Blessed by the Potato

Greetings loyal readers. I want to give you fair warning that this post will contain what is for many people too much information.

You’ve been warned.

Seriously now, I’m going to talk about my pee in a bit, so skip this post if that bothers you…

Ok, so I was at my parents’ for the day, and my dad is still recovering from chemo, so there are a ton of mega vitamins around. A bottle for a multi-B vitamin, some giant vitamin C pills, some vitamin E & D tablets, as well as some echinacea and other herbal junk… the only one missing was A, I think. I usually take a multivitamin at home (Flintstone’s :) since I don’t eat properly at all, but don’t actually seem to need much excess vitamins (I think my system really aggressively absorbs anything I put in it), but my parents only had these crazy grown-up ones. So, I took an individual C, D, and E vitamin, each of which was easily twice the size of my combined multivitamin.

Then, I got a sugar craving, and there wasn’t much sweet in the house. I had to get lunch and money too, so with 3 trips I could justify taking the car (rather than walking, don’t know why I was feeling so lazy, the weather was gorgeous) and got cash, a sub, and stopped at the pharmacy for some snacks. What I really wanted was a pack of Runts, but they didn’t have any. Their whole candy section was depressingly low on stock. I saw some sugar-free hard candies and figured they’d be kind of close to Runts (they were hard and fruity, and that’s how sad the candy section was), and I figured they wouldn’t draw as much flak from my parents (who really want me to stick to my diet since I look like crap).

They tasted pretty good, actually — they were sweetened with a combination of Splenda (sucralose) and another artificial sweetener that I’ve forgotten. There were only 3 flavours, all sour citrus (lemon, lime, and grapefruit) but none of them were overly tart, the sour was very subtle. After I ate about half the package I started to feel really ill and bloated. The stupid things gave me terrible gas pain and I started burping like crazy — so loud once that I scared the dog! Despite all the, er… pressure relief, the bloating was actually really painful/crampy.

That wasn’t all that fun, and I remembered why it was that I distrusted all manner of bizzare, expensive replacements for sugar. Going to the washroom later (I told you there’d be pee) I noticed that my urine was a crazy shade of neon yellow: it looked pretty much just like Moutain Dew. Ever since I had my kidney stone I have to check pretty much every time I go to the washroom to make sure I’m not too dehydrated (or cloudy, or bloody, which is always fun because sometimes when I was passing the stone the pee would be bloody before it really hurt, so I’d see it and be like “oh, shit, this is going to really fucking hurt in a second” and then it would, though most often the blood was actually from the previous round of pain). So I see this and immediately start to worry that the sucralose has somehow made it out of my bloodstream through my kidney, and that no good could possibly come of that.

Turns out it was due to the other thing I ate at my parents’: the B-vitamin complex. It had way, way more vitamin B2 than my body could use in a day, and the excess is naturally expelled by the kidneys and turns your urine freaky bright yellow. Thank goodness for Google, with my history I could have hypochondriacated my way into an emergency room for that one!

PS: I hearby coin “hypochondriacated” as a verb, and you must pay me a dime every time you wish to use it.

After Finch had a huge amount of roadway washed away in a flood last year, Sheppard just had a giant sinkhole form from a broken water main and will close the road for a long time to come…

With games being so expensive, myself being so poor (particularly through say high school), and the number of truly fun, long-lasting games few and far between, it’s not much of a surprise when I tell you that I’ve pirated my fair share of games. The last few years I haven’t been to anywhere near the same degree: partly because I’ve got a bit more money to spend on them, partly because instead of “trying them for free” I just don’t bother at all with games I don’t think I’ll like, and partly becuase I just don’t have time for more than the one or two games I have installed right now.

Like many others, I’ll often buy a game that I really liked after trying it out… I first got WarCraft II, Command & Conquer, and Civilization III and IV as less-than-legal copies.

