Farewell

And so it has come time for me to face my fate, and return to puckapunyal. I leave today at 1430h, and return on the 18th of February, at which time I will be 21. Weird. Hope you all have fun, I shall see you when I get back. I leave you with this picture of my skateboard:

Angels of Death

How expert we have become at killing each other. This is footage taken by an AC130 Gunship Take note that people die in this video.

Skate Or Die

Ok I was going to put a poll on here but blogger isn't cool with me using javascript inside of a post. I found a way around it, but I wouldn't be able to pull code from an external source, which I need to do to post a poll. There's probably some way of doing it but its too much of a pain in the ass, so I'll just ask my question the regular way:
Should I buy a skateboard? Could be fun. Thoughts?

Ok, wtf? Just noticed it actually published by javascript, despite telling me that it wasn't going to. So go vote, post below this one.

In the meantime, check this out. I wanna watch that show, could be interesting. Wanna download it for me fudgeman?

Skate Or Die

I hate you myspace

Man, its 10.25am, I so shouldn't be up yet, and I blame myspace. I embarked on a missiob last night, a mission to create a myspace profile that was not ugly. This began at about 8.30pm and did not conclude until 3am. God myspace sucks. Firstly it has no way for you to edit the code in a NORMAL way, meaning my editing had to be done by jamming stylesheet code into the "About me" box, and whatever extra actual content I wanted to add had to be done by jamming some html in the same box and using more CSS to jam in on the screen where I wanted. Took me a really long time to find a reasonably well coded stylesheet that someone else had made to use as a template, but I really needed one since myspace gives you no hints about which stupid little boxes are referred to by what tags. Probably could have looked in the source but it was just so hideous that I couldn't bear looking at it for very long. Myspace is just as ugly on the inside as it is on the out, possibly moreso. Especially on mine: I present to you one of the few myspace profiles that is not ugly, and may actually be almost decent (I may change a couple of things still): www.myspace.com/nonugly

Dunno if I'll actually use it now that I've made it. Maybe, maybe not. I'll see how it goes.

Btw tell me if something looks retarted in your browser, I sincerely doubt that myspace is capable of displaying everything the same in all browsers. This may mean I can't fix it however.

It's interesting how whenever you let people customize something, you get so much crap coming out of it that its not funny. Especially if you let them customize it without giving them a non-hackjob way of doing it. Of course the lay person is going to end up with something hideous! They don't know CSS, how are they suppose to make something that doesn't offend the eyes of all? Why myspace? WHY!?!? Even those who do know CSS don't always have -6 HOURS!- to waste trying to de-crapify something that shouldn't have been so ugly in the first place. Even the default layout is ugly. It has bad chi. I tried to find an awesome picture of someone stabbing with a wushu broadsword, such that you could feel the chi shooting out the end but I only found about one that captured that feeling, so I had to settle for a dude fly-kicking at the same time, which is cool but doesn't have as good chi.

Also I found this nifty kendo video:

Mahaha

For some reason I decided to count the number of times the word "fuck" occurs in each of our blogs. I thought the results were pretty funny (though not unexpected) so I thought I'd share them :p.

Jason - 0
Scotty - 1
Erin - 2
Steve - 2
Cara - 0
Amy - 3
Fudgey - 0
Ben - 1
Sean - 16

These results are accurate at the time of posting for whatever was visible on the main page of each blog :).

Also, I happened to be looking up Falun Dafa on wikipedia and came across some interesting things:

The study states:

"We here report the cellular and molecular changes in Falun Gong practitioners' PMNs that may attribute to enhanced immunity, alteration of apoptotic properties in favor of a rapid resolution of inflammation, as well as PMNs longevity based upon a much more economical balance of protein synthesis and degradation."

"Drastic system-level changes of gene expression were detected in PMNs of Falun Gong practitioners, while little changes were detected among non-practitioners, despite the differences in age and gender. Most interestingly, the genes that are regulated in a consensus fashion among the practitioners can be grouped into several functional clusters, which are directly linked to PMN functions in anti-viral immunity, apoptotic property and possibly longevity based upon a much more economical balance of protein synthesis and degradation."

The Falun Dafa Australia website lists three surveys conducted in China in 1998, all of which suggest significant improvement in health levels. While the latter two provide no information related to who performed the surveys, the first lists a team of eleven researchers assembled from various institutes, hospitals, and universities. This survey was conducted on over ten thousand Falun Gong adherents in Beijing. The results suggest that among the participants Falun Gong’s disease healing rate was 99.1% with a cure rate of 58.5%. The rate of improvement in physical health was 80.3%, while 96.5% in mental health. The results of this survey indicate that Falun Gong has a significant effect in disease healing and improving health.[8]

Source - "Falun Gong", Wikipedia

I thought that was pretty cool. Might have to get back into it again.

Chicken

Extract from "Prisoner's Dilemma", Wikipedia

Learning psychology and game theory

Where game players can learn to estimate the likelihood of other players defecting, their own behavior is influenced by their experience of the others' behavior. Simple statistics show that inexperienced players are more likely to have had, overall, atypically good or bad interactions with other players. If they act on the basis of these experiences (by defecting or cooperating more than they would otherwise) they are likely to suffer in future transactions. As more experience is accrued a truer impression of the likelihood of defection is gained and game playing becomes more successful. The early transactions experienced by immature players are likely to have a greater effect on their future playing than would such transactions affect mature players. This principle goes part way towards explaining why the formative experiences of young people are so influential and why they are particularly vulnerable to bullying, sometimes ending up as bullies themselves.

The likelihood of defection in a population may be reduced by the experience of cooperation in earlier games allowing trust to build up[6]. Hence self-sacrificing behavior may, in some instances, strengthen the moral fibre of a group. If the group is small the positive behavior is more likely to feedback in a mutually affirming way encouraging individuals within that group to continue to cooperate. This is allied to the twin dilemma of encouraging those people whom one would aid to indulge in behavior that might put them at risk. Such processes are major concerns within the study of reciprocal altruism, group selection, kin selection and moral philosophy.

I was reading about the a certain type of mathematics known as Game Theory, which started from reading a wikipedia article about the "Political status of Taiwan". This led me to reading about "Brinkmanship", which then led to "Chicken (game)", which led on to the article on the Prisoner's Dilemma. I'm sure you have all know about the game of chicken, if not the mathematics of it, and probably the prisoner's dilemma too in one form or another. They are rather famous. I just found the above paragraph an interesting example of the way the psychology and mathematics involved in an extremely simple game such as this can be used to explain real-world human development. It's an interesting study in why people develop selfish or selfless qualities, and kind of boils most of the worlds problems down to something very simple.