When I woke up, everything was strange. Little windows kept appearing in the bottom right corner, saying that the computer was infected! Perform a free scan now! And they seemed so eager for my attention that I was skeptical right away. I unplugged my computer from the internet, turned it off, and hoped that the problems would go away.

They didn’t. The world was not so kind.

Later, my sister told me that she couldn’t access the internet from my computer. I found that I could only with great difficulty get an internet window open, and that even then, I couldn’t load a single webpage. Not even something as simple as Google. I was very cross, and I resolved to do something about it.

Remembering a fix Merlin (name redacted) had shown me during the summer, I went to a different computer and downloaded a trial version of Antimalwarebytes, and then transferred it to my computer with a flash drive. And then it scanned for two hours! But at the end of it, things were working again, and now I have internet again.

It seems to have deleted some of my most prevalent Gchat contacts, if their disappearance from my list and this computer trouble are related at all. I’ll be trying to re-establish contact with those people in the next few days. In the meanwhile, I’m happy to have internet again.

Christopher Hitchens died last week on December 15th from complications due to advanced esophageal cancer. He was a breathtaking author, dedicated hell-raiser, unequivocal anti-theist, and heavy smoker. I didn’t know much about him except that he was the author of God Is Not Great, which I read, and it was a stunning work.

Mr. Hitchens said last year that he’d be lucky to be alive in five years, and sadly, it didn’t happen. Some hoped that he would change his mind and seek religion in his hardship (a view all too indicative of belief-in-belief, the position where one wishes to believe, and then convinces themselves that they do). That didn’t actually happen either. In September, he wrote in his column on Vanity Fair, “please do not trouble deaf heaven with your bootless cries. Unless, of course, it makes you feel better.”

I wish he’d smoked a bit less in the interests of living longer.

I plead that the world regard him with statistical rigor, and not do him the insult of claiming he was killed by divine will. That’s not a statistically plausible claim, and he refutes it himself in his article here: http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2010/10/hitchens-201010.

RIP Christopher Hitchens. We shall have to work faster to slay the dragon tyrant.

I don’t actually have any excuse this time. I fell asleep right after dinner, and although I set my alarm for 23:30 in the fond hopes of actually waking up and blogging, I didn’t. I’m sorry.

Finals are over, and were over on Friday. Friday was an awake-early, two-finals, yell-at-little-students sort of day. I really didn’t quite know what to make of the AI exam, but the Engineering one was kind of fun. It was very mathy and three hours long, so I had time to sit there and flounder around until things sort of made sense. Even though it took me more than two hours, I was only the second person out, so I feel like my sparse attendance hasn’t done too much damage. After that, shower, and then my class of little zerglings (where they trolled like they’d never troll again (it was their last class)), then Rock Band, then sleep.

Today, I woke up, and then did not commit to getting up for about five hours. Something about that doesn’t quite seem optimal, but then again, maybe it is.

I had an interesting talk with Pesto (name also redacted), who thinks I should be a vegetarian. It quickly turned into a much more complicated problem. Right now, conversation is on hold, and I’m trying to come up with a good mental model of a non-sentient entity that still has meaningful utility.

I should pack. If I don’t pack, I shall not be ready to leave in seven or eight hours, and the room will moulder while no one is here, and smell weird when we get back, and I shall forget something small but significant, and perhaps I will have to buy a new phone charger yet again.

With the fondest hopes of being a more punctual functional person.

The trouble with delimiting days by midnights is that my best work hours, which extend from dinner until 3 in the morning or so, make it hard to notice midnights.

I started my last programming assignment around 3 in the morning yesterday morning, with 23 hours before it was due, and despairing of ever finishing on time. (It’s actually been extended until tomorrow, but I didn’t know that at the time.) Assignments often range in the neighborhood of 50 hours, so even if I programmed nonstop, I might expect to finish halfway. I went to bed a good whiles after the sun rose, and then I woke up.

All was dark and still.

Frantic, I grabbed at my cell phone for the time: five minutes until 18:00. That left just eight hours to finish programming, and I wanted to have dinner besides. I’ve been programming frantically since then. Python is a wonderful language, where things are actually simple, and lists can be made of anything in the world (even other lists!), and memory never needs be allocated and then freed. But in the midst of all that, midnight passed quietly by, and I missed another day.

From now on, perhaps I will try to blog as early as possible each day about the previous day, to better the likelihood of catching each day.

I’m not even a math major yet, but every few updates the world comes back to this, and here we are again.

The dean was very kind and granted me a 36-hour extension on the math final, which ends in about 2 hours. He and Ms. Rhonda must’ve really pitied me. They fed me candy and orange juice, and the dean explained that he was cleaning out the bookshelves and giving away the former dean’s music books. They’d be in a box outside his office, and I can take as many as I want! I think a book a day is a good rate to be taking books.

I’ve answered maybe half the problems and basically given up. The remaining problems, I’ve either thought about for a long time with no progress, or they’re just completely over my head, and I’m anticipating trouble submitting this thing. The math building likes to lock down its offices and mailroom at night. Argh. I’d like to not fail this class.

