i prefer pi

On the last Saturday night in October for the last three years, I’ve embarked on a personal journey that has transcended the very laws of space and time. Since 1918, the government of the United States has seen fit to enact Daylight Saving Time from April through October, granting us an additional hour of daylight. When DST ends, clocks officially tick from 1:59 a.m. to 1:00 a.m. (again), creating an opportunity for paradox just waiting to be exploited. If you’re on the campus of Texas A&M, I invite you to partake in the 4th Annual Rumours Anti-Time Run with me this evening: leave your dorm room around 1:30 or 1:45 and head to Rumours (an on-campus coffeeshop and eatery). Enjoy some breakfast and the company of fellow nerds, and when they close up shop at “2 a.m.”, head back home. If you’re fast enough, you’ll get back to your room before you even left. Come on… it’s a tradition!

(Disclaimer: Yes, I stole the idea from the Negative Time Tommy’s Run held each year at CalTech)

Edit: (2:00 AM, 31 Oct) Phew! The Anti-Time Run was a success, but a narrow one at best. The soulless minions of orthodoxy that manage Texas A&M�s Food Services have willed that Rumours be closed at midnight on Saturday nights, in an apparent attempt at quelling our little rebellion against the laws of nature. But we were not quelled! Thinking quickly, we diverted to the Northgate Taco Bell, only to discover that it, too, was in league with the fell Protectorate of Time. In our last moments of desperation, we sighted the neighboring McDonalds, defiantly open twenty-four (and twenty-five!) hours a day, a beacon of hope for weary time-travellers such as we. Parfaits were purchased and spirited back to the Bright building by Jacob the Lesser. Seeing that I had Not Much Time Left in which to complete my quest and still having one stop remaining, I sprinted from Bright to Hart Hall, delivering a sundae to Dimitri, the dutiful RA and our sometime companion in such matters, and raced homeward. My fleetness of foot paid off, as I completed my Rumours-Taco Bell-McDonalds-Bright-Hart Anti-Time Run in a scant negative five minutes. He who dines and anti-time runs away, lives to anti-time run another day!

What’s cooler than cool? If you said “ice cold”, go home. The correct answer is “These two links”.

1. Courtesy of my brother comes a link to UNT’s Albino Squirrel Preservation Society. Yes, there really is an albino squirrel on their campus. Yes, there really is a society dedicated to his preservation. Yes, you should download the video of the squirrel eating corn.
2. Maybe everyone else knew that Xanga published RSS feeds, but it’s certainly news to me. Try http://www.xanga.com/rss.aspx?user=BishopCMB for example. RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and is a standard for publishing website “feeds” that contain minimalist versions of a site’s most-recently–updated content. You can get an RSS feed aggregator (or join Bloglines, which is what I do) to subscribe to all of the sites that you check most often. It’s like having a newspaper that remembers which articles you’ve already read that is always up-to-date on the information that you care about. If that sounds too tech-y to you, go back and watch that video of the squirrel. He’s really cute!

This weekend has had more than it’s fair share of ups and downs and epiphanic realizations. Basically, nothing turned out the way that I’d expected it to, and I got a sunburn to boot. Thank Goodness that His thoughts are higher than my thoughts, that His plans are higher than my own. As Jared says, “I am still learning things I should already know.” I am continually being made!

Now for something completely different: When I stepped onto the scale for my weekly weighing this afternoon, it showed (for the first time since high school) that I weighed just under 200 pounds! At the beginning of 2003, I realized that I’d gained close to 50 pounds during my first three semesters at A&M, and that if I didn’t do something, that trend was likely to continue. There’s a history of diabetes in my family, so more than just dropping the pounds, my goal was to make lifestyle and life-long changes that would keep me healthier. It’s taken a long while (almost two years), but it’s definitely been worth it. I’m not trying to boast; I just wanted to let y’all know that I had reason to celebrate and that it’s possible to live and eat on campus healthily! :happy:

Some more random thoughts from the margins of my notes:

• I wonder what Kaplan (the author of “Transworld Heir Lines” a philosophy paper that deals with the notion of other possible worlds) would say about the disconnect between the way that people want other people to be and the way that people actually are…
• What is the correct contraction of “and”? If I wrote out “peanut butter n jelly,” should I put the apostrophe before or after the n?
• I might make my first C ever in Pattern Recognition.
• I put the cart before the horse way too often. Like, always.
• It occurs to me that even if I had the will/desire/courage to ask a girl out on a date, I would have no vehicle in which to transport her. On the other hand, this would be a good excuse for double- or group-dating, which would probably be a good thing.
• I have just 42 more Tuesday and Thursday class-days before I graduate. I should probably interpret this as some sort of a sign.

This may be the worst piece of tripe that has ever appeared in The Battalion: Multiculturalism does more Damage than it does Good. Not only is his thesis flawed (and it changes from “Multiculturalism presents a subtle encouragement of racism” to “The movements toward multiculturalism and diversity are flawed in conception and evil in practice”) and his argument wracked by logical fallacies, but he takes quotes out of context, misinterprets what the original authors are saying, and throws in grammatical errors to boot. More on this later.

It’s high time for another Word of the Moment. From my Philosophy of Language class, we have:

Haecceity
\H[ae]c*ce`i*ty\, [L. h[ae]cce this.]

1. Literally, this-ness. A scholastic term to express individuality or singleness; as, this book.
2. the essence that makes something the kind of thing it is and makes it different from any other

“There is no possible way to use ‘haecceity’ in a normal sentence.”

(I don’t think that the pronounciation guide is much help. The first syllable sounds like “hex” and the rest of it rhymes with “laity” or “gaiety”)

I’ve uploaded a few more albums of photos from this summer to my photo gallery. You can see me scaling Mount Bandera, parasailing high above Washington State, and infiltrating the headquarters of Nintendo of America.

“This drug might give you a little buzz, like a caffeine high, when you take it.” So said the doctor at the health center. I don’t have any congestion, but I don’t have any sleep either.

Tonight, while standing on the corner of University and College, while thinking of nothing other than Freebirds and my Ethics paper, I encountered something divine. Looking up, I saw one of the most amazing skyscapes ever. An amazing fire in the west painted the whole sky with rosen hues that deepened to a majestic purple. Clouds of cotton and slate dotted the hemisphere, and cold stars began to twinkle at the zenith. A sliver of a crescent moon stood out against the setting sun. There are skies sometimes that let me know that even if I could render scenes on canvas, I would never be a Painter. There are skies sometimes that I wish that I could capture forever. There are skies sometimes that remind me that this is my Father’s world.

O cratered moon and sparrow�s wings,
O thunder�s boom and Saturn�s rings,
Unveil our Father as you sing,
And my soul wells up with hallelujahs.

K C I P P 03: the flu is a bad thing to get for your birthday

I agree. I had a great time at home, and I was exceedingly glad to see Mom and Dad and Sarah-Jean again, but ultimately, I returned to College Station sicker than when I left. I hope that I haven’t contagioned anyone in the process. Thanks to everyone who wished me a happy birthday — if you get the chance, pray for my health and my ability to complete a paper that is due tomorrow night. Now… I’m off to hit the (Nyquil) bottle and go to sleep.