Home Video-a-Palooza!

This would have been a science post, but it got erased when I let Lou Ryan's mom check her email on my laptop -- because her laptop can't access our wi-fi -- and she shut it off!

I know. Just when I thought my BlogImpediments were outta here, something always surprises me.

And if you doubt my story, I actually caught this blunder on camera -- precisely because this was the only time I was in the living room with Lou Ryan and his mom, while trying to figure out how the video function on my camera really works, and all three of us were distracted by electronic devices.

Yes, I just had to try to make a witty comment (which the camera cut off at the end anyway) before asking her whether she meant shutting the laptop, or actually turning it off (thus erasing my blog post and everything else that was open and that I thought I had saved), but didn't because I wasn't too worried about that.
` After all, I thought it was ludicrous that anyone would even think of just turning off a computer that has several programs open, and besides, why would anyone turn their computer off, which shortens its lifespan, instead of putting it in sleep mode (which you can do by shutting the screen)?
` As soon as I stopped recording, I asked, "You mean, put the screen down?" and she said, "No, I meant turn it off," and I said, "No, never do that," and she said, "Well, it's too late."

I was really annoyed when I saw that the post I was working on (as well as documents in which I was translating things from Spanish to English) were completely erased somehow. That's what I get for working on posts outside of Blogger, which backs up your progress automatically.
` Such is the fog of having a short attention span, and other human faults. Speaking of, here's a picture I took in the fog -- I tried to get the spider web in front of my reflection so that you can see it better:

Anyway, I should at very least be thankful for the fact that, after five years of stress and suffering with much worse roommates than the ones we just booted out, as well as some seriously unsafe and miserable, sometimes utterly intolerable living conditions, I've finally earned my degree -- I think!

What else? Lots:

FREE AT LAST after five years of crazy roommates!!

Today I have much great news, photos, and the first video I've taken with the same camera that I use for my photos.

` Maybe I said this next post would be sciencey, but maybe I've been spending more time reading and writing in Spanish than in English. My final is tomorrow, I'm finally supposed to get my degree, and am determined to work harder at Spanish than is necessary.

This dismal travesty of myself as a science writer is overshadowed by my elation at the wonderful state of affairs beginning on June 1 -- no, it's not liquor being sold at the grocery store: Rather, we are no longer housing, putting up with, and cleaning up after any crazy, creationist conspiracy-believing or schizophrenic substance-abusing people!

Also, that day, I saw the USS Nimitz try to creep by undetected by moi:

You can't hide from me, Nimitz!

Anyway, without these people around to stink up the house, the smell actually had almost completely disappeared by June 2, before we had even started our massive cleaning project:
` Among other things, Brianade got the bathrooms and I vacuumed the carpets -- including the stairs, without a hose --, and Lou Ryan -- superhero that he is -- did more than twice as much work as either of us, including throwing out literally pounds of rotten stuff from the back of the fridge!

Since then, I've been struck by my lack of needing to shovel garbage from the counter into the garbage can next to the counter.
` Let me repeat that -- there are no longer piles of garbage on the counter that I need to move a few inches over, into the garbage can that is sitting right underneath it. As it should be.

Also, the last time I was swamped at the sink, it was just after the Pickled One had brought up his store of dirty dishes (complete with mold, cigarette ashes, and something that used to be milk), and then left them on the counter for me to wash. Never again!

In addition, now that I won't have to constantly scrub the cheese grater, our sponges will last longer! On a related note, no more melted cheese to pick out of the texture on the plates -- also, no more textured plates to pick cheese out of!

` Similarly, no more scrubbing egg out of the plastic container in which the same housemate would cook them -- in the microwave after midnight! Shortly before he had left, I had to get out of bed and vent the house because of the stink (a combination of his late night egg microwaving and his own body odor), and this was something I did routinely. No more!

And, although all of this is really great, there is one more thing that is perhaps more astounding:

Freak? No -- I am officially an ass.

'Tis a tale of woe, a tale of creativity, and of a subject not even worthy of mentioning in my life; two Facebook unfriendings. Also, dry erase board-drawings:

This was May 20th, the day that I missed the eclipse because it was raining, the day that I wore men's underwear and was delighted to find that it doesn't ride up on me, and also the day that I decided that the well-used, beaten-up pieces of whiteboard (which used to be my own single piece, the brutes!) was good enough to use for practice sessions.

