Shouzer

I was reading some news today, and I happened upon a couple strange stories. I figured I’d share them.

Up first is this story about a rape case. The strange thing about this is that one of the defendant’s lawyers is making the claim that one of the girls was fat and probably enjoyed the attention. Wha?! This chick actually passed the bar? If this is what it takes, I could make a damn fine lawyer! “Sure my client killed that guy. But he was ugly!! The world is better of without having to look at him. I rest my case.” And the crowd goes wild!! (Wouldn’t there have to be a crowd if something like this is allowed?)

Next in the queue is this more serious story. Basically, one of the Republican candidates for president said in a recent debate that perhaps America’s foreign policy is to blame for 9/11. As a result, the GOP is trying to have it barred from the rest of the debates. Some guy said, “I think he would have felt much more comfortable on the stage with the Democrats in what he said last night.” Wha?! Just because he has a different opinion on the war or its cause, it makes him a Democrat? That’s just silly. I can just see Dick Cheney now… “Whittington isn’t sure about Iraq? DEMOCRAT! GET HIM THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!!” Then he mumbles, “I must take him down.” Of course, then he shoots him in the face. (Note: I guess I could be way off base here. It’s quite possible Whittington simply how Cheney can be against gay marriages when his daughter is an open lesbian. Either or, I suppose.)

Finally, we have this story about a Chinese woman with a five-inch horn in her head. Wha?! It mentions that it’s been growing for three years. Now, most people would probably get that shit checked out and cut the fuck off. Not her. I think you’ll agree the most plausible explanation is she’s the result of a failed cross-breeding between humans and unicorns. Wikipedia claims that the Unicorn is a creature “whose power is exceeded only by its mystery.” Now, who wouldn’t like to have a bit of that? Granny Zhao certainly would.

It’s about time something like this came around. Being beautiful is such a chore.

The item to which the title speaks of is this: Withholding weather information. It happens every day on the teasers for the evening and nightly news. You’ve heard it before. The lead anchor gets a 6 second spot where he blurts out something along the lines of, “What’s the chance of rain tomorrow? Find out tonight at 9.” And then you’re back to your show. Why not just tell me in that 6 seconds what the chance is, and spare me the trouble of waiting. The local news should not be competing with other programs in its timeslot for viewers. That’s insane. The news should be a daily staple of American life, regardless of viewership. But this is what their tactics suggest they are doing. If the local television news is competing with anyone, it should be the internet, especially for a topic such as the weather. When I want to know the weather, I want to know it now, not later. By reminding me that I don’t know the chance of rain tomorrow only sends me to the internet for the answer. I don’t wait around for the 9 o’clock news to get my weather fix. It’s counterintuitive, if you ask me, and I just don’t understand.

Somebody finally stepped up. And his name is Roger Goodell. He’s the commissioner of the National Football League, and recent reports offer evidence of him in having the largest mansack of the any of the commish in the Big 4, er, 3 (sorry NHL). According to recent reports, Adam “Pacman” Jones and Chris Henry will be suspended without pay for the season and half the season, respectively, for their off-field confrontations with the law.

I really wish you could have heard a conversation I had with Jared regarding Jamar Smith. My stance on athlete behavior is pretty much this: You are told from the first day you play for a school (be it grade school, junior high, high school, etc.), that it is a privilege to represent your team, and you should act accordingly. That means your standards are higher because when you wake up in the morning, you represent not only yourself, but a much bigger population (Ex. your fellow students, faculty of the school, fans of the team, citizens of the city, donors to the organization, and many, many other stakeholders). You are told it is a privilege on day one. You are told on day two. You hear it before every home game, every away game, every new season, and ever offseason. By the time an athlete exits his college playing days and ascends to the pros, the word privilege and its definition are ingrained on his (or her) mind.

Because of this, I find it more than difficult to look the other way when an athlete displays poor judgment on or off the field. These men are payed to play a game that they supposedly love. That’s a privilege. So when you bring your ex-con gangbanger posse to the club during All-Star weekend, and someone gets shot, I have no sympathy for you. The same goes for when you have sex with a minor, assault a police officer, get pulled over with a blood alcohol level of twice the legal limit, beat your wife, or any other act that brings shame to the team you play for. If you do one of those things, you just bought yourself a ticket to the unemployment line. Call me old school, conservative, or just an idiot, but all this makes sense to me.