But three weeks ago, I took an interesting step: I set out to get a cracked copy of a game I already owned. Yes, when it came out I downloaded CivIV since I really wasn’t too sure of the transition to 3D models and the required processing power (and it still bogs down sometimes even on my desktop system; large and huge maps simply aren’t an option for my laptop). But it was a lot more fun than I was expecting, so I went out and bought it at Christmas…

However, I don’t usually have much time to play when I’m at home here in London; a lot of my gaming now is done on my laptop when I’m visiting my parents and everyone’s gone to bed. And I’m just sick of having to keep track of where my CDs are for the games I want to play. I often break the jewel cases in my bag, which makes me afraid for the CivIV disc since it only came in a paper sleeve. Transporting it almost every weekend has me worried that I’ll lose it. And finally, the CD drive on my laptop is really loud (it drains the battery too, but I only ever play plugged in). So, I went out into the dark corners of the internet and found another cracked copy and reinstalled it on my laptop so I don’t have to worry about the discs.

I know game companies don’t generally have games that work without the CD’s, since a CD read is one of the better anti-piracy methods (it’s fairly difficult to copy a disc with something like safedisc on it, and it’s not nearly as invasive as driver-level or registration-check-on-startup methods), and without that it becomes far too easy for even casual pirates to copy games by simply lending their CDs to their friends. However, I think it might be something they have to consider as gaming on laptops becomes increasingly popular…

The adage is often misinterpreted. People take it (and the related Carpe Diem) to mean they should grab life by the balls and live it to the “fullest”, bugger the consequences. All too often, “fullest” is taken to mean “most fun”, all the sorts of things you wish you could be doing right now instead of work, or reading my website. The sorts of things you think you may wish you had done more of if it were indeed your last day. However, I suspect most people won’t necessarily wish they’d spent more time drunk or on a rollercoaster or out whoring around. They’d probably wish they called their mother more, or read with their kids, or went for a bike ride with their friends. I’ve thought about it, and I think that if I were lying in a hospital bed knowing it was my last day, I would ask for a laptop, and I would write. I would do my very best to take what wisdom I’ve collected in my life, and set it down for others who follow¹.

As another Earth Day passes by virtually unnoticed, I tell people not to live selfishly, bugger the consequences. As Frank Herbert said “The highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences.” Still, live each day as though it were your last, but don’t just go thrill-seeking.

Rather, don’t put important things off for another day that might not come. Make your mark on the world, do the meaningful things that will be your legacy.

With God above and the Potato below, I hope there is an afterlife. I pray for it (and moreover, pray that it will be pleasant). I want to watch over humanity, and hope my descendants live on through the end of time, populating the stars and mining the secrets of the universe…

…however, I doubt that there is one — or if there is, I do not think there is any return, no (meaningul) influence extended from that realm to this one. Its existence cannot be relied upon. So if you seek immortality, you must earn it here and now, in this life. After you’re gone, all that will remain are your works and your offspring. It is my religious belief that our duty — our sole duty when all is said and done — is to improve the world around us just a little bit. To fight back againt entropy; to plant trees under whose shade we do not expect to sit, and to raise our children to be better people than we ourselves are.

So, I propose a new saying: “Live each day as though it were the first in the life of your new child.”²

Most of us, not having experienced that day, don’t really know what it’s like (the closest I can come myself is the birth of my baby sister). But we can imagine it: the feelings of joy, hope, and responsibility. Which brings me to another phrase I’ve coined just now: “what would Daddy do?” Again, I’m probably a freak amongst my peer group for thinking of these sorts of issues, but I have to wonder: would I want my son³ doing the same stuff as me? Would I be able to tell him of my experiences in this life and be proud of it, and not be shamed into lies of omission? Would I ever have to face being a hipocrite, telling him not to do things I used to do all the time myself? Would I want my daughter to date a guy like me? It’s sort of like trying not to make my mother ashamed of me, but somehow it seems more important when I think about it this way around. Perhaps that has something to do with the weird little things that make my mother ashamed of me, like when I wear a hat indoors, or sleep in past noon…

Footnotes:

1. Then, I’d probably load up a game of StarCraft to try to take my mind off things.
2. And I don’t mean running around like a crazy person and screaming with labour pains.
3. No, Wayfare isn’t pregnant. I really do think of these sorts of crazy things just out of the blue.

