Week Eleven of the Philosophing

We'll week-in-reverse this bad boy:

Sunday - put the final touches on a first draft for my law paper. A lot of time, probably way more than would indicate any efficiency on my part, was put into that beast, so it was nice to have it done.

Saturday - Wrote the arguments and conclusion for the paper. This took pretty much all day. Blar.

Friday - Great day. Came in early and polished off the "cultural arguments" section of the law paper. Went to my seminar class on Gender, Race & Technology and just had a great discussion, a lot of which was prompted by me and my impatience with people who don't talk. We were missing a few of the Bio & Society people due to conferences, so here was a high potential for some sitting and staring. I threw out some controversial ideas just to wake people up, and it completely worked, got people heated and bantering and all that. We talked about sexual language "inherent" in nuclear war, the appropriateness of fictional work as an academic tool, and different concepts in racial genetics. Cool stuff. A couple of professors were visiting, and though the tendency for them is to sit back and observe, they jumped right in. Awesome.

Followed this up with lunch with the HSD crew, then went to a presentation on nanotechnology and 4th amendment rights by Alan Rubel. He was one of the visiting professors from class, and in his presentation he essentially argued that nanotechnology will actually serve to improve privacy concerns. Tres cool. Ran back from that to the lab for about five minutes, then had a quick meeting with Dr. Steve Hoffman about his neuroimmunophilsophy course. Which sounds excellent - he's interested in concepts of self and mind as understood via immunological processes / pathologies. I'll probably take it.

And capped that day off by running home to take care of the dogs and then jetting over to Scottsdale to play some softball. We won both games big (20-1, 16-3), and then Beck and I grabbed dinner at Los Olivos. Yay for a fun end to the week.

Thursday - Spent the bulk of the day doing the reading for Friday's seminar course, though I also managed to get in a bit of preliminary work on the cultural arguments section of the paper. I also had a fun pizza lunch with Mark and Melissa and then met a bio student named Jake for coffee at 1. He is interested in collaborating on a cool sounding bio-philosophy project on the conscious experience as limited / defined by biological factors - exactly the sort of "informed existentialism" stuff I might be interested in. So a good, productive meeting, and I'm glad I'm not the only yahoo who thinks in this way - even a bona fide scientist type has noticed the problem! Yeah!

Wednesday - An entire day devoted to finishing up the legal arguments in the evolution controversy. I also went to a law class on "forbidden science" where we essentially learned that we're all going to die from bioterrorist attacks, and how! A sort of a bummerish day.

Tuesday - A day spent entirely writing and citing legal papers. I think I took a 20 minute break to toss the frisbee, but otherwise it was nose to grindstone from 7:15 - about 7 at night. Argh.

Monday - A morning spent on the aforementioned Alan Rubel's paper and a presentation on it from John in HSD. Law class featured discussions of democratic decision making and jury competence, focusing a little bit on genetically modifed foods. Otherwise I polished the outline for the law paper.

There you have it. A busy, productive week. There's alot of reading and meetings and whatnot that I glossed over in there, too. And lawn-mowing, Ultimate, and watching two (Beck-chosen!) movies, Forgetting Sarah Marshall and You Don't Mess with the Zohan, which were entertaining (the former much more so than the latter) when they weren't abjectly stupid (the latter, period). As a redemption, Beck also grabbed Pushing Daisies, a nice macabre show whose first two episodes were very solid.

More later. Time to get back to work...

Wa. Friggin. Hoo.

After what feels like hundreds of hours of reading, outlining, writing, citing, etc., I just finished the first draft of my first grad school paper. Yay. Mailed it off to the professor for notes and everything. Phew. It's the paper that I posted the abstract for here about the evolution debates. If you are hexta-bored and want to give it a look, well here you go:

Cultural / Legal Incongruence in the Evolution Controversy

Fun times. And I get to beathe again at least for a few seconds until I have to read a landslide slew of more articles. But it's good to have something tangible done.

Alrighty then. Breakfast now, reading in a bit, more blogging later.

The Royal WEfnuk: Week IX

Hard to get too fired up about this one, and again, stats are not worth keeping. I think the stats concept is entirely in the trasher at this point. AH, well.

We killed a team tonight, getting up 14-3 and then goofing around until 15-6. I played fine = no turns, lotsa scores and ds and thrown scores whatever. Frankly, these games have been a little boring lately. The league is not incredibly competitively balanced, and it sucks for everyone involved when one team can just do absolutely nothing to stop the other. Next week should be a little better.

Poor Amber got run over (not intentionally, and not even really recklessly; just bad luck) by one of the other team's guys. She left the game and the fields; I'm not sure if she had to go to the ER or what. Looked bad; she may have broken her collarbone. Ugh.

And sorry for the dearth of late. I've been writing a big law class paper and with all the citations, it's just taking forever. I'm about 18 pages into what is supposed to max out at 40. I'm going to try to push through and finish it this weekend - at least finish the draft - so I can come up for air then. Perhaps I'll post then about the absurdity of a state that can elect Obama but amend its constitution to redefine marriage as "We hate gay people." Sigh...

Internet warning

Beware a spam email message trumpeting President-elect Barack Obama's victory last night. The email will have a link to what is supposedly a website with election results. However, when you arrive there you will be asked install an update to Adobe's Flash Player before viewing a video. Don't do it!

Computerworld magazine explains. What's actually downloaded is a Trojan horse that compromises your PC then floods the machine with more malware. Another good reason to own a Mac, but if you don't be careful. According to Dan Hubbard, Websense Inc. VP of Security Research in Computerworld, "This is very coordinated, with evidence that they planned this, then waited for the election results."

CDCP?

Julie Louise Gerberding, CDC Director

Did you know that the Centers for Disease Control, the CDC in the shorthand parlance of the health community, is really the CDCP? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention? Neither did the Clarion Content. The name change occurred all the way back in October of 1992. In the intervening sixteen years have you ever heard anyone call it by the full name or use the initials CDCP? Us either. Heck even their website is cdc.gov not cdcp.gov, which incidentally doesn't even a redirect back to their website!

Obviously they are doing a less than stellar job publicizing the prevention portion of their mission. It seems to follow that America has chronic health problems that have worsened to do the persistent lack of a prevention ethos in this country; among them obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease and their ilk.

What kind of prevention are Americans doing? Getting a flu shot at Walmart along with their bag of potato chips and corn syrup based soft drink!

Texas Tech Bell Ringer

With Texas Tech playing its biggest football game in eons, it seemed like a great time to break out an oldie but a goodie.

Ladies and Gentlemen,




The Texas Tech Bell Ringer

That Kinks Song From That Commercial

That's the Nu-q-lar Searl (minus James) in Boston at the Tufts 10K a couple of weeks back. Photo by Greg.

That's a vintage Cloud Nine team picture. How many players can you name?

That's a pic of Crisis Bureau Frontman and Tufts Emen Captain (best captain ever?) Mike "Verbal" from his wedding day. In the interest of equal opportunity:

That's Tali, Mike's wife, a primo individual who's playing at UPA Nationals today.

And that's Wrigley... and no, no she will not move so you can get in bed.