The Airing of Grievances

So I may have lucked out when it came to holy tires...but that was pretty much it. Let's look at all the ways this vacation has thus far epically failed:

1. Times I intended to visit my friends over break: 4-5. Times I actually will only if my luck improves: 1-2. Fucking snow.

2. Number of times I had to go to the tire place to sort out their fucktard tire job: 4. Hours spent going back and forth in the car on Christmas Eve because of this: 5+.

4. The Most Awful Tire-Changing Experience Ever: After waiting for over an hour to get my snow tires on, I'm hyped to go when I see that they forgot to give me my old tires back (retards), and my tire light is on. While I'm in the car waiting for them to fix the light issue, one of the mechanics starts hitting me up for my digits while his friends are (supposedly) fixing my tire pressure. After I blatantly but kindly crush any hopes he had of getting it on with me, I just want to get out of that place as soon as possible, but I then realize that I came into the garage at an obnoxious angle, and allow one of the other guys to back my car out for me. Great, now they all think I'm a bitchy prude, and a tool who can't even drive her own fucking car out of a tight spot.

I then had to return to the tire place twice after this.

5. This Year's Christmas Darwin Awards are some of the most worthy in ages. They include: a neon yellow J-Crew knit sweater, and a 2.5 foot-long wall sculpture (in aluminum) of Serotonin. (I may be a chemsexual and all, but that's just taking it too far). Expect a poll soon so as to determine which exactly is more hideous.

6. Things I remembered to bring home for vacation: The condo keys. Things I forgot: my passport.

7. Number of different responses I got, all from supposedly reliable sources, in regards to if/how I would still be able to travel: 3.

8. All I needed in the end: My driver's license. What I managed to lose between boarding the plane and landing: My driver's license. Fuck.



Let's hope this was enough for one "break"...

The Great Miracle of the Christmas Snow Tires

Christmas is supposed to be about miracles. I'm not sure how much I actually adhere to that whole "immaculate conception" story (uh huh...yeah...right. Good one Mary, no really, totally clever!), but I'm still a spiritual person, so from now on I've decided to dedicate one post each Christmas to celebrating a great miracle that has occured that year. This year, we will celebrate the Great Miracle of the Christmas Snow Tires:

So long story short, I was foolish enough to have allowed myself to both live in New England and own a car that doesn't have Four Wheel drive. This hadn't been a problem until yesterday, when a freakish blizzard hit and the 'rents made it pretty clear that I wasn't driving until Mother Nature was done PMSing. My freedom jeapordized, I quickly entered mild panic (and uber bitch) mode. Once things cleared up a bit the next day (thank God), I immidiatley got about getting a set of snow tires to at least fend of the worst of it, and gleam what little liberty I could.

A set of snow tires, that is, that were out of stock throughout the entire state. Unless I bought them personally off the internet, the dealer said, I would have to wait who knows how long to get Baby pimped for the season. This was clearly unacceptable. After contacting a local franchise of the dealer's supplier chain itself, I also had no luck. According to the computer, they said, the tires were out of stock everywhere in the state and might not even be availabe for over a month.

I don't know why I decided to google the franchise again after it had clearly jusy failed me on a whole civil level, but I did. I randomly picked another nearby town's franchise from a list of about ten, and called up. Yup, guess who had the tires. Two in stock, two to be ordered... and in by tomorrow. I also saved $100.

So have a juicy Christmas, and remember what we've learned here today: Either there is a Jesus and he loves you and wants you to be happy, or that computers downright suck.




PS: Randall Munroe, I love you, but really now what the FUCK do you have against Chemists?

Bad Life Decisions

Based on the title of this post and the time of year, you might think I'm referring to just throwing my last exam (which I only need a 65 on to still get a B+ in the class) and deciding to go get my drankity on with my friends who were free and doing so about 12 hours ago. Sadly, no. I am talking about the life decision that was made by whoever determined the last, oh, THIRD of my Logic 100 curriculum.