About Jamar Smith, I said I feel for the kid. He’s young, under a lot of pressure, and I hope his situation doesn’t prevent him from getting an education and providing for his future family. Do I think he should be kicked out of school? No. Do I think he should play another game for the Fighting Illini? No. He knew it was a privilege to play for his university when he made the decisions he made that night. He must have been told hundreds, if not thousands, of times in his life. That’s too much to ignore for me.

One day, I am going to teach high school math, and if my dreams come true, I’ll be a basketball coach at that school. The first day of tryouts, every child will be told what an honor it would be to make the team, and how his life should reflect that honor. Any other coach, parent, or role model those kids have will tell them the same thing. If one of my players cheats on a test, gets caught drinking, or performs an act anything less than becoming to his school and team, he will have played his last game. It’s not me trying to be a slave driver or a hardass; it’s nothing more than my belief of how athletes representing a team should behave.

Back to Roger Goodell handing down those thick suspensions, read this quote from the AP via FoxSports:

“It is a privilege to represent the NFL, not a right,” NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said in a statement announcing the suspensions. “These players and all members of our league have to make the right choices and decisions in their conduct on a consistent basis.”

We see eye to eye on this one.

All classes have been canceled for Tuesday (Feb. 13) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. More than 5 inches of snow fell overnight, up to another foot of snow is possible by Tuesday night and a blizzard warning is in effect. U. of I. employees who have been designated as essential personnel are expected to report to work.

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Pictures to come later.

Today I’m passing out a few free links to whoever wants them.

First up is an interesting article right here about a portable generator that produces its power from waste. It really doesn’t say what type of waste it accepts, but it’s cool nonetheless. It makes me think of the “Mr. Fusion” that the Doc had on the Delorean at the end of the first Back to the Future.

Next is a bit of a strange story from /.. Found here, it’s about Gorbachev apparently asking Bill Gates to step in on the side of a headmaster being charged with piracy. Apparently, if the unlucky headmaster is convicted, he could be sent to a Siberian prison camp. It seems more than a little disproportionate.

Third on the list of links is this link to the current rankings in college basketball. SIU has managed to make it into the top 20 in the coach’s poll. It really shouldn’t come as a surprise, given that they have all five of their starters back from last year. Still, it’s nice to see them getting some respect. Hopefully they can keep playing the way they have lately, because they did have some dumb losses early on.

Up last is something I’m pretty happy about. For those of you that don’t remember, I’ve posted more than once about my belief that the Real ID Act was a bogus piece of shit (a fact exemplified by its being attached as a rider to a supplemental spending bill for the war in Iraq). Well, you can read here about a number of states that have basically said they won’t do it. Hurray for some states standing up for their citizens when the federal government won’t.

On that note, I also read over the weekend that minimum wage is being raised by about $2. It’s about time, but apparently it took the Democrats coming into power to make something like that happen.

Huh, so I remembered how to post. Maybe this’ll be my new, cool thing to do for the New Year. Maybe not. For those curious, the past couple months have consisted of school, research, and med school interviews. Now the first two are not so much fun. But, minus the stress and prep leading up to it, the interviews have been a good time actually. Bitching and moaning about the whole process and its associated waiting and seeming randomness with other applicants is funner than one would think. I’m now also a believer of the mantra that interviewing gets easier with practice - things just got easier and more natural for me…gotta see it to believe it I guess. As for what all’s going on with my application process, check me here. And why the anonymity on the profile, one may ask. Pretty much because admissions committees check mdapplicants and another site I’ve been known to frequent. I’ve recently started posting to SDN since it’s been a pretty big help in the app process for me, and I figured I’d share some of my pseudo-wisdom.

On the topic of med school, I’m in - and it feels pretty damn good I’ve even got some choices. A decade and a couple hundred thousand dollars from now, I might just have this doctoring thing figured out. Until then, I’ll have to settle for sometimes knowing what’s going on in medical shows and if I’m lucky, being able to point out things that are wrong. Since getting all involved in the application process, I’ve started reading med-related blogs and decided to start one up.

