The Coded Message

So, I'm going to do some translations of some good ol' German fairy tales, and post them on my blog. Today, I'm going to do the a Riddle Fairy Tale, entitled "Riddle Fairy Tale":

Three women were turned into flowers, which stood in the field, but one of them was allowed to spend the night in her house. As day drew near and she had to go back to her comrades on the field and become a flower again, she said to her husband this one time: "if you come this morning and pick me, I will be saved and henceforth I will stay with you." It happened.

Now the question is: how did her husband recognize her, as the flowers were entirely similar, without any differences.

Answer: 'dieweil sie die Nacht in ihrem Haus und nicht auf dem Feld war, fiel der Tau nicht auf sie als auf die andern zwei, dabei sie der Mann erkannte.'

I'll leave a comment with my translation of the answer.

I enjoy the occasional alcoholic beverage. Sometimes, I enjoy a whole night of drinking. However, as I am only 20, all my drinking thus far has had a shadow of illegitimacy and illegality. Luckily, this coming winter, I am turning 21: my drinking will be made legal, my parents will return the whisky they confiscated from me, and I can enjoy myself in peace. Obviously, I should celebrate this new opportunity by an excited drunken party on my 21st birthday. It's traditional.

But I'm going to boycott this tradition -- I will not drink a drop of alcohol on the day of my 21st birthday.

See, I don't think there should be a drinking age of 21. For one thing, the federal government should not be allowed to force a national drinking age with their manipulative funding scheme: the majority opinion in South Dakota vs. Dole is on my list of "Supreme Court opinions that only make sense when drunk." But more importantly, I think that my right to liberty as an adult human (and I define the age of adulthood to be at least as young as 18, if not 16) overrides the government's half-hearted attempt at preventing me from drinking. It astonishes me that I'm considered responsible enough to choose my own law-makers and judges, and not responsible enough to have command over my own body.

So I'm not going to give the law any dignity, any respect. On my 21st birthday, it may be the case that the government will have finally come around to stop telling me not to drink, but I refuse to care about whether the government wants me to drink or not. If I drink on my 21st birthday, it's like I'm saying "finally, I can drink." Which is like I'm saying I acknowledge that in some way I "couldn't" drink before. And it's always been my policy to give this law no respect.

If I had a tradition of always drinking on my birthdays, I would continue it. But I don't, so the only reason I would drink on my 21st birthday is this artificial tradition of drinking extravagantly on your 21st birthday is completely artificial -- an artifice of a law I won't acknowledge.

I'm not even going to celebrate the fact that the government (and my father) are going to stop harassing me about my drinking. They shouldn't have been in the first place, and they will continue to bug those younger than me. There's no actual change of heart or change of behaviour on their part for me to celebrate.

And when my parents finally give back the scotch they stole from me, I'll be damned if I thank them for it.

The original Pennsylvania constitution contained the following provision:

"That all men have a natural inherent right to emigrate from one state to another that will receive them, or to form a new state in vacant countries, or in such countries as they can purchase, whenever they think that thereby they may promote their own happiness."

That's kind of awesome (although I kind of wonder why we can't do it even if we think it'll make us depressed). My favourite part is the part that goes "to form a new state in vacant countries, or in such countries as they can purchase...".

You laugh, but I'm serious.

This whole founding new states thing (and I think "states" is here meant in the general sense, rather than just including members of the United States) is very difficult to do nowadays, which is presumably why this provision doesn't appear quite like this in the modern PA constitution. But I still appreciate the sentiment, outdated and old-fashioned though it may seem. I feel the drive embodied by it, the drive to be part of something new, something emergent, the drive for my life to have purpose beyond the mere following of well-trodden paths.

Give me some frontier, or, failing that, countries to purchase.

So I was reading the Wall Street Journal, when I came across an interesting advertisement. It started out with an attention-grabbing headline: "Last year, nearly 5000 teens died in car crashes", leading me to expect a plea not to drink and drive, or perhaps merely to wear my seatbelts, or possibly for parents to talk to their children about car safety.

Nope. It was a bit more political than that. As I read on, I am asked to contact my federal representatives in support of the STANDUP Act, a proposed federal law that would restrict drivers under the age of 18 with respect to passengers and driving hours, while standardising the permit system. Specifically, it would forbid people under the age of 18 from having multiple non-related passengers under 21, and create a nation-wide "driving curfew".

