hypocrisy (noun) - 1. The practice of professing beliefs, feelings, or virtues that one does not hold or possess; falseness. 2. An act of instance of such falseness.

I guess we're all hypocrites in one way or another.

This is a bad week for me. One midterm last night, and 2 more on Thursday, mixed in between the studying are visa applications, marking assignments which basically implies that Ming has no life this week.

Today marks email number 3 about my Brave New World essay.

Today was a joyous day, and tonight is going to be a restless night for Canadians all over the world. We cheered in unison as our hockey team finally broke the 50 year draught and brought home the Gold in the Olympics. It's about time.

I must have passed at least 10-15 drive-by's honking and waving the flag as I walked home from the library.

The National Post had an interesting article today about how Swedish newspapers blatantly blamed the Swedish team for letting down their country, citing quotes like "Guilty: they let down their country", and "a team with the world's best paid hockey players cannot lose to the Olympic playoffs' worst team". I still vividly remember Sundin kneeling on the ice after the game, bowing his head in shame.

But honestly here, how can a nation put their pride at fault? It's a game for fuck sakes. People win and people lose, and smart people get on with their lives. Sure I'm pissed that Law lost to Great Britain and Martin lost to Norway to rid Canada of two sure-win gold medals, but that's what happens in a sport. The best performance wins.

The problem is that the Olympics represents the pinnacle of an athlete's career. It's as if nothing else counts except a gold at the Olympics. World Championships, annual meets, those count for nothing. The Olympic gold is what every athlete strives for. A whole life of training for a 4 minute performance.

Is it worth it?

A little birdie told me that someone went with someone to someone's house at 3 in the morning, made a lot of noise, then threw up all over the place. Hmm, I wonder who that someone could be.

By the way, Happy Birthday Ben.

Being in mathematics, I guess I have to make a comment about the numbers behind tomorrow.

February 20, 2002, at 8:02 pm, written in dd/mm/yyyy/hh/mm format becomes:

20/02/2002/20/02

Yeh for palindromes. We've done enough with it on assignments, and we finally see one.

The last one like this was 11/11/1111/11/11 (or Nov. 11, 1111, at 11:11 am), and the next one won't be until 21/12/2112/21/12 (or Dec. 21, 2112, at 9:12 pm).

Far too much studying to do, and yet I'm on the internet reading and updating blogs. It's ridiculous the amount of procrastination university students go through. Anything but study. I'm sure we've all heard anecdotes like "that's when my room is the cleanest", or "it's when I do my best cooking".

I think it's the escapist nature of human beings to procrastinate. We try to avoid the fearful moment as long as we can, while doing menial tasks that we know our mothers would be nagging at us for. I don't know what my room would look like if there were no exams. When would I have the time or energy to clean after myself?

ACCESS is down again.

This will be my third (and hopefully last) gripe about coop. Our (preliminary) ranking forms were supposed to be available today at 12 noon. I go to the lab at 12:02 to check the results, and the application server goes down. Nothing I didn't expect. But I have to emphasize that, UW claims to be the most innovative school in Canada, and yet our coop (the thing that Waterloo's known for) system (which just went HTML this year) goes down as soon as a couple hundred eager students try to access it at the same time. Not very accessible (pardon the pun) in my opinion.

But there is some good in all this madness, they did find me a job. So Amazon, here I come.

"My cat's breath smells like cat food" - Ralph Wiggum

True words. God I love the Simpsons.

There is an article in Slashdot linking to a story in the Oregonian about how a private school in the US doesn't teach anything about computers until the 7th grade, and how 1/3 of the pupils are from high-tech families. The school teaches students "art, language, music and dance, as well as classroom basics" and says "we want them to eventually see what a computer can do for them, but only after they know what they can do for themselves."

Good ideas. But that is because many of those kids most likely have had some interaction with computers outside of school. However, for the rest of America, whose families are not rich enough to own computers, where else are they going to learn the skills? I would bet that most of the kids at Swallowtail can use a computer for basic needs (like word processing and internet), even though they haven't had any "formal" training. But what if you come from a poor family, haven't had any computer interaction, and then go to highschool where teachers expect all your essays to be typed out in 12 pt font, double spaced with a 1" margin?

