narcissism and the greater good

Earthworms in puddles
Hapless victims of giants
But why were they there?

Almost every day this week it rained. It made for a fairly miserable time getting to class with a laptop, but it did give nice spans of time to ponder the great mysteries of life, like why the hell earthworms crawl across cement? I brought this up in conversation with a friend of mine. "You know, if you're an earthworm, and you were to find something that you couldn't dig through, why on earth (!) would you continue across it? It seems ridiculous!"

He commented, in a sarcasm-about-wisdom-hiding-actual-wisdom tone, that if no earthworms had done it, then they would only be in one spot. They are fighting for the greater good! Or perhaps they are emo earthworms. But the first sounds much more noble.

	Christopher Columbus worm
	Amelia Earhart worm

On the other hand, stories in Time and Newsweek recently began insisting that humans aren't really tending towards that sort of commitment to the species at large; we're becoming more and more enthralled with ourselves. Well, not humans in general, but the US, at least, is suffering from a "narcissism epidemic." Interesting. I wonder if all that teaching that little kids get about being a beautiful and unique snowflake is best summed up by Chuck Palahniuk: You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile.

Well, maybe putting it so bluntly isn't the right thing, either, but I can certainly see where psychologists might get inklings that people, especially my age, might be getting a bit big-headed. I have borne witness to many a student spending hours grooming his or her Facebook profile page to make it attractive to, you know, anyone who might visit. Such effort! And the fact that some employers and graduate schools now use Facebook to help make decisions on candidates sort of encourages that, too. I dunno... I'm not sure that I can subscribe to that. I know that I spend too much time on Facebook after my lenten resolution ended, but I think I'm doing a better job than a lot of people. Anyway, it's time for adventure. I have to put off thinking about this atomic theory paper for as long as possible.

days go by

I'm too lazy to
Write a real post, so I'll just
Write a few haikus.

Friend requests, messages,
Too many to leave me sane.
Why do I do this?

College students march,
A rainbow of umbrellas,
Hunched against the rain.

Winding down, slide with
The flow. Grades will come, just sit
Back, relax, enjoy.

Easter food heavy
In my belly, but it gives
Energy for fun!

Sustainabili-
ty is too long to fit in
Just five syllables.

Green tech, green campus,
Lectures about them abound,
Sustain IU week!

Pink petals poke up
Colouring campus coyly
Suggesting a sniff.

a few things i've learned

Ninjas (or ninjae?)
Come from wise masters, failure,
And dedication.

And, you know, some other things. Time's pretty important. Anyway, I have been experimenting with my sharp new Ubuntu install, and it's way fun. I haven't really used Linux as a desktop environment except during my time at Google, and being at work sort of precluded playing around with all the nifty things that it can do. I took the GRE on Saturday morning, and I think that the few weeks that I've had this thing to play with actually improved my score by a couple points, haha.

It's intriguing to me to learn the things that people think are cool about computers. On Friday I was on a panel for undergrad women who are interested in Computer Science, for example. Sarah Loos, who lived/worked/blogged with me last summer, and I tried to get the girls excited about, you know, interesting algorithms and stuff we worked on at Google, deep ideas about computational complexity, blah blah blah, but their interest was only really sparked when I offhandedly mentioned that I had a) given up Facebook for Lent and b) written a script to block me from it and allow me to access it again once Easter arrived.

"Can you really do that? Wow! What class do you learn that in?"

"Um.. well, to be honest I sort of taught that to myself. But It was the foundations that I got in my CS classes that let me do it, really."

Yeah, so it was sort of bullshit. It's really trivial, actually, to add a line to your hosts file and write a cron job to remove that line on 4/12. But they just thought it was the coolest thing. :)

Oh, I guess that's only one thing I've learned, and this is entitled "a few things i've learned." What else, then... I wrote a script that will verify that an ISO burned properly to a CD (thanks, once more, to the internets!), I've discovered the joys of aliasing commands:

$ alias ls='echo muahahahah'
$ ls
muahahahah

(super fun to do if people forget to lock their screens in the lab, but I have useful aliases, too ;) ), I've set up nifty passwordless logins to the computers at school, and a few other things, probably. Those are the ones that come to mind, anyway.

no facebook: day 2

Productivity

No longer punctuated

With random people.

Well, it's been about 37 hours since I swore off Facebook, and it's been beautiful.  :)  I guess I never spent that much time on there, but I did take microbreaks from whatever I was theoretically supposed to be doing in order to see if I had any messages/invites/pokes/whatever.  It's amazing what removing those 15 second diversions can do for focus.

I'm a little sad about the fact that I essentially lost a second email address.  I know a lot of people won't be contacting me at all for 38 more days.  :(

In other news, I'm starting to lean more and more towards Cognitive Science for graduate school.  I've had meetings with a couple of people in the department over the last day or so, and the idea of combining all these seemingly-random things that I've been studying up until now into a coherent sort of discipline is really appealing.  I signed up to take the GRE for Computer Science in early April.  I have to say I'm at least a little apprehensive; I can only assume that there are things I won't know on it that I'll learn in the next year, but from my score on the practice exam I think I'll do okay.  I'm hoping to get a book from a prof about graph theory, which is an entire topic that is entirely missing from IU's CS program.  Meh.

lent

I like to observe
Other folks' holidays. It's
Good for the soul.

Well, I'm not Catholic, but Lent starts tomorrow, and I've decided to give something up. I observed Ramadan a couple years ago, and that was a really rewarding experience. Why not, right? I decided to forgo Facebook for the next 40 days and 40 nights. We'll see how that works out, haha. :) Hopefully it will end in my being more productive.

Anyway, I will still be existing until Easter. If you need to contact me (and you can't use Facebook to do it!), my email address and phone number are still listed on my Facebook page. ;) Teehee.

Wish me luck!