Gah! This is my absolute worst nightmare as a libertarian-leaning person. Not only do I object on principle to the idea of federal government making these sorts of decisions, decisions that ought to be left up to the states, but I object to the decisions themselves, as they restrict freedom in the name of safety.

So, in response to this ad, which told me to "tell [my] congressional representatives that [I] support the STANDUP Act of 2009", I did a little research, and contacted my representative, telling him that I opposed the law strongly. All in all, I'm glad I saw this ad, because otherwise I wouldn't have heard of this horrible bill.

Recently, I launched an interesting experiment: I blocked slashdot and osnews, the deadly-addictive computer-news sites that filled up so much of my time with empty browsing, on both of my computers.

This experiment, my friends told me, was doomed to failure: when I was bored and in the slashdot-reading mood, I would (I was assured) lose my resolve and and go manually unblock them.

Turns out, my urge to read slashdot was not strong enough. I'd type "slashdot.org" into my browser, see the error message, think to myself: "do I really want to read slashdot?" and do something interesting like practice Japanese, play keyboard, or go on Facebook instead. On a few precious occasions, I even did something "productive", which was the original goal of the whole exercise.

Spurred on by my success in breaking my slashdot-obsession, I moved on to blocking more sites, including facebook.com and, my newly-discovered love, twitter.com. This worked almost as well, although I found myself unblocking them every time I got a notification by e-mail that someone'd messaged me on Facebook, and then proceeding to facebook-stalk my favourite facebook-stalkees anyway.

Nevertheless, it did help me cut down, so I continued on my goal of forcing myself to work through increasing boredom.

In a sense, it worked. The sites I found myself blocking in my race against Internet boredom started getting more and more interesting. Eventually, I found myself reading ridiculous amounts of FiveThirtyEight and Ann Coulter, trying to understand by careful study the reason for partisanship in America.

This is a lot cooler than reading OSNews, but still not "productive". After putting out a few politics-high-inspired tweets (for which I had to unblock Twitter each time), I watched all the episodes of the Daily Show available online.

Then I realized something -- I was going to Facebook less. I was reading stuff I was interested in (I moved on from raw politics to Supreme Court cases pretty quickly, and now know more about Constitutional Law than I already did...bwa ha ha). Is this not really my goal?

I noticed that I never even attempted to go to Slashdot. So I unblocked all the sites, and let myself relax. I haven't gone to Slashdot since, except for to read comments recommended to me by friends. The urge has mostly died. I've reclaimed my life! Yay! Take that, Slashdot.

Your turn, XKCD!

In the article at http://blog.christianitytoday.com/ctliveblog/archives/2008/02/karl_rove_and_t.html, there is a comment saying "...He was just following the advice of Jesus, that 'God helps those who help themselves'....".

Not only is it completely unclear (at least to me, anyway) what the comment-poster was trying to argue, but they didn't even spend the three seconds it would take to find a chapter-and-verse citation for their "bible quote". If they had, they would've quickly found, in any of the top few Google hits, that the quote was not by Jesus, but in fact by Ben Franklin (as is pointed out in a couple of the later comments).

Time was, being able to quote the bible chapter-and-verse was a sign of hard work. Some people underwent years of study to learn where to find interesting quotes from the bible and (in many cases) to memorize citations for the "important" quotes. Those who hadn't undergone such focused study could end up spending hours of research to locate a quote that came up in memory. In informal discussions like the one accompanying the article, it would've been quite understandable if someone couldn't pin down where exactly in the bible their juicy snippet came from.

But nowadays, there are not just one but several public-domain translations of the bible available online in full, searchable text, in addition to many other websites full of famous quotes by an almost unbelievably variety of people. There is no longer any excuse, especially in an online forum, to not cite bible quotes chapter-and-verse (and attribute other quotes to their proper sources), so everyone (including the poster!) knows where it's from:

Ctrl-T. google.com. "God helps those who helps themselves." Ah. Ben Franklin. Oops.

