I am an excellent (written) test-taker. I am good at educated guessing. I am (or used to be at least) also really good at memorizing. I educated-guessed my way through the final exam of a biology course for which I had skipped almost all the classes to score a B. I could stay up the night (or two nights in a row) before an organic chemistry exam ( Read more... )

No, this entry is not about how beautiful women like my wife can be a distraction to growing boys, however true that may be. This entry is on grading curves, not teachers' curves ( Read more... )

In previous posts I have mentioned preferring quality over quantity ( Read more... )

Many when previewing movies bring up the idea that "This movie could not have been done until today." Some (*cough* Lucas *cough*) have even used this as a supposed reason why a movie took so long to make. I wonder how true the statement is in all cases. I can see why "The Return of the King" had to have computers -- no way could the scale of the ( Read more... )

I saw the final Star Wars episode (that is, III) last night at midnight. It was exactly as I expected; I pretty much was not surprised by anything really. It was probably better than the other two new ones, it was worth seeing once, it had a share of cool scenes, but it still had all the same problems: utterly terrible special effects that looked ( Read more... )

I was reading today that digital camera sales are going through the roof. This raised an issue about which I think many are unaware ( Read more... )

On Thursday, I was arguing with a good friend while playing Sonic the Hedgehog 2 on an old Sega Genesis system that if I were not a theist I would be a suicidal nihilist. He didn't believe me. So we argued for about a half hour over this entirely unprovable quality of hypothetical me from an alternate universe. I claimed that without a divinity, I ( Read more... )

Mr. Lewis has come up quite frequently recently. It turns out that reading one of his books has triggered an entry that I would have posted on Thursday had my poor little gerbil not died ( Read more... )

I can't remember exactly what brought it up, but I was talking with K. today in lab about synthesizing diamonds. (Oh, yes, I remember now....) Apparently, we have finally reached the technology where synthetic diamonds are indistinguishable from natural diamonds -- or even more pure -- with one exception. Apparently, if you shine a UV light on a ( Read more... )

On Friday, I was at lab till about midnight, but all I had to do for the last few hours was to wait on a bunch of solvent to evaporate. M. came in looking bored, so I showed him my SNES emulator, and we proceeded to play Mario World. He made the usual comment about being sooo good at that game, so I showed him the extra challenging levels at the ( Read more... )