Duck Facts

            It’s been I while since I’ve written anything, but what better way to come back than with more Duck Facts! Let’s just say that I have spent this hiatus in tireless research so that I could share these new and amazing facts about the universe’s greatest animal. Here they are:

1. A duck’s strength is proportional, by volume, to 42 Arnold Schwarzeneggers.
2. Duck webs are stronger and lighter than carbon nanotubes.
3. The pyramids were built by ducks.
4. Ground duck horn cures impotence, and also cancer.
5. In ancient Assyria the duck was a symbol of virtue.
6. Ducks are invisible to radar.
7. If you combine duck poop and diesel fuel you get napalm.
8. Cows with perfect karma are reincarnated as ducks.
9. The preening oil produced by a duck’s uropygial gland is waterproof, fireproof, blocks 99.99% of UVA and UVB rays, and smells like lilacs.
10. Ducks have 12 lives.
11. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle applies to ducks on a macroscopic level.
12. If you stare into a duck’s eyes you can see the meaning of life.
13. There is no word in the Finnish language that rhymes with duck.
14. Humans share 102% or our DNA with ducks (they have all of ours, plus some).
15. If a woman weighs the same as a duck she’s a witch (ducks also reverse newtification)
16. In Soviet Russia, ducks hunt you.
17. I would never lie about ducks.
18. Duck tears reverse aging.
19. Male ducks have a corkscrew shaped penis that can be up to 25% of the length of their bodies and is capable of explosive erections.
20. Ducks can survive indefinitely in vacuum and can withstand temperatures ranging from 6 to 1282 Rankine.
21. Some West African ducks have been known to spontaneously change sex from male to female in a single sex environment.
22. If a fox mates with a duck it produces a red furred flying mammal. It’s called a dox (nobody knows what it sounds like). If a dox breed with a ram it will give birth to a large wooly flying mammal, with horns. It’s called a rox. If a rox and a salamander have sex the baby is giant red flying lizard with horns that breathes fire. It’s called a shit.

Who's laughing now?

Subjectivism

            The ongoing quest to reduce all my thoughts, opinions, and actions down to a single source has hit another milestone. Previously, I’ve written about my ego and its desire to have no needs, and it’s been almost a year since I described my aversion to compulsion (how the time flies). I’ve kept digging and have found a pattern of subjectivism below everything. Subjectivism is basically a belief that truth isn’t singular and depends on how you vied it. This view of truth covers everything; from if a song is good, the speed and direction of a moving object, the color of a shirt, or the mechanism by which air is necessary to combustion.

Songs, or any art for that matter, is a good example since everyone has different opinions and preferences on the subject. You might say this is because it is a complex subject that depends on highly variable tastes, but the way so many people state the quality of art as an inarguable fact makes me think that they believe their opinions are the objective truth (objective being the opposite of subjective, where there is one truth and all others are false). I believe that all thoughts on art are equally valid and have even gone so far as to say that the subjectivity is what makes it art. How a song makes you feel is something that is uniquely true to you, and even if you don’t agree with a single other person that can never make you wrong.

 

I don't care what anyone says, One Night In Bangkok is my best song ever

For speed and direction let’s say a car leaves St. Louis headed West at 75 mph. But what if you view it from a car doing 80 mph in the same direction? Now the car is moving East at 5 mph. What makes a velocity relative to the surface of the Earth truer than a velocity relative to anything else? It may have more utility, but it isn’t any truer. The Earth is rotating and moving through the solar system so it’s not like it’s a constant reference. Plus the solar system is moving through the galaxy and the galaxy is moving through the universe. Don’t even get me started on how the universe itself is expanding and how the constant speed of light throws a whole new twist on everything. Even without relativistic effect the speed and direction of any object is completely dependent on what you measure it against.

            Color requires me to get a little more abstract to describe how it is subjective, so stay with me. The simplest example is just when you have an uncertain color that will be described differently by different people. The same hue could be described as cyan, aqua, teal, turquoise, bluish green, or greenish blue depending on who you ask. With the aid of some color charts you could probably get most people to agree, but this is assuming everyone views it under the same conditions. Add in factors like differences in lighting, angle, and distance (or monitor settings) and even the same person can see the same color in completely different ways. The same hue can look different under incandescent, florescent, and sunlight, not to mention under just different kinds of sunlight. What makes any one color the true color? This hasn’t even involved the fact that I think different people could view the exact same shade differently due to purely mental differences, which is an idea that completely blows my mind. Stuff doesn’t really change from green to red very often (unless you shine only red light on it, in which case everything becomes a shade of red), but subjectivity isn’t about anything being true, it’s simply that more than one thing can be true.

 

Looks aqua to me

            The mechanism by which air is necessary for combustion is an oxygen and phlogiston reference. I’m a big fan of phlogiston as it’s one of those Baroque period scientific theories that is a really elegant and reasonable explanation of events, but when viewed with more modern scientific evidence is completely false. Until Robert Boyle came along, people believed that combustion was due to phlogiston, a sort of elemental fire, escaping from a substance. The surrounding air needed to be circulated so it wouldn’t become saturated with the phlogiston. We now believe that the process is actually oxygen reacting with the substance and the air must be changed to replenish the supply of oxygen. I would argue that the discovery of oxygen doesn’t make the theory of phlogiston any less true in its time. People then believe in it just as much as people believe in oxygen now. Belief in oxygen may have a lot more evidence, but I don’t think that makes it inherently different from the historical belief in phlogiston. It’s not that we could go back to a phlogiston theory, but maybe oxygen doesn’t work exactly how we think it does. You never know when another Boyle will come along and find some evidence that throws everything back to the drawing board.

            Those are some examples of how I view subjectivity, but that doesn’t really explain the effects it has on me and my life. Since this is basically a continuation of my post about compulsion, I’ll explain how it ties in with that. Essentially, embracing subjectivism means that I view different opinions and viewpoints as equal. My beliefs are no more true than anyone else’s, and theirs no more so than mine. Compulsion is one person forcing their way of thinking on another, and that strikes me as wrong. Presenting evidence and working to bring someone to a different point of view is persuasion or informing, which is okay, but forcing a full conclusion is compulsion, which isn’t cool. An example of how I feel about this is pulling out into traffic. If I’m waiting to turn onto a street but pulling out would mean someone already driving along the road would need to slow down then I won’t do it. The other driver probably has a plan to drive along the road at a roughly constant speed, and by pulling in front of them I’m forcing a change in this plan (compelling them to slow down). Just because I desire to get to where I’m going a little bit faster doesn’t give me any right to interfere with someone else’s desire to reach their destination as soon as possible. The burden is on me to respect their desires because I am the one making the choice of when to pull out. I’m in control and can change my own plans without affecting theirs, but the other drive can’t really do the same. This whole situation is greatly complicated if someone is waiting to turn behind me, and usually results in me panicking. But then given a choice I’ll go for the one that least impacts other people.

            Subjectivism also makes me really skeptical. For me, all truth only exists when viewed from a certain perspective and who is to say what it would look like when seen differently. I can believe that the Titanic sunk because it hit an iceberg based on what some history book tells me, but how can I be certain that if I were to actually witness the event I wouldn’t see that it was actually sunk by a time traveling Russian submarine (11 year old me’s theory). The iceberg seems a lot more likely at the moment, but one good piece on evidence could easily shift the balance the other way. I already mentioned my doubts about oxygen. I believe in oxygen because the idea is useful and it can help me explain and predict the world. This doesn’t mean that I would ever say that it’s objectively true, and I’ll always maintain a belief that it could be false. This suspicion of falsehood is something I can and do apply to everything.

 

Is that some Soviet era submarine paint scraped off on the side there?

            After all that theories and opinions are still important to me. In fact they are the thing I find most important. I usually can’t care less about facts and figures, and when I do it’s only in relation to the conclusions that they support. I’m really bad at remembering a person’s eye color or birthday, but I’ll remember if they don’t like the Talking Heads or if they wanted to be a veterinarian growing up. I remember these things because they interest me. This is why I don’t like small talk but love debate. Small talk is usually just an exchange of facts: the weather sure what nice; I grew up in some town; this one time this happened; none of that matters to me. I care about opinions and the ideas that support them: I liked this movie because it made me think; my favorite kind of car is so and so because the styling is whatever, I prefer smooth over chunky peanut butter because it spreads better; this is what I want to talk about. Sure I don’t much care about which team people believe will win the big game, but it’s still better than a list of high scoring players or something. What I really like are ideas I don’t agree with since they present things from a new perspective. New information is always better than the same stuff you already know, and a discussion is vastly improved when it has more than one side. Different conclusions drawn from similar inputs is the core of subjectivity and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

            A subjective attitude isn’t all positive though. Depending on how you look at it, it can make me either easygoing or uncaring. I’m not competitive because I believe there are more ways to measure success than by who scored the most points, and I don’t get real upset things don’t go my way since my plans aren’t the one best way for life to be. I consider these good things since they help reduce stress and conflict. Not so good is the fact that I often don’t take things as seriously as I probably should. I have a tendency to simply drop out of troubling situations or feelings with an “Eh, it doesn’t really matter”. Sure this helps me get over mistakes and stuff like that, but I don’t think that it is always the most mature way of dealing with problems. There is a lack of that extra amount of motivation need to solve some problems so they just end up unresolved. Having embraced subjectivism also means that I’m always just one short step full blown nihilism, ennui, or solipsism, which is scary. A love of utility seems to be all that holds these unproductive views at bay. Now that I think about it, desire for utility is another major factor in my personality, but this post is about subjectivism so let’s forget about it (for now).

            To wrap this up, I don’t think that truth is concrete but that doesn’t make it any less valuable. It may be dependent on a specific point of view and initial assumptions, but truth is still useful. Or maybe I’m wrong and objective truth is really a thing. Eh, it doesn’t really matter.

My Religion Part Three: And It Was Good

 There are a few things that I don’t have covered with my quasi-religion. Most of them have to do with my antisocial tendencies, and subjective beliefs. Let's take a look shall we.

To start, I don’t have a place where assistance can be summoned from outside of one’s self. I’ve got no one to pray to and no supernatural force from which strength can be pulled. This isn’t a problem because I feel that everything a person needs can be found within. If I need inspiration I can just look at all the accomplishments of humanity and know that I am a part of that. If humans can go into space, I think I can deal with any of my troubles. We’re all chocked full of potential, and belief in yourself is the best help a person can have. This system requires independence and personal responsibility and those are good traits to encourage in my opinion. If you do need a little extra help, hopefully other people can supply what you need.

Speaking of other people, I lack the community aspect that organized religions offer. I have no set place to go, ceremonies to perform, or group to associate with. A joiner I am not, so I don’t feel much of a loss. Individual and unique views are a good thing in my opinions, and I come to most of my conclusions through self-reflection and an ongoing quest to reduce my ignorance. Some may like to delegate these tasks out, but I like to keep it in house. Without a group it’s hard to develop an “us vs them” mentality, which can help reduce conflicts. I do get a little scandalized when I hear someone doesn’t believe in evolution or something like that, but I try not to hold it against them. A generally subjectivist philosophy helps here, since I believe there is no absolute right answer to any question. A variety of different opinions is just more interesting. I mean, it’s hard to have a good discussion about a topic in which everyone agrees.

On a bit of a side not, I dislike how grand many places of worship are. When your building is funded by charity, I would think it best to keep the cost down. I understand that the point is to inspire awe and a sense of grand scale, but I think that is a job for the ideas and not the buildings. I also have this objection to government buildings. 

This is why North Dakota has my favorite capital building

Nobody is imbued with any special status in my view. I have no priests, saints, martyrs, messiahs, castes, saved, or damned. There is no supernatural metric I hold to by which people can be judge as better or worse. Mental gifts of physical talents can separate people and everyone has developed different skills, but these can be surprisingly insubstantial. Money and social connections can also give advantage, but in the end all of these things are so often borrowed and traded that they aren’t that hard to come by. An individual’s past can also have causal effects on their future, but these are by no means always rational. Enlightenment is an idea I almost adopt, but it implies an endpoint which is something I don’t have. Collecting knowledge and answering questions are goals of mine, but this is a process that will always be ongoing. I can’t imagine there will be a point where science finishes its journey. I also have a near saint like regard for many great minds of the past, but this is limited. Isaac Newton is an idol of mine and I have tremendous respect for his ideas, but I also understand that he was kind of a jerk. People are always just people.

Smart guy, but he didn't always play well with others

No book or writings can be used to show or record my beliefs. You might think that these blog posts are meant to collect and hold my feelings, but I view it as more of a brief expression of my thoughts at one moment in time. Everything in here is subjective; both in the fact that I don’t expect everyone to agree and that I don’t even expect my own opinions to remain the same. The point is to inspire thought, not to answer questions. Making any idea solid seems like a mistake, because it might need to be changed when more perspective is gained. You never know when the next paradigm shift might happen and all that you believe gets thrown into a new light.

            That was enough self-indulgent introspection for now, so I’ll wrap things up. I’m probably guilty of just using religion as a convenient catchall to cram a bunch of my theories into one place, but it worked well enough (This all started as a parody of other religions call Peteism, where everything was done “for the love of Pete”, but I decided it wasn't very funny). Each idea probably could have been explored separately, but I’ll save that for my giant unreadable philosophical book that I will hopefully never write.

My Religion Part Two: Let There Be Infinite Alternate Universes

            I’m describing what I call my religion, and religions are usually about more than faith and a sense of awe, so I guess I’ll go in to some of my other beliefs that are commonly covered by religions.

First should probably be the origin of the universe. I support the Big Bang, but that is more of a description of how the universe started and not how it came into being. I use infinite parallel universes to explain the origin of everything. Most of the infinite universes are going to have a group of laws and conditions that can’t result in stability or even any physical existence at all (such as if there was an inverse cube law instead of our inverse square law, assume a three spatial dimension universe, obviously), but when you have an infinite number of tries to make a universe, a few of them are going to end up making sense. I also have room in this theory for of universes that exist in a stable way, but also have rules different from our own, which is fantastic. Imagine a universe just like ours, except the Pythagorean Theorem doesn’t work! Just try to think about that for a while without giving yourself an aneurism.

Stay classy geometry

For the end of the universe I have beliefs with a similar theme. I accept the scientific theory of a universal heat death as the progression of entropy reaches a conclusion, but with some extra bits of my own added on to make things interesting. The extra bits are the fact that I’m not certain than the Big Bang was a unique event. We could get another bang every few trillion years (give or take) due to some unknown spontaneous energy generation (I have faith that matter is energy). The whole idea of something happening once, and only once, makes me suspicious. Just because the Big Bang is the only such phenomenon that we know about doesn’t mean that it is the only one that can or will happen. This is an example of using skepticism to expand one’s worldview rather than contract it.

Next up should probably be the afterlife. I’m going to dip into my infinite alternate universe theory again and pull out something neat. I think it would be endlessly stupendous if every alternate version of a person collapsed into a semi-collective consciousness after death. Basically, you would because aware of every other life you could have lead depending on different choices or circumstances. You would get to know how your life would have progressed had you gathered the courage to ask your sweetie to prom, or had been born the son of an absolute monarch in the middle ages. Extended far enough this would end up giving you complete causal knowledge of the universe, since you would have witnessed everything and anything that is capable of happening (because technically everyone is an alternate version of you). You would get to become Laplace’s Demon upon death, which isn’t a paradox since you're no longer a causal agent. I like to maintain a sense of identity in this afterlife, because an exploration of all possible universes wouldn’t be as good without a solid origin.

You could meet your evil self!

Last, I’ll cover my source of morality. Earlier, I explained how I believed morals to be subjective depending on the social system in which they exist. A good act is one that benefits society, and evil the opposite. Assuming the society is one that benefits you and others anyway, or else the opposite is true (basically you can overthrow a cruel dictator and it would be good, baring the establishment of an even worse social system). This carries a bit of a utilitarian aspect to it, but I don’t get bogged down with trying to weigh alternatives against each other. I don’t think you can ever sum the pleasures and pains of yourself and everyone else and come up with a best action. For this reason I think that intension is more important to morals than consequences. One should just do one’s best to benefit themselves and those around them, while also trying to do as little harm as possible. In the end, all this boils down to is "try to be a jerk as little as possible". Things just go better that way. The golden rule is also a good thing to follow.

All in all, I think that does an okay (if extremely brief) job of answering some of the major questions typically covered by religions. I’m still not done with this self-adulating shenanigans, so next time I’ll talk about the aspects of religion that I don't have.

My Religion Part One: In the Beginning

            In the past I’ve been known to claim my religion is Norse. I was basically treating the whole idea of religion as a joke, which isn’t really all that useful. I’ve been doing some thinking and I’ve come up with some slightly more mature ideas on the subject. My new collection of beliefs have all of the aspects of religion that I view as positive, without some of the stuff I don’t think is so great. Let's talk about it.

            If I had to sum up my beliefs in one word it would be pantheism. Basically, I see God as being indistinguishable from the universe and its laws. God isn’t a great word since it implies an amount of anthropomorphization, so it would be more accurate to say that I feel the universe possesses a level of divinity. I’m awed by many aspects of the universe; the consistency and power of mathematics, the grace and opportune qualities of the physical laws, the beauty and efficiency of nature, and the seemingly endless breadth and depth of the universe. I wouldn’t say that I worship these things, because I don’t have any sort of rituals or observances, but my regard goes beyond a simple appreciation of science and nature. Close inspection or reflection on everything I perceive can cause simultaneous feelings of wonder, excitement, disbelief, and warmth. The ability of my mind to comprehend concepts from infinity to simple geometry (there is no such thing as a straight line in our physical reality, they exist only as an idea, which is fantastic), the way simple rules can be used to predict or achieve complex actions (like understanding the orbits of the planets, and then landing robots on those planets), the myriad of systems that work together in biological organisms (me for instance) to perform even simple operations (like closing my hand) or between organisms (like gut bacteria; I have an ecosystem inside me), and the fact that the universe simultaneously has no edge and has continued to produce ever smaller particles (wave-particles, or whatever they prefer to be called) as fast as we can find them (it’s turtles all the way down, but also all the way up) are just a few examples of things that fill me with amazement.

I love giant space cameras

My faith in the existence of these things (I’ve never seen an atom and haven’t personally dissected animals to see how their organs work) is very important to me. This faith isn’t just believing what scientists tell me. I also fully accept causality (that causes lead to effect), persistence (that the backs of objects are still there even if I can’t see them or that the laws of gravity will continue to function in the same way), and that my senses give me an accurate representation of the world. These may not seem like concepts that can be doubted to most people, but I’m not most people. I’m some sort of crappy pretend philosopher who writes rubbish on the internet. I’ve always had a strong skeptical streak (I once failed a true of false quiz about the Titanic, not because I didn’t know the answers, but because I was doubting our ability to site history as absolute fact), and I could easily fall into a solipsistic world view. My beliefs are an active choice, made because they make my universe more stupendous. They also have quite a bit of utility (it is hard to pursue pleasure if you don’t believe in the existence of your body).

This could be a fake picture and I would never know

This whole “religion” thing is based around my abnormal view of the world. I mean, I lost sleep the other night because I was so excited about a number series that I had thought up (numbers that are the least common multiple of sequential numbers: 1, 2, 6, 12, 60, 60, 420, 840…). Another good example is the fact that I write introspective essays and post them on the internet. Speaking of which, I think this is enough for one go, so, TO BE CONTINUED.

Crapsa Brand Comics

My comic is up and running. I've got it on a free hosting site so that it will hopefully be easy to find. I'm only three pages in, but my illustrations are beginning to be slightly less terrible. My writing is pretty much the same as it always is. The current update schedule is "whenever I finish a comic", since I'm not really able to forecast how long it will take me to draw a comic. Anyhow, I hope you enjoy them.

G’nite 2013

            Do you want to know who’s still great? My grandma, that's who! I already gave a summary of her general stupendousness last year, so I’ll just report on the things she accomplished over the last year. She sent 242 emails during the year, and I should admit that she became aware of my spread sheeting on February 26 so all my data is probably biased after that point. I didn’t really notice any obvious changes in the data, so like any crappy researcher, I’ll just ignore the problem. A good thing about having her read my statistical analysis was that she learned how much I love her homemade buns, so now she makes them especially for me (I can never say my writing never got me anything). I don’t have much information from the last three months of the year since she was on a marathon vacation, so my seasonal data is also skewed, but whatever. On with the analysis.

            The form of the emails remains mostly unchanged from last year’s, so the first thing reported is still the weather. Her descriptions of the local Rapid City weather break down as follows:

The worst description in there is probably Goofy, so it looks like Rapid City is a nice place to live (From my own experience, I’d say it is). Grandma is pretty stoic though, so her “Good” probably covers a broad range of weather. The “Ok?” days come from September when she wasn’t getting outside due to her sciatica (we also lost a whole month worth of card playing to that crap). Luckily my aunt healed her up so hopefully she feels better now. 

High temperatures were reported for 16 separate towns, from Wisconsin (Wicksconsin) to California, over 231 non-consecutive days. Gold Canyon, Arizona had the highest average temperature at 86.2°, they shared the highest temp of 109° with Dallas, Texas, and had the highest temperature of anyone in the family 173 days (that’s 74.9% of the time), and I will never forgive them for it. New Rockford, the origin point of the family, was consistently the coldest, with an average of 50.9° and the lowest recorded temperature of -16°. The average of all the local averages was 65.5°, which might be the most useless stat ever. Actually no, because I tracked the number of times my grandma’s friends had their hair done (23). More importantly (?), Rapid City had a mean error of 3.325° in the next day forecast, and was correct eight times out of 80.

