unison, getting about three-fourths of the messages out of the game successfully. I had noticed a particular one fairly early, but decided to delay tackling it until later because it looked to be a symptom of other, smaller bugs. Finally, I had to tackle this bug; for some reason, a message would completely stop in the middle, but only after several messages had been sent in quick succession, and it would fix itself a few messages later. It's probably something to do with a loop condition or data integrity check; however, I can't figure it out because Visual Studio C# Express 2010 doesn't support multi-threaded debugging.

wuts up?

I can't stand that phrase when it is used as a greeting. I can never figure out whether the speaker means it literally or merely using the phrase as a greeting. Normally, I try to strike a middle ground with a one sentence overview of what I'm doing, but that frequently seems awkward, especially when the speaker keeps walking on or focuses on something else immediately after uttering that phrase.

Traditional phone lines and TV going the way of the dodo?

Are we approaching the day when TV and phone lines are obsolete? Phone landlines are on the way to being obsolete. TV still has a significant amount of inertia to overcome, especially with DVRs so prevalent, but it could happen. I can already get all the services I would normally get from TV and a phone line from the Internet. They sometimes aren't as polished—if that can truly be said about some of the service my provider, Comcast, gives—as services that the incumbent companies give, but the Internet is increasingly approaching it.

General Grammar Irks and Two Specific Things

I always cry a little inside, and express my distaste a little more overtly in some cases, whenever I visit Facebook and internet forums that have comments with absolutely no vestige of grammar or even spelling. I always wonder if the poster actually wants to be misconstrued when he leaves his post with no punctuation.

Dean's List

I recently made the Dean's List at my college for the third time in a row. I have never made a big deal out of it; you only need a GPA of 3.5 for the semester to get on it, and I've had a perfect 4.0 GPA for all the semesters so far.

Project Unison

Unison is a programming project I am pursuing over the summer to automatically control a character in a popular online game. I wish to use this project to put something of size and meaning on my resume in the AI sub-field of computers.

Counting the Digits in a Sequential Integer Series

Last year, I developed a way to count the number of digits in a sequential integer series without having to count the digits in each number. I am still not entirely sure why I pursued this, I think I was working on some programming project that got me thinking about how long a file would be if I wrote sequential numbers to it. Anyway, it was an interesting project; I learned a lot about the summation operation, among other things. Less wonderful was letting this project lay fallow: writing how this equation works has been challenging, to say the least. But, you are probably not really interested in the how, but more of the what I am talking about.

Wikipedia Trails

I love Wikipedia. I know it is not an academically accepted source of information and can be changed by anybody with a computer and Internet connection. In fact, Wikipedia itself says it is not a creditable source. However, it presents information in such a uniform and (usually) easy to read fashion that I often catch myself reading for an hour or more.

Goals for Summer 2011

This summer, I have a set of goals to achieve. Mostly in order they are:

1. Code project Unison to the beta stage (I'll post later on what the details of this project are.)
2. Obtain the first level of ATA instructor training certification (the red collar).
3. Learn Linear Algebra and Statistics—I was given books on these subjects and I should read them.
4. Find a programming internship.

The first two are really my two main goals. With Unison, I'm not entirely certain if I want to find a programming internship, but I put it on here anyway since I would love to make some money from all this coding knowledge I have.

For #2, I have two thoughts:

1. Taking this path has the potential to get employed doing something I enjoy very much.
2. If you can teach something, you will know it infinitely deeper than if you just studied it. I'll have to post something on this at a later point.

Testing Method

One of the tools I use to get good grades is the way I take tests. This method really only applies to multiple choice exams and it involves several passes of the test along with quite a bit of logic. I will lay out how I take tests, step-by-step, after the break.

Me, Myself, and I; An Introduction

We claim to have several personalities: Me, Myself and I. Many people have claimed this in the past, but we have defined, more or less, how each one thinks and acts.

The start of something uncontrollable

After much Googling of different phrases and possible titles, I have come up with one I am very happy with. Dual natured - I love and hate paradoxes - and it gives the blog a nice direction to follow.