During the primary season, Joe Biden was my favorite pick. If I had not been swayed by the exciting prospect of having a women or a half-black man on the ticket, I probably would have supported Biden. I really liked his frank and direct way of answering questions, and he wasn’t afraid to show his emotions. It gets too tiresome to see politicians mincing their words all the time. Sometimes, it’s really refreshing to see some fiery oration. And of course, this is in the great traditional of America’s founders. And Biden’s competence was not just in his passionate speaking – he always had answers that were slightly unconventional and sensible. He really appeals to the contrarian streak in me.
But since he’s been picked as the VP candidate, he seems to stepped down his rhetoric. This is a little disappointing, but it is also expected. It can be argued that his strong rhetoric may hurt Obama’s campaign. On the other hand, the VP candidate has traditionally held the “attack dog” role, so perhaps Biden needs to step it up a bit.
In the end, I will be very disappointed if Biden allows the normative powers of the national spotlight to curb his personality.
For an extremely entertaining demonstration of Biden’s fire-power, check out his speech from the Senate floor:
P.S. By the way, I noticed a spike in traffic to my blog. Did you find my blog through a link from elsewhere? If so, please comment and let me know, or at least tell me how you got here. Thanks.
Walking into Essie Mae’s for a late dinner at 10:30PM is usually a dismal experience. The grill is off, and the cold lunch meats are already half-packed and ready to be put in the fridge. Of course, all the pizza and wings are gone, and for some reason the lazy staff isn’t frying up fries or fingers anymore. But severe limitations always yield the best creativity, and this is no exception.
I ordered myself an egg salad sandwich (in whole-wheat bread, of course) with Jalepeno peppers and some sliced tomatoes- and voila! Perhaps one of the best sandwiches I’ve ever had. If you get the chance, you should try this someday. The creamy and savory egg salad goes perfect with the tart tomatoes and the spicy peppers. Mmmm.
Many who advocate civil unions for gay couples argue that it is a practical way of granting equal rights to gays without ruining the ’sanctity’ of marriage as that between one man and one woman. Some even argue that marriage is fundamentally a religious institution. Buy wait- there is a problem here.
First, if civil union couples have the same legal rights as that of married couples, then what is actually the difference between the two? Tradition? Religious distinctions? But the government does not have the constitutional right to be engaged in either of these issues.
If marriage is a religious institution, why is the state handing out marriage licenses? This would be a violation of the separation of church and state. And separating marriage and civil unions by name only for matters of tradition? This is just as bad as ’separate but equal’.
If we as a society recognize marriage as an institution that the church has a say in, then the state should only issue civil union licenses, even to straight couples. But as long as the government sanctions ‘marriages’ for straight couples, it must do so for gay couples as well.
Without real legal differences between marriage and civil unions, granting one to straight couples while another to gay couples would be unconstitutional, while distinguishing the two with real differences in legal benefits would be discriminatory.
Just got my iPhone today! I am writing this post from the wordpress application ! It’s pretty amazing to be able to make a blog post from a phone. And this touch keyboard is actually surprisingly easy to use. I find that if I just type fast without worrying too much about typos, I get amazing accracy!
Overall I am very impressed by this phone. Quite unexpectedly though, the third party apps are mostly useless. I was expecting the app store to be the best part about this phone – not the case!
I think it is great that I have already done email, twittered, looked up directions, and made a blog post from this phone- all things I never did once on my Treo because it was such a clunker.
At least 50 people have lost their sight after staring at the sun hoping to see an image of the Virgin Mary, according to reports.
Alarmed health authorities in India’s Kottayam district have set up a sign dispelling rumours of a miraculous image in the sky and warning of the dangers of looking into direct sunlight.
Forty-eight cases of sight-loss, allegedly caused by photochemical burns on the retina, have been recorded at St Joseph’s ENT and Eye hospital in the region since Friday.
Despite warnings, and the potentially harmful effects of their actions, believers are allegedly still flocking to a hotelier’s house in Erumeli near where the divine image is said to have appeared.
Here we are, surrounded by computers and aircrafts, and people are still stupid enough to do this kind of thing. As somebody famous said, ‘We take airplanes to get to an astrophysics conference. But when is the last time somebody got on a magic carpet to get to the spirituality conference?”
My favorite reality TV show of all time has been The Mole, ever since I first saw it on TV back in 2001. Back then, the first season was on. Even though the show returned for an even better second season, the show was canceled afterwards. The reason was simple: the show is too cerebral and intriguing for your average reality TV crowd. A pedestrian viewer tuning in by chance would have been confused and bored.
But to my pleasant surprise, the show has returned this summer. For many reasons, this revival will never be as good as the original seasons. (One of the most important reasons is that Anderson Cooper is no longer hosting the show. Anderson’s delivery and demeanor brought a sort-of posterity to the show that played well with the spy-thriller look and feel of the show.)
