Get ready...

For this...



And this...



and this...
That's right, I'm going to heaven. In Chinese, its called Xishuanbanna (its actually four words but they write it like this in English) and its actually in South Eastern China (I think?...hey don't judge me, China is big). China is so big that it takes the same length of time to go from Vancouver to Beijing as it does go from Beijing to Xishuangbanna (although the second trip will be by bus). This trip will be all about sightseeing and photos and being one with nature. When I get back, expect a couple long blog posts on my adventures in the wild jungles of the motherland. Actually, I should change that to if I come back. Not to be a downer but its just not as safe in China as it is in Canada. Those peacocks you saw earlier probably carry bird flu or something. Oh well, at least I got vaccina...oh wait, I didn't. Also, when I get back I will be so out of the loop that this will be all I can talk about. Here's to hoping the Canucks are still around by the time I'm back (The hotels have free internet but we're not bringing a computer so unless I go to an internet cafe populated with Chinese Starcraft kids, there's going to be a lot of catching up to do). World, don't you dare go crazy on me while I'm gone.

How to judge if someone is good

If the technology ever gets advanced enough, someone should create a realistic simulation of what the world would be like if everyone were you. You wouldn't experience life from all their perspectives but rather everyone on the face of the Earth would look like you, have the same personality, talk like you etc. Of course each of them would have different experiences and would accomplish different things but it would be interesting to look at the global effect of such a move. For example, if everyone on the Earth were like me, I assume the Earth would be more quite. The global food shortage would probably be resolved because all the people who eat more than me (that's a lot of people) would eat the same amount as me. Fastfood chains would go out of business since I haven't eaten fast food in years. The number of cars on the road would be significantly reduced since I assume all the versions of me would be equally as incapable of passing the driving test. I guess that solves global warming too. There would probably be a lot of bad thigns that happen as well but self serving bias won't let me think of them. Also if everyone were me, how would the many versions of me reproduce? I guess that's a question for another time.

D-day

If I survive tomorrow, I well be well prepared for next week. If I don`t, I won`t need to worry about next week. Win-win situation.

This is just to see if I can actually influence what the ads are about...

banana.banana.banana.banana.banana.banana.banana.banana.banana.banana.banana.banana.
banana.banana.banana.banana.banana.banana.banana.banana.banana.banana.banana.banana.
banana.banana.banana.banana.banana.banana.banana.banana.banana.banana.banana.banana.
banana.banana.banana.banana.banana.banana.banana.banana.banana.banana.banana.banana.

When you type a word that many times, if begins to seems weird.

Way to go Pearson. You are slowly alienating your customers.

"Don't do it Mastering Physics. Don't you dare..Damn it, why did you do that Mastering Physics. You're lucky you're the last Mastering Physics, Mastering Physics, because otherwise..." This was I thought as I stumbled through the last Mastering Physics(for those who don't know, this is an online homework assignment website in conjunction with our physics textbook) assignment of the year. I swear to you, I was this close to becoming the Asian version of this kid:

Scary to think about isn't it? Now what I am left to wonder is why Pearson, the company behind mastering physics and biology and chemistry and all the expensive textbooks we have to buy would do something that would alienate their small base of customers. What am I talking about? Let me explain. Pearson products are targeted to University students. University students are generally pretty smart. Smart kids generally like to be right. Pearson makes up questions on topics we haven't learned about and then makes them into multiple choice questions where if you make the wrong choice, you get 0 on the question. That doesn't exactly jive with the philosophy of a smart kid who always wants to be right. No, in fact, that throws the wrongness in that kid's face and says: "Ha, you should have known better. Now your physics mark will suffer."You might argue that we learn from our mistakes, and yes I did learn from this unfortunate experience. I have learned to detest Pearson and all its products, especially Mastering Physics. Luckily for me, I probably will never take another physics course again. If there is something called Mastering Pharmacy, so help me God...

P.S. The "smart kid" I mentioned wasn't me. Just smart kids in general.

Spot the big kitty

Forget asteroids, technology will be the downfall of humankind

And I don't mean robots/androids on a homocidal streak. I'm talking about normal everyday technologies. I admit that these technologies provide great comfort (although comfort is a relative feeling, just ask those tropical foragers) and that without them, we would all be living in small villages living off the land. But this also means we would be seperating populations of the human species in all different environments and promoting diversity in the process. Now, thanks to globalization and technologies such as trains, cars, planes, boats, tv, phones etc, we are more connected with the world than ever. This is a great thing for world trade and it is also good of a little interacial breeding. You know that joke where in the future everyone will be have beige skin? Well, that could very well happen and it wouldn't stop at skin color. It would also include similar immune systems and physcical appearance and genetic dispositions etc. Do you know that classic example of evolution with the peppered moths of industrial England? What do you think would happen if all the moths were white and the trees suddenly became covered with back soot. All I'm saying is that maybe there is some biological purpose to our parents wanting us to marry people of the same race beyond just cultural similarities. Maybe this will preserve differences, differences that could very well keep our species going for the next millions of years. Too bad it isn't going to be an asteroid that kills us because unless Bruce Willis has a time machine, I don't see much we can do to stop this slow but persistent process.

just when you thought it was safe to go back to the park...

