Probably a bad sign when I haven't posted anything for a week, and I'm about to go on vacation for another week. A quick glance at the headlines:

Sports: The four highest paid players in baseball are Alex Rodriguez, Derek Jeter, CC Sabathia and Mark Teixeira. They will make over $100,000,000 next year. All four play for the New York Yankees.

Feel good story that isn't news but will be reported as news anyway: I experienced a Christmas Miracle yesterday. I went to Walmart looking for a few items and, predictably, only found 1 of them. I went to the front of the store to purchase my one item, only to find the typical mess of long lines of people with heaped up shopping carts. I picked a line and got prepared for the long wait, only to have two different people in front of me with carts piled high invite me to go infront of them. I ended up with almost no wait! In Walmart! 3 days before Christmas! And nice people exist in Walmart! Amazing!

I've competed in a tractor pull. I hadn't thought about this in years, but about 15 years ago, I drove a little tractor in the competition. I didn't win, nor really have any clue what was going on, but I did it. And how many people do you know who have competed in a tractor pull? I bet you wouldn't have thought I was the one, huh?

(The tractor was much smaller than anything I was able to find on youtube.)

I opened a spreadsheet at work today. 485 KB file that transfers almost instantly over the network to my computer. But sadly, when you have about 1500 links to about 400 other spreadsheets in the file that it has to update, it take 2:51 to open the file. Another "hooray for Excel" moment.

Beam Me Up

About a decade ago, while coming home to visit my family, I was stopped as I got out of the car by an older man who lived a few doors down the street from my parents. (He might still be there, I'm not sure.) He came up to me and said something like "Scott, how is your brother Clark doing? I remember when he was just a little kid . . . blah blah blah . . ." Basically, he invented an older brother for me, figured I was that brother and that my name was Scott. Weird.

Fast forward a decade. There is an older guy in our new ward who keeps calling me Scott. I was well introduced correctly when we first me, and he's called me Clark successfully multiple times. But he keeps reverting back to Scott, even after being corrected a few times. And he doesn't even notice when he does it.

So, I guess I must look like a Scott or something.

Still Using Zebras

This blog is a bit over 2 years old, and has nearly 400 posts. Nearly all of them have been long since forgotten. However, this post from a year ago today is easily the most visited post this month. Suzanne's response on her blog seems to be equally hot. The posts are about an old Christmas song called "Santa's Using Zebras Now". And it's virtually unknown and nearly un-googlable. Googling "Santa's Using Zebras Now" gives Suzanne's blog as the first hit and mine as the 3rd. The second reference is to someone posting the lyrics which they copied off of Suzanne's comment on my cousins blog (6th google hit on the search). (I know this, because they reference the song as an "annual Blockburger favorite," a line from my her comment, but can't figure out what a 'Blockburger' is. Apparently no one has heard of those, either.)

The last two days alone have had six visitors to my blog looking for the song. They come from Greensboro, Memphis, Salt Lake, Schaumburg Ill, Lincoln, Ancorage and Washingtong. (As I was typing that sentence I just got another visitor from Riverside.)

So, if you're looking for the song, you're not alone. And you're also not alone in not being able to find a copy. Some people have offered some help on Suzanne's blog. (Maybe we all need to convince Suzanne to get over to our parents house and track the music down. It might be the world's last remaining copy!)

Bimodal Twilight

I have not read, nor do I plan to read any of the Twilight books. I have not seen, nor do I plan to see any of the Twilight movies. If you love the books, Alex can provide you with all you could ever want on that topic. For the rest of us, I will not fan the flames by providing any snide remarks on the topic, nor poking fun at the story in any way.

My real purpose in bringing this up is to talk about normal distributions. Thrilling topic, isn't it? You're all quivering with anticipation I'm sure. (Or are you quivering because of my luminous marble-like pasty white complexion?)If we were to go measure something like . . . say . . . the mass of all your T-shirts, what would we expect to find? Logic would tell us that they'll weigh roughly the same, but there will be some variation. Some will be worn out and thin, and weigh less. Others will be a size to large, meaning more fabric (plus, still in mint condition because you don't want to wear a big ol' T-shirt) so they'll weigh more. If we were to graph the results, we would likely see a 'normal' distribution. We call this 'normal' because so much data comes out looking like this. The size of leaves on a tree. The height of 2 year-olds. The distance you can throw a baseball. Anything where there is an expected value, and then some events that fall a little beyond or a little short of that.
Now, many things are not 'normal'. If we were to expand our measurement to the weight of all your shirts, we might find it to be 'bimodal'. (Remember, the 'mode' of a data set is the single value that is most common. To be bimodal means there are two different values which are both significant maxiumums (though one will still likely be larger).) In the case of the shirts, we would expect that T-shirts are light, but that your vast collection of sweaters would introduce another graphical hump. Lots of things are also bimodal, typically things that depend on some factor with two possible outcomes that influnces the data. The weight of a group of people, for example. We would expect to see a peak where many of the women fall, and then a separate peak higher up for the men.Ok, that was all warm-up for what I really wanted to get at. What would we expect for a movie rating distribution? At first thought, maybe a normal distribution. Imagine seeing a movie with a very large group of friends and discussing it afterwards. You might expect that many people would rate it 'ok' with a few that liked it more, or a few that liked it less. If that's what actually happened, then maybe the movie you saw was 'I Am Legend'.