Whatever that comment-poster's argument was, it looked like the entirety of it was premised upon the quote being from Jesus, from the bible. What might've been an insightful point turns into pure embarrassment, from the lack of a little research.

(And for people not raised in the Christian tradition: when you quote Jesus, please cite chapter-and-verse. A Jesus quote from the Gospel of John indicates something different than a Jesus quote from the Gospel of Matthew. Also, please don't paraphrase or even adjust the phrasing. Not only is it then harder to search for the quote on Google if you use your own paraphrase or an obscure translation, but you also risk distorting the meaning in ways that are clear to someone raised Christian but less clear to you.)

A few disclaimers and clarifications:
- I'm often guilty of something similar myself, though -- for example, I recently forgot that Time Magazine also appeared on the Internet and tweeted a tidbit I'd learned from it without a link to the article. Shame on me. Luckily, a friend of mine found the article and posted it to at least my Facebook audience.

- If the poster had looked over the Google results too quickly, they would've found "Hezekiah 6:1" as a chapter-and-verse citation for the quote, without noticing that the article goes on to point out that there is, in fact, no such book as Hezekiah. While I learned in kindergarten to recite in order the names of all the books of the bible, I can understand that some people, who might not have had such an admittedly strange upbringing, might think that "Hezekiah" was a real book of the bible (although Hezekiah is a real biblical figure, the 13th king of Judah).

- Unlike many of the comments on that article and many of the hits on Google, I don't mean to say that "God helps those who help themselves" is a flawed sentiment. I am neutral on the merits of the saying, mostly due to having some deep philosophical questions about what "God's help" would constitute, exactly.

But just because a quote isn't from the bible doesn't mean it's a bad sentiment or anything, even if people often falsely claim biblical origins for it. "The road to hell is paved with good intentions" is one of my favourite proverbs, and it is certainly not biblical.

So the Pirate Party is heading off to Brussels. Congrats, Pirate Party!

But when I go to celebrate by setting my Facebook party to Pirate Party, I notice something very suspicious. When I type in a party name like "democrat" or "green" or similar, it shows up on the drop-down list. But when I type in "pir" for "Piratpartiet" (or "Pirate Party" or "Piratenpartei") nothing shows up. None of the many European Pirate Parties show up.

Communist parties show up as you type them in, any obscure American party shows up if you start to type its name, so many Swiss parties show up when you type in "Schweiz" it surprised me. I never knew there were so many obscure parties!

With all these parties listed, it can't be that the Pirate Party is too obscure -- after all, they just did rather well in an election, and are probably being listed by thousands if not millions of Facebook users. No, Facebook is doing something fishy here, and I don't think they should get away with it.

Dan's running his quotefile using my software now! So I'm going to take mine down now. The whole point of putting mine up was better software and the "suggest quotes" link, and now we have both on his page. If someone says something funny, and he knows them, or even if I just know them, submit it, and he'll likely put it up.

Anyone else want to run a quotefile with my software? It's getting a lot better now that Dan's using it too.

So from time to time I run across some claim that texting is ruining the minds of my generation, and so far, they've not come out to much. The basic pattern I've seen so far is a post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc declaration: "Kids are so stupid nowadays! They also text a lot, and use other newfangled technologies! The texting must be making them stupid."

Unsurprisingly, much of the whining and complaining comes from teachers, which leads me to this theory: teachers aren't willing to admit that our educational system sucks, and instead will push the blame anywhere else they can, and if possible, onto us. Onto my generation.

Here's my message to these people:

People have said the same thing about TVs, about traditional telephones, and about cars. Are the Amish better off than we are? In some ways, maybe yes, but if so, why haven't you become Amish yet, o professors and English teachers? Allergic to hard work, maybe? Do you too much like your cozy jobs where you get paid to write jeremiads, which serve to make teachers and parents more authoritarian when we are already the most overparented generation?

You're not even good at writing jeremiads; perhaps you should try some of the classics, like the book of Jeremiah.

The darnedest thing happened to me yesterday.

So I got this friend request two days ago from a [woman's name, omitted for privacy] and I didn't know her. So I reply "Sorry, but I don't remember who you are" in a message but don't reject or accept the request.

Then Will IMs me yesterday asking if I know who [same name] is -- apparently she's been friending lots of Gettysburg people, and Will thinks it might just be that there's a facebook virus like sometimes happens, that's friending as many people as possible.

