Blessed by the Potato

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.