But when you think about it, this isn't really typical of peoples resonses. Usually a bunch of people think a movie is 'good' or 'ok' but there are a few who really, really love it. Such is the case with 'Ice Princess' which is nicely bimodal.
Or maybe you've seen a movie where many of the people thought it was ok, but some of them really liked it, while others really hated it. That might be 'Four Christmases'. (What is this? Trimodal?)But, I think it is really interesting (and likely unique) to find a movie with no middle ground. You either love it or hate it. And that, is Twilight. I think what we have here is the data from all the women who went to go see it, as well as the results from their fathers/boyfriends/husbands. ;)
All movie data sets came from imdb.com

MNC

Oklahoma and Florida will be playing each other for the mythical national championship next month. According to ESPN, OU and Florida have never played a game against each other. And that is why college football his forever doomed to championship disputes. Even with a playoff, ranking and seeding teams would still factor in, and you just can't do it when teams don't play very many games and don't play each other. Apparently, OU and Florida can only find time in the schedules for each other every . . . oh, say, 100 years. They play conference games, and then are busy playing their in-state non-conference rivals, or their local crappy teams for easy wins.

Chistmas Songs

Two years ago, I complained about the general low quality of Christmas music. The talent level required to get music on the radio seems to drop significantly if it is December. I don't like that. (I'm sure that this has nothing to do with any donkey songs that were re-brought to my attention recently.)

This year, I hope to bring to all of our lives some good Christmas music. If you've got songs you wish to nominate, go for it.

The first song to be high lighted is "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen / We Three Kings" by Barenaked Ladies and Sarah McLachlan. The album "Barenaked for the Holidays" is in general quite good, and this song is excellent. Two songs that are individually terrific, and interesting interpretation, a good pairing of performers, and a snappy beat.

Football

"I'm looking forward to the inevitable upcoming post on the BCS, in light of the injustice Texas endured this weekend."

I'm not sure if Adam predicted the future here, or I'm simply giving the readers what they want. (Pay attention to this reader(s), ask and ye might just receive.)

For those of you who are less informed, but want to know what Adam is talking about here, Oklahoma (OU) gets to go to the Big XII championship game rather than Texas (UT), despite Texas beating OU on a neutral field. This is because the tie was broken by OU being very slightly ahead of UT in this weeks BCS rankings. (What are the odds that anyone reading this didn't know this, yet actually cares about the subject? Slim.)

Now, I've never really heard Adam be much of a UT fan, but he was raised (if not born) in Texas, so I assume that he'll be disappointed with me when I say that I think the end result (OU over UT) was right, even if the course to get there was a bit screwy.

First, it is important to remember that it's not like the BCS tie breaker is the first and only tie breaking method used by the Big 12 conference. In the event of a 2 way tie, the head to head game is the tie breaker, which makes sense. But, this was not a 2 way tie. It's been quickly forgotten that Texas Tech (TT) also has a single loss this season. TT beat UT, UT beat OK and OK beat TT. Other than that, each team is undefeated. So, unscrambling things is a bit trickier. In the event of a 3 (or more) way tie, the Big 12 tiebreaker procedure calls for a comparison of:
1. Teams head to head record (each 1-1)
2. Teams record w/in their division (undefeated).
3. Records against next highest teams in division starting w/ #4. (undefeated)
4. Reocrds against all common opponents. (undefeated)
5. BCS ranking. (OU wins)
6. Winning percentage (tie).
7. Winner chosen by draw.

So, if we had chosen to skip the BCS mess, the winner would have been selected by picking names out of a hat, or ping-pong balls, or a three sided coin. I don't think that would be better. Its a tricky thing, deciding three way ties. I'd be curious for suggestions of what specific measurable metric should be used instead of the BCS. (Poll 100 people?, time of possession?, turnover margin?, graduation rate?, winner-take-all game of Battleship?) Remember, that people are always loathe to use margin of victory, as it encourages running up the score.

But, since I already said I agree with the selection of OU (if not the method, though I don't particularly have a better one) I will now support that claim. First off, this blog does a decent job of comparing UT, OU and TTs games against each other. Basically, OU came out way ahead on net points and net yards between the two games. Analyzing the games would show that perhaps the score was "run up" a bit in the OU/TT game, you can't fault a team for wanting to build up a large cushion in the first half against one of the most explosive offenses in the nation.

OU likewise wins a schedule comparison, in my opinion. This is where TT gets dropped from the conversation. They beat Eastern Washington, UMass, Nevada and SMU. That's 2 I-AA opponents, an ok WAC team and a bad C-USA team. About 50 or 60 teams in the nation could expect to go undefeated in those games. UT beat FAU, UTEP, Arkansas and Rice. While none of those teams are out right horrible, none of them are all that good either. OU, played Chattanooga, Cincinnati, Washington and TCU. Two of those teams (Chattanooga, and UW) are just terrible, but Cincinnati (10-2, BCS #13) and TCU (10-2, BCS #11) are pretty good. A schedule of 2 good teams and 2 terrible teams is tougher than 4 so-so teams. A #25 team would expect to beat all 4 of UT's non-conference opponents, whereas they would likely be glad to finish 3-1 against OU's opponents.

(The schedules also show that TT had to go to OT to beat Nebraska, UT had a single close game vs OSU, and OU has no win of less than 14 points.)

So, there you go. Really, the big looser in all of this is Oklahoma State, which is probably a top 20 team, maybe a top 15 team, yet couldn't do better than 4th place in their division of their conference. Ironically, their chances of going to a BCS game would have been better if they had moved to the MWC. Going undefeated against TCU, BYU and Utah is easier than against OU, UT and TT.