But as I'm talking to him, her response comes that she thinks (but isn't sure) that she was in church, elementary school, and middle school with me, but then left after 6th grade. So I naturally ask which elementary school, which team in middle school, and which church while me and Will discuss how a virus could still have said that automatically. But I friended her at this point because I believed her really.

She responds "St. James Lutheran Church, James Gettys,..." and that she doesn't remember which team number but remembers Mr. Zykal and Mrs. Kuharske and a gifted teacher Mrs. Robinson (thus my recent facebook status asking if anyone else knows about a Mrs. Robinson). That matches me almost exactly.

I go see if she's on facebook chat, and she is, so we talk.

I apologize that I still don't remember her, and she says that's OK, she was shy in school, she wouldn't have stood out. I mention something about Will, she said she's been friending Gettysburg people recently. I said that for me and Will our memories have gotten all emotionalized, so her perspective as an outsider is interesting historical knowledge, which she agrees with us on.

She admits to having only one memory of me, and I get nervous, because I think it must be something really embarrassing, because I know that I did a lot of embarrassing things when I was young (this isn't just me freaking out about stuff: I was a weird kid). So I'm like "uh oh, what is it?"

Apparently, she saw me in the church basement playing Heart and Soul all by myself, both parts at once. And she was surprised and impressed, because she had only heard it before as a duet. So she went home and she practiced until she could do it all by herself too.

She told that story so sweetly too.

I asked her if she still played piano, and she said now and then, she majored in it in high school. Their high school has majors, and was one of the top 100 in the country. I'm like: gburg high isn't one of the top 100 in the country.

She's like "I'm sorry to hear that" which kind of offends me a little (not actually too much) because I was more trying to get at how cool it must've been to go to a top 100 school. So I'm like: "no, it's ok. I mean, maybe between 1/5 and 1/3 of the teachers should be doing something else instead, and are totally useless, but the other teachers make up for it. Plus, in our classes, both good teachers and bad teachers, the students helped each other out. We learned a lot more that way. I feel like that doesn't happen in a top 100 school." To this she smiled: ":-)".

Anyway, I'd completely forgotten how I used to play piano in the church basement, and it was really touching to have someone random friend you on facebook and for a conversation like that to work out so nice, so it just was a really refreshing encounter. I like encounters like that.

Some Wikipedia articles really annoy me. The easiest way for a Wikipedia article to tick me off is for it to be about a word and all its meanings, rather than being about a specific phenomenon covered by one meaning of that word.

The article upsetting me today is the one on teasing. It can't make up its mind whether it's talking about the form of playful joking, the somewhat similar but usually distinct mockery that goes by the same name, or the situation when playful joking intended playfully gets out of hand.

Then it has an "other uses" section where it talks about the completely separate concept of "being a tease"! It even starts out by saying "teasing is a word with many meanings".

Look, "teasing" isn't a particularly notable word. I can understand an article about a word like "the" (which redirects to Article (Grammar), at least right now), but there the article is very literally about the word -- it is a notable word. What the teasing article should be about is the concept of teasing.

The article is hard to follow, randomly mentions child abuse a lot, and reads like it was written by the anti-bullying committee with an "oh I guess teasing is sometimes OK between adults" concession here and there. Someone (and not me because I only do minor edits on Wikipedia) should split the article up into three articles which would go something like this:

- Teasing -- this should cover mostly how it functions in healthy relationships, but also cover how sometimes it gets out of hand, meant hurtfully, and misinterpreted, and its relation to mockery.

And it should start out with a phrase like "Teasing is a social activity" or something defining what teasing is!

- Mockery or maybe Teasing (cruel) or Bullying (which seems to already exist) -- this should cover the stuff about "child abuse" and harmful teasing, which is quite separate.

- Tease (human relationships) or similar -- this should cover what it means to "be a tease".

It's impossible to read an article that's about two or three separate things, however related they might be, if the article refuses to cover the ideas separately. It's like there was some third-grade teacher editing this who would've felt guilty saying teasing was sometimes OK without putting a huge "but..." immediately afterwards.