Basic computer training in school is a good (if not essential) ideology (I mean, who goes to university that doesn't know how to type?). But if the parents feel strongly about non-technological development, then that's their choice for their children's education.

By the way, you can check out Swallowtail at their website. Note the irony.

Is there a resurgence in reading the novel Brave New World? Over the past month, I've had two requests to cite my essay about the book, which I wrote in Grade 12 for my Independent Study. I've never, in the past 3 years, received anything like this before.

Strange.

I just saw The Count of Monte Cristo. By Hollywood's standards, it could be considered a good movie, but it is a complete misrepresentation and bastardization of the book. They overplayed Edmond's smarts while in the jail, and completely underplayed the cunningness he used to get his revenge. Even the roles of the other characters were perverted to make this movie a literary travesty.

They shouldn't have even bothered to keep the same name. They probably could have changed the names of the characters and the title of the movie, and gotten away with it.

Now I realize that you can't possibly fit a 900 page book into a 2 hour movie. But their "interpretation" was perhaps a little too much, and much of the original subplots and themes were left out.

Warning - the following may contain spoilers, so don't read on if you still want to watch the movie.

The movie completely ignored the role of Haidee, the young slave purchased by the Count who is key in the ruin of Fernand, as well as the ending of the book. Edmond's alter egos (the abbe and Lord Wilmore) are not portrayed at all. There is also no mention of Mme. Villefort's attempts to poison her step-daughter (who wasn't even in the movie), and her father-in-law (who in the movie is killed by Fernand). M. Morrel's financial ruin in the book was also changed in the movie, where he was ousted by Danglars from his own company. The intricate details that the Count went through to plan the downfall of those who betrayed him is not presented as well as it could have, and the punishments the perpetrators receive are all altered. And the ending, well that just takes the cake. A typical Hollywood-style, happily-ever-after, Albert-is-the-son-of-Edmond, Mercedes-still-loves-Edmond, no-mention-of-Haidee, I-can't-think-of-any-more-hyphenated-words type of sugar on the icing.

Truthfully speaking, if you've never read the book, then go see the movie, it's probably better than some that are out there. At least it deals with betrayal, revenge, love, hope and faith. But if you have, then I'd recommend not spending the $12, go to a library, and borrow the book to read it again.

Can I just point out how much trouble this university causes me? Just when I think that I have my academic career figured out, they go ahead and change all the courses, and when they are offered. I've spent countless hours figuring out when everything is offered, and what prerequisites there are, and now, that's all changed. I have to think everything over, and that's not so good, especially with all my assignments and midterms pressing down.

Apparently, not only can coop book me two interviews at the same time, they can also book me two interviews for the same company, for the same job. And we pay them $400 a term to do this for us. Sure, they find us jobs you say, but it doesn't help if I can't go to interviews, or that their punishment for missing interviews is so harsh.

My first googlewhack (warning, large file 200 Kb) - utilitarianism unauthentic impossibility.
Or if you don't like that one, try this: "notorious utilitarianism"

Don't know what a googlewhack is? Look for it on google.

To pick up from yesterday's post, what if you had a dream you didn't want to wake up from? I've often had dreams (which I can no longer recall), where I would wake up, press snooze, and dive right back into. I remember Richard Feynman writing about analyzing his dreams while he was sleeping. Maybe I should give that a try, and see if I can be consciously aware that I am dreaming, and actively change the plot of the dream. If you think about it, our imagination is really more powerful than any form of entertainment out there, and if we can tap into that source, we can have the wildest time of our lives.

I wonder what it would be like to have a dream so real, that you couldn't tell if it were a dream. Usually, in my dreams, something random or illogical happens that triggers something in my brain, and I can say to myself that this is a dream, and I can tell myself to wake up. But what if the dream is so logically formed that everything just seamlessly fits?

A Chinese philosopher, ZhuangZi, once had a dream that he was a butterfly. When he woke up, he said, "I don't know if I am a man dreaming that I was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that I am a man."

So, instead of studying and doing my homework last night, I was up til 4 am (well, with a nice Silver Spur break in between) doing a redesign. It's not a complete, from the ground up, revamping, but the look has changed. You can see version 1 here, and compare it to version 2. Let me know what you think.