Addendum: I meant to say this initially, but forgot, what with Firefox crashing a few times during my post. How can I support OU when UT beat them, head to head? (Though, TT beat UT, and OU beat TT, but OU lost to UT, even though UT lost to TT . . . . ) It's all about sampling size. One game is a really crummy way to figure out if one team is "better" than another. 12 games is still pretty crummy, but that is something we can actually work with. This is the underlying difficulty with college football. 119 teams, and they only play 12-13 games each. When faced with this 3-way tie connundrum, I believe it is best to use the entire season as an attempt to gauge which team really is the "best". It's a poor system, but it's all we've got to work with.

News Flash

You heard it here first, folks, Julia now has 2 teeth.

Couple that with a slight cold, and a trip to a strange place and Shannon and I got to hold Julia A LOT all weekend long.

.Word Processing

For no reason at all, my thoughts are turned today to my memories of taking Word Processing in high school. This was back in the day of Word Perfect 6.1 or something like that. I'd work, typing away on our computers running Windows 95. Of course, the class wasn't all that difficult, so most of us only spent about 2 days of the week doing the work. One day a week was generally devoted to putting illicit copies of solitaire on as many computers as possible. Another day or two of the week was usually devoted to doing homework from other classes. Typing up essays for European History.

I also took Desktop Publishing form the Hillcrest business department, but that class was much worse. The teacher was much less capable. (Ms. Diamond, who taught word processing, didn't have a hard class, but she at least knew what she was doing. Mr. I-can't-remember-his-name honestly didn't know much at all about desktop publishing.) By then I was a senior, and was therefore not interested in spending class time doing desktop publishing or homework for another class.

I dreamed the other night that I was back in high school, but sadly, my dream only involved math class. But, I imagine that if I were in Word Processing now, we wouldn't be so amused by only playing solitaire. We'd probably find even less productive things to do with our time, like surfing the internet to read rambley, blog posts that will likely leave half the readers wondering what on earth is going on, while the other half can't quite belive that I'd be goofy enough to write a post like this for a collection of people that I've never met.

Amish Friendship Bread and Exponential Growth

If you're not familiar with Amish Friendship Bread, here's how it works. You receive a ziplock back with a mixture of flour, water and sugar in it, presumably from a friend. Over a 10 day period you squish the bag around, and add more flour, water and sugar. Then, on day 10, you pull out 4 portions of the mixture, and give it to friends. You then add more stuff (eggs, oil, baking soda, etc.) and bake the bread (which is more like cake if you ask me). So 4 of your friends now have the stuff, and repeat the process over the next 10 days. It's tasty stuff.

In the last 2 weeks, Shannon and I have gone through that whole cycle, which lead to a brief study of what this 4 fold growth means for the world, as well as our supply of flour, water, sugar and ziplock bags.

Basically, it comes down to this: buy stock in Ziplock. And their competitors. Anyone making an airtight bag.

After 10 days, 4 people have the bread. By the end of a month, we're up to 64 people (roughly the population of my street). Not that impressive. By two months it's 4,096 (small part of town), and by 3 months its 262,144 people (all of southern utah). And, like all exponential growth problems, this is when it starts getting fun. One more month reaches over 16 million people, or the population of a whole pile of western states (UT, NV, ID, MT, WY, CO, NM, ND, SD). At the conclusion of 5 months and pass one billion people, and at 6 months we have about 10 bags of Amish Friendship Bread for every person on earth.

From here, the problem repeats itself, in a way. Once everyone has a bag, start the growth over again but after a month it's not 64 of your friends that have a bag, it's you that has 64 taking over your kitchen. By the end of the year, there are about 4,700,000,000,000 billion bags of Amish Friendship Bread in the world. (And you're rich, because you bought stock in Ziplock, remember?)

Clearly, this does not describe reality. Shannon and I received some friendship bread a few years ago, and since it hasn't taken over the world yet, people must not be passing it on. If only 25% of the people who received the bread passed it on, it would just barely remain in existance. If the rate went up to 30% growth would be small, with my one loaf of bread growing to about 600 over the course of a year. In reality, the survival rate of the bags is probably somewhat lower than 25% which would not be sustainable for the friendship bread population, and would require certain individuals to create the bread from nothing occasionally to start up new chains.

Ok, I think I finally got all this out of my system and I can go on with my life.

Pie

This deserves its own post, separate from the rest of the feast info. Greg brought a fabulous pie to the feast: lemon sour cream. Stephanie gets absolutely no credit for the pie; Greg picked it out and it was declared when they bought it that he would get all the credit and/or blame for the choice. From me, at least, he gets only credit. It was fabulous. I just finished off the last of it. I miss it already.

Fatten up for the Feast

Ok, let's move the conversation on from my showering habits . . .

This weekend we had our first annual (bi-annual?, decadely?, and only?, only time will tell) "Fatten up for the Feast". The idea is that if Thanksgiving dinner is so good, we should have it more often. So we had some friends over and Shannon and I whipped up a big turkey, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, stuffing, corn, pink stuff, gravy and pie. Our friends provided rolls and more pie.

Things turned out pretty darn well. The bird was not quite as thawed out as it could have been, but it was close enough; mostly it was that the end of the neck was still ice-bonded to the rest of the turkey and didn't want to come out. We aimed for a 6:00pm meal, and actually started a 6:09. That might be a new world record!

The food was good, and, more importantly, we've got a whole pile of leftovers! If we were picture taking folk, we would have taken pictures which we could then post on our blog. But, instead, all you get is my lovely descriptions, which apparently count for 0.196 pictures.

Shampoo

Is anyone else out there as weird as me? In my lifetime I have read the label on shampoo bottles thousands of times. I exaggerate not. Taking a shower is, in my opinion, a fabulous way to pass the time, and I'm generally not in much of a hurry in there. So, while relaxing, I have a tendency to read anything that is at eye level, which is mostly shampoo bottles. (Shannon, on the other hand, who usually showers without her contacts in, has probably never read a shampoo bottle in her life.) So, all totaled up, I've passed an untold number of hours reading the directions (lather, rinse, repeat) the flower descriptions ("Ocean Breeze soap: it's just like an ocean cruise except there's no boat and you don't actually go anywhere") and the fun trivia questions (Q: 60% of women admit to throwing what at their significant other? A: Their shoe. [But you need the matching conditioner bottle to get the answer]). And then there is the list of ingredients. dichloro-phenol-benzoate this and isoberylpolycarbozome that. The ingredients don't change much from brand to brand, just those secret "natural oils and extracts". But sadly, since moving to St. George we don't have a shower with anything to read at eye level, so I'm a bit more bored during my shower relaxation time.

Christmas list addition: waterproof books!

RTN

Our new home is equipped with many things: yard, ceiling fans, garage, garage door, etc. But we do not have cable or any sort of dish. Those things are expensive, and we decided to try going without it. (It is rather a lot of money that most people spend on something that they readily admit they waste too much time on.) We can watch some shows online, and we invite ourselves over to friends places for BYU football games. Anyway, we recently went and invested 14 bucks in a set of rabbit ears to see what sort of 'free' tv we might get. Basically we get 1 channel, unless you include the very static-y PBS station (that I think comes from Las Vegas). And what channel do we get? ABC? NBC? CBS? Fox? KBYU? Nay! None of those! We get RTN: the Retro Television Network.

Each Sunday, we get a roughly 20 page magazine of TV listings for the week in the paper. RTN isn't included, but looking up their schedule online, you can see that RTN shows the same exact schedule of shows every day of the week. So if you want to watch Nightrider or Magnum P.I. come on over. I don't get to see the A Team, as it's on when I'm at work. The same schedule day after day (it is different on the weekends) for who knows how long. No plans to change for the holidays, or anything like that. I imagine that right after Thanksgiving dinner we'd be able to get together to watch Dragnet if we wanted. (Unless your family eats Thanksgiving dinner at noon, in which case you might be done in time for Kojak.) Anyway, our TV is awesome.

(We'll be getting a digital converter box soon so we can see if any digital stations make it to our house.)

We have found proof that Julia is truly a Blockburger. While we have tried to feed her all manner of foods, she utterly refuses to touch most of them. But there is exactly one food that we can get her to eat for dinner: A bowl of Cheerios. Further proof that a bowl of cereal is a perfectly acceptable dinner option.

Shannon was reading Parents magazine which had an article on the Obamas (as well as the McCains). (I assume the magazine predates the election.) As we don't have TV (I think our TV situation needs to be it's own blog post) I haven't seen Michelle Obama much. When Shannon showed me the picture of the Obama family, I immediately thought that she looked a lot like Kimberly Elise, who played Denzel Washington's wife in John Q. You should really use that link, not so much to look at her picture and think to yourself "Clark is nuts, they don't look anything alike," but so you can scroll down to what her first credit is on imbd. Back in 1995 she appeared on a single episode of "Newtons Apple" (a fine show). Specifically it was the "Jungle Survival/Liver/Emus" episode in which she got the coveted role of "Bile duct supervisor". If only I'd known that was a career option!

Musical Family

Shannon and I brought extensive musical knowledge into our marriage. And I'm always amazed at how little it overlaps. (I could also write a whole post about how often one of us mentions some little trivia item that we totally expect the other to know, only to find out they have no clue what we're talking about. It goes both ways on all sorts of topics.)

Shannon gets huge bonus points for bringing Guster into my life. And she's also been the mechanism for introducing me to a lot more Ella, Etta, etc. type of music. I, on the other hand, seem to always be pulling out some piece of music from the 60s that Shannon isn't familiar with. (This is a result of our upbringing. Shannon's parents have classical music on records. My dad has the White Album in the original cellophane, and can tell you what month just about any song came out from 1964 through 1970.) It goes like this: I'll reference some song lyric which draws a blank look from her. So we youtube it and often her response is "oh, I didn't know those were the lyrics to that song." She's usually heard the songs before, but may not know the title or artist. I'm not sure that I've brought any important musical discoveries to her existance, but at least more weird organ solos.

This post was prompted by me asking Julia last night "What's your name? Who's your daddy? Is he rich like me?" This was followed by Shannon's aforementioned blank look, which lead to youtube, "Time of the Season" by the Zombies and an organ solo. So now you're up to speed. Enjoy:

Music

Ok, here's the deal. I've got a non-ipod portable music player. It was cheap, we've had it a few years. Getting music from my CD collection to the music player is pretty straight forward. I put it in the computer, let media player rip it and load it on. But here's where it gets messy.

We also like to occasionally buy music from itunes. It's convenient, easy, cheap and people sometimes like to give us gift cards. But to get the music from itunes to my music player, as far as I know I've got to burn them to a CD, then rip them with media player and life is once again good.

But wait, I'd rather use itunes to listen to music on my computer. Media player is . . . well, made my microsoft. So now I'm going through my media player files and loading them into itunes, which consists of itunes making another copy of them in the itunes format. So, I end up with two copies of every music file on my computer.

I'm not hurting for hard drive space, and everything works fine. But this is all a whole lot of nuisance.

November

I celebrated the first day of November by mowing my lawn. How about you?