Seriously! I was hoping for a good write-up about how people tease each other in friendships, and how such teasing is implemented, and I got the bully-free program all over again ("It's cool to be bully-free!"). That was bad enough the first time around.

Actually, these are kind of out of order, as were the last ones, but only when it's not important and you would never notice:

1. Planning something awesome is still planning and sucky.
2. It's actually happening! I can't believe this!
3. Oh no, please don't end up sitting somewhere else.
4. Moving sidewalk!
5. I am not interested in fashion.
6. This place looks like it's out of a comic book!
7. Mountain!
8. I can purchase my own alcohol!
9. Whiskey!
10. Oh, it's spelled "whisky"? Really?
11. Whisky! I like whisky more than whiskey anyway.
12. I'll say restroom if I damn well want to.
13. No one cares about football.
14. Should auld acquaintence...
15. Dancing is fun...
16. I'm not drunk!
17. It's not allowed to be over.

So I've heard from several people the sentiment that XKCD is getting worse, and even more extremely, that it is no longer funny. And while there's a certain category of comic that I really like and that's been appearing less and less and basically hasn't appeared in aeons, and while it has had some flaws, I did an overall survey and found out that how much I like individual comics, at least when divided into categories, hasn't changed all that much.

I suspect the entire thing might be an illusion -- we only remember the old ones we like, but all the new ones are fresh in the memory. Although some of them (like 427, for which I endorse this article, and agree with him that the original red spiders were different and so much better and represents something that's been sadly lost in XKCD) are just random repetitions of memes for their own sake, which is really bad, as XKCD full knows (XKCD 16 !!!)

(I saw a copy of an Omegle conversation where people were just reciting xkcd 16 to each other, which is exactly what xkcd 16 says not to do for Monty Python quotes. The irony is just too strong, and somebody is missing the point really bad. That said, sometimes quoting things like that can be fun, but not xkcd #16.)

But anyway, after clicking the random button a bunch of time on XKCD, and categorizing the comics based on how much I liked them, I found that they have, for me anyway, really not been getting worse. (I had to use random rather than going through them in order so as to prevent my definition of "like" from drifting and therefore mucking up my data.) I found that not only did I like more comics then I thought I did, but that I couldn't really predict the age of the comic from the contents unless they were really old (< 80 or so). Even though I recognized most of them I still couldn't tell you even a ballpark estimate of the number!

For the extremely bored, here's the data I collected (yes, I have no life. I also read all of the incomplete German translation of the history of the comic today):

Like so much I can't even express:
10
98
205

Like:
- Cynical Truth, and a Wake-Up Call for the Idealist:
44
592
584
513
202
- Rather Insightful:
526
367
545
501
125
477
488
- Fun (either zen and cool art or just a fun story or amusing sentiment):
479
466
425
370
165
123
282
290
190
320
371
139
474
319
408
183
341-345
494-498
29
8
461
142
105
228
37
331 (but I would not like the movie)
520
410
257
284
567 (it's false though, it's a perfectly fine convention)
- Joy and Serendipity and Love and Beauty and...:
414
325
249
338
313
264-268
372
20
13
551
152
283
- OK, IDK how to categorize:
2

Meh, it's OK:
4
212
166
435 (I like this one, but it's cliche, and it's false)
550
56
565
251
296
512
351
94
153
376
75
233
350
155
390
147
141
476
120
396
34
259
440
412
128

Blah:
426
181
462
53
50
168
88
204 (although it did prompt me to look the incident up)
517
51

Edit: Made links, fixed glitches.

I got the idea to do this from a rumination playground post, but I'm sure this idea isn't particularly original. Ah well, originality is overrated.

Mine aren't all so positive:

0. Parents...
1. I need to see a shrink.
2. I'm normal?
3. I like playing cards.
4. I fear death. I fear the future. Everyone's aging. (this was a repeating one)
5. I need to do something with my life!
6. We aren't actually getting along.
7. I like to go swimming!
8. OK, I'll take Swedish.
9. With the hammer of Thor I will smite you giant!
10. I'm low on time, I've got so much to do.
11. I miss Gettysburg (this was Thanksgiving).
12. I am thankful for Ailsa. (also Thanksgiving)
13. I love oyster mushrooms.
14. Dog! Leash? Leash? No leash. Freeze. Run? Hide? Run? Hide? Phew.
15. You betrayed me!
16. Did you seriously just invite me to Scotland? (I am still thankful for Ailsa, and it's no longer Thanksgiving)
17. Airplanes???