Rudy and Russo's Big Gullibility Experiment

This post, which includes video of UFO hoaxters exposing their own trickery, is actually an article I wrote for my Corrigendopedia website back in 2009, back before I even had my own computer.
` Since it is not only awesome, but requires absolutely no effort on my behalf, it's the perfect thing to post when I'm devoting absolutely no time to writing new posts. (Busy with school and a million other things -- but only until June.)
` This is it:

Some folks are fascinated by the fact that so many people can mistake, for example, a water bird for a lake monster (that is, until they see it fly away) or even believe that the well-known and simple deceptions of a cold reader are actually genuine psychic powers.
` In November of 2008, two friends in New Jersey were having a discussion to this effect. These friends, science teacher Joe Rudy and talented skeptic Chris Russo decided they needed to pull a stunt to help open people's eyes about such self-deceptions. According to their article in Skeptic magazine (Vol 15, No 1 2009);

We brainstormed the idea of producing a spaceship hoax to fool people, bring the charlatans out of the woodwork to drum up controversy, and then expose it as nothing more than a prank to show everyone how unreliable eyewitnesses accounts are, along with investigators of UFOs.

How to do it? Attach ordinary road flares to three-foot-diameter balloons via fishing wire and duct tape, inflate said balloons with helium under the cover of a wooded area between Hanover and Morris Plains, then let them go at fifteen-second intervals. Importantly, to demonstrate that they are not part of a government cover-up, as so many 'conspiracy theorists' would claim, Rudy and Russo would thoroughly video-document themselves doing so.
` The resulting 'Undentified Flare Object'-launching footage looks rather like this 'drawring' of mine, if you squint....

I drawred this frame from video of Russo and Rudy's last Unidentified Flare Object launch.

Their first launch was on January 5, 2009, and was followed up by four more launches in January and February, each one receiving overwhelming attention from news outlets and conspiracy theorist networks alike.
` On top of this, Rudy and Russo pretended to be mystified eyewitnesses in a television appearance on News 12 New Jersey and a radio appearance on the conspiracy-promoting Jeff Rense Program, as well as a live appearance at a Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) symposium all the way over in Illinois! (To be fair, MUFON had recognized it as a hoax right away.)
` If that weren't enough, they also pretended to be dumbfounded about the results of their first launch on one small section of their documentary video, which they displayed both at the MUFON symposium and on the popular internet video site YouTube, garnering even more attention from all over the world!

Changing my habits...

Many things have happened, but I'm only going to talk about a few of them. And post this picture of the sunset from the other day:

May 14, 2012:

PREDICTABLY, I talked to my psychologist about my inability to work with noise in the background, thus structuring my life around opportunity. Of course I cannot force myself to keep going without beating myself up, but what I can do is calmly sit for two minutes while doing nothing, thus at least keeping myself in the room. This should open up some new doors.
` I sure can't wait to get these two roommates out. I came home to one of my drunk roommate's friend's car in the driveway, and them playing music below my office, which I can only block by closing the door of my office and bedroom and going out into the living room.
` I had just bought some groceries and was sharing some cookies with Lou Ryan and Brianade, and didn't bother putting the package back in the cupboard until half an hour later, and by then there was no need, as all the cookies had been eaten.
` Apparently, the drunk roommate thinks that when I leave a partly-eaten pack of cookies on the counter, that the rest of the cookies are for him and his friends. Should I talk to him about it? Since he's on his way out and threatened to call the cops on Lou for wanting him to stop blasting his music at 4:30 in the morning, maybe I won't bother.

Creationists at Skeptic Night

(Last updated: May 23)

I've finally completed the many hours required to write about an event that happened on April 17. On that date, the Seattle Skeptics meeting was packed with science enthusiasts eager to hear members of the Creation Association of Puget Sound talk about why they think that the earth is only thousands of years old.