Also, more running updates. The reason you haven't been getting any is that I haven't been running. It doesn't take much to give me an excuse not to go out, and Shannon's choir performances and Halloween teamed up to be just the thing. But I was back out today. Same 20 minute run, but I keep making it just a couple of houses further. 2.20 Google Earth miles in 20 minutes makes for 9:06 miles. Maybe I will stick with it more if I make a 'running' tag.

Pumpy-Kins

It's that time of year again. If you recall, last year Shannon and I created Chester our hand-turkey-Thanksgiving-o-lantern. This year, we went a little more classic Halloween style. (Incidentally, that brings my lifetime pumpkin carving total up to 2, I believe.) I'll let Shannon post pictures of hers, but here are a few shots of mine:

And then we started having fun with the camera:

And then we decided to go extra freaky with the camera work. I think it's pretty cool.

Taxes

Physics man (not what he calls himself, but what I call him) had an interesting post about bad graphs and tax plans today. Really, it's about bad graphs, but the example is a graph about the proposed tax plans of McCain and Obama. So, I've got a political question for the better informed people out there.

As I understand it, Obama wants to raise taxes for the very wealthy and cut taxes for the non-very wealthy. I don't know if this would yield a net increase or decrease in revenue for the government, but clearly they would at least partially cancel each other out. Obama would also increase spending in some areas (health care) while decreasing it in others (military).

McCain, on the other hand, wants to cut taxes for everyone. This will clearly produce less income for the government. What is his plan for decreasing spending to match this decrease in revenue?

In general, I wish candidates would take at least a short break from promising us everything but the kitchen sink and spend a minute or two explaining what programs they plan to give the ax to. I realize it's unpopular, and unfortunately the presidency is all about being a popularity contest, not about making good (and sometimes tough or unpopular) decisions. So, for either candidate, what fat are they going to cut out of the budget?

(I can already hear certain people out there salivating over the chance to say "NOTHING! They both want the government to just grow and grow and spend and spend.) (Hey, I'm not saying you're not right.)

Halloween

Alright folks. Halloween is in 3 days, but our (old) ward party is in just over 48 hours. I have no costume. I don't feel that I need one, but I'm not necessarily opposed. These are our assets (Italicized items have been added since the original post):

• Junk laying around my house
• My wardrobe (pretty boring)
• Shannon's wardrobe (but I'm not cross dressing)
• A clown nose
• Glasses (just plain glass lenses, so I can wear them w/o bumping into things)
• Long hair (I haven't cut it in a month, so it's pretty shaggy)
• Long beard (well, long for me. Again it hasn't been touched in a few weeks, so it's long.)
• A beret (actually from France!)
  
• Suspenders
• Straw Hat
• A baby
  

Any costume ideas?

If I listed it in the assets, its pretty much free game. So if you can come up with a costume that involves cutting my hair weird, I'm open to it, provided I can get it back to something reasonable afterward. Same thing with the beard (hmmm . . . I could shave half of it off and go as a Nair commercial?) The current top idea is just to slick up my hair, put on the glasses and pretend to be someone else. Hey, it worked for Clark Kent. (Yes, I realize that he slicked up his hair and took off his glasses, but the principle still applies. Comb hair + adjust glasses = perfect disguise.)

p.s. As an interesting note, I can't currently shave my beard completely off. I can trim it down pretty short, but I simply don't have any sort of razor at home of any kind that I could shave it all off with.

Tooth!

I found it, so I get to report on it first. Julia's got a tooth! There will be no photos, because it's near impossible to get a finger in there, let alone a camera. I haven't seen it myself, but I've felt it. While watching the football game, she was gnawing on my finger and I thought it was a bit sharper than normal. So she's got at least a part of a tooth poking through on the bottom.

I choose to blame the tooth for her super cranky behavior last night, and not the fact that dad was left alone at home to take care of her.

Vibrate

I just realized that my cell phone was on vibrate. I put it there on Tuesday when I was at Shannon's choir performance. You know, in the extremely, super unlikely event that someone would call me during the performance. 3 days later, I realized it was still on vibrate. And I missed zero calls because of it. Why? Because, as it turns out, my phone has not sent or received a call or text message in 3 days.

But I do use it every day as both an alarm clock and calculator.

Funny thing is that 15 years ago, that's what I used my watch for . . .

BCS Busting

No, this isn't about Utah, Boise State, TCU, Tulsa, Ball State or BYU going to a BCS bowl. Each year I root for the situation that would cause the greatest embarrassment to the BCS system. 2 (and only 2) undefeated teams from BCS conferences meeting in the championship is the worst. It means that the BCS system worked that year. So, I root for things like 5 undefeated teams (2004), or 2-loss 'national champs' (2007).

So, here are the top two methods of making the BCS look (even more) foolish this year:

The first possibility is hard for me to root for, because it involves both Utah and Boise State being undefeated and ranked in the top 12, but Boise State not getting a spot in a BCS bowl. It's not that I have a problem with either team doing well, it's just that it would require Utah to beat BYU which I simply cannot root for. Recognizing, however, that my rooting has no effect on anything, should BYU lose, this would be a potential silver lining on an otherwise terrible day. Tulsa and Ball State remaining undefeated would be nice, too

Scenario number 2 involves Oregon State and USC both winning their remaining games. This would leave Oregon State at 9-3 and USC at 11-1. These would be the only 1 loss teams in the Pac-10, making Oregon State the Pac-10 champ and punch their ticket to the Rose Bowl by virtue of their head to head victory. Then, I need top-10 teams to start losing, and quickly in order that USC (currently #5 in BCS standings) end up in the MNC (Mystical National Championship) game without winning their own conference. This would likely require something like Missouri winning the Big 12, and then the SEC to beat each other up, or perhaps a freakish Minnesota Big 11 championship. Maybe these things aren't too likely, but it could happen.