About school, I’m pretty sure one of my exams today was an exercise in bullshitting, because that’s what I spent the majority of my time doing. And for once in my undergrad, I didn’t really care. I mean, I’ll still study and whatnot, but if some exam decides to tear me a new one, it’s not that big a deal…at least not for another 9 months. Hell, as long as I don’t get any Cs, med schools are done caring about GPA, meaning that so am I - and it feels pretty damn good.

And since everyone loves a little premed learning here’s a couple of things I’ve learned so far. Fun words to throw around in anatomy: peduncle, tubercle/tuberosity, calcaneus, gastrocnemius, pterygoid, mastoid, caruncle, fundus, sartorius. If you tear your ACL or rupture your Achilles, it’s gotta be pretty violent because that shit is pretty strong, even on cadavers. Oh, and the skull has holes. A lot of them. Stuff goes through these holes. Once in a cadaver lab and you will *never* forget that smell. When you’re a fetus, your lower body pretty much gets shafted in terms of nice, oxygenated blood. Bacterial pathogenesis: bacteria sometimes good, sometimes bad. Bacteria can be little thiefs by using your own stuff against you. Bacteria living in cells - a bitch to get rid of. Sneaky bacteria that never show themselves outside of cells are ninja-like and just might kill you. The ballsy bacteria which can get into and live in your bloodstream *will* kill you. Medical ethics - here are two sides of a moral argument…you decide. Just don’t break the law, piss anyone off, or kill anyone. Immunology - something binds something which signals something to do something. Oh wait, it matters how well, when, with whom, where, and why things bind. Vaccines are good. Viruses are pretty hard to deal with. Neurogenesis research - the brain makes new neurons, who knew? Figure out why and how this happens. Maybe I’ll get more learned with physiology and endocrinology next semester.

Back to the post title - it’s always a good feeling when your landlord tapes a notice to your door telling you the following. “Valuable stuff: leave it behind over Christmas break and it will probably get stolen.” Thanks, CPM. That’s why I gave you a security deposit. And about the apartment, I refute the theory of heat rising. Actually, I take that back. After living in a loft, heat only rises if it’s summer. When it’s winter, heat does *not* rise - it stays on the first level of the apartment. I’ll defend that thesis to the death.

Good word, newsages. I found three stories this morning on /. that I happened to like. The first, right here, is about how the US is actually going to begin pulling troops out of Iraq. That’s great news, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t know what sort of ramifications it’ll have on the new government there, but it’s time for us to quit wasting American lives on it.

The next story, located here, is a bit more recently relevant to me. On the way back home from the cruise, American Airlines tore up one of our bags. The pulling handle was actually broken in half and the metal on it was bent up all crazy. They claim they don’t cover it, because it’s an “external attachment”, but that’s fucking bullshit. Those handles retract, and we sure as shit didn’t leave it out when we gave it to them. So somebody took it out and then fucked it up.

Anyway, the story is about the Sydney Airport using RFID tags to better track their bags. The part that caught my attention was this sentence: “Industry experts say that baggage mishandling costs the industry globally $US1.7 billion each year”. Oh boo-hoo. If the god damn airlines were just more careful with that shit, it wouldn’t happen. Morons.

The third and final story, which can be found here, is apparently about the Antikythera. It’s an analog computer that was developed almost 2000 years ago to map the positions of the sun and moon, and to map the lunar phases. It’s pretty cool, when you get right down to it.

I didn’t really pay much attention to the political atmosphere much here in Missouri purely because I was not going to be voting in it.  There was, however, one key issue that did keep my interest and I am happy to say the outcome was a good one. Amendment 2 was voted in favor by the people of Missouri by more than 27,000 votes, according an article in the Post Dispatch.  Amendment 2 allows for the protection of all forms of embryonic stem-cell research in the state allowed under federal law. 

This amendment had come under heavy scrutiny and political debate, especially by groups such as the Missourians Against Human Cloning.  In their opposition campaigns, they would use religious and moral ideals. Politics and religion rarely go well together, throw science in the mix and you surely have a recipe for disaster.  What really upsets me about the whole stem cell issue is that people automatically jump to the issue of human cloning.