I totally missed yesterday, but I hope the internet forgives me my slip, for truly, it was for a real reason.

I didn’t actually much “wake up” yesterday morning. It was shortly after midnight, and a yet unnamed internet mathematician, “Discord,” was trying very very hard to coax me into studying for my physics final. (Hi, Discord! I don’t know if you’d like your name left out of the Internets, so I’ll refer to you as “Discord” for now.) Course, what I actually wanted to do was play video games and sleep, so around 9 or so, we gave up and went to breakfast, drank hot milk with sugar, and wandered through the Yale New Haven graveyard. Then, we returned to respawn point, and Discord packed very very quickly.

And then I watched Discord disappear back into the Internets, and it was the saddest thing ever.

I sat the physics final, where I spent twenty minutes doodling at the test, until I became rather cross and decided that the sooner I answered the questions, the sooner I could leave. I submitted it without checking over anything and went home. There, I slept until night.

It was when I woke up around 22 that I finally decided something was amiss other than putting Discord back into the Internets. Things hurt a lot, and all the coughing was making me want to throw up. (I’ve had some generic cold-flu-like symptoms for about a week now, but I didn’t really think much of it.) I went to Walgreens, acquired some cough syrup, and ingested it, but all night, I just kind of burrowed into my respawn point, and did not respawn, and wasn’t quite able to finish my take-home math final.

This morning, as soon as the office opened, I made an appointment to meet with the dean of Davenport. The dean’s secretary, Ms. Rhonda, sent me to see Yale Health Services. I did that, and they told me, you have bronchitis; here take these antibiotics, and also take this really-strong prescription cough syrup.

Then I met with Dean Brasseaux, and he said he’d try to get me an extension for the take-home final. I’m really eager to stop being a coughing snot-dripping sick person, and go back to being a functional person again.

First day and I very nearly missed today! That’d be a lousy way to start off this project!

Last night was a very drunken Rock Band sort of night, and then today might’ve been a sleep until midday sort of day. There’s this indeterminate block of time between dinner and midnight that just flies by and vanishes, and it goes nowhere, and afterwards I can’t ever quite remember what it was spent doing. The block of after-dinner time today was a happy jumble of reading, talking, speculating on people’s psychologies in relationships, and video games. Somehow that ends up taking six hours!

I really hope this is a hundred words because I’m very much out of time to write more. Hit submit now and check the word count later!

I’ve recently been inspired by the blog Heszterhegyi (http://heszterhegyi.wordpress.com/), which strives to update something each day, and this Less Wrong post (http://lesswrong.com/lw/53e/just_try_it_quantity_trumps_quality/), which says that the way to get better at something is to do lots and lots of it. And also by my recent experience writing sightreadings for carillon auditions, where I learned that if I just kept churning out more dinky little passages, then eventually even the dinkiest ones would be not-terrible.

Therefore, I’m going to try really really hard to update this blog once a day, with an entry of at least 100 words each day, for a month. And then after that, I’ll see where things stand. “Days” and “words” will be delineated by midnights in Eastern Time whitespace, respectively. As to the updates themselves, I can only hope that they are not horribly uninteresting, but I hope that they’ll get better as time goes on.

Peace and happiness!

Hello, world!

Wobster109 is drunk. Typing is harder than normal. I keep frameshifting all my letters over by one, and everything is very difficult. I keep skipping words, and then I look back and have to erase things and try again.

Nothing is where I think it is. My fingers are all slow, and it’s making me a bad typist and a bad rock band player. If I tried to play piano, I’d probably be a bad pianist.

Everything takes longer to reach my brain. It takes a few seconds to realize that the ramen bowl is hot. Because of that, I could carry my ramen bowl upstairs, switching the weight to a different finger every few seconds, because it took that long to realize the bowl was hot. I’m less precise in rock band. When the notes are small, I can’t do anything at all.

The biggest difference is that anything tactile seems further away and less acute. The touch at my fingertips is dulled, like there’s a layer of padding between me and anything else. When I poke at my face, I don’t feel it as much as normal. When I sit back, I sit back a bit harder than I mean to, but even so I don’t really feel it. And also there’s bit of lag between when I want to do something and when it happens.

This is all very lulzy ^^

I bet a lot of you out there consider yourselves followers of Christ. I bet a lot of you consider yourselves to be people who turn the other cheek.

Please pardon me, for this is far from what I observe. Rather, I see a world of vengeance. I see judicial systems built around vengeance. I see masses of people rejoicing at death. I find this contrary to Christendom.

Do you fancy yourself a forgiving person when you forgive your friend a small insult, or your classmate a small misdeed? Ask yourself how you would respond if someone caused you personal inconvenience. The burglar steals your passport, and you must pay $150 for a new one. Do you forgive, or do you hate the person who inconvenienced you so? Far worse: a cold-blooded killer murders your beloved sibling. Do you forgive this criminal, or do you wish them harm?