So, what other potential fiascos are out there waiting for the BCS? What are you rooting for?

Running

I've taken up running again. Since moving to St. George, my main sources of exercise have been basketball and cycling to work, but neither has happened much for a long time. My ward just couldn't get behind basketball, and I tired of the low turnout, so I quit that. Cycling only works in spring and fall. I quit cycling early in the spring because of Julia's imminent arrival (no one wants to get the phone call at work that the baby is coming and then have a 20 minute ride in the hot sun to get there!). Then for the fall, I moved further away from work. It would be 30 + minutes to get there now. So, I'm running. This is also spurred by Brian, who has been running lately. I've had a good time reminding him how I used to run much faster than he does, but really, I know that he could out run me right now.

Yeah, health, weight, etc. None of those are good enough to get me running again. But get me to be competitive w/ Brian and suddenly, there I am. So I'm running . . . but slowly. Really, I'm out of shape. But, thankfully, it gives me something to blog about. I've been twice. Here's the update:

Trip 1:
My plan at the start is to run for 20 minutes. I set my watch for 10 minutes and run away from my house, and then when the time is up, I turn around and come home. The first trip led me 1.07 miles away (all stats are from Google Earth, unless I say otherwise) with a net elevation gain of 124 feet. The return trip was only 1.01 miles; I didn't quite make it back in my 10 minutes. At that point, my lungs hurt, and I felt pretty bad. That's 9:37 per mile. Ouch. I knew it would be bad, but I didn't think it would be that bad.

Trip 2:
Same plan. Same route. I came up just short on the way out, but more than made up for it on the way back. Instead of coming up a half dozen houses short of home, I made it a block and a half past home before the 10 minutes was up. And, I feel tired, but not ready to die. I could actually speed up at the end. A lot of the improvement is just from not going too fast at the beginning. Anyway . . . that's 1.02 miles out and 1.11 back. 2.13 miles total for 9:23 per mile. 14 second improvement. So that means . . . . about 3 weeks and I can run 6 minute miles, right?

Sometime soon I'll have to take out my GPS and check it against my straight line approximations from Google Earth for distances. At least I know that the numbers I get from Google Earth are minimums for distance, so if anything, I'm faster than I think.

Yuck

Thoughts from a disappointing football game last night:

- BYU did not play terribly. It was disappointing, but not terrible, but not good either.

- TCU is better than 24th in the nation. They will move up in the rankings, and deserve to.

- Let's look objectively at BYUs games so far this year:

• Northern Iowa: a pretty good I-AA team, which translates to a mediocre to poor I-A team. BYU played well, but not great against them. BYU looked like a ranked team, perhaps, but not a top-10 team.
  
• Washington: a winless I-A team. BYU won by a point. The closest Washington came to beating anyone else so far is a 7 point loss to Stanford. Is Stanford ranked?
• UCLA: a poor Pac-10 team. (Sorry, that was a bit redundant.) BYU absolutely crushed them. Beating a poor team 59-0 is just what a top 10 team would do.
• Wyoming: a bad WAC team. Wyoming has been outscored in conference play 153-23. They are 2-5 with a 1 point win over Ohio and a 3 point win over I-AA N.D. State. They lead the nation in turnovers. Beating them isn't exactly a big accomplishment.
• USU: a bad WAC team. BYU looked ok against them, but not like a top 10 team.
• UNM: an ok MWC team. 21-3 victory, that probably should have been 21-10, because that was a pretty cheap holding call.
• TCU: 32-7 loss to a good team, where BYU never looked like they had a chance.

- My point is, the UCLA game is the only game where BYU has looked like a top 10 team. Even before the TCU game, BYU was either a top 10 team that had played a bad game 3 or the last 4 weeks, or they were about a #20 team that had played one excellent game where everything went their way. TCU confirmed that the latter is more accurate.

- I give Bronco credit for going for it on 4th down. Rather than trying to kick a few field goals and make the score look a bit better, he played for the only chance his team had to actually come back and win. He played to win, rather that to keep himself from looking foolish for missing a 4th and whatever.

- If Utah had been in Fort Worth last night, there is little chance they would have won. I've seen a couple of Utah games this year and I know what we all know: Utah plays just good enough in 1 half to make up for their lapses in the other half. Utah has not played only 1 game against a I-A opponent with a winning record at this point (Air Force) and Air Force has 4 wins against SUU, Wyoming, Houston and SDSU.

- I've only seen 1 TCU game, but I'm ready to say that they are the best team in the conference.

King Louie

I hereby command everyone to not misunderstand me.

Utah has a very good kicker named Louie Sakoda. He does both their punting and their place kicking, and he is better than average at both. But people (fans?) have taken lately to calling him "King Louie" and that's where it starts getting weird. I don't know about the rest of you, but when I hear "King Louie" I think of the Jungle Book, and the orangutan named King Louie. It doesn't make me think of any kings of France because it isn't followed by a number, and besides, they spelled their names Louis, not Louie.


Now, I generally frown on the over-sensitivity of some people over things like this, but we must separate out how the world ought to be, from how it really is. In a perfect world, you could give Louie Sakoda the title of "king" because you think he's the best kicker around, and it would be ok, because we would all know that you're not implying anything else. But, it seems potentially problematic to give someone a nickname that is going to cause some people to think that you've named him after a big monkey. (So my sister doesn't have to clarify, orangutans aren't monkeys, they're apes, but again this isn't about what is true, it's about what people think.)

