More Posts Coming Soon!

Yo dawgs, I've had a busy weekend so I haven't been able to post anything (sorry), but I'll get some more stuff up during the week. I have to post about why men are smarter than women and put up moral quandary part 2 of 2.

In the meantime, check out this post about GiveMeSomethingToRead.com and also look at some of those links!

Playful Yet Pedestrian English Tests

I am often confused like this guy up here when I take English reading comprehension tests and I get to a question like "What is the tone of the passage?" Why am I confused? Because the answers are all weird! Here's a sample:

Question: What is the tone of the passage?

Possible Answers:

(A) Resplendent but curtailed

(B) Ardent and artificial

(C) Persistently phlegmatic

(D) Unflinchingly sesquipedalian

(E) Immobile yet randy

How am I supposed to answer this kind of question?!?! What usually happens is I read the question then read the answers one by one, laughing after each (actually since it's a test situation it's more one of those breathe-out laughs) because they sound so funny and improbable, but then realize when I've done that on all five that there are no more options. So then I guess randomly.

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Just another random thing I wanted to bring up: I don't think that there are any words in English that have five vowels in a row (or at least not a common word), but in French there are at least one, and the one I know of has all 5 vowels! It's the conjugation for "they were playing"—ils jouaient.

For all of you non-French-speakers, you are probably wondering what the point of having all those vowels in a row is. Is the word pronounced "jo-uu-ai-ent"? Actually it's just "joo-ay." That's what French is like—if you want to seem legit just say the first few letters of a word in what sounds like a French accent then don't pronounce the second half of the word at all. Also throw in a few highfalutin "ahh"s.

Image credit: http://www.52shows.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/huh.jpeg

Great Website for Interesting Stuff

As I wrote in a recent post, I wanted to share a great site I have found.

It's called Give Me Something to Read. It's associated with InstaPaper (an app), which you can use if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, but you don't need either of those to take advantage of it.

Anyways, Give Me Something to Read basically takes the most frequently bookmarked articles by users, and the guy who runs the site chooses a few to put links to on most days. It might be sort of similar to Digg or Delicious or whatever that stuff is, I've never tried any of that.

The site ends up giving links to articles about a lot of different subjects, ranging from economics (perhaps the most common because of the recession, but there's plenty of other content), psychology, biology, sociology, business, technology... and so forth. I highly recommend you check it out!

Here are some of the best pieces I've read because of the site:

The Itch. About a woman whose scalp started itching and just didn't stop. Just a fascinating article—gives some medical/biological details (not too technical, don't worry), and really engrossing. Long but I couldn't stop reading it. Note: it gets a little gross in places.

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education. The writer, a Yale professor (or at least used to be, but maybe not now because he sort of disses Yale in the article) talks about why elite education  is failing some of what he considers its basic goals. That description might not sound that interesting but just check out the article. It will make you think about what you want to get out of college.

America the Illiterate. I just found it shocking how "illiterate" America is, or at least how little so many adults read. Some pretty amazing statistics.

Check out Give Me Something To Read! Don't be discouraged if you don't immediately find something you think is interesting—look a bit.

Image credit: http://www.goodhope.org.uk/departments/eyedept/images/magnigreadingclose.jpg

Gmail's "Funny" Quotes of the Day

One of those weird images of kittens supposedly saying something.

It's pretty hard to say what about something makes it funny, isn't it? Well maybe I'll make a post later about that, but now I want to point out something that's NOT funny: those gmail funny quotes of the day.

Let me give you an example: "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." -Douglas Adams

The first problem with all of these is that they're called the "FUNNY" quote of the day. It's not good to say that something you're about to say is funny; it just raises expectations. Also, in this case, the reader knows to expect something funny, an effect which is often achieved by something unexpected. If you know to expect something unexpected, then the expected thing isn't unexpected anymore, so it won't be funny!

This quote, about deadlines flying by, just doesn't amuse me at all. On top of it being called "funny" before I read it, it's just not very clever, ironic, insightful, anything. Plus you can tell that Douglas Adams was trying to be funny or unexpected; this doesn't always kill the humor but it raises the bar for how witty the joke/statement/whatever must be.

What do you think makes something funny? I think I'll have a more detailed post on that sometime later.

Image credit: http://img337.imageshack.us/img337/1152/chortlesnortga8.jpg

Real-Life Ocean's 11

Check out this story of a huge diamond heist that happened several years ago. The story was just broken. Note: it's a pretty long story—might take you 30 minutes to read it all. But it's pretty cool.

Later I'll post on a website that helps me find interesting articles like this one.

Upcoming Post: Men Are Smarter Than Women

Yes, that's right: men actually are smarter than women. It's a little risky for me to write this now with my only reader (at least until this post) being female, but I need something risque to jump-start my blog.

Anyways, I'll provide an explanation for this seemingly outlandish, unconscionable claim soon.

Image credit: http://www.ocpp.org/2005/einstein-tongue.jpg

Tie Does NOT Go to the Runner

Maybe you've heard that in baseball, "tie goes to the runner." However, this is NOT true! Nowhere in the rule book will you find this. The umpire is supposed to determine which happened first—the runner touching the bag or the fielder catching the ball. It's impossible for the two events to happen at EXACTLY the same time.

Image credit: http://www.eteamz.com/greshamll04/images/UmpireSafe.jpg

Moral Quandary: Part 1 of 2

As you can tell I have been posting on tons of different random stuff. Now, onto a moral question!

Let's say that you have the choice of yourself dying or someone else (who you don't know) dying. Would you sacrifice the other person? What if the person was someone you know, but you don't find out who until you declare your decision?

