Please note that all blog posts before 8 April 2007 were automatically imported from LiveJournal. To see the comments and any LiveJournal-specific extras such as polls and user icons, please find the source posting at http://brianenigma.livejournal.com/2003/04/substitute just sent me a link for something called Friendster. It looks like it is trying to be like the old sixdegrees.com site–where you can see how far removed you are from people and visually see how the whole web of friendship works–only Friendster does not look as well refined and much more slanted toward dating. Anyway, if you care, I think this is how you can add me.
Kate and I just finished watching The Haunting (her, for the first time). Aside from the utterly craptastic ending, the first half is still pretty good, as far as style and spookiness. Then it just gets formulaic–and not even a good formula. Anyway, the movie acted as a bit of a springboard for discussion. We started thinking, “what if there was a Skully character there?” Would it have changed the dynamic if there was a scientific skeptic? Somebody who is logical and knows the scientific method would be more apt to spot what is really going on when they tell you a test is for one thing, but it is really for another. They tend to more fully understand the workings of double-blind tests. On the other hand… Scientific people are just as apt to be superstitious about things, if not more-so sometimes. (“I cannot disprove the ghost, so I will leave the possibility that what we perceive as ghosts is the manifestation of some phenomena that we cannot yet describe.”) For instance, I consider myself scientific. I took a great deal of physics, and the requisite calculus, in college along with the information science classes. Still, though, I believe in certain “supernatural” things, except I have more scientific (or pseudo-scientific) reasoning than most. Kate, also scientific, believes in “lucky socks”–that certain socks on certain days will give her a positive or negative spin on life. It freaks me out to sleep with the bedroom door closed. It also freaks me out to have the TV volume set to a number not divisible by 2 or 5. These are pretty superstitious beliefs, yet stemming from scientific people. So, all-in-all, it is hard to tell how different the movie's situations would be with a skeptical, scientific person amongst the characters.
This weekend, we are going TREASURE HUNTING! There was a spot on NPR this morning about Geocaching. I have several friends that do it and have a blast. I never really bother to try it out–mostly because I thought it involved a lot of forest, desert, and hiking off the beaten path. After punching in my zip-code, I come to find that there are dozens of caches around town. I think the ninjas and monkeys are going to go on an adventure.
So, it turns out that this light-up keyboard, which I thought was just a random gimmicky thing that I would not care about, ends up being quite useful. While I can touch-type without looking at the keyboard, it is nice to be able to find the home keys and the funky keys that are specific to this one (the option and command keys, volume, and eject).