Greatly contributing to my various moments of weakness lately was the fact that I bought a box of 12 Mars bars a few weeks ago. Interestingly, they were all contest wrappers, with a 1-in-6 chance of “winning instantly” yet in 12 bars, I didn’t get a single winner. That got me to thinking that maybe they rigged the contest so that winning wrappers aren’t put into bulk packages (since the profit per bar is lower). It’s a type of manipulation that’s been done before — Tim Horton’s, for example, only has cars in it’s roll-up-the-rim contest under large or extra-large cups, and regionally skews the odds.

But rather than bandying about useless speculation and rhetoric, let’s go to the statistics! The Chi-Squared Test allows us to determine whether the observed frequency of a sample differs significantly from the expected frequency of the population. In other words, we know that in any realistic sample we’re not going to get the expected frequency of winners: for every 12 Mars bars, we won’t always see 2 winners. Sometimes there will be 1, sometimes 4, sometimes none, and if you’re really lucky, all 12 could be winners. With statistics, we can see what the odds are that our difference from the expected frequency is due to random chance alone (unfortunately, it will never tell us definitively that shenanigans are afoot — but we can take the probabilities and make up our own mind).

So, our expected frequency, E is given on the package as 1/6, or 0.1667. Our observed frequency O is 0/12, or 0. Then, we find the Chi-Squared statistic which is (O - E)²/E = 0.1667.

We do the same for the non-winning bars, O = 12/12 = 1, E = 5/6 = 0.8333. (O - E)²/E = 0.0333.

The total is 0.2000. For a single degree of freedom Chi-Squared, this is merely unfortunate, and not different enough to suspect shenanigans (a greater than 10% chance that this was due to chance alone).

But I’m keeping my eye on you, Mars-Effem, Inc.

Yes, yes I will do nearly anything to procrastinate when the mood strikes.

I woke up yesterday more refreshed than I had been in a long time, which was particularly odd since I only had about 4 hours of sleep last night. I decided to stick to my diet, and I did a remarkable job — the first day I haven’t cheated in a really, really long time. I had soup for lunch/breakfast, and a veggie sandwich on whole wheat for dinner. At one point my stomach was hurting a bit, so I had a chocolate-covered granola bar to help settle it down. I substituted water or juice for almost all my drinks, so I actually did pretty well by the end of the day.

Then, shortly after midnight I had a very sudden onset of depression and stress. I realized that despite feeling like a human being for the first time in a long while, I still didn’t get a whole lot done. Now I’ve got my mock defense tomorrow, and I still haven’t finished preparing my slides, let alone practicing my talk. It is, in a word, terrifying.

So I went through my pictures, since I’m also really missing Wayfare (I haven’t seen her in forever) and she has a really nice smile that just makes me feel good :)

And doing so, I realized that I have barely any photos of her at all. I know we’re both camera shy, but that’s borderline inexcusable. In particular, I don’t have any from within the last year… most of our picture-taking is done on vacation, at Halloween, and at Christmas, and this year I was too busy to take a vacation, she was sick for Halloween, and I was sick for Christmas, so there were none.

Looking at the pictures of myself, I realized that I’ve really gone downhill in the last few years. I’ve always been hard on myself, and cerebrally I know that, but looking back I wasn’t actually all that hideous in 4th year (the summer of 3rd year was also a particularly good one for me vis-a-vis working out, so it’s perhaps no coincidence that that was fall that I had the confidence to ask Wayfare out in the first place). I always had the problem of looking too young before that, then in 4th year the beard really helped me out, I think… and now I’ve swung too far into looking old and decrepit. At least I took advantage of what looks I had at the right time :)

I also found that photo of my bald spot buried in a Halloween folder. I had been meaning to compare for some time now, but just couldn’t find that photo anywhere (and it’s no wonder — I swore I took it in February of ‘05, when I started Rogaine).

Anyhow, none of this really lifted my spirits much, so I decided that I had been subconsciously self-medicating with chocolate, and my good day had thwarted that. So, in a weak moment, I broke the one good diet day I had and had another few chocolate-covered granola bars (they’re not actually much better for me than regular chocolate bars — they’re just a little bit smaller, and have slightly more complex carbohydrates than sugar… they’re still really fatty).