Will do winter and second semester tomorrow. This is more history than thoughts, but ah well.

Actually, just one from second semester, at the very end and so very much so out of order:
I'm a senior!?!?!?!?!?!?

So I haven't been posting to the blog for a while. There are a number of reasons for this, but a lack of ideas is not one of the reasons. Perhaps the opposite is -- I have so many ideas that when I sit down to write something, I can't make up my mind which one is most important for me to write about.

That's not the main reason I haven't been blogging though.

It's partially because my life is busy. In the past week, I've moved to a new apartment, tried to get set up in it, while meanwhile still having my responsibilities of shipping books, doing work, and doing homework. Posting to my blog should be a "responsibility" as well, as I made daily posting one of my summer goals, but try as I may, I can't get myself to take my own goals that seriously. External pressures like my job or my seller reputation get my attention, but my goals list and TODO file, not so much. It's been a significant problem in my life: I can't figure out how to make myself take myself seriously. But that is a matter for a whole 'nother blog post (gah, even more ideas!)

But these things are all small potatoes compared to the big thing that's keeping me from writing in my blog: the decision to write stories. See before, when I had an idea, I wrote a blog post about it eventually. Now, when I have an idea, I have two options: I could boringly write a blog post about it, or I could write a new, enlightening, and in-depth story about it.

Except for then I have to have a plot. And characters. And the plot has to be interesting. And the characters realistic. And different from each other. And then, after you've translated the idea into a story, then you can start writing it. By the time you've finished this process, the idea you wanted to get across might just be a minor side-thing in the story, in which case I might even end up wanting to throw it out to preserve the story's purity.

At this point, I wonder who's doing the writing: I started out with a simple goal in mind and now I'm off on a tangent which I could never have foreseen and which I certainly never intended. Such is art, I tell myself, and I continue writing. And then I end up so embarrassed by the result that I throw it out (I like to use the Linux 'shred' command for those who are interested, although I'm pretty sure it doesn't work on SSDs like mine). And then I remember how intriguing the story idea was so I then start over from scratch.

So writing stories is much more time-consuming and much harder than writing essays, especially rough essays like my blog posts. And I have so many ideas! With stories, it would take a lifetime to say everything I want to say, and I'd have to work hard at it. And meanwhile, I'd be living a life, experiencing new experiences, and coming up with even more things I want to say. My brain would explode, my ideas file would outgrow my hard disk, and I'd end up lying on my death bed rambling about some cool new philosophy I'd come up with, hoping my family cared enough to write some of it down.

I'd be an eternal rambling man (as I was once nicknamed), and I would never actually feel fruitful. Or settled.

Perhaps I should put myself in a bubble and prevent myself from experiencing any new experiences or having any new insights...although then I guess I'd start writing about how it is to live in a bubble and what it means to live a life without external experiences.

But I have to admit to myself the sad truth: 90% of what I want to say turns out to be boring. But since I had so so much to say, it actually comes out to be a happy truth -- it's just that I have to recognize what's boring and what isn't.

This is actually rather difficult, especially because apparently (according to Ailsa anyway), I'm interested in everything. Even, apparently, fashion. And apparently (and this always surprises me when I encounter it, even though it shouldn't), most people have much more limited interests.

But in the meantime, as I'm working the story thing out, I should write blog posts again. It lends important balance to my life, and anyway, essayish blog posts and stories accomplish different things, have different effects on the reader,

If I get it backwards, bad things can happen. If I say in an essay what belongs in a story, the reader will not be convinced of it, and will ask for examples, and I will basically have to write a story anyway to convince them. If I say in a story what belongs in a blog entry, at best I end up writing something entirely different. At worst, I end up writing boring, preachy dialogue or narrative that, when copied and pasted and reorganized a bit, would make a mediocre blog post.

I make this whole thing sound so complicated, and from reading it, I make it sound like I have some idea what I'm doing, and some confidence in all these opinions. Don't be misled -- I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing.