Archives
The life, times, trials, tribulations, ups, downs, ins, outs, and everything in between that goes into or comes out of…well, me.
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Pages
Categories
- Binghamton (3)
- Columbia (3)
- Comics (1)
- Friends (9)
- Heather (4)
- Life Events (19)
- Magic (10)
- Movies (4)
- Music (1)
- News (2)
- Opinion (17)
- Other Sites (7)
- Penn State (1)
- Theory (6)
- Uncategorized (2)
- Updates (12)
Blogroll
Diversions
- Digg Social geekiness.
- Fark If it's on the fringes of news, its in the mainstream of Fark.
- Indexed Jessica Hagy creates observational humor out of math-related constructs on index cards. That sounds utterly ridiculous, but please, please, PLEASE look and see how wonderful it is.
- Internet Movie Database If you even slightly enjoy movies, you must have this site committed to memory.
- Nanaca Crash The most addictive thing that you can't inject.
- Orisinal Bringing flash games and wallpapers to an art form. The tagline is "Nothing is original". Funny that his own site disproves him.
- Psych Experiment It's things like this that remind me why I like being a psychology major.
Inspirations
- Derren Brown Beyond description.
- Penn & Teller Living proof that you do not have to sacrifice any artistic integrity to be enormous stars.
- Penn Radio Penn Jillette is a man of many talents. One of them is being completley insane, but having very rational and compelling arguments for his insane thoughts. This is his radio show.
- Simon Lovell Simon will have you pissing your pants laughing. Which is exactly when he'll take you for everything you're worth.
Recent Tracks
Writing And Blogging
Posted on June 20th, 2008 by Zach.
Categories: Opinion, Theory.
For the 5 of you out there who actually read this blog, you might wonder why it takes me so damn long to get a blog post out. Well, a good part of it has to do with the fact that on a regular basis I forget I even have a damn blog, but there’s also another reason that I was reminded of recently. That reminder prompted me to come on here and tell you a little bit about my so called “creative process” and why it sucks.
69 Across
Posted on April 14th, 2008 by Zach.
Categories: Uncategorized.
I’ve been playing around with Crass-Words: Dirty Crosswords for Cunning Linguists, by Francis Heany lately, and it is far too much fun. If the title did not make it obvious. it is essentially a book of dirty crosswords, where the themes, answers, and clues are sprinkled, nay, bombarded, with R-rated sentiments. Some of these are kind of subtle and almost cute: 28A: Probed in public? is CROSSEXAMINED. Others are a little more direct and can make you unsure about doing these in public: 30A: Caught sight of a flasher? is SPOTTEDDICK. And then there are those that are just unabashedly dirty: 56A: It may be spit or swallowed is JISM.
Hey There
Posted on April 7th, 2008 by Zach.
Categories: Magic, Opinion, Life Events, Friends, Columbia.
Hello, all. I’ve got about 30 mins. until class, and the computer rooms aren’t working at school so I can’t go print out the lecture notes. Already did the crossword and listened to whatever podcasts I had downloaded, which takes us to the 2nd page of my ongoing list, “Things I Want/Should/Need to Do”, and lo and behold, “Post On Your Blog” is right there, just under “Check daily iron intake”.
Since I don’t have a ton of time and don’t have any coherent idea of what I’m about to write, I’ll just bullet some things that are in/on my mind:
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Soundtrack
Posted on March 5th, 2008 by Zach.
Categories: Opinion, Theory.
At the request of many people you don’t know unless you happen to be one of the requesters, I am going to do two things at once:
A) Post
B) A soundtrack meme
I wholly understand that I can’t do B without doing A, and therefore my list is redundant and I am taking credit twice for doing one thing, but if I can’t take liberties like these in my own damn blog, then where can I?
Giving credit where credit is due (and in rapid fire fashion), I found this meme by first reading this, which is how I found this, and eventually this. I found that it was also here, and that Rex Parker is actually my English teacher from Binghamton, and one of the best professors I’ve ever had. Who knew?
The basic idea for those who didn’t take the time to go look at the other places where this is posted: the meme gives you a part of the movie that will be the movie about your life. You put iTunes on shuffle and press play. The first song that comes up is the song that plays during that part of your movie. You write it down here, along with witty commentary. New part of the movie, press next, get new song for that part.
Ok, so full disclosure on how I’ll be doing this. I’ll be fair and take the first song that comes up so long as it is a song I have actually heard before (there are a few things in my iTunes that I have never listened to, either because they creeped in there without my knowledge or I just never got around to it). I’ll follow this format:
Part Of Movie
Song Title, Song Artist
How it fits in to my movie.
…and get the parts of the movie from Prof. Sharp’s blog. If I can, I’ll provide links to Youtube or another site so you can hear the song, but I won’t upload them here, since I don’t want to deal with any copyright infringements.
And….here goes.
New Year, New Quiz
Posted on January 9th, 2008 by Zach.
Categories: Life Events, Friends.
Over at G’s blog, he posted a end of 2007 quiz. Since it’s much easier than writing anything original, I stole it from him and filled in my own answers. Enjoy, and feel free to continue the cycle of laziness by taking it yourself.