In other news, this is my 100th blog post!. That’s not even counting my static pages (e.g.: recipes), so it’s moderately exciting! I had hoped to come up with some memorable post or event to mark the occasion, but simply didn’t. In my defense, it came up sooner than I had planned (I thought I would slow down my posting rate and not hit 100 until after my defense). So far, the site has been a little too much of a vanity project for my tastes, I was hoping to stay closer to topics of more widespread interest (and, sadly, this post is exactly the sort of thing I hope my site would not become). I blame the software — after the set-up headaches, WordPress has been surprisingly easy to use, and really handy for just firing up and hammering out some utter gibberish from whatever computer I happen to be on. The search function will come in quite handy, I’m sure, as I remember that finding something on my old site was quite a pain.

Oddly enough, I still miss the crappy gifs of various Potato-based dishes for the various sections of the site. Speaking of the old site, what piece of brilliance do you think I should salvage from it next? The Great Potato Encyclopedia was a clever idea, IMNSHO, but since its original introduction Wikipedia has come out and made it ridiculously big, so my effort will seem lame by comparison (particularly if I use a type of wiki software, which would almost be demanded for ease of use, even if I am the only writer). The Advice Column could come back with little difficulty, but it’s been a long time since anyone has asked my advice on anything. I suppose I’ve made too many terrible life choices myself to be accepted as a valid font of wisdom, multiple personalities or not. Plus my readership just simply isn’t high enough for even pseudoanonymity to apply.

Ah, well, aside from writing more drivel, the next steps for the site I plan on taking involve cooking some of the things in my recipe section and actually photographing the process.

This is Your Scalp on Science or The Science Diet: How to Gain Weight and Lose Hair Through Stress and Malnutrition.

From animal studies, we can definitively say that Science causes cancer in lab rats. We have also seen statistically significant correlations with maze-running, aversion, and strange weight-gain behaviours. Maze-running in particular is interesting as the correlation is non-linear. It is a behaviour virtually unknown without trace amounts of Science present, however, after a certain threshold the amount of maze-running behaviours begins to drop as more Science is added (this has been dubbed the “psychology” point).

In the current paper we discuss an investigation of Science on human subjects (ethics note: while this study has been approved by the ethics review board, informed consent was not obtained from our “background” subject group, who were forced into a single science class as a “balancing” requirement; the low dosage used as well as the generally accepted safety of Science justified these actions. For the more intensive dosages, the usual methods of informed consent and voluntary enrolment were followed.)

Three basic dosages of Science were examined: background, consisting of less than 60 hours of undergraduate-level instruction, with no exposure after age 24; undergraduate, consisting of 3-5 years of daily exposure, occasionally reaching acutely intense levels; and graduate, consisting of continuous Science exposure until the subject was no longer able to procreate (or, in very rare — and may we say, beautiful — cases, when successful procreation spawned a protective desire to withdraw from the study). As mentioned above, consent was not typically obtained from the background group. The undergraduate group was enrolled with the promise of a “chance” at an admission slot in medical school and vague predictions about job growth, employability, and potential income. The graduate group was, oddly enough, convinced to join the study with no more than the offer of a break from the real world.

Our results, in a word, are disturbing.

The background group often reported feelings of resentment and hostility towards Science following their exposure, and these subjective measures were backed up with a subsequent behavioural aversion. Otherwise, no long term effects, either positive or negative, were seen on the majority of the background group as a result of their Science exposure.

The undergraduate group often reported an “appreciation” for Science, although reservations were often held about particular branches and fields. Interestingly, while chemistry had the most complaints from subjects, there was no consistent pattern of resentment. We hypothesize that there may be patterns based upon the student’s area of study, for example biology students may dislike physics and chemistry moreso than biology, but we do not have the sample size in our data to make conclusions of that depth. Otherwise, the undergraduate group suffered a number of minor deleterious effects, including above-average weight gain (90%), impaired social integration (85%), vastly reduced courtship attempts (85%), poor sleeping habits (80%), poor social integration and networking (70%), periodic alcohol abuse (65%), excessive and often ridiculous highlighting practices (30%). Oddly enough, the reduced socialization and mating seen came despite significant increases in their driving factors (namely, lonliness and sex drive).