Back to the unknown people—what if it's you or 10 unknown people? (If you would sacrifice yourself instead of the one unknown person, you can stop now.) What if it's 100 unknown people? 1000? 1 million? 1 billion? I sort of hope that you'd stop by now and sacrifice yourself. What's the exact number you would transition from saving yourself to sacrificing yourself? Would it change if you saw the people being killed? It really shouldn't, right? But in practice maybe it would.

Stay tuned for part 2, which should be a little more interesting.

Image credit: http://www.crystalinks.com/plato.jpg

St. Patrick's Day

Chicago dyes this river green each year on March 17.

Happy St. Patrick's Day! 

St. Patrick's Day seems like a random holiday if you think about it... so why do we celebrate it?

A little background. St. Patrick is some Irish guy who lived from around 385-461. (I'm not making this up but Wikipedia might be.) Anyway he became something of a national hero in Ireland I guess—in fact, St. Patrick's Day is a national holiday for them.

How'd it come over to the US (not to mention the rest of the world)? Well, it must be the Roman Catholics from Ireland who immigrated into the US. The first St. Patrick's Day parade was in 1761 in Boston. George Washington even gave his troops a day off on this day in 1780 as an act of solidarity with the Irish in the Irish fight for freedom.

Basically, I guess that the holiday just stuck. I couldn't find out why we're supposed to pinch someone if they don't wear green—probably a tradition some silly schoolchildren started.

A Dissapointing Post Title

Why should I be sad with the title of this post? Look at the title again. Look carefully. Get it? If not, either you don't think that minor spelling errors are that big a deal, or you don't know how to spell DISAPPOINTING. There are TWO P'S and ONE S, not the other way around. I see this word misspelled (yes, misspelled is spelled misspelled) SO MANY TIMES, especially on the internet. I know, it's not really a very big deal, and everyone misspells some words, but whenever I see, for example, an iTunes review and the person writes that they're "dissapointed" with the album, I skip to the next review for someone I can trust. Maybe not always fair. If you start trying to notice it, you'll see people misspelling "disappoint" (that's the right way!) a lot.

Think of it as 2 words if you have to: dis-appoint. (Although I don't think that it has anything to do with un appointing anyone or anything like that.)

Another word I can think of that people commonly misspell is "weird." That's the right way—weird. NOT wierd.

Neither of these is a very big deal, but people might look down on what you write if you make just one error like this! 

If I can think of more common errors I'll add some...

Do You Sound Good Singing To Yourself?

If you sing out loud along with a song, have you noticed that usually your voice sounds good, or at least on key? Maybe this is only true for me but I doubt it. Maybe it's because you're listening to the song, which sounds good and on key, while you're singing. But if you hear a recording of your own voice, singing or not, it always sounds awful! I think I've heard that people hear their own voices in a way that is biologically different from the way other people hear their voices—in other words, if you hate your voice, it's probably just an illusion! Think of it this way: do you actually hate the way that anyone else's voice sounds? OK, maybe for a few people, but it's not really that common.

When lead singers of bands listen to their own songs, do they cringe at their own voice?

Image credit: http://www.sju.edu/studentlife/studentresources/oml/Pictures/music-notes.jpg

Senioritis

When I tried to find an appropriate image for this post, for some reason I found a lot of pictures of kittens with a bottle of beer.

Anyways, on to the topic of this post. Senioritis. Does it exist? Obviously it does. But I think that part of the reason it keeps existing is that people have been hearing about it for years and now think it must apply to them. Why does it have to? The point of being in school is to learn. In the ideal school, you would not have to be tested because the ultimate goal would be learning knowledge, learning how to learn, and learning how to interact socially, and if you really want to learn those things then there's really no reason to be tested. If you really wanted to learn, though, there wouldn't be Senioritis!

That was pretty muddled, but what I guess I'm saying is that you don't have to give in to Senioritis. If you think about it, your second semester in senior year is 1/8th of your whole high school career! Put another way, if you're going to a private school with a tuition of, hypothetically speaking, about $30,000, and you slack off for a semester, that's sort of like $15,000 down the drain!

Ironically I got the idea for this post because I am up past midnight, procrastinating on... sleeping. I'm done with my work but I'm still up, having fun doing random stuff. I think I'll go to bed soon.

Lastly, to sum up and conclude with ending finality, relax and enjoy 2nd semester—go to performances, sports games, hang out with friends, all that—but don't slack off too much! Don't get your college acceptances revoked!

OK well that post was really boring I think. They'll be better in the future I hope. Hey, I'm new to blogging, what do you expect! At least I included an image with this post. Give me a 2nd chance!

Photo credit: http://www.digitaldutch.com/arles/tutorials/thumbnail_tags/galleries/thumbnail_tags_with_size/imgaes/Hammock.jpg.

Blog Inspirations/How I Came Up With This Blog's Name

Hi all. I'm Sean and I'm a senior in high school. I doubt that that introduction was necessary, though, because I doubt that anyone who doesn't know me will be reading this blog.

So, why am I creating a blog? Well first of all, everyone else was doing it so I decided to too, but more specifically Kaytee made me do it. I think that puts her total at 2 (at least) people she's forced to create a blog. Anyways check out her photo blog, it's really polished and professional. The main photo on the top always makes me so hungry!

On to the purposes of this blog. I'm not really sure what I'll write about. I think I'll just write about things that I find interesting. Heck, if you ever have any suggestions, send 'em in! This blog is almost more for personal use, like a journal type thing for fun, and if people actually read it then that's just a bonus. (Don't worry, it won't get too personal.)

That gets me to the title: literally figuratively. I didn't know what else to call it, and I find it funny how often the word "literally" is misused. "This car is literally exploding with paint!" "That test literally killed me!" "They literally traveled to the 4 corners of the earth." (Maybe that last one was just from the Flat Earth Society.)

Anyways, maybe not a great title or anything, but people didn't think Xerox was a great company name and look where it got them!