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Tanking ecomomy? We just bought a car. What now?

My parents are amazing. They are super stingy with money most of the time but then sometimes they just spend large amounts of money in one shot. That's right. No lease. No financing plan. Just pay the money straight up. I guess in an Asian kind of way, this is logical since you have to pay less money total if you consider interest. Anyway, the new car is a Toyota Venza. I wanted them to get a hybrid but they said that we didn't have a car that could fit 5 people. The Venza has five seats, same as the cars we have now. Well, I will admit that it is much spacier(if that is a word). The car is pretty nice though with all these high tech gadgets and stuff. It also looked pretty safe with all the airbags that could pop up from all over the place. I have a question though. Why don't they have any airbag type things on the outside of the car? I guess it would be kind of late because another car would have already hit the outside of the car for it to deploy. But most crashes don't just involve one collision so if air bag thing deployed after the first impact, the second and later impacts would be damped significantly. Also, if you happened to crash into water, this would keep the car afloat. Just a quirky idea. If you happen to take it and make millions, I expect your first child in return. Think about it.

You know it's bad when you wish someone would say april fools

While no good april fools pranks happened close to home, there were several groups of people that were hit pretty hard on April 1st, too bad they weren't jokes.

First, a unedited, unfinished version of X-men Origins: Wolverine was put on the world wide web for everyone to see. Fox, the distributer, is absolutely pissed that someone would do this. Now there is worry that the opening weekend numbers may fall as a result. And those who have viewed it have generally commented that it is a pretty bad movie. Here's a question for the person who stole the footage and for all the people who viewed this unfinished version: What is the purpose of watching a movie? Is it not to be entertained? Do you expect an unfinished product to be as entertaining as a finished product? That's like going to a photo shoot and taking the first unedited photo, turning it into a cover, and then have people say how ugly the model is. I imagine it would look something like this:

And also, don't you think it's unfair to comment on someone's work before they have a chance to finish it. That's like telling Michaelangelo in the middle of painting the Sistine Chapel that the colors are too bright. I'm not saying Wolverine will be like a masterpiece, I'm just saying that I expect the finished product to be pretty good (when I watch the illegal pirated version).

Some more bad news. This time at the hands of a university. It seems that on April 1st, UC davis sent out acceptance letters along with many other universities. Only problem is that they sent the letters to every single person who applied. Then about an hour later, they sent out emails to the people who didn't get in but were told that they did. This must have been pretty crushing, especially if the students had out of ecstacy declined offers from all the other inferior colleges they had applied to, thus leaving them without a university or a future. If I were UC Davis, I would be expecting a pretty big class action lawsuit any day now. That's just how it's done in the US.

nature>my brain>computer

Why do I think the above statement is true. Let me give you the evidence from my experiences today:

Nature: I saw nature in its full glory today. First, I saw a coyote chase a rabbit into the bushes at which time the bushes frothed violently. The sounds of the chase were exhilerating. Second, I saw a seagull poop while it was walking and without any change in facial expression or pace. I thought: "Man, what a graceful animal."

my brain: I got my 2nd math midterm back today and I didn't do as well as I had hoped. Not because I didn't understand the concepts( I got the hardest question right) but rather because I read and interpreted a question wrong. This resulted in a big deduction which basically ruined what could have been a great exam.

computer: So my computer has been doing crazy stuff lately. Not only is it super slow, but microsoft word wouldn't let me save my document that I had been working for over half an hour. After not being able to do anything, I closed the window in frustration. So I basically lost half an hour of work because of my stupid computer (and to a lesser extent, my brain).

A modest proposal for fixing the economy

Have you noticed the economy is pretty bad right now? Of course you have because the media won't stop jamming it down our throats. Have you noticed those commercials on the radio asking for 2000 new RCMP officers? Of course you have, because it is on all the time. My proposal deals with both these problems. To increase the number of jobs, why not just put a police officer on every block of a certain size. This would drastically increase the number of jobs that don't need university degrees for those who have just lost their job and don't have time to go back to university. With a police officer on every block of every neighborhood, crime should decrease as the majority of criminals won't commit a crime if they see a cop nearby. Just think how people suddenly put on the brakes and slow way below the speed limit when they see a cop car behind them. Also, since police officers don't have to move all the time, they would no longer need police cars to patrol because they could simply walk. This would decrease the carbon dioxide production of the city, helping to combat global warming in the process. Of course, there are negatives. A sudden increase in police officers means less strict policies onwho can become a police officer. This system may be unfair to those police officers who have to work in more crime riddled neighbourhoods as compared to those who work in subrbs. Despite the negatives, if they ever manage to invent some sort of bullet, knife and fire prood suit, then I might just ditch my scientific plans and become a cop.

Chemistry's dirty little secret exposed

No, this is not about Bohr's illegitamite monkey baby. This post is about a shocking process that occurs in organic chem labs around the world. As you may or may not know, organic synthesis involves the production of large molecules from smaller molecules via reactions that transfer and add substituents. One of these reactions that we are learning about right now is the SN2 reaction. Most chem students probably don't realize this because they are actually paying attention, but consider the following: SN2 reactions involve a "neucleophilic attack" by a neucleophile that is so "attracted" to an electrophile that it comes in from behind and "bonds" with it, forcing the electrophile to lose a substituent i.e. I-. What does the word neucleophile remind you of? Need I say it involves Dateline and a hidden camera? And this unsuspecting electrophile is just bonded to without giving any prior consent. This whole process is so traumatizing that it loses "I" or what I like to call its innocence. So now you know. Will you ever look at at a SN2 reaction the same way again? I certainly haven't. I wonder what consumers would think when they find the following on the back of their allergy medication: Numerous molecules were chemically raped in the process of making this compound.

It's a Cat lick Cat world. Don't get licked!

You may be wondering what the hell that title means. I'll elaborate.
1. As most of you know, cat's are lazy (I would know since I have a cat)
2. Cat's lick themselves (displaying their crazy flexibility in the process) to clean their fur and to build up an arsenal of massive hairballs that they can then unlease on their unsuspecting owner
3. How lazy does a cat have to be to let another cat lick it?
4. Don't be that cat

Basically, I am saying that you shouldn't be lazy. You see, laziness has literally decreased all of our university grades compared to highschool. Do you know why? It's because our teachers have become lazier. Since they don't want to mark so many exams, they make fewer exams with fewer questions worth more marks. Thus if you make a stupid little mistake, that is worth a lot more than it would be in highschool. And there is also that thing about research and how our professors spend half of their time doing that. Do you know those Sprint commercials about how the world would look if it were run by construction workers or postal workers? Well university would be like that if they replaced our professors with highschool teachers. I am aware of a couple of teaching machines from highschool that would be able to mark hundreds of exams for the very next day. It is possible. Well what would happen to the university professors? Well, they can go teach middle school when education doesn't matter as much and where they can do all the research they want during recess and all those "teacher meetings".

A little bit of profound in the morning

Two ideas have popped into my head recently that I can only describe as philisophical, although I've never taken a philosophy course (don't even try to say TOK) I assume that is what philosophers get paid to do ( do they actually get paid?).

1) I assume all of you woke up this morning (if you didn't, I suggest you pinch yourself right now). What if tommorrow you could wake up as a different person. Not as yourself in another person's body but just as a different person. You would experience everything from their perspective but you would not know that you were once someone else. So you would literally be them. Now here is a little question for you, who would you be willing to switch with (because if you become someone else, they have to become you)? Would you like to swich with one of Bill Gate's children (by the way, you can switch to a different sex because you will be them), become Lebron James, become a famous actor, become the president (who would want to be a prime minister?). But of course, keep in mind that the other person will have to become you. if your life sucks (relative to their life), wouldn't that be kind of unfair for them? Of course they wouldn't remember their old life but still, you are aware of this when you make the decision to switch. If you turn the argument around, would you sacrifice your pretty decent life to give another person a chance to live an ordinary life. Would you be willing to switch with a homeless person, or an orphan or a disabled person? No one would ever know that you made such a decision so it would be a truly anonymous gift to some person.

2) Now that I am going back to China, I was thinking about all the places I haven't been. I have only been to Canada(BC obviously, Alberta, Ontario and Quebec), China (Tianjin, Beijing and now QuinMing), and the US( Washington, Oregon, California for one minute). Sure, I have plenty of time to visit all the places I haven't visited but what if you don't consider a place to be a country? What if you consider it a more precise location like a city or an attraction? The physical act of being someplace only requires about a square foot of land beneath and a layer of breathable air around you. Consider standing on a movable tile that can be any place on Earth. I call this your tile of being. There are probably billions of tiles of being all over the planet, but consider this. Have you even experienced all the tiles of being in your own house. Now the tiles of being near your computer and tv and bed and washroom would probably be pretty worn out but have been to all the tiles of being in your own house? What about that tile of being in your garage or maybe on your patio. If you consider it like this, we haven't been many places at all. But that can be changed easily. When you walk, you are literally moving from one tile of being to another. In one day, you can experience many tiles of being. Imagine a trip around the world to increase your tiles of being. No place would be a bad place as long as it is a new place. This would probably make vacations more pleasurable for everyone. So go out there and accumulate your tiles of being. What have you got to lose?