I'm here to kick ass and chew gum. Fortunately, I've still got lots of gum.

Sacre-Coeur, 23 June 2007.

_______

I've been writing a lot more lately, and its making me feel very nostalgic about the website I put up when I was at Wasatch Academy. It feels good to be writing, kind of cathartic. Just putting something onto the screen is somehow liberating.

Enough about that: I'm heading back to OR for Felice, my sister's, wedding in eight hours, and I'm pretty excited to go back to the states for a bit. Even better is the fact that I'll have a few days of vacation, something that hasn't happened since Spring Break. At the end of the school year, I finished the writing competitionon a Thursday, packed up my apartment and flew out on Friday, arrived in Paris Saturday evening, and started work on Monday at 8am. Been going strong since. Needless to say, I'll be glad for the break.

Also very cool, I'll get to see a few people who I haven't for ages when I stay in Portland for a couple nights.

Right now, I'm contemplating an all nighter. It's 4am in Paris now, and my flight leaves at 12:55.pm If I go to sleep when I get to my seat, it will be 4am in Oregon. I can sleep for 7 or so hours, then wake up 3/4 of the way through the flight to Houston, at about 11am, OR time. Then, if I land in OR and don't go to bed until midnight or so, I should be able to get a full night's sleep and wake up without any jetlag. We'll see if it works.

Gotta finish up my packing, so I suppose I'll do that when I'm finished with this post. I'm stoked to be going back to Oregon for a while.

______________

And now, some pseudo-political nonsense:

On the Need for Marijuana Law Reform

The United States prohibition of alcohol in the 1920s and early 1930s resulted in large economic and social costs to the country at large. There were two primary effects of that prohibitions which severely undermined the American economy:

1) A vast amount of taxable income went unreported. As a result, it was not collected. This reduced operating revenue for the Federal and state governments.

2) The organized crime associated with bootlegging caused its own set of losses: First, there were significant policing costs--having to enforce prohibition meant diverting cops to that task and taking them off the street and preventing violent crimes. Further, the criminal organizations responsible for the majority of the bootlegging also perpetrated a variety of additional crimes which both increased the policing requirement(and further reduced funds and manpower available for other tasks) and came at a very high social cost as well.

The prohibition of marijuana is fundamentally similar to prior prohibitions of alcohol. There are related ideological roots and legal precedents. And there are similar associated costs, both economic and social.

Repealing current Federal marijuana laws would have the following beneficial effects:

1) It will allow states to decide how to regulate sales of marijuana, including complete bans if they wish. Allowing states to act as 'laboratories of government,' and try out new policies to determine their effects, the best solutions will eventually emerge. Further, by allowing states to determine whether or not to allow the drug, American citizens will be given better opportunities to live in areas with laws they agree with, thus maximizing choice in what kinds of places they want to live.

2) By heavily taxing marijuana, the Federal government could create a significant revenue source. This is money that could be used for pressing national concerns: education, healthcare, scientific research(from NASA to the National Insitutes of Health to the National Science Foundation), and other badly needed social services.

3) We could free valuable Federal police manpower to deal with more pressing national security needs. This would result in a significant boost to the effort in the war on terror. Further, by legalizing marijuana and allowing it to be sold and grown legitimately, we would take away a major source of funding from the criminal organizations(terrorist or otherwise) that profit from the marijuana prohibition.

The war on drugs has come at a significant cost to our country. Countless individuals have been jailed or otherwise severely penalized for growing marijuana and selling it. The systemic costs of supporting an overcrowded jail system full of non-violent offenders are a drain on resources badly needed elsewhere. We must repeal Federal marijuana laws, allow states to choose whether to proscribe or simply enforce age limits, and we must tax it, turning it from a resource-drain into a source of revenue.
______________

And now a random rant:

The stupid bitch of the week award goes to....
The Checkout Lady in the Express Lane of the Monoprix on Rue de Courcelles

Having never even heard the word efficiency(or, for that matter, efficacité), it's no surprise that this stupid bitch was totally inept. All the other lines were flying by--people with baskets full of groceries were moving far quicker than the sad few in the express line. But I stayed there, thinking that the short line in front of me would soon end. But it was interminable.

There were 3 people in front of me when I got in line. It took the checkout lady 10 minutes to get through the first two. At least three of her coworkers came and talked to her while she worked. And she had to stop everything to respond. She wasn't scanning or making change while they spoke to her--the act of speaking exhausted her mental resources. I inched closer. The line grew longer behind me. The woman ahead of me had 8 items, which she put onto the conveyer. The idiotic checkout lady scanned one at a time, very slowly, putting down the scanning gun between each item as she grabbed the next. Not only was she completely unable to multitask, she even lacked the ability to process single threads at any decent rate. I was the next in line. After the stupid bitch of the week spent 4 minutes checking out a woman paying cash for less than 10 items, I stepped up. I put down my single bottle of wine, and prepared to pay. I'm not going to go into the mind-numbing boringness of standing there: suffice it to say, it was just more of the same. How it could take her 3 minutes to complete the transaction, I will never understand.

Granted, 17 minutes isn't a lot of time, but having to waste it standing in line just because she was too retarded to do her insanely simple job really pisses me off.

I'm not bitter. I just think she should be fired. And possibly imprisoned.

______________

And now, a long time ago in a galaxy far far away:


Tie Fighter: |-o-|
Advanced Tie Fighter: (-0-)
Tie Bomber: (-o-0-)
Darth Vader's Tie Fighter: <-o->

X-Wing: >=[^]=<
Y-Wing: Y (lol)

Light Saber: =*========[&/&:::::]
Doubled-edged light saber: =*=======[:::::&*&::]=======+=

@-_-@ Princess Leia

metaphysical musings of a mellow mind meditating on a momentous mellifluous mural

Musée Marmottan Monet

And now some pseudo-scientific nonsense:

Space-time: an intricate relationship between physical distance and the amount of time it takes to get there.

The Universe's outer limits are defined by how far away light could travel from us in any direction. In this sense, it appears boundless--what could possibly happen to light along the way to make it stop? As far as we know, only a powerful enough gravitational force could ever stop a photon traveling through space(Excepting impact with a solid mass). So in a relativistic sense, the 'knowable' universe is strictly limited in a physical sense by the speed of light, and thereby the speed of the fastest possible information that could reach us.

Just a thought.

And now some pseudo-religious nonsense:

I. In the beginning, there was not much at all.

II. As time progressed, it became quite apparent that 'not much at all' is a little boring.

III. There was light. It emanated from every direction at once, in every direction at once. Everywhere it went it encountered space--it was as if an enormous gravitational pull that had constrained it--not for ages, not for aeons, but for a true, endless infinity, for there was no time before the light--was sudenly released. Immense energy flowed everywhere--to wheres that hadn't even existed a moment before.

IV. As light encountered light it became matter. Purest energy condensed, at first boiling hot into plasma, and slowly, slowly, into swirling masses that begot their own gravitational pull. All of the energy that existed before the Event became, in this way, reconcentrated throughout a newly constituted space-time continuum, and achieved its own light--the bright light of fusion, which, even still, was far paler than the light of the Event itself.

V. With time these stars became out of balance. The resources within them withered--Hydrogen turned to Helium, and Helium into Carbon, and so on, until finally, the very souls of the stars became so corrupt with heavy, immalleable iron, that they consumed themselves, and expired in enormous blasts. The cataclysms resulted in the complete destruction of the being of the stars, but each produced a light far greater than at any other moment in the stars' history, yet a light still far inferior to the first Event.

VI. And these heavier elements eventually recoalesced, forming their own bodies--bodies which could not live without the light of nearby stars. There was one of these bodies in particular, a swirling globe of iron, its core a fiery forge, yet one still far less intense as the cores of the forbearer stars, and is immeasurably less intense than the Event. It's outer crust cooled by the vacuum of space nearby--hydrogen and oxygen formed together to create water.

VII. The perfect mix of chemicals existed, inspiration hit, and life began. And life contained within it a fire, but a fire that burned far dimmer than the core of its planet progenitor. Immeasurably paler than the star that gave it energy on which to exist. And infinitely paler than the Event itself, the precondition for all of space-time.

VIII. This life began to effect the planet around it. It consumed some chemicals. It excreted others. And slowly, slowly, the thinnest, topmost layer changed--it became more and more habitable, and more and more lifeforms emerged--adapting from prior organisms into more and more complex ones. Self-replicating protein strands. Mitochondrian. Prokaryotes. Eukaryotes. Protozoans. Plankton. Multicellular organisms. Algae. Metazoans. Trilobites. Fish. Insects. Amphibians. Ferns. Insects. Reptiles. Dinosaurs. Birds. Viruses. Mammals. Primates. And humans.

IX. And within every human burns a fire. A fire, like all animals', far paler than the Earth's own, even more so compared to the stars, and infinitesimal compared to that which created it. Yet within every human is a fire that apprehends, and that reaches out to understand the universe around it. An intelligence which in its own way, though physically dim, specklike, shines far brighter than anything before it, save only the Event itself.

Alternate ending:

IX. And humans are a vaguely interesting species that really haven't done anything that cosmically significant at all, but have managed to cause some pretty ridiculous problems for themselves in their own little neighborhood.


In other news, Paris is still fun, and I've started a Flickr Account where I'll be uploading some pics.

And now, a roflcopter:

========+:::+========  \
    _ ____l___          --0-- 
   /O/  ___  0\_         _o  \                  
  (=   /_AM__   \_______/ /
(-:_________________lol__/
         \  \
    \____|__|_____

It's actually way faster than it looks.