Wow, it has been a lot longer than expected

I just realized, Last week on Tuesday was the 6 month birthday of my little piece of the internet here.  It has gone by a lot faster than I expected, and I am enjoying it.  Any feedback?

I wanted to take a minute to quote someone “Personally, for you, I’m betting on a month an the WAY outside”.  Words of encouragement like that are hard to forget on your 6 month birthday.   I encourage the writer of that comment to stop by and say hi. 

Shoes

Ok, I don’t really know if any women read this, but guys, ask your women.

What the hell is it about shoes? Women are drawn to shoes like cats to catnip …like a lawyer to the scene of an accident…like a crackhead to crack.

I don’t understand.

Shoes are a piece of material that protects your feet from the ground. They are portable padding. They are decorative, but are the one point on the body FURTHEST FROM THE EYES.

On the stairs leading up to our apartment there is a landing and my wife decided to locate a “Shoe rack” there. When I agreed to that I was imagining the 1-2 pairs of shoes that the two of us wear regularly. I have work dress shoes and sneakers. She has two pairs of sneakers and a pair of black dress shoes she wears on weekends sometimes. That means 5 pairs of shoes tops.

The day after I agree to the “shoe rack” I have a frekin Payless located on the landing. The rack is 40” wide, and three shelves tall. Most of the pairs of shoes are wedged in there sideways because there is not enough room for them to sit side by side. I have never seen that many shoes outside a store before, and I grew up in a house with 4 people.

This morning I go to get my shoes…I poke around the shelf. Now, her feet are a size 8, and I wear a 13….when you add that difference to the inherent difference between men’s and women’s shoes, I should not have trouble spotting my shoes. They were no where to be found. So, look under the edge of the table where they used to be located…gone. I wake my wife up and ask her where she put them. “Oh, there was not room for them, so I decided to put them in your closet.”

So, the pair of shoes that she wore in our wedding and said she would never wear again is now conveniently located next to the door, where they can collect dust along with 35 other pairs of un-used shoes, while the ONE paid of shoes I wear every day are located in the closet in the bedroom.

Conclusion: Women are simultaneously attracted to shoes like a fat kid to a doughnut, but also they repel logic like an Emo kid from Donny Osmond trying who is to give them a haircut.

Where am I from?

Ok, if you live in New York, everyone says you are from the East Coast.  Californians are said to be from the West Coast. (*edit: aparently, they moved California to the WEST coast when I was not paying attention. )  Everyone in the middle is described as being from the Midwest. 

My question is “Where is the Mideast?”

If something is in the middle then it should be described as being in the middle.  If you want to break up the middle into different groups, you could label them East and West.  However, it makes no sense to me that we have a Midwest, without a Mideast.

I can see that conversation:

Guy 1: Where are you from?

Guy 2: The Mideast.

Guy 1: What part?  Egypt? Turkey? Algeria? Iran?

Guy 2: Nope, Ohio.

Dearborn Michigan has the highest concentration of Islamic people per capita in the US (only beaten by Jakarta Indonesia), so I think it is only fitting that we be re-named the Mideast.
Beginning immediately I am going to start a grass roots campaign to change it.  If you live in Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, or Alabama I am going to begin referring to you as being from the Mideast.

Car heater

Here is one thing I dread.  I live in Michigan, it is cold here.  I get in the car and crank up the defroster on high.  The heater eventually gets the blowing air warm and starts cranking out some heat.  Then I turn the knob from defroster to floor heater.  The part I dread then happens.  The warm air starts flowing into the floorboards, pushing the mass of cold air up past my face.  I an blast chilled for a few seconds until the heat makes it’s way the entire length of my body. 

What if they replaced the knob with three sliders.  One for defroster, one for dash vents, and one for floor vent. Each slider adjusted how much air came out of each.  With them all cranked open there is low pressure to all three.  With one closed the other two get medium pressure.  With two closed, then one gets high pressure. 

This way I could close the floor and dash vents, and blast my dash, then slowly open the floor a crack to warm it up down there, so I don’t get blast chilled when switching to floor heat. 

They can invent a car that calls 911 when you are in an accident, a car that tells you to turn left to get to Taco Bell, and a car that warns if you are backing up too close to something, but they can not pre-heat my feet?  I don’t understand.

Communication

The little altercation in my comments yesterday brings about a topic that I feel strongly about.  Communication.  Here is my Psych 201 definition of what communication is, and how it works.