I can honestly assure you that attending lecture, attending section, and reading the book, will make absolutley no difference regarding how well you master the subject of Logic. Why? Because once you get past a certain amount of "oh, that's cool, learnable, and relevant" they pretty much run out of things to teach you. Due to this, they spend the last third of the semester talking about weird infinite numbers and playing dumb mindgames. I assure you that the last third of this class is instructive in no way, shape, or form, nor is it useful in anysense of the world. (The first bit? Sure, but they really should have just quit while they were ahead.)

The final exam does not really review anything you've been taught, it is simply a test to see how far you can stretch the limits of your imagination based on ABSOLUTLEY ARBITRARY rules, a diet consisting mainly of ESPRESSO, SUGARY CRACK BROWNIES, and BREAKFAST FOODS, about 5 HOURS OF SLEEP to last you TWO WHOLE DAYS, AND AFTER DEVOTING THE PAST 12 HOURS STRAIGHT TODAY ALONE TO THIS USELESS, IRRELEVANT, STUPID, ADVANCED PLACEMENT IQ TEST THAT SHOULDN'T EVEN GRADE YOU ON MATHEMATICAL ACCURACY BECAUSE SO LONG AS YOU ACTUALLY FINISH IT YOU'VE ALREADY MADE INFINITE LENGTHS YOUR BITCH ABOUT TEN TIMES OVER!!!!!!!


Aside from that, for someone who's been awake for almost 30 hours straight I'm feeling awfully normal and chipper...Care for some tea?

Collegiate Cooking

The Goal: Bailey's Pudding

Tools at Hand: a 2oz shot glass, a graduated Nalgene, cheap silverware, the tray that came with your refrigerator, and the set of heart-shaped mixing bowls you just had to have.


Go.

Useless

bi⋅month⋅ly  [bahy-muhnth-lee]
–adjective

1.
occurring every two months.
2.
occurring twice a month

Irkings Continued: Probability

In the study of cosmology, where actual data is scarce and one has to rely strongly on mathematical theory and probability, I find myself getting incteasingly frustrated by the approach so many people take with probability. This is actually a problem I've had with the subject ever since I first encountered it in my junior year math class. (ironically, this was the best I ever did on any type of math in that class by far- so hopefully this is not simply the product of my own stupidity)

So here's my super secret beleif: Probability is bullshit.

Really, it is. I can never say so in class because I will immidiatley be bombarded by people demanding an explanation, which I would then have to give orally and therefore deeply fail. But here's how it works:

If there are five marbles in a bag, each a different color, then the probabality of getting one marble of one color blindly is 20 percent. if you repeat this process, the more you do it the more the actual results will come to resemble what probablity dictates. So yes, probability can explain what has happenned in the past or over a large series of attempts, but it can tell us absolutley nothing about what will happen, and essentially breaks down when it comes to anything really important.

In life, very important decisions are rarely remade enough times to reveal their statistical nature. If you have 1 bullet, 100 or so square inches of skin it could hit on someone, and zero skillz, probability tells you that you will eventually hit the target you want at least once for every 100 or so times you fire. But you don't have 100 shots- you have one. As that bullet sails through the air, the chances are 1/100 that it will hit the target you want. Here's the common mistake: most people assume that since it is so unlikely, it won't happen. But what if it did? It still could, infact, hit the spot right on target. And once it does, where is your precious probability now? Since you only had one bullet and one try, it's completley irrelevant. If there was a different universe for each possible outcome, we could have been living in the one where it hits all along and not have even known it.

Now we can expand this thinking to greater things, namely probablity itself. Back to the marbles- there is a small chance that no matter how many times you grab into the bag blindly, you will pick out the same marble. But what if you did keep trying again and again, and kept on getting the same marble. It could absolutley happen. We might simply be unknowingly living in that specific universe of possibility, and in that indefinite phase before the next marble is taken out of the bag, no one is any wiser.

And here's another issue I have with statistics even if we ignore the latter- Birth Control. They say the pill is 99.9% effective, but what does that really mean? Does that mean that for every 1000 women who use the pill in their lifetime, only one will still get pregnant? Or does it mean that for every day a woman takes the pill, there is a 1/1000 chance that this is the day it won't work? Or, even worse, does it mean that for every 1000 individual times she has intercourse while using the pill, one of every thousand is unprotected? They're all very different actual numbers. Ponder it.