The graduate group, however, had the most severe reactions to Science. In addition to all of the social problems above, the graduate students suffered severely accelerated hair loss and/or greying, a vast reduction in real income and long-term income potential, a decrease in the number of and sucess rate of courtship behaviours, a oncomitant decrease in fecundity, and a virtually non-existant land-ownership rate (despite a 5-year job assurance, and a nearly 50% ownership rate in the age-matched controls). Furthermore, there were widespread cases of malnutrition, poor posture, nearsightedness, high blood pressure, and a general inability to calculate the tip on a typical restaurant bill. The positive effects of Science were extremely difficult to extract from the background noise: a general feeling of “warm fuzzies” was seen sporadically when Science appeared to be helping the world at large. These were fleeting, at best, and a dark humour bordering on brooding melancholy was more typical. A deeper understanding of the universe as a whole is, undoubtably, a nearly universal benefit. However, it was nearly always coupled with anger and resentment at “the idiots in charge of it all” and the “unwashed masses who follow them because they don’t know enough to act otherwise.” Which side the net benefit of this relationship falls on is difficult to determine.

Additionally, an increase in vocabulary was reported anecdotally. However, we could not quantitatively distinguish a difference between the Science students and those in English. This matter is still in doubt as there were significant questions surrounding the typical English structure of “like-like-like, like, you know” as it is unclear whether this should be counted as a hexasyllabic complex, or a string of monosyllabic gibberish.

In conclusion, while the cancer and maze-running rates were satisfyingly low in the human subjects exposed to Science, numerous deleterious effects were seen with little compensatory positive life changes. Thus, it can be said that long-term exposure to Science should be avoided on an individual basis. Interestingly, it appears as though Science has profound benefits for society as a whole, despite the cost in individual life quality [see Hawking, 1991, and Sagan, 1996]. Unfortunately, this study did not investigate altruistic characteristics in the Science group, nor the possibility that our volunteers may have been a self-destructive, self-selecting group. Further research in these areas is called for.

Figure 1: Hair loss and greying seen following 1 year of Science exposure at the graduate level. The hair was originally thick and black all over.

Figure 2: Hair loss and greying seen following 3 years of Science exposure at the graduate level. Note that ethical guidelines required us to intervene in this case in the best interest of the subject, so it should be noted that this degree of hair loss is subsequent to a year of topical Rogaine treatments. Initially, the subject in question exhibited the grocery list of side effects to the Rogaine, so the dosage was halved and no longer vigorously massaged into the scalp. This may have decreased its overall effectiveness, though despite those qualifications the hair loss is frightening.

Telemarketers are by their very nature annoying, trying to get you to answer questions or spend money with a hard sell right in your own home, at a time that is not necessarily convenient for you. As a result, we hang up on them a lot. Most of the time if the phone rings and the person on the other end doesn’t say hello within 2 seconds of me answering, I just hang up (they often have the computer dial a few numbers at once, so there’s usually a pause of a few seconds while it switches over to the live operator). As a result, they’ve tried to come up with new and ever more annoying ways of getting me to stay on the phone.

A while ago, the London Free Press would call every two weeks or so, saying “[Potato]? Congratulations!”

I’d say “Huh?”

“You’ve won!” They’d say.

“Er… that’s great. What did I win?”

“$5 off a 6-month subscription to the London Free Press, now what address can I have them set up delivery to…”

The exact same script, 3 times in a row. I think the third time of asking them to take me off their list it finally took, because I haven’t heard from them in a while.

More recently, I’ve been getting calls from a recording, saying that “this is not a sales or marketing call” (typically a red flag that it is, indeed a marketing call) and that there is a very important message for me… I just have to press 1 to get my message. The first two times I got this I just hung up on it, being paranoid that it was some sort of collect-call scam (once I press 1 they start billing my phone bill). On the third call curiousity got the better of me, so I pressed 1… and got put on hold for a minute. The nerve! To get put on hold by an answering machine! They called again today, saying that there was an important message for me, and that they’ve tried a few times unsucessfully to reach me… this time I didn’t even have the option to press 1 to get it.