The first person (I’ll call him talker) has an idea in his head. 

The second person (I’ll call him listener) does not have that idea in their head.

Communication is simply the act of the “talker” doing something that makes the “listener” have the same idea in their head as the “talker”. 

For example, I am the talker and I am thinking of a beach ball, and you are the listener.  If I say Beach Ball.  You probably picture in your head what I am thinking about.  If I describe the ball’s diameter, colors, and play a sound of the ball being hit, you probably have a very good picture in your head.  If I show you a picture then you probably have a perfect idea of what I have in my head. 

Now, here is where the tricky part comes in.  There are two things that can muddle communication.  Those are Mis-communication and slang. 

For example: If I point at a burning match and say “That’s hot.” You know that I mean that it has an excess of heat and you do not touch it for fear of being burned.

However, if we were at the mall and I pointed at a watch and said “That’s hot” you may think that I meant to say that it is attractive and pick it up, only to discover that I knew that the light bulb in the display case had heated the watch, and you get burned. 

Now, here is the concept that spurned me to write this.  Let me tell you a fun story.  Long ago I worked at Sears selling TV’s.  Before I get into this story, please know that I worked in electronics during the day.  It was EXCEPTIONALLY boring 99% of the time, so we all got a little loopy to pass the time.  One day a customer left a pen behind that said “Tom” on the side of it.  A co-worker adopted the pen.  She came over and said “This is Tom.  Tom is my friend.”  The next day I brought in a pretty silver pen from home and said “This is Dave.  Dave is my friend.  Dave is cooler than Tom.  Tom is a loser.”  A few weeks later a rather dirty guy from the loading dock asked out my friend.  She said “no thanks, I have a date tonight….with Tom.” and shot me a look.  I died laughing.  The Dave and Tom joke lived for a long time.  One day, quite a while later, I was helping a customer and needed a pen.  I waved at my friend and said “Can I borrow a Tom?”

Now, here is the important part. 

I wanted to borrow a pen.  When I said “Can I borrow a Tom?” do you think she thought I wanted to borrow a person?  No.  She reached over and handed me a pen.  I used a word that communicated to her that I needed a writing instrument.  If I had said the same thing to anyone else on the planet it would have been mis-communication, but with her the word Tom, in that context, it was an effective form of communication. 

My point is that communication is about getting someone else to think what you want them to think about.  In my last post I talked about “subconsciously leading a raid”.  Technically, if you read a Psychology text book (which I doubt most people have) you would learn all about how the subconscious is not active while we are awake.  The much more common definition I meant to use when I used that phrase was how we are able to do things without paying attention to them.  For example breathing; if you pay attention you can control your breathing, but most of the time you do not control it, it just seems to happen.  I would define that as you are subconsciously controlling your breath. 

I apologize if I confused anyone. 

rights

My post yesterday about racism, and the subsequent e-mail got me to thinking.  Do you realize what a good thing it is to live in this country?  I hate the president. … (long dramatic pause)…..(crickets chirping).  Please note the distinct lack of government troops coming in to kill me.  Please note I am not going to be arrested, and my family tortured for saying that.  Note that I will not lose my job and become homeless because no one will risk talking to me for saying that.  When I walk to the sink I turn the faucet and I get fresh clean water.  When I flip the light switch I get a constant supply of electricity.  When I drive down the street I do not need to carry a lot of cash to bribe the corrupt government police at checkpoints.  I not only have a lot of things that other parts of the world do not have, I don’t have to put up with some of the things that other parts do.  I have the best of both worlds.

I have a right to say whatever I want.  NAAPC is racist.  I hate the president.  The moon is made of cheese.  I hate our governor.  I think we should annex Canada.  I think I would like to wear socks made of Bacon.  I think that WW2 was filmed in the same studio as both the moon landing and the JFK assassination.  Everyone knows JFK works at the same K-mart as Elvis and Jimmy Hoffa. 

(Obviously those drifted from real to satirical….except for the Canada part.  When I become president Canada needs to prepare for winter…Nuclear winter. (insert maniacal laugh here.))

Enjoy the freedoms that the founders of this country fought so hard for.  Enjoy the high standard of living that our fathers and grandfathers worked so hard to give us.  Live that life that you have the right to.

Racism

In America there is a problem that is hurting our ability to function well as a unified country.  That problem is Racism.

I did what I always do when I want to learn more about something.  I Googled it.  Here are some of the top results for Define: Racism:

1) A form of discrimination based on race, especially the belief that one race is superior to another.

2) Prejudice or discrimination based on an individual’s race; can be expressed individually or through institutional policies or practices.

3) Refers to beliefs, practices, and institutions that negatively discriminate against people based on their perceived or ascribed race.

4) Discrimination on the basis of race

5) Racism couples the false assumption that race determines psychological and cultural traits.

Now, to roll those up and apply a little thought to it, racism is basically treating one group of people differently from another based on race.  Any act that separates people based only on race is a racist act. 

Hmm…

I guess we need to define race.

1) The term race describes an ethnic group, tribe, or other set of individuals descended from a common ancestor. It commonly serves to distinguish between populations or groups of people based on different sets of characteristics.

2) People who are believed to belong to the same genetic stock.

3) Subspecies: (biology) a taxonomic group that is a division of a species; usually arises as a consequence of geographical isolation within a species.

So, in other words, race is how people look, and where they come from.  It does not involve special abilities or deficiencies.  It is simply a cultural definition.  It is a way of saying that I am different from you because you were born somewhere else.  That means that racism is basically someone saying that they are different than someone else based on where they were born.

Hmmm…interesting.

If race is based on geographical isolation, then an American is someone that is born in America.  A European is someone born in Europe.  A African is someone born in Africa.  If you want to get into hypenation, then a European-American is someone born in Europe, that moved to America.  An African-American is someone that was born in Africa then moved to America. 

What is confusing to me is why everyone automatically calls someone African American if they have dark skin.  I went to college with some African Americans from Gahana.  They were really nice, and told some great stories about growing up.  I had an English class with a kid that mentioned that he was doing something because he was African American.  I noticed that unlike my friends from Gahana, he had no accent, so I asked where he was born.  Ohio.  I asked where his parents were born, Ohio.  His Grandparents Ohio and a few other states.  (insert quizzical / confused look here)

I informed him that he was simply an American.  He got madder than a cat in a pillowcase and told me in no uncertain terms that he WAS African American.  He even held up his arm and pointed at his skin as if it were some sort of ID card.  He then told me that his ancestors were from Haiti.  (for the geographically challenged (TJ) Hati is part of an island in the Caribbean) He informed me that people from Haiti are black, so he is African American. 

I kindly informed him that black was a color.  I held up a black pen and a black marker and said I don’t call these African American pens, and African American markers just because they are black.” 

I want to point out one of the definitions of racism from above again “Racism couples the false assumption that race determines psychological and cultural traits.”  This is my favorite one.  Please note the very important words in the middle False Assumption.  My other favorite is “Prejudice or discrimination based on an individual’s race”. 

This means that anyone that does anything based on race is by definition a racist.  Every site I visited denounced racism as a bad thing.  I agree, racism is bad.

I want everyone to look at the words that make up a popular acronym that is the name of an origination.  According to their own web site their mission statement says that “The mission is to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate racial hatred and racial discrimination.”  With a mission statement like that, you would think that they would be pretty good at ending racism.  They would on the ball.  Racism would be their bitch.  They would know more about eliminating the differences between the races than ANYONE else.  That origination is the NAACP.  That acronym stands for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. 

Lets look at what that name alone says.  First and foremost, it defines the “colored people” as different.  That alone is the first step into racism.  If one group is different, then they are different for a reason.  You don’t define someone as different just because you can, you differentiate because you want to show off the differences.  The second thing you can glean from that name is that “colored people” are somehow weaker and inferior.  You can think this because if they were not weak, then they would not need a support group to help elevate them to the level of everyone else.  For a group who’s mission statement is to eliminate racism, they are off to a bad start. 

Now, lets look at the actions of that group.  One of the biggest thing that the NAACP does is provide college assistance to “colored” students.  They are singling out a particular race, and only working with that race.  By definition, that is discrimination, and therefore that is racism.  So.  The NAACP, who’s mission statement is to stop racism and racial discrimination, yet every one of their actions is counter to that.  Every action IS racist.  Every action IS racism. 

If you will notice the definition of racism it does not say “to discriminate against X colored person”  It says “Prejudice or discrimination based on an individual’s race” no matter what race is doing the discriminating, and what race is being discriminated against.  Any action that is done based solely on race is racist. 

I have a good idea.  I am going to start a coalition to end racism, and it is going to actually work.  I am going to draft laws that make it against the law to identify yourself as from a place that you do not have legal citizenship.  If you were born in Canada, and moved here, you can call yourself Canadian American.  If you, your parents, your grandparents, and 5 generations back were born in the US, but the ones before that were born in Canada, then you are an AMERICAN.  You don’t get to hyphenate.  Also, if you DO have the right to hyphenate, then you can only do so by country.  There is no such thing as African American.  There is Moroccan-American, Haitian-American, and Chinese-American, but only if you can legally live in that country.

America has been described as the great melting pot.  The problem with that analogy is that to be a melting pot, people have to melt.  They have to share their heritage with those around them, and they have to absorb some of the culture from around them.  Kind of like stew.  There is beef, but it has some of the taste of potato.  It is still beef, but it is part of something larger.  The current mentality in America of celebrating non-integration into a society makes America into a tossed salad.  We are all different and remain different.  You never get the flavor of crouton when you bite into a tomato. 

If you want to eliminate racism, then stop being different.  If everyone works toward sharing and growing into one cohesive culture that has the flavors of all the people that are combined inside it, then it is a much stronger society.

(I want everyone to know.  This is just over 1300 words.  Be thankful that I edited.  It was over 2000.)

My entire point here is summed up in this cartoon.

http://s12.photobucket.com/albums/a216/bobthegoat/?action=view¤t=race.jpg

*Edit:  I got an e-mail in about 10 minutes after posting this.  I want to clarify my position.  Any person that believes that any race is different from any other race is wrong.  I do agree that CULTURES are different, and that races tend to follow cultural lines.  Anyone that discriminates based on race is a racist.  It does not matter if you discriminate in favor of white, or black, or red, or yellow, or polka dot.  Any preferential or detrimental treatment of someone based solely on the color of their skin is racism.  And just to be clear, Affirmative Action is RACIST. It is saying that someone should get assistance just because of the color of their skin, and that implies that they are weaker, that they need assistance.  If you don’t believe me, are you aware that the NAACP’s scholarship programs offer assistance to “African Americans”.  Did you know that a majority of the population of South Africa is white?  It was settled by the English and dutch.  Are you aware that despite the NAACP’s offer to assist “African Americans”, they refuse to help WHITE people from Africa?  So, they are really only offering to help ”African Americans that fit within a certain color range”.  That is definition of racism. 

And, in response to the person that would not comment, but rather decided to e-mail me privately.  I respect your right to have any feelings on the issue that you want.  I respect the right you have to express those feelings.  However, I also have the same rights.  If you don’t believe me, read the first line of the Bill of Rights that this country was founded on.  I have the freedom of speech.  If you don’t like what I say you are free to not listen. 

Thank you.

Violence in Video games

There are tons of ideas out there about the effects of violence in video games.  Many people (that are not gamers) have an idea that gamers are violent people, and that games teach you how to be violent.  Seeing as most of the people I know are gamers, I want to pose some concepts here that may help you should someone confront you on this subject. 

I will never even hint at denying that games are not violent.  It is precisely that violence that makes games NOT violent.  Everyone experiences times in their life where they are frustrated.  Everyone has times they are angry.  That anger has to go somewhere.  There are different ways to deal with that anger.  You can bottle it up, and never release it.  This is the Mr. Rogers syndrome.  You eventually run out of storage space and break.  When you do you find yourself middle aged and you have no idea what to do with your anger.  The second way of dealing with anger is to take it out on those around you.  You can be mean to your co-workers, and beat your wife.  This is not a good option.  Anger slowly dissipates when there is nothing around you angering you.  If you find a hobby that makes you happy you can slowly dissipate your anger. 

Playing games is a modified version of taking it out on those around you and a hobby rolled into one.  Games give you a situation that you are in control of and it allows you to use your abilities to succeed.  In real life you are often not in control, and if you succeed it is usually due to luck.  Games help satiate the need to succeed.  Doing this lowers stress levels because it fills the mental need to win.  Also, it is a low stress environment that allows angers that built up during the day to dissipate, just like a hobby. 

Normal humans, thinking at an adult level, can distinguish between real and fantasy.  Children do not have the ability to differentiate between real and imaginary so they should not be allowed to play violent games in any circumstances.  Instead, children’s games should focus on pattern recognition, and hand eye coordination.  Any violence what so ever can be translated into real life by a child.  I am an adult.  I know that when I click my mouse button and a missile screams across the map fragging a bad guy that he is really just the digital representation of a person, not a real person.  I know that in the real world my actions are wrong, and not acceptable, and I think that games can actually re-enforce this (more on this point later). 

I read in an article about a lawsuit filed by Jack Thompson (famous anti-game lawyer from Florida) with regards to the game Grand Theft Auto, arguable one of the most violent games out there: “the game taught [him] how to point and shoot a gun in a fashion making him an extraordinarily effective killer without teaching him any of the constraints or responsibilities needed to inhibit such a killing capacity.”  Now, let me address this bit by bit.  There are multitudes of errors in here.  I want to address three of them.

First:  Guns in real life are…well…REAL.  Nothing you can do other than aiming a gun can teach you to aim a gun.  Aiming a gun is a skill that takes time to develop.  The only possible part of aiming a gun that a game could possible teach you is how to line up a sight picture, but that is something that GTA does not do.  There are no sights in GTA. 

Second: “extraordinarily effective killer” I have to wonder what is meant by this.  Killing is a yes or no output.  There are only two possible outcomes of an attempted killing, you kill the person, or you fail to kill the person.  Calling someone an Effective killer is like calling them good at answering True or False questions.  I think that they meant to say that it made him an “extraordinarily Efficient killer”.  Efficient killer is someone that is good at it.  The problem here, again, is the game that was chosen as the victim of this allegation.  GTA employs a shooting style called “spray and pray”.  It is called this because the idea is that if you unleash enough bullets in a given direction you will eventually hit something, just due to sheer statistics.  There is no such thing as a “Good shot” in GTA that was not at least mostly due to random luck.  Some games teach you to control your shots, and to aim.  Those games would have been a better scapegoat for them to start with.  Saying that someone learned to be a killer by playing GTA is like saying that someone learned to be a hacker by playing with a See And Say, or that they learned artistic combinations of colors with a Lite-Brite. 

Third: The one thing that GTA can teach you is DON’T KILL ANYONE!  If you want to experience this go play GTA.  Get in a parked car and drive around the city obeying traffic laws.  You can drive around forever.  Get out of the car, beat down a gangster, steak his gun, and wack a cop.  See what happens.  Anyone that has played GTA knows.  They can tell you.  The police come storming in and lay a Rodney King all over your face.  You get a beat down like you are Tina Turner, and Ike is on a rampage.  Every time you do something against the law the police are all over you like a fat kid on a Ho Ho.  This type of learning is called Negative re-enforcement.  If you do something bad, you get a police star.  Police stars are bad.  Do something bad, something bad happens.  Google Pavlov, he did a lot of research about how effective repetitive training is.  It is easy to state quite truthfully that GTA teaches you that breaking the law is bad, killing people is worse, and killing a cop is the worst thing you can do. 

Did everyone just hear that?  I’ll repeat it.  GTA teaches you that doing bad things is BAD. 

Statistical proof.  That is what is required.  If you want to prove that something is causing something then you need to do some data collection. Lets say you saw that through a period of time crime was increasing, then something was introduced into the system, then crime increased.  You could state the hypothesis that what was introduced into the system caused the increase in crime.  However, since video games have been introduced the number of murders per capita in the USA has been decreasing.  In the last 20 years the murder rate has dropped.  I think that indicates at the very least that video games are note the cause of crime, and possibly that they have helped lower it.  I would hypothesize that video games have made my generation lazier and more compliant, and therefore less likely to commit a crime.  We are a generation of people that have learned to do the best we can within a set of rules.  Crime is breaking the rules and is not allowed.

I have heard my fill of anti-game rhetoric.  I have not seen even one point that seemed valid enough to even try and come up with a test to verify.  If an anti-gamer wanted to get my attention and make me listen to his arguments then he would show me a professional tennis player that learned how to play on Pong, or a player in the NBA that learned by playing NBA Live, or that Tiger Woods secretly trained by playing Golden Tee.  Start prosecuting the people that made Pole Position or the Burnout series for all car accidents, heck, even go after the makers of bumper cars…then they would get me to listen.  Until then they are just scapegoating an industry because they can’t comprehend that a human’s mind can be defective.