Do I know if that would happen or not? No, I don’t, but neither do others who say it will happen if stem cell research is allowed.  I imagine it’s a sign of the times, just as it was when in-vitro fertilization was a new concept.

I’m no expert in stem cell research, but I have an understanding of how it works.  These cells are the precursors for every cell in the body. When stimulated properly they can grow into any adult cell–blood cells, brain cells, muscle cells, liver cells.  This isn’t a direct cure for people with incurable diseases, but it is a means to begin searching for one.

Just as in-vitro fertilizations and organ transplants were first met with criticism and problems, I hope that one day stem cell research will be accepted by all as a legitimate therapy and a means of finding cures for diseases.

In other news, nice to see that that the Democrats are now in the majority in the House.

Check out this story about the government trying to protect us from ourselves. Basically, it seems to me that they’re trying to interfere with our lives just a little bit more.

Now, I imagine there actually is some legal basis for this, since schools are funded by the government. (Of course, OTOH, we fund the government…). It just seems like one of those things to me where you never know when they’ll decide to draw the line between what they can and can’t block.

Hezbollah has declared war on Israel. You should read this article about our reaction to it. It’s sad really. To me, we should be running over there to support Israel. The French government is saying the Israeli counter-attack is disproportionate. Yeah, I’d like to see him say that after he has soldiers kidnapped. The fact of the matter is a large portion of the world’s Muslim population would love nothing more than to see Israel destroyed, and Israel has every right to defend themselves.

Speaking on the subject, the Irianian president said, “Despite the barbaric and criminal nature of the occupiers of Jerusalem, the regime and its Western supporters do not even have the power to give Iran a nasty look.” That’s the kind of thing we need to be concerned with–not Iraq.  Iraq has not been a threat to us since 1991.

It just seems like one of these days, Israel is going to lose one of their wars.  We need to help them out before it’s too late.

Here’s another great story about our government eroding our privacy. It’s ridiculous that Bush gets away with this stuff. Somebody want to explain how that works? I don’t care what his intentions are–he’s breaking the law. Here’s a good comment on it.

[Edit:] Like this guy points out, you Republicans are supposed to be the ones for smaller government that plays a smaller role in our lives. Yeah, that’s happening. You’re spying on us, you’re deciding who can and can’t get married, and so on. It’s appalling.

It’ll be a glorious day (hell probably would have frozen over, too) when everybody realizes that this is the kind of thing that happens when you elect leaders like Bush. The judicial process doesn’t matter anymore. They can say what they want about needing to “help the police”, but how about the police respecting our country’s laws?

A new study claims that ultra-clean environments can actually lead to problems with allergies and auto-immune diseases. Maybe now companies will finally stop thinking they need to make every damn product anti-bacterial. It’s ridiculous really. It just makes the bacteria evolve.

The Pirate Bay was taken down yesterday by Swedish police. It’s been covered pretty heavily in the news. The thing thing I found hilarious, though, was that the MPAA had an offical press release about it.

“The actions today taken in Sweden serve as a reminder to pirates all over the world that there are no safe harbors for Internet copyright thieves,” said Chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) Dan Glickman.  “Intellectual property theft is a problem for film industries all over the world and we are glad that the local government in Sweden has helped stop The Pirate Bay from continuing to enable rampant copyright theft on the Internet.”

First of all, what a douche. Didn’t everybody laugh when he said, “there are no safe harbors for Internet copyright thieves”. Could you take yourself more seriously? It’s ridiculous, really. Sorry, but I’ve got more things to worry about than making you wealthier, Mr. Glickman.

Secondly, the part of the intellectual property theft. That’s just a misnomer, and after taking a bit of psych and having to take a decent amount more, I’m rather offended by it. Nobody is stealing your intellectual property. If they did, you wouldn’t have it anymore. There’s no way to take somebody else’s knowledge for your own. Yet they think up this horrible-sounding name for it, and that’s something that will, without a doubt, affect public opinion. Well fuck you, I don’t feel sorry at all for the MPAA/RIAA. I hope piracy is hurting you like you say it is (despite the fact that it’s obviously not). I hope both organizations (read: cartels) collapse under the weight of their stupidity.