So I still have no idea what this weird attempt at telemarketing is all about, since nowhere in the message did they say who it was that was calling or what it was about — just that there was an important message for me, and that it wasn’t a sales or marketing call. It’s like those drug ads where they don’t want to tell you what the drug does (because as soon as they do, they’re obligated to report the side effects). Maybe in another few weeks they’ll call again and tell me what the big deal was with all the annoyance and secrecy. I’m pretty pissed at whoever it is, though: if the message was actually important, then going through all this nonsense without actually telling me what it is is just dumb (plus, if my answering machine had picked up, there’d be no way to press 1 and get it — why not just play the message for those cases?). And if it’s not, then I’m angry about all the drama and mystery (not to mention the 4 phone calls now).

After writing that, I found out that they had also been calling my parents’ house, and my mom managed to catch the number the machine spat at her then. Having hit two of my numbers, I figured they might actually have something important to say, so I called. Turns out it’s a portfolio management company, and someone with the same name as me has an account with them and doesn’t have a telephone number on file. So…

…wait for it…

… they had their autodialer call everyone in Ontario with the same name. I gave the receptionist a piece of my mind about calling so much and not even having the stupid message tell me what it was about (nor even who was calling!), but she didn’t seem to care in the slightest, not even after I said that I doubted they’d get a very good response with a vague message like that (it really sounded like a telemarketer).

Another call today was from “Liam” (who had a very strong non-Irish accent and a phone connection so poor I could barely hear him). Usual charity begging for money stuff “oh, how about we just get your mailing address and send you a package?” I know that they must take in more money than they spend on telemarketers and mail-outs, but I don’t know why they try to push it so much… if I said no on the phone, am I really that likely to change my mind if a mailing comes? If so, why not just do the mailing? Also, I know they’re trying to save money by hiring the cheapest call centre in India, but you’d think they’d give them more than a tin can and a length of string to talk with, since it’s their communication that’s key here.

I finally got around to adding a contact address on the sidebar. You’ll notice that I’ve taken two steps to try to avoid spam. The first, of course, is that I’ve put the address in an image. Unfortunately, that makes it look slightly askew from the rest of the column. Ah, well, we’ll just have to deal with it. The other is that I’ve used my Gmail address. For those that know my more frequently checked addresses, continue to use them.

I also pulled over One Nation Under a Groove: A Quantum Mechanical Analysis from the old site by request. My Pages section on the right is getting a little crowded, but I’m hesitant to start lumping the stories under a “writing” page (as I’ve done with the recipes). I also tweaked the line item spacing a bit, so it should be easier to tell multi-line titles apart.

Wow, I’ve been talking about movies a lot lately. Let’s get back to the real world for just a quick post here (I know, the real world sucks, which is why we watch movies)…

So I get a call this morning that I need to quickly, like right-this-minute, edit my acknowledgments and re-send them to the department, because one of my examiners is listed there as a co-author for my review paper so he can’t be an examiner so if that’s the case I’m basically fucked for defending this term. I’m a little groggy and not believing this, but I do it, and check my email and find a whole string of messages about this.

You see, there was a hell of a time getting an examining board together for me, so in the end we had to use one of the people on my supervisory committee. This isn’t terribly unusual, since you try to nab the people who know your subject area for your committee when you start, and those end up being the same people qualified to examine you. The only stipulation is that they sit on the sidelines while you prepare the thesis (and he did).

… so when someone caught that he was listed as a co-author, they weren’t sure about how kosher the whole thing was and all of a sudden everyone was scrambling about looking for a last minute replacement examiner and recklessly throwing around terrible words like “delay” or “postpone”. Nuh-uh, none of that.

Then, after a lot of stressing and hair-pulling, and my committee member/examiner testifying that he really hasn’t seen the review paper in about a year (and truthfully is really only a coauthor because he’s part of the same group — he hasn’t written a damn thing, and I doubt he even read the whole thing through yet, let alone reading all the studies that went into it), the university said that it was ok, and we’ll go ahead as planned, so everything’s ok now.

Some days I swear they’re just trying to give me a stroke to save the trouble of an exam.