But despite inherent flaws, the show seems to be holding up well. Episode 5 last Monday was the best so far. I was concerned that the games this season were not as intriguing or cerebral and too physical, but the games on this last episode seemed to return to the tried-and-true formula for the games on the Mole: force the players to trust each other to win money. Of course they can’t, because one of the players is secretly the Mole, hired by the producers to sabotage the game.
At the end of each episode, the players take a quiz, and a typical question reads like: “What color shirt was The Mole wearing yesterday?” or “What year did The Mole graduate from college?”. This forces the players to not only try to figure out who is the mole, but also to be extremely observant. The lowest-scoring player is executed from the game. The thing I really like about this game is that your fate is entirely in your own hands – no popularity contests and no luck. It’s purely a game of keen observation.
One thing that I have not enjoyed about this season is all the fighting. The original seasons always had everyone getting along well. It seems that the producers hired more colorful personalities this time around, perhaps to boost ratings. But this sort of bickering and fighting doesn’t suit this show very well. The show used to have more of a very cool and thrilling spy-mystery sort of vibe. It’s still got some of that, but all the fighting seems to be destroying that mood.
Either way, the season seems to be getting better, so I will keep watching. A surprise appearance by a past season Mole or Anderson Cooper would be really awesome.
That’s right. I am declaring my prediction right here and right now. McCain will win the presidential election and Obama will lose. Here are the reasons:
1. Obama is black.
I hate to say it, but most of lower-middle class white America is not ready for a black president. This is not to say that lower-income whites in the south and the midwest are racists. It’s just that there is a cultural divide between these two racial/cultural groups. For the average white voter in this demographic, voting for Obama is uncomfortable. It’s important to recognize this fine line between racism and simple discomfort with an unfamiliar culture.
2. The Republicans will tag Obama with a nickname like they did to Kerry with “flipflopper”
Republicans are masters at this sort of PR campaign. A likely target for this sort of thing would be Obama’s stance on meeting with foreign leaders unconditionally. Republicans will paint Obama as someone willing to meet and negotiate with terrorists. (Which is all the more outrageous, since negotiating Terrorists is actually not a bad thing.)
3. Obama is too smart for a politican.
I hate to say it, but Obama is too cerebral to be appealing to many voters. This is unfortunate, because it is precisely his intelligence that will probably make him a great president if he were elected.
4. Obama’s message of “Change” is really bullshit.
Seriously, I thought liberals were smart. Why are we falling for this sort of crap? For one, “change” and “hope” are so vague they mean absolutely nothing. “Change”? Are we going to abandon the constitution? That would be change, right? I mean, isn’t “change” virtually what every politician campaigns for? When is the last time you heard a candidate say “We need more of the same” even when things were going well? The bottom line is, while Obama may make a great president, it’s not because of his message of “change”. His strengths lie in his intelligence and wit. Obama’s slogan of “change” is so empty and asinine. Why doesn’t he add the message “I want to win” and “We need to get more electoral votes” in addition to “change” and “hope”.
If there is one thing going for Obama, it’s that McCain is really bad at speaking. If anyone else had been the Republican nominee, Obama would have been already toast.
So I had nostalgia for some old games like Lemmings and SimTower, but unfortunately, the Mac version of these games were only available for Mac OS 9. Being on an intel Mac with Leopard, it wasn’t possible to run these programs immediately. So I spent a good deal of yesterday and today trying to get an emulation of Mac OS 9 to work on my Macbook.
Sheepshaver is an open-source solution that emulates a PowerPC to run Mac OS 9 on an intel Mac, but like many open-source apps, they don’t make it easy. I had to track down various Macintosh ROM files of old PowerPCs, and also fiddle with a preference file in Terminal. o_O yikes! Nevertheless, I was successful, and I feel smarter for having done it. Here are some screenshots:
If there is one area of mathematics I do not enjoy, it is combinatorics. Whenever people start saying things like “n choose k, but divide by two because you double counted,” it goes right over my head. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but there is something really hard about counting arguments for me.
I would have dismissed combinatorics outright as being petty and stupid (perhaps unfairly) if it had not been for my Topology seminar last semester. In studying simplicial homology, I learned that at the heart of space, there is something fundamentally combinatorial about it. You see, simplices (which are in essence n-dimensional generalizations of triangles) are defined and dealt with in a purely combinatorial fashion. And yet, this reveals something deep and fundamental about the nature of space.
The moral of the story is that combinatorics is very fundamental. It seems to crop up in nearly every branch of mathematics. And yet, it seems to be the only area that category theory has not swept under the rug as being a “trivial application” of category theory.
I wonder if there is a way to formalize and abstract counting arguments in a category-theoretic fashion? (I think Yoneda’s lemma is already hinting at this.)
P.S. Sorry about the exceptionally nerdy post. Not every post is like this, I promise.
As you can see, the visual style of this blog is much more streamlined and professional now. I really like the clean and simple look of this new theme.
But there are improvements to things you cannot see as well. The Wordpress backbone has been upgraded to the latest version, and the sidebar has been completely widgetized! Now, I no longer have to create my custom sidebar (with the twitter updates and all) every time I change my theme.