Pierre (where I live) had an average of 60.5°, and a high of 99° and low of 1°, which has a nice symmetry to it. My temperature was only superlative in the family on September 22nd, and I still shared the high temperature (with friggin’ Gold Canyon). Let’s have a temperature graph to help me get over Gold Canyon and their warm weather.

Grandma is still going to her exercise class, and Robbie is still teaching it. She attended 74 times with an average of 20 old goats jumping around (her words, not mine). That’s about 74 more times than I made it to the gym last year. Robbie busted out some new moods this year including; wondering, hurting, crazy, remembering elvis, razzed, gonna party, bad at fishing, questioning, missed, and ok. Some of those might not technically be moods, but that’s what I wrote in my note so I’m counting them. He was still happy 35 times which is 48% of the time (down nine percent from last year). That just doesn’t have them same impact without the pie chart, so here goes.

On the days when grandma doesn’t exercise she goes to the communal coffee hour (she still brews the coffee on the days she doesn’t go, because she's great). The size of the bunch averaged 13.0 people on 85 occasions. Conversation covered many diverse topics, including; Vivian’s pet deer, Vivian’s 102 birthday, bootlegging and home brew, new apartment owners, unwanted phone calls, Vivian’s immigration (multiple times), Jack's supplied paper work, farming in the good ol’ days, Janice’s Montana ranch, foreigners getting our money, and weather. Everyone’s blood pressure was checked twice (that I hear about), and grandma was 140/68 and 130/68 (I don’t know enough about blood pressure to understand if that is good or not). Sunday mornings are spent at Mass. I was prayed and lit candle for on 30 reported occasions. 

Reported mid-day activities were baking 26 times (buns five of those times!), sewing 76 times, shopping 44 times, and eight trips to visit Grandpa in the graveyard. She entertained guests 27 times, which resulted in at least eight trips to Ruby Tuesday (her favorite restaurant). I think I can make an asinine graph from this.

Evenings are still spent playing cards with the occasional game of bingo on Mondays. Hand and Foot is still the most popular with 141 games played. I like it because it’s graph friendly. See:

Pinochle is another favorite with 76 games played. Grandma took all the tricks a total of 14 times and got double pinochle in 38 instances. She also had a winning year with a record of 88-87. Let’s celebrate with some pie.

Bingo winnings came in at $61.00 this year. With 27 games, that's $2.26 a game, which isn’t bad (keep in mind that Grandma gets excited when she makes $3 for mending her neighbors pants). Her friends were also winners. Maxine won 11.5 times (split once), Vivian six times, and Chuck 14.5 times (he even won a blackout).

I had to change the way I recorded the closing quotes this year because we were just getting way to many new quotes. I divide the quotes into seven categories that I think cover everything anyone can say about anything; Advice, Quip, Commentary on Life, Relationships, Religion, Metaphysics, and Virtue. Virtue was the winner with 119 appearances, but Relationships was in a close second with 105. And because it is basically the name of the game, here is a graph about quotes.

Don’t worry, we’re not done (you were worried right?). Catchphrases, all the greats have them, and my grandma is no different. I still don’t know what it means, but “so gates” showed up 321 last year, or 1.32 times per email (up 0.16 from last year!). The “vashislous” count was down to 18, and we had eight “yah voult”s (can you pluralize a quote like that?). Some of my other favorite Grandmaisms, as I call them, where questionable Rip Van Winkle references (did he have a little yellow pup?), Majic, falling into all caps when talking about Hand and Foot during the long losing streak, mentioning a lady with a baby bump in a tight t-shirt, Harold going bananas, calling her car a red hotrod, being fat and happy, plugging my aunt and uncles vegetables, and getting excited about watching Rudy on TV (a football game show).

            Grandma didn’t go to bed any earlier last year. The average time sent for the emails came out to 2:48 am. I think some were sent the next morning, but there were still plenty of legitimate 2 am sendings. I’m still not really comfortable with doing math using time in excel, but I converted everything into a 24 hour time with midnight being 12:00. It works alright I guess (I did figure out how to do math in stationing notation, which has nothing to do with my grandma’s emails and is also pointless since I don’t work in engineering anymore, but I’m still excited about it). Anyway, here’s a graph:

            Finally, I was only mentioned seven times last year. I guess I need to give grandma some more rides if I want to keep getting name dropped.

“If I have a thousand ideas and only one turns out to be good, I am satisfied.” Alfred Nobel

“Never was anything great achieved without danger.” Niccolo Machiavelli