more like communistcast.

So, go to Comcast Help & Support.  Under “Connection”, we have the question, “Do you discriminate against particular types of online content?”  The answer is basically:

“No.  [...]   We respect our customers’ privacy and we don’t monitor specific customer activities on the Internet or track individual online behavior, such as which Web sites they visit.  Therefore, we do not know whether any individual user is visiting BitTorrent or any other site.”

This is kind of like saying, “You can eat any food you want.  Therefore, for example, you can eat baby corn.”  Very general to ultra-specific.  That’s why I like comcast.  I have no idea how much it’ll cost to transfer my service, and it takes me hours to get through to someone to answer my questions, but that’s okay ’cause I can just download some movies off of BitTorrent in the meantime.

I mean, they’re not watching me or anything.

Not just cheese anymore.

Now, you might have pegged me for one of those lactose intolerants that hates cheese, milk, etc., etc., in much the same way that someone who sneezes from cats might hate cats or someone who is allergic to pollen can’t stand pollen — but you’d be wrong.

No — I’m more of the ever-losing gambler who can’t stop going back to the same slots that keep eating up his hard-earned money.  I can’t stop having cheese, or milk, or anything creamy.  It’s just too delicious.  With my lactaid, I’ve been able to minimize any unpleasant effects, but occasionally I still feel pretty awful after eating lactose.

Despite this, I’m always on the lookout for new lactose-including foodstuffs.  One of my friends told me to check out this new salad dressing — that, you know, it was simply divine, and that I haven’t tasted Caesar until I’ve tried it.

The advertisements are based on the idea that every other salad dressing has tons of preservatives and chemicals in it that just makes it bad – but this dressing is different! This is, of course, trying to jump on that bandwagon of “green is good”-ist thinking, but is this necessarily a bad thing?  No, not necessarily, but only if the salad dressing is good.

“Classic Caesar — made with lemon, garlic, Parmesan, and four times the Romano cheese [four times as what?], this zesty dressing is bursting with flavor.”

It sounds promising.  No artificial preservatives, the ad promises.  Plenty of nice pictures.  The raspberry vinaigrette looks pretty good, too.

So, if you’ve been living under a rock, you might not have recognized that I’m talking about the new Kraft dressings.  But why am I bringing this up?  I mean, yeah, it’s cool that they have ranch, caesar, and some other random flavors that look pretty good and I sort of want to try — but why write a post about them?

1)  I haven’t written in a while.  I’ll update why later.  Mostly, it’s the moving.  It’s killing me!  I’ll take pictures later.

2)  Because the advertising is nearly perfect — except for one fatal flaw.

The pictures?  No, they’re basically perfect except for the cheesy mirror-reflect thing that should be beaten out of every graphic designer when they receive their degree.  The descriptions?  No, they do a pretty good job at making me want to buy the damned dressing.

It’s the name.  Pure Kraft.  Every single commercial I see regarding it makes me think, “why did they name it Pure Kraft?  it’s literally one syllable away from Pure Crap.”

It’s like calling your friend a motherfluxer.

Controversial Topic.

Ask someone, “Who wrote The Souls of Black Folk?” and if they know and answer, they’ll say one of two things:

“W.E.B. Du-BWAH.”

or

“W.E.B Du-BOYS.”

The second one is right.  Look it up.

Especially you, Conan O’brien.

I play to win.

So what have I learned from the university so far?  Two things:

1)  Hummus.

2)  How to win any argument regarding philosophy.

The former is obvious, but the latter may not be — so I’ll take you through it case by case, step by step.

Case 1:  Someone is talking about an actual philosopher [Kant, Hume, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Aristotle, etc.].

This is a common case, so I feel it should go first.  In this case, we have two kinds of arguers: those who pronounce the philosopher’s name right, and those who pronounce it wrong.  If they pronounce it incorrectly, odds are they read it on their own — it should be enough to start with, “oh, the interpretation that my professor gave was…” and then say anything.  This should be enough to discourage them.  If not, continue reading.