To sum it up: I don't have a real opinion on Sakoda. He's a good player, and I've never heard of him doing anything stupid or jerk-like, so I assume he's a decent person. I'm not accusing those supporting the King Louie nickname of anything at all, but if it were me, I'd think twice before naming a person after an ape.

Qwest sucks

Still no internet at home.

We've had Qwest DSL for 2 years. When we moved down here, we set it up, it took one rather painless phone call and it worked without fail for 2 years. So, when moving, we figured, why change? They're no cheaper (or more expensive) than anyone else, so I made a phone call make the switch.

Phone call #1: I talked to 2 people, the latter of whom had big problems getting the addresses to work out right, but we eneded with the agreement that we were cancelling our phone, moving our internet and it would work by Thursday (last Thursday).
Time of Phone Call: 1 hour 2 minutes.

Phone call #2: Shannon called on Thursday (last Thursday) to see at what time she could expect the internet to be working. She was told that our phone line was connected, but that there was no order for DSL, and, better yet, that DSL was not available at our address.
Time of Phone Call: 20 minutes.

Phone call #3: After Shannon called me to tell me of phone call #2, I called Qwest to see what the deal was. The confirmed that the phone was hooked up, but DSL was unavailable. I pointed out that three people had already confirmed that DSL was available, and then after looking harder, it was decided that we really could get DSL after all. We started working through the process, when I was put on hold, and then the call dropped. Maybe it was my cell phone's fault, but given the increasing load of evidence pointing to Qwest's incompetence, I'm voting on it being their fault.
Time of Phone Call: 15 minutes.

Phone call #4: I called back, and re-explained my problem. The other fun part is that I get to talk to 2 people per phone call. I explain my issue, and then I get transferred to "loyalty" where I go through the whole thing over again, get put on hold for ridiculous periods of time, and they "fix" the problem. This phone call was no different. It started at work, I drove home, and it continued at home for a long time. The call ended with the agreement that the phone would be canceled, and DSL hooked up. They were to call back in "30 to 60 minutes" to tell me my new account number, and tell me when I could expect the DSL.
Time of Phone Call: 45 minutes.

Phone call #5: They didn't call back. So, Friday, I called again. Lo and behold, upon calling, it was 'confirmed' for me that I had orded phone, but no internet. I once again informed them that we wanted NO PHONE and YES DSL. It took a long time. This phone call once again hypothetically ended with the understanding that we would have no phone, but we would have DSL to be hooked up by Thursday (next Thursday)
Time of Phone Call: 53 minutes.

Summary: Qwest is utterly incompetent. If you can get a service hooked up, it might work well for you, but good luck getting there. I keep telling myself that it should only take one competent employee to get things sorted out and then I won't have to worry about it any more. Unfortunately, we seem to have hit 12 incompetent employees in a row. We'll let you know on Thursday if it works.

P.S. Shannon hates not having any internet, as she can't read blogs, or talk to anyone. But her phone works, so you can call her if you're bored. Or, if you live near by, you can go visit. She'd love it.

Football game

I watched a game last night, and I won't say which one. But I will give a small tip for any fans out there wondering what to do at the end of a game. If you are ranked in the top 20, playing at home, against an unranked opponent, in a non-conference game, against a non-rival, in the middle of the season, and you're a double digit favorite, and then you win on a last second field goal, DO NOT RUSH THE FIELD. Rushing the field is to be a rare and special event. Big upsets, conference titles, knocking off ranked rivals, knocking off top 10 opponents while unranked.

Watch out Utes

Tuesday night I had a dream. I don't remember the real point of the dream (do dreams have a point?), but I remember one little tidbit. In my dream, someone told me that Utah put up 45 points on Oregon State. Unfortunately, the Utes gave up 72. Be warned. There is a non-zero chance that my dream will come true.

Interesting, I think, that even in my dreams, sports scores jump to my attention and stick in my memory. Again, the dream was about a slew of other stuff, and the Utah/OSU score was just something I saw on the computer screen.

We moved! This has several results:

1. We've been cleaning our old apartment a lot
1a. We're too tired to blog.
2. We have no internet access at home..
2a. We couldn't blog even if we had the energy.

We should have internet access at home tomorrow (I think) and as we get our new lives sorted out our blogging should probably return to it's old levels.

MWC II

Not that any experience in my life has lead me to expect voter consistency or logic or brain function at all . . . but here is another poll from ESPN today.


To summarize: 59% of the country thinks that the MWC is better than both the ACC and the Big East, but only 38% think that the MWC should get an automatic BCS bid. I suppose this could be consistent if a) the people feel that the at-large bid will be sufficient for the MWC or b) the people feel that this year is a fluke year for these three conferences, and that an auto bid would be a waste for other years.

MWC

For a few weeks now the football world has been abuzz with the idea that the MWC might be better than some of the BCS conferences this year. The Big East and the ACC are the top candidates, with a few people even willing to take shots at the Pac-10, given the numerous head-to-head matchups that have gone the way of the MWC. Good arguments can be made either way, and strength of conferences is always tough to pin down in a sport with so little overlap of scheduling. Not surprisingly, people in UT tend to be big MWC supporters. But as these things always go, the rest of the country is a bit more skeptical . . . or so I thought. This surprising poll is on ESPN today.


