Mizblog

Michael Ham: Negative Irreproducible Tweets… for Science.

It seems like all my original ideas are now being independently reproduced by other people, so I’ll just start dumping a few others that I’ve heard recently.

• “Placebo” brand pills – scientifically proven effective on many maladies
• Idiot urine test – always comes up positive

Holy shit, what a terrible movie! The movie physics were so stupid it wasn’t even fun for me. I liked the hacker kid character, though. He was pretty cool. :)

“Live Free or Die Hard” on imdb.com

The day after Thanksgiving, my cold really kicked in. It still wasn’t too unpleasant, but I knew it was coming hard. It served me warning. I relaxed.

On Saturday SHAZAAM! My fucking skull almost exploded from the pressure. Mucous was filling every crevice in my head, and my skull felt like it was about to give out. The only thing that kept me from wallowing in extreme misery was watching movies, so I began a movie marathon.

Pink Floyd The Wall
Inception
A Beautiful Mind
Zookeeper
Hot Tub Time Machine
Pineapple Express
Limitless
District 9
Die Hard
Star Trek
Watchmen
Kill Bill Vol. 1
Lost in Translation
Tropic Thunder
Red State
My Neighbor Totoro
Constantine
The Breakfast Club
Howl’s Moving Castle

The congestion became worse at night, and when I’d lie down I’d immediately convulse with coughing fits. That meant no sleep for about 4 days, so I watched most of those movies at night instead of sleeping. Not that sleep was even possible. When I got too exhausted to cough, I’d sleep for a couple hours and then spend a half hour trying to clear my lungs.

If I weren’t so fat, I’d have the most amazing abs!

Today was the first time I’ve ever hosted a family Thanksgiving feast. It went better than I expected, except now that it’s over I’m exhausted, sore, and am coming down with the crud. Or, as some would call it, “The ‘itis”.

Quick recap of injuries I’m still trying to recover from: mid thoracic sprain, gout, plantar fasciitis, and a strained right quad. The real killer is the sprained back, which I think is the root cause of everything else bad that’s happening to me. It’s preventing me from doing regular exercise because it hurts when I breathe deeply. I’ve been doing physical therapy for the last month, but all they’ve managed to do for me is to make it hurt worse.

Bird Mite Infestation.

A friend of mine is currently battling a bird mite infestation. It’s a horrifying experience. The medical establishment is not well equipped to deal with such an infestation, and many doctors don’t even imagine that bird mites can live off of a human or a pet.

They can!

The CDC is investigating strains of drug-resistant bird mites growing in California. It’s truly frightening. Bird mites are tiny (up to 0.5mm) and translucent, making them almost impossible to see without magnification. They’re most active at night, burrowing into skin and invading the nose, mouth, sinuses, and even the urethra.

So don’t let birds nest anywhere near your house. When disposing of abandoned bird nests, wear gloves and long sleeves. A dusting of borax wouldn’t hurt either.

If you do find yourself host to bird mites, you’re in for a fight. They’re hard to kill, they infest everything around you, and they go nuts on you at night, making sleep difficult. You’ll have to clean everything every day, fumigate your house, treat your pets, shower twice per day, change your diet, and invest in a variety of exotic cleaning supplies just to manage the infestation.

There is no cure.

Don’t you feel itchy?

Well, it’s finally happened – my wife and daughter returned from Nepal after a 3 month vacation. They’re epically failing to adjust to the local daylight schedule, having slept through most of their first 3 days back. It seems there’s rarely an hour of daylight in which all of us are awake. The trip has turned my whole family into extreme night owls!

The best way for critics to earn enduring fame is to lavish their worst criticism on the best art of the day. Later generations will remember them as examples of sheer boneheadedness.

I’ve been practicing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu at UCLA for the last few months. I’m so new I don’t even have the funny pajamas. And I always hurt after class. Today is no exception. I feel like I was hit by a truck.

Last night we were taught the twister roll! That should have been exciting, but my knee popped the first time my partner rolled me and I think that put a damper on the rest of my evening. It doesn’t hurt, and I can walk on it just fine, so I have no idea what happened in there.

The class meets in Wooden Training Center at UCLA, in the blue room. The mat (floor padding) in that room is covered with some very rough vinyl, so whenever you rub your skin against it, some of that skin is going to stay on the mat. I have a chunk of skin missing out of my right foot. Scraped off by the mat. Stingy!

This summer there are about 50 people in the class, and the room can only handle about 20 people comfortably. That means for most of the class, we’re standing around watching others do drills, or we’re trying to practice techniques in a tiny area while keeping a constant eye out for neighboring groups.

We’re two classes into the first summer session now, and I don’t feel like I’ve improved at anything. I’m up against vastly more experienced partners than in my beginner class last Spring, so they’re illustrating my lack of experience and technique. Hopefully some of theirs will rub off on me over the next couple months.

Apparently I forgot how to post on here for a while. I’ve been condensing my thoughts into Facebook-style snippets, and that’s becoming unrewarding. I’m going to start posting here more regularly, I swear!

I was stumbling around the Internet when I came upon this article, with its provocative title. Aha! Maybe here is someone else who’s also figured out what I’ve figured out.

http://www.darshanchande.com/2010/01/are-humans-really-intelligent.html

Alas, it was not. However, it did get me thinking and wanting to respond in two different directions. First, what’s wrong with this author’s assumptions, reasoning, and conclusions? Second, why is this really a good question to start getting at some really big issues that concern me deeply?

I’ll begin by pointing out some of the author’s statements that made me cringe:

“One of the proven observations by the naturalists is that life on the planet is being governed by an immaculate mechanism of Nature according to which no species of organism would grow so much in population that it wipes out any other species and no species of organism would shrink so much in numbers that it gets wiped out by some other.” WTF?!? All my observations show that this is the opposite of true. Sometimes entire populations go extinct, and no it’s not always because of the actions of people. Sometimes the environment changes and the organisms can’t adapt fast enough to survive. Sometimes this causes a chain reaction in which many species become extinct and a whole biosphere dies off. Oh well.

“It is evident from the process of natural selection in evolution that Nature takes due care that every species of organisms on this planet is best equipped to survive in its environment.” Another statement that is the opposite of true. If I were to rephrase this to make it correspond more with my view of Truth, it would say: “It is evident from the process of natural selection in evolution that Nature takes due care that every species of organisms on this planet that is not equipped to survive in its environment will be extinguished.”

It’s hard to keep this process going, but let me end part one by examining the author’s claim as to the purpose of intelligence. “the main function of intelligence is to make life better; to bring ease to life.” In this, I heartily disagree. This claim trivializes the purpose of intelligence. The purpose of intelligence is to allow an organism (or group of organisms) to adapt to a changing environment faster than would be possible if the only means of adaptation were via genetic evolution.

Still, we may reasonably ask “Are Humans Really Intelligent?” as did the original author. Well, I guess that depends on what time scale you use to look at it. At the timescale of riddles, word problems, and toy puzzles, we seem to be the benchmark for intelligence. We’re able to learn to see patterns in the world, and use them to predict outcomes and consequences. The better we are at this process, the more intelligent we are able to behave.

But then I read comments on YouTube, and they were like little windows allowing me to peer in on sadly crippled minds. So depressing.