Of course you don’t lie down and let people trample on you. Of course I don’t advocate letting killers walk free. Of course it is necessary to protect others from these people. But suppose that the authorities have captured the killer. Suppose that they can lock him away where she will never hurt anyone again (I alternate between the use of male and female pronouns). In this case, do you choose for him to suffer, or do you choose for her to live peacefully?

What I often hear from people is, “he deserves to die,” or possibly “she forfeited her right to life when he took someone else’s life,” etc etc. I’ve been told that this idea of people deserving punishment comes from ancestral times where punishing offenders served as a deterrent to others who might commit crimes. This might be true; I don’t know. What I do know is that there is a difference between punishing her because you want to deter others, and punishing him because he deserves it. The difference is that when you want to deter others, the punishment is distasteful but necessary. But one who seeks retribution rejoices as they watch the criminal suffer.

(It is still uncertain whether the death penalty acts as an effective deterrent, but if we really cared, we’d look at some other countries before and after the death penalty, run some studies, and then decide. Instead, we implement first and then tell ourselves we’re protecting others. We’re protecting others! Feel that warm glow.)

It is easy to “turn the other cheek” over trifling things. The real test is whether you still do so when the other has done you the worst wrongs and fully deserves the worst punishment. Whether you still forgive even though your heart and your friends and your community’s popular opinion all cry anger! and the injustice done to you wounds you so deeply you will never stop hurting. When you see the smile of your deceased friend and say through your tears, “I hope the perpetrator is spared all unnecessary suffering,” only then have you turned the other cheek.

Otherwise, you are operating on a system of revenge and retribution. At this point, I pass no judgment on whether that is right or wrong, nor do I claim to be a forgiving person myself. But I do say that if one would wish harm upon a criminal solely because they deserve to suffer, and one still considers oneself someone who turns the other cheek, then one is somewhere mistaken.

Therefore, please pardon me that I do not care to celebrate Bin Laden’s death with you. To me, death is a tragedy, regardless. I do not think it a mistake. It was, in all likelihood, necessary. I’m sure it saved many lives. It is most likely the best of all possible outcomes. Nonetheless, I wish it weren’t necessary. If there was a way to achieve the same result without death, I’d have preferred that. I rejoice that the lives of others were saved, but I cannot find joy in death. Thus, I mourn his demise as a necessary but regrettable event.

Perhaps you wish to say to me, “you’d feel differently if your own family member died,” or perhaps “you haven’t lost a loved one, so you have no idea what it’s like.” I acknowledge these objections, and I answer that you’re absolutely right in that I don’t have firsthand experience. Perhaps I would feel differently had it been my own family killed. I don’t know. But I aspire to be a utilitarian, so I hope I am not someone who would choose suffering that would not benefit anyone else. Maybe I would end up choosing vengeance. If so, I am neither an other-cheek-turner nor a utilitarian.

Others of you will say to me, “but the punishment makes the victim’s family feel better.” To me, this is the same as arguing that banning gay marriage would make fundamentalists feel better. I’m not precisely sure why this is not an acceptable argument to me, but I believe it lies in my firmly-rooted view that unless my neighbor deprive me of my life or liberties, I leave them be. You will then argue, “but the criminal deprived someone else of their life and/or liberties!” You know what I mean. I mean that if they are at no further risk of harming the life and liberties of others, then causing them suffering would be without benefit.

A final word: it has often been said to me that if I were myself in times of trouble, I would not be an atheist. (Compare to “you’d feel differently if your own family member died.”) Often, I’ve been told that if I simply study the [Bible, Qur’an, Book of Mormon et al.], then I would see the “truth” in it. People have said to me that I should pray with an open mind and ask the truth of any super-powerful entity that may be out there. I’ve been told that “all of science” “corroborates” a certain religious view. I believe that people are told these things in church. I’d hazard to guess that one’s church officials always say that “any atheist who reads the holy book seriously will see that it’s true,” or that “any nonbeliever who asks for the truth with an open mind will become a believer,” or that “science supports intelligent design.” The constituents believe these things, and they say to me, “well you must not have had your heart open.” “You must have expected it to fail.” “You must have been looking for little details to argue.” On and on. This is very insulting to me, because every time I tried, I tried honestly. (My dear friends, I am not referring to you here. I know you’ve always trusted me to try with an open mind, and I am grateful that you never doubted my integrity as a truth-seeking person.) I’m not looking to get into any debates here over anyone’s religious views. I simply point out that it is a myth that all unbelievers are unfortunately uneducated, or that they would convert instantly in times of need. Please understand that atheists don’t think to themselves, “I will deny god so that I can live a hedonistic lifestyle without consequences.” (I’ve heard this one a great deal too.) We simply don’t believe, the same way you don’t believe in Zeus. In times of need, we would no more suddenly believe in god than you would pray to Zeus.

Wishing vengeance is certainly far different than believing in gravity, or disbelieving in Zeus. It is much more uncertain how a person would behave, thrown into such a drastic situation. All the same, one cannot assume that others react the same way as oneself. So do your neighbors justice and assume not that they are naive or stupid or wrong. As well, do yourself justice and seek the true motive behind your chosen response.

Peace and happiness,
109