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What You Get For Being Early
Posted on December 12th, 2007 by Zach.
Categories: Magic, Columbia.
Occasionally if I make it to the station on time, I take a 7:58 express train as opposed to my normal 8:25. When I do so I usually have about an hour, sometimes an hour and a half (depending on the subway) before class starts. I wrote this thing while sitting in an on-campus cafe waiting for class to roll around. It might turn in to something more, but probably it will just stay like this and not be looked at again. It’s about a little game I play by myself when I’ve got time to kill, which is something most people do, but not at this focused of a level. I started doing it after reading about it in one of my assorted magic books (I believe it was Absolute magic by Derren Brown?). I just put the game into something of a dramatic context, so now it kind of reads like the opening chapter of a novel or something. Anyway, enjoy, leave comments, and hope that I survive 6 hours of finals on the 17th so I can continue to post here. Whole shebang starts after the jump.
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f(x) = Go to hell x, when x=Calculus
Posted on November 10th, 2007 by Zach.
Categories: Columbia.
This fucker is ruining my life:
A recent poll of scientists and non-scientists found that both groups consider Isaac Newton’s contributions to the world to be greater and more important than Einstein’s.
Quite obviously, the people who took this poll never took Calculus.
Calculus is essentially a mathematical study of change. Change in the slope of a graph, change of some variable with respect to another variable, change in my mental state compared to the time before I took this class. There are two people associated most notably with the discovery of Calculus: Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. They more or less discovered it at the same time. However, they went about it very differently. Leibniz was of the mind that calculus was important (the fool!), and set out to make it as easy as possible for non-mathematicians to understand. This way of writing Calculus is known as Leibniz Notation, for obvious reasons. Isaac Newton, on the other hand, thought to keep Calculus a secret, and used very complicated notations so that only the brightest of minds, and himself, could know its secrets.
You might ask, why be mad at Newton then? He’s the one that wanted to keep Calculus secret, and if it was secret, you wouldn’t have to take it! Excellent point. However, Calculus does have its uses. Do you know how to find out how much blood a heart pumps? Calc to the rescue. Or, as my book gives the clever (ahem.) example: If a man is on a ladder that is leaning against a wall, and the ladder falls, how fast will the man be falling when the ladder is 5 ft. from the ground? Answer: Stop doing math. The man is obviously severely injured. Look at the blood! Call 911 an stop taking derivatives, you sick bastard.
So while Leibniz set out to make Calc available to those who need it, Newton was a sneaky little fuck who only published his thoughts because he didn’t want Gottfried to get the glory. For that act of douchebaggeriness, I focus my hate towards Newton.
The fact of the matter is, Calculus is important up to a point. At a certain level of complexness, there are very few things in real life that one would ever be able to compute to any degree of accuracy like the one required in this realm of mathematics. Even seemingly simple problems, like finding how fast a balloon is expanding as it is filled with air, are extremely convoluted in real life - what kind of rubber? Is the air totally clean? What’s the composition of the air? What are the external pressures on the balloon? How is the air supply uninterrupted? It never can come out exactly like real life.
Of course, I’m making that up. I have no idea if Calc is useful or not, mostly because I do not understand Calculus. I have been studying my testicles off to try and get it, but this is a useless exercise, since at the sight of “d/dx”, said testicles retract into my body never to be seen again.
And so, I sit here. Studying. Writing blog entries that don’t actually lead anywhere at all. Hoping that come Monday I might actually know something for my test.
Jesus what has my life come to?
Quick Update
Posted on August 27th, 2007 by Zach.
Categories: Updates.
Just briefly - I deleted that thing on the right side of the blog that said the current book, movie, videogame, etc. that I was obsessed with. Not because I didn’t like it anymore, which I did…just that it didn’t work so well. It changed my text around, wouldn’t post pictures, etc. So it’s gone. Perhaps I’ll just post the next time I have things like that to tell you about.
Oh when the posts come marching in…
Posted on August 25th, 2007 by Zach.
Categories: Updates.
Egads its been a long time since I’ve blogged. I have a lot to tell you people, and now that things are starting to (starting!) to settle in around here, I have plans to post a lot more. So in the coming days look for, in no particular order: An overview of why I chose Columbia over Penn State, what I think of Columbia so far, a review of my new bag (doesn’t that sound exciting), an update of that little sidebar thing that says what I’m currently obsessed with (it’s very out of date), and much more. Don’t hold your breath too much…just a little.
Something I Wrote
Posted on July 14th, 2007 by Zach.
Categories: Magic, Opinion.
I wrote a review of a magic book for an online community of magicians called Go Magic Go. I figured since it was already written, and I had nothing else to write on this blog, I’d post it here. It is exceedingly long and detailed, and will probably be of interest to no one, but here it is. It’s slightly edited for this blog, but not much, and not for content (for example, I had all the ad copy from the creator’s website in the review, but I deleted it for here. If you want to see it, follow the link in the header of the review.) Hope you like it (btw, my name on the boards is FigaroTheParrot, after Derren Brown’s stuffed parrot’s name, which is why I signed it ‘Figs’ at the bottom).