Why Change for Others?

I was watching a show called Community and the main characters are concerned for one of their friends, Abed, because he's a bit unconventional. They worry for him because they find out that some girl might like him (and she's actually attractive). They're afraid that he might not get another shot at a girl like this. They try to change Abed by giving him advice on how to behave, act, and talk. Abed follows their instructions only to have the group realize in the end that they didn't really need to "help" him.

In the end, they find out that he actually never had a problem with girls - that he even pretty much has enough game to get any one that he wants; and he does. He tells them that people try to help him all the time and they get frustrated when he doesn't let them try...so he lets them find out for themselves and he changes for his friends because it matters more to them than it does to him.

"Changing for other people isn't such a big deal when you know who you are and what you really like about yourself." - Abed Nadir, Community

Merry Christmas (With Statistics)

Read this somehwhere:

Is Santa Real?



1) No known species of reindeer can fly. BUT there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen.

2) There are 2 billion children (persons under 1 in the world. BUT since Santa doesn't (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total - 378 million according to Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million homes. One presumes there's at least one good child in each.

3) Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house. Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false but for the purpose of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding, etc.

This means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000 time the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second - a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.

4) The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set (2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight. On land, the conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting the "flying reindeer" (see point #1) could pull TEN TIMES the normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine. We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload -not even counting the weight of the sleigh - to 353,430 tons. Again, for comparison - this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth.

5) 353,000 tons travelling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance - this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy. Per second. Each. In short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity. A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force. In conclusion - If Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's dead now.

Merry Christmas!

Seriously - have a Merry Christmas & all that crap (lol). If you don't celebrate it, then enjoy your day off. And if you don't have the day off, then sorry your life SUCKS. hahaha

Peace,

- knowledge

lmao..How is This a Real Song?

I've included a video with the lyrics so you can follow along. I'm trying to figure out if a religious person should be offended, or if it's actually a legitimate reason to pray for.

"Oh Lord, don't let me cheat on my girlfriend. But Lord, if you can't stop me from cheating, just don't let me get caught (neva eva. Neva eva)". Hahahaha

Good luck with exams, everyone

- knowledge

"A Very Brave Woman"

It sucks 'cause she probably wouldn't have to do that if care about appearance wasn't so slanted towards women.

Anyone who knows me, knows that I have a vendetta against make-up. Up until that video, I actually despised make-up...but I hate it a lot less if it makes people like her feel better. Must be hard as hell to deal with that stuff. Especially when it's in their teens/younger adult years when it matters the most to the rest of the world.

I've always said that beauty lied primarily in facial structure (if it had to be physical), but I do know people who care about their bf/gf having clear skin. I feel for you ladies (in general) - there's just so much pressure that it's hard not to care about appearance.

But I still don't like make-up. I've never seen anyone who I honestly think NEEDS make-up (not even the chick in this video). I don't find her repulsive, but it saddens me that other people might.

Either way, I think it's admirable that she outed herself like that. Good for her.

- knowledge

Occupy Wall Street...Boss

IDGAF - this is boss as hell. Stay hungry ;)

Is Tuition Really THAT Unreasonable in Ontario?

E-mail from the student federation at my university:

In May of this year, student representatives from across the country voted to call a national day of action in 2012 to demonstrate Canada-wide support for a national vision for higher education. This means on February 1, 2012 students from Victoria to St. John's will be taking to the streets to demand reductions in tuition fees, greater investment in college and university education and measures to alleviate student debt.

Is tuition really THAT bad? I did some calculations and on a bad year, it'll be 8k a year including textbooks. Minimum wage (10.25) for 20 hours a week, for the rest of the year will earn someone roughly 9000 dollars after tax returns and all that crap for students. Now, you factor in that minimum wage isn't even mandatory - there are plenty of student jobs that pay 12/hour at the very least. That comes to around $11000 dollars after tax returns. So that gives students more than enough spending money. If they want even more spending money, they can find plenty of jobs that'll pay 15/hour. Or they could even find a higher-paying job, work less, and still afford this "insane tuition" (which, by the way, is 10000 - ~50000 a year in the United States).

On top of all this, it seems like people forget that OSAP is a privilege; not something that we're entitled to. If you can't work and focus on school at the same time, then the government's nice enough to give you an interest-free until you graduate. I'd even go so far as saying that being able to go to a university in another city isn't something that we're entitled to get a loan for.

WTF gives? Are students just whiny little babies, or am I missing something here?

Occupy Bay Street (Toronto)

For the people that don't know (or the people who saw some sort of sad excuse for a protest on TV), the crux of the Occupy movement is that 1% of the world essentially decide life for the other 99% and control around 42% of the world's wealth. 


The protest is SUPPOSED to be about inequality...when the real issue is capitalism. There are a bunch of people realizing that capitalism doesn't work. Or that it does, but with an end-life. And we're just unlucky enough to be at the pinnacle of it. The very concept of capitalism is competitive...and with competition comes a wider gap. It's funny 'cause it emphasizes hard work, but the longer a capitalist system goes on, it becomes more about luck. I like capitalism; it's the reason I can have the things that I need an/or want. But I'll admit that it sucks for the people who haven't had much luck in it. After all, that could've been me.

I think it's way too easy for the people who are well-off to say "suck it up and deal with it" 'cause they'd like to think that they deserve to be where they're at, and everyone else just brought it upon themselves. But that's not the way the world works - some people CAN'T help themselves...or if they can, it's not enough to actually fix things. But capitalism's never been about equality - which is what democracy's here for (ie. banks mess up the fancy world we live in and we have he right to protest about it). It's the only check we have against that system, and to be honest, it doesn't seem like we have many other "systems" to try out. Power and wealth differences will always exist because it's at the heart of capitalism. I don't think people realize that for someone to do well, someone else needs to do worse. 

I get what they're protesting, but I'm not sure there's really much that can be done. You can prolong a "failing" system by patching the leaks, but it's eventually gonna end up the same way. Given that, there's 2 ways to take this: accept capitalism and the idea that some people flourish and some are **** out of luck, or move towards a more equality-based system where everyone's doing okay. But that leads to another problem. No one wants to be "okay". Everyone wants to be great. No one wants to be okay because we'd all rather be happy, even if it meant risking that we'd be sad at some point. 


The rebuttal here is that it CAN be fixed - that you need to have regulations in place to control the rich who get greedy, which wrecks the economy for everyone else. But until you can fix people, that **** isn't gonna happen. It's especially NOT gonna happen in a system where the rich call the shots. You can't tell people who are the reason we even had or saw success in the first place what to do. Not even if you're the government (unless you're richer than them).

I saw the protest and it does more damage to the cause than anything else. It's a shame it wasn't better-organized. At the same time, the media's doing a good job of diffusing the issue - they use any chance they can get to bring attention to how disorganized it is, rather than trying to explore the different issues and factions. For such a big city, our version of occupy was such a sad demonstration (or maybe a testament to how we don't have it that bad).

A lot of people say that they're identifying the issue, but not proposing a good fix. Maybe 'cause there isn't one. So basically, hey're bringing attention to how we're all screwed and there's not much that we can do. And that's what I'm trying to do here. Here's to hoping (and in some cases, knowing) that some of you guys (will) make it in to the 1% club. ;)