If they are not discouraged, or they pronounce the philosopher’s name correctly, then you’re up against someone who may know something.  Now, if you’re on top of your game, you’ll be able to argue in some sort of legit way — but what fun is that?  So let’s assume you know nothing about the philosopher that the other individual is discussing.

If the philosopher sounds old [before, let's say, 1900] then just say, “<Opposing opinion> about <philosopher> is interesting, but it fails to take into account relativity.  From some point in the universe, it would appear that cause follows effect — and the argument breaks down.”  And, of course, it doesn’t matter if this is true or not.  What matters is that you make them believe it.  This is an exercise for the reader.

If the philosopher is newer [foucault, deleuze, lacan, ...] then the argument is even easier: simply say that your interpetation of their work is exactly the opposite of what their interpretation is.  And, furthermore, there is an obscure paper from <philosopher> which backs up your argument.  Unfortunately, it’s not translated and is written in <language your opponent doesn’t know>.

Example:

“Yes, I feel that Foucault thought that Psychoanalysis is not a be-all-end-all diagnosis tool, but rather just another technique of power.”

“I disagree.  I think Foucault thought that Psychoanalysis was muy legit.  It’s in his paper — oh, do you know French?”

“No.”

“– it’s in his paper, Psychoanalysis est muy legit. Have you read it?”

“Oh…no.”

And that’s all there is to it.

Case 2: Someone is talking about their philosophy regarding {life, love, morals, etc}.

If they haven’t read Marx: tell them to read Marx sometime, and it will totally change their minds about EVERYTHING.

If they have read Marx and are NOT feminists: tell them that their ideas are great, but they’re missing the BIG feminist picture.  And that they’re sexist.

If they have read Marx and ARE feminists: don’t talk to them.

Case 3: You’re talking to yourself.

Just stop drinking so much.

Really.

I’m worried about you, man.

Bones.

Bones, I thought, was just going to be a huge rip off of House.

Well.  It is.  If it came after House.  If not, then House still did it better.  Anyway, at some point during the episode I was watching, there’s a lot of old stuff in some kind of bank vault or something, and Bones goes, “Dead languages, Egyprian art, Pythagorean mathematics…” and they cut to a page in a book with a huge triangle with the sides labeled.  Just a big triangle.

Yesssss.

London Bridges.

I’m going through a lot of the Analysis books I have that I always thought I was too dumb to go through. Turns out, I’m not THAT dumb, but it is slow-going.

Maybe it’s because I hate analysis.

Maybe it’s because I only read it right before bed.

Maybe it’s because I hate analysis.

Whatever the reason, I’ve come to the realization that analysis isn’t all that bad. It’s like taking my head out of the clouds of Galois Theory and Homology groups and taking a big hearty bite of the real numbers again — and, oh, yeah: this is when open means there’s an epsilon ball around crap. WHAT. yeah. Because we’re not just working in nice spaces anymore — we’ve got a METRIC.

So one thing that I proved last night that took me a while [shut up, math majors.] that I thought was kind of fun was the following equality:




where s is just, you know, some s > 1 and p is a prime number. The formula actually works for any s such that the real part is greater than one, I believe, but it’s fun to play around with it if you just stick to the naturals.

There is a very easy “smack yourself in the head” proof of this. It’s purely algebraic. The easy kind of algebra. And it’s really fun. This, by the way, is the equality between the Riemann Zeta function and the Euler prime product formula.

Try computing this for s = 2. See what you get. Neat.

This may be the single gayest entry, ever.

So, I was watching 30Rock.  It was that episode where Liz goes for that much younger guy.  During the scene where she’s looking for something to wear in wardrobe, she’s wearing this purple striped shirt.

I *have* that shirt, and I was totally going to wear it to genderfuck under my dress.

Okay, now, to balance this entry out, lemme put in some hetero stuff.

1.  I made tacos.

2.  I played Civ4 with my friend Emily.  We totally didn’t win, but we ALMOST got to the second continent.

3.  Today when I tried to play Civ4, my computer crashed.  =[  sad.

4.  I spent the rest of my day reading about drama on deviantart.

5.  Then I played Die Hard for the NES.

That game is pretty damn sweet.