It might be a bit small to read, but 59% of the country thinks the MWC is stronger this season than either the ACC (26%) or the Big East (15%). As expected the MWC is getting huge results from the west where they are polling at 90%. But Pac-10 states are voting for them at about 80%, Big 12 states are at about 70%, SEC states are about 60% and Big 10 states at about 50%. The MWC is even winning in states that have ACC and Big East schools. Further, the MWC is second in every state except North Dakota, Vermont and New Hampshire, but those 3 have only combined for 14 votes, so that's a very small sample to make conclusions on. (Maine is the only other state with under 10 respondants.) (Also, MWC is tied with the ACC in Mass.)

Moving Time

I've been really impressed with the number of people who have been offering to help us move. I've been turning them away in droves. I may end up regretting that in the near future, but I've had at least 15 people already offer. We're trying to do a lot of the moving by ourselves during the week, and I keep going back and forth as to whether it will not be a big problem, or if we've got so much stuff that it's going to take WAY longer than we anticipated. Check back on Thursday and see which ones turns out to be true.

It's never to early to start arguing

So here are some (very) early BCS rankings! For those who can't wait until week 6 or so when the first official rankings come out, someone over at bcsguru.com has been nice enough to compile early results. They're not official, as the Harris Poll doesn't vote yet, and some of the computers haven't released results either. But where an offical piece is not available, the compiler has done a good job of having a reasonable replacement for it.

Item to remember: If it's hard for humans to make sense of who is good and who stinks after just 2 or 3 games, it's even harder for a computer, resulting in Nebraska being ranked #1 by one of the computers.

Item to remember #2: Computers are not allowed to factor in margin of victory. The idea is that this keeps coaches from running up the score to impress a computer. So, the computers don't know that USC beat OSU by 32 points.

Finally, it looks clear that 3 MWC teams control their own destiny as far as the BCS. BYU, Utah and TCU should each make it, provided they go undefeated. (TCU still has to face Oklahoma in Norman.) A reminder that a top 12 finish guarentees a BCS spot, and a top 16 finish also does, provided you finish ahead of a BCS conference champ. However, there is no way that a second team can also guarentee themselves a spot. Basically, an undefeated ECU team could finish 8th, but if an undefeated MWC team finishes 7th, they're likely going to miss out.

Of course, I could point out that there are 10 BCS spots, 6 of which are promised to conference champs. The SEC and Big 12 look like good candidates to get 2 teams into BCS bowls, but the Pac-10 looks like USC and a bunch of crud, the Big 10 is questionable, and the Big East and ACC are having serious problems this year. Could it really be the year that 2 teams bust the BCS? Probably not.

Football

I'm certainly not the first one to get a post about the weeks happenings out there. And the fairly obvious didn't escape the grasp of Tyler or Brett. Basically, the MWC had a very good weekend, particularly OWNING the PAC-10. (a.k.a. USC and the 9 dwarfs.) Brett covered the whole spread for the conference well, but I just want to add:

BYU over UCLA -- I missed the game, as we went to Grand Canyon for the day. (Note, it isn't The Grand Canyon. This is one of the things I learned there.) As BYU utterly destroyed UCLA, and the middle/bad portion of the rest of the conference beat up on ASU and Arizona State, maybe I'll be spending all of my Saturdays down south. Also, I've been pronouncing UCLA as "Uck-luh" for some time now. I'm now appending this to "Yuck-luh". BYU clearly more than met expectations in this game.

Utah over USU -- Utah unfortunately could not have surpassed what was expected of them without winning 70+ to nothing. Against a team so bad all you can do is not screw it up, which they didn't.

UNLV over ASU -- If you watched UNLV play Utah last year, and ASU this year, you'd think they were pretty good. If you watched any of their other games, you'd think they're terrible. I don't understand. Also, this was at ASU.

SDSU/San Jose State/North Dakota State/Wyoming -- Brett points out that Wyoming escaped vs North Dakota State, and SDSU lost to San Jose State, but "at least it wasn't North Dakota State." Actually, The gap isn't that big. A few notable teams from the tail end of Sagarin's rankings:

• #93: Northern Iowa (I-AA)
  
• #96: San Jose State
  
• #105: Washington State
• #113: North Dakota State (I-AA)
  
• #121: San Diego State
  
• #135: Utah State
• #167: Idaho

My point is that bad I-A schools (USU/SDSU/ISU/etc.) can be worse than good I-AA schools (UNI/NDS/App St. [#73]). It's certainly hard to compare the relative strength of the ends of what are really two different spectra, and we're judging off of 2 or 3 games worth of data, but according to Sagarin, North Dakota State is the 14th best I-AA team, which places them ahead of 21 I-A teams.

Professional soccer leagues in Brazil have a system where the worst teams each year move down a division, and the best teams from the lower divisions move up. This would be the equivalent of a good AAA baseball team (the Bee's for example) becoming a major league team next year while a bad MLB team (Mariners) would get pushed down to AAA. You can always earn your way back up the next year. Obviously in baseball this wouldn't work, as the minor league teams aren't independently owned and operated, but you get the idea. You actually earn your place, but we all know that college football frowns on that sort of concept.

Physics Man to the Rescue

So, the internet has been a flutter with stuff about the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) which was fired up for the first time yesterday in Switzerland. Specifically Ben has wondered if this could lead to the end of the world, (not an idea he made up) and Carrie has thought that it may be effecting my pens. I don't really know much about the LHC, or tiny black holes, but I suppose I know more about it than a lot of people, so I might as well comment.

First off, particle accelerators and colliders have been around for decades. A problem we have with atoms and other tiny things is that we can't look inside them. We can't disassemble them; there aren't screwdrivers small enough. So instead, to look inside an atom you smash something into it, bust it into all it's consituents and take a look at those as they come flying out. Then you try to guess what was going on before all the destruction. Its the equivalent of trying