Well, this is it: the last post of my journal ever (maybe). Six years. Six hundred posts. An average of a hundred posts per year. I could try to distill the essence of this journal down to some theme or collection of a few sentences, but that would be silly. And since I'm not doing that, I don't know what to do. Some things have changed. Some ( Read more... )

Thoughts
Some stuff I've been thinking about around the time that is now or perhaps in the very recent past...

In The Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan, there are sections that seem to outline what one might call the mainstream skeptical views on certain claims (about stuff). I've seen pretty much the same line of reasoning elsewhere too, and the ( Read more... )

Trading mysticism for futurism
I'm critical of a certain type of labeling. When a person's entire set of political perspectives or methodological frameworks or notions about the nature of reality or even identity as a whole is reduced to a single word, I tend to think the people framing things this way are, at best, very lazy. Simple labels are ( Read more... )

Last night, I started an unusual entry in this journal. I knew it would take a while, but I kept working on it. For some reason, my computer slowed down to a crawl (it's been performing poorly lately, so today I cleared up some diskspace and defragmented, but I think having Skype open might have been taking up too much memory, so we'll see) while ( Read more... )

I am posting this rant here too because I can. I originally posted here on account of that being where my chemistry posts go, but my rant posts usually go here, so this time, the post can be in both places. I don't think anyone besides myself reads both my chemistry blog and this journal anyway.

I realize this is a departure from the content I ( Read more... )

Or maybe the medication. I don't know which. I suppose anything is possible. After all, I have reached moksha. Shush. Listen, my parents are home. I can hear them. They cannot hear me. There's a lot I want to do right now, but I don't feel like it. Now my dad is bothering me. The dog likes me. I think it's just the virus. Medication doesn't even do ( Read more... )

Today I went to the Pacific Science Center with my mother and sister. It was vaguely familiar, but really I hadn't been there in so long that it was quite cool. Well, it's always cool. The main reason I wanted to go was because of the Lucy exhibit (lasts until March 8th). I had absolutely no idea what would be there other than Lucy. It was ( Read more... )

So as you already know (or I'd imagine you do, anyway), last week U.S. Airways Flight 1549 was struck by birds after takeoff, compromising its engines. The plane went down in the Hudson river and everyone on board survived. There were only a few injuries and none of them were really critical. Since then, news organizations have been referring to ( Read more... )

I dug around in my room and found my organic chemistry textbooks. Yes, "textbooks" plural. There are four of them. Only two are really important right now. There's the main textbook, which is nice and heavy like a textbook should be. It's the most important one. There's study guide & solutions manual, a companion to the main textbook. This will be ( Read more... )

I posted a sort of "new years" entry at the beginning of last year. I tried to make some resolutions, which I hadn't normally done. They ended up being more like aspirations, distant hopes, and bad jokes. But I am more satisfied with 2008 than I was with 2007 ( Read more... )