Category: General

I saw Elizabethtown tonight.

It didn’t get very good reviews, but I loved it. I’m not sure if its becuase a lot of movie resonated with me personally, or it was the mood I was in or what, but I really really liked it.

I’m a BIG Kirsten Dunst fan. I’ve liked her in everything I’ve seen her in, and in Elizabeth town her character is absolutely totally adorable. It may even surpass Mary Jane Watson. (In which she delivers one of the best lines I think in movie history in Spiderman 2 at the end of the film which she says “go get em tiger”. Its what she said, combined with how she said it that made it great.) I even liked Wimbeldon.

I haven’t seen many movies since summer started. I still want to see Proof and Wallace and Gromit.

Cherian, in a brilliant post, put up the comments from Ratemyteacher.com on some teachers in the debate/speech community.

There is a common thread which runs through most of these: they are mean and only like kids in debate.

There are some other really salient things in the comments which I’m not going to go into here.

I’m cooped up on the computer lab in Pillsbury Hall today. I got a small iPod boombox to keep my company.

Songs on the playlist today:

• Man in a Shed – Nick Drake
• Love Will Tear Us Apart – Yat Kha
• My Wife – The Who
• Diamonds on the Sole of her Shoes – Paul Simon
• Zach and Sara – Ben Folds

There are certain products that you keep seeing new designs of that really have no reason to be improved. Toothbrushes, tennis shoes and razors come to mind.

I admit, when Gillette came out with the Mach 3, I switched over to it and still use it today. But when Schick came out with the 4 blade razor, I balked. Well, now Gillette has come back with the 5 blade razor. FIVE fucking blades.

A good history of the proliferation of blades can be found here.

The marginal improvement of 5 blades over 3 blades is not 66%. I dare say its even 5%. Even if I can accept that the 5 blade razor is better, I doubt it would be worth the extra cost. I already pay way more than I should to use the Mach 3. As a result, I tend to let my razor blades go way longer than I should becuase it costs so much to purchase them. When I was in Argentina I looked for razors, and the Mach 3 was kept under lock and key at the grocery store and cost more than any item I could find in the store.

I would really like to see them put some innovation into the area of decresing the price of blades, rather than trying to technically improve something that can’t really be improved.

There is something else afoot here, however. I decided to a little analysis of my own…..

Here is a summary of the dates major advances in shaving technology were made.

Unknown – 1 Blade. Straight Edge Razor
1904 – 1 Blade Saftey Razor
1971 – 2 Blades. Gillette Sensor Excel
1999- 3 Blades. Gillette Mach 3
2004 – 4 Blades. Schick Quattro
2005 – 5 Blades. Gillette Fusion

Here it is in a graphical form:

You can see we are quickly approaching a shaving singularity. A point in time where the number of blades on razors will be increasing so fast, the total metal reserves of the world will be unable to keep up in making blades. This is the shaving singularity. The end of mankind and stubble.

Pray for us.

Returning to the subject of how bad Mac football is….

They lost this weekend to Northwestern Bible College, 40-14.

The noteworthy part of the game?

…..Norhtwestern Played another game previously on the same day!

They got blown out by a bible college who had just exhaused themselves a few hours before hand playing another game. Go Scots!!

I shy away from religion and politics on this blog, but I’m going to hit them both head on in this post.

The New York Times had a cover story today on creationist geology.

The article starts off with this winner:

Tom Vail, who has been leading rafting trips down the Colorado River here for 23 years, corralled his charges under a rocky outcrop at Carbon Creek and pointed out the remarkable 90-degree folds in the cliff overhead.

Geologists date this sandstone to 550 million years ago and explain the folding as a result of pressure from shifting faults underneath. But to Mr. Vail, the folds suggest the Grand Canyon was carved 4,500 years ago by the great global flood described in Genesis as God’s punishment for humanity’s sin.

“You see any cracks in that?” he asked. “Instead of bending like that, it should have cracked.” The material “had to be soft” to bend, Mr. Vail said, imagining its formation in the flood. When somebody suggested that pressure over time could create plasticity in the rocks, Mr. Vail said, “That’s just a theory.”

Wow. Where to begin.

1. Its not a theory. There are two labs here at the University of Minnesota where they deform “hard” rocks. They do it by applying extreme temperatures and pressures to rocks. (the type found deep below the surface). Rocks are mineral assembelidges and their behavior is pretty well known based on the properities of the minerals.
2. Sedimentary rocks like the type found in the Grand Canyon were never “soft” like magma is soft when it comes out of the earth. They started out as loose grains and gradually cemented with pressure and time.
3. If all the sedimentary rocks on Earth (or most) were deposited in one big catalysmic event, you should see an ordered layering of sediments by grain size. You can prove this yourself with a bucket and some dirt. Fill it with water, throw in some sand, silt, small rocks, clay and soil. Stir it up and let it sit for a while. Like a week. What you will see is that the big chunks fall to the bottom first, the smaller chunks go next, and the really small bits which are suspended in the water column take a long time to settle. You wont find a layer of small stuff below a layer of big stuff. However, you see this all the time in the field. You see layers of shale below layers of sandstone. This can’t be if you had only one major sedimentation event.

They don’t spend much time on geology, because its way easier to prove them wrong than with biological evolution and natural selection. Also, when you start to look too closely, you quickly come to the conclusion that if geology is wrong, then the basis of all physics and chemistry have to be wrong too.