` We were disappointed that they didn't have any "new evidence" for a young earth, as had been promised, but at least we were thoroughly amused: This photo is of Neil Huber (who earned a real Ph.D. in biology), deluging us with bass-ackwards bible logic that has nothing to do with evolution, while the audience tries hard not to laugh out loud:

You can see why we would be disappointed when you take a look at the description for this event from our group's Meetup page, at which point in time there was already a waiting list. Here's the beginning:

Konnichiwa Seattle Skeptics!!
 Ok, well I've never updated an event that was actually full to capacity while I typed- so either I am really late with this update...or holycrapthisisgoingtobeapopularevent!
  (This month I'm going to keep my skeptical pre-soak banter to a minimum to give our guest speakers as much time as possible to present.)
 This month our speakers are from the Creation Association of Puget Sound (CAPS) and they are here to give a talk titled:
 "The Young Earth Hypothesis"

Just after this event, my Creationist Roommate (or "CR") left me some commentary on a Facebook post of mine, saying that I am too proud and not scholarly enough to actually take a good look at "creation science", the assumption being that if I had, then I would begin to doubt the fact that the modern theory of evolution is one of the best-supported scientific theories of all time and is the only way ever known to explain or understand all species ever discovered, and is consistent with (if not supported by) everything we know, not only in all of biology, but in chemistry, geology, astronomy and even nuclear physics.

Of course, CR has admitted to not exposing himself to the subject of evolution past the level of children's books -- and that was around 20 years ago -- so I doubt he could have any real or accurate memory of even that.
` As for me, I've spent over ten years off and on studying evolution at a college level (sometimes even at college!), all the while reading creationism articles of varying levels, and have recently been shaking off the rust.
` Part of this has involved many months of asking CR for suggestions in the creationist aspect of my research (heaps of which I showed to him). He said that a lot of the sciencey stuff went over his head, and thanked me for having so much more enthusiasm for such research than he did.

In a nutshell -- which I shall expand upon in other posts -- he shows a very incomplete understanding of what the scientific method is, as well as basic scientific concepts and theories. Yet, he also seems to think that he knows more than enough to be certain that I'm wrong, despite his admissions that science is not his strong point.

Why is he so certain that I am wrong, to say nothing of almost all of the world's scientists? I am willing to bet that it's because, he claims, God Said So, personally telling him of the world's six-day creation less than 7,000 years ago. Because pretty much all scientific fields show a distinct story that is obviously different from What God Said, that means that science must be an anti-God conspiracy/satanic religion led by the devil, instead of actually science.
` Therefore, the reason that I, Spoony, think that science makes sense must not be as much because of my understanding of it, but because I prefer to be led by sin and temptation. He says that's because there are only two paths to life, and if you don't believe that everything in the bible is literally true, then by default you're following the path to Satan.
` And as for the majority of Christians in the world who accept the earth's long history and the evolution of species? They're not really Christians because they don't believe that the entire universe originated many millennia after humans had begun domesticating plants and animals -- and yes, many of them don't believe in the Jesus-or-hell thing, either. For those sinners, presumably, Jesus will not be clicking the 'save' icon.

So, when you look at it that way, that would seem to make it sensible to call me proud and accuse me of not having done my homework, right?
` But, I digress -- this post is about the creationists from CAPS and their presentations (which they seemed to have copied and pasted from creationist websites), so let's take a look:

Do I DO too much?

As promised, here's a picture of Vada from May 6, chirping at me from the roof outside my window! She even has two heads!

I have more pictures -- and nicer ones, too -- but first I'd like to be frank, even though everyone calls me Spoony. You see, not only is my BlogLife passing me by, but so is my actual life.
` I felt so much pressure to get this homework assignment done (read: was literally wracked with dry heaves and a severe headache) that I stayed home from this (taken from Town Hall Seattle website):

Tuesday, May 8, 2012, 7:30 – 9:30pm

Downstairs at Town Hall; enter on Seneca Street. $5.

Drawing on a surge of new research, Leonard Mlodinow unravels the complexities of the subliminal mind and reveals its profound influence. The bestselling author (The Drunkard’s Walk, which he brought to Town Hall in 2008, and the new Subliminal) examines how the mind’s subliminal processes, not the conscious ones, largely drive our experience, perception, behavior, memory, and social judgment—a realization that can help us recognize and avoid common pitfalls in our work, lives, and relationships. Presented as part of Seattle Science Lectures, with Pacific Science Center and University Book Store. Series sponsored by Microsoft. Series media sponsorship provided by KPLU.

*Sob!* Not only did I miss out, but have still failed to complete the assignment. In related news, I feel as though I've developed an ulcer. If this stress-induced illness gets much worse, I'm also going to miss school tomorrow, and there's a test, which I should be great at!

Lou Ryan has suggested that I learn how to relax. Sounds like a good idea, however, doing so often foments regret in the churnings of my mind. Why's that? Well, just follow the churnings: