Today's rating: 2.8

To continue on the “documenting your life” topic: the thing that really frightens me is the ability to do multiple regression analysis on your life. I don’t want to know the correlation coefficients for the major events in my life. I know that it would be possible for me to prove that I have better days when I’m wearing a shirt that says Duke basketball on it but I’m a lot happier just leaving that to “it’s my lucky shirt” versus being able to describe it in terms of standard deviations. The fact that I have thought about doing something like this probably means that I am not in the “standard deviation” category anyway. Yeah, there is no way that my life would pass a six sigma process.

(There is one part of my life that I really try not to document. I try to never run a bar tab, just pay cash for every drink. I’d prefer to not get that credit card bill at the end of the month. Even if I could write most of it off as research for my novel.)

Changing topics, I wonder how many people have the dream of waking up one morning and realizing you have a test in a class you hadn’t attended. I get that one all the time. It is always for a mechanical engineering course that I signed up for at the beginning of the semester, went to class a few times, stopped going to class because of some random excuse (like I hate engineering), and realize during finals week that I’ve never dropped the course and I have to take the test. I’ve had this dream for a decade, despite the fact that I never missed a class and could tell you the homework assignment that was due two weeks from now. I swear, one time I woke up and had to turn on the lights and find my diploma just to convince myself that I was no longer in school anymore. I know my subconscious well enough to know that these dreams mean that I’m stressing out and that stress manifests itself in images that are most familiar to me (i.e. school). Well, it’s still better than the dreams where I’m falling…

Oh, saw one news story that I had to bring to a larger audience. From the people that brought you astrology, witch burning, and the earth as the center of the universe we get the following news blurb. “President Bush encourages the teaching of Intelligent Design in schools.” Yes, our president wants to teach creationism. Guess that shows what an Ivy League education accomplishes at the end of the day. I’m sorry but intelligent design is not science. At it’s best it is saying “life is really, really complicated so it can’t be caused by random chance.” Except that random chance is incredibly complicated and powerful as well (study fractals for a few minutes, that’s all random noise creating patterns). I’ve said this before, but if you are going to complain about poor science scores and a lack of scientists and engineers you then have to allow students to learn science. You can be a scientist and still be a spiritual being. But when done poorly spirituality can really destroy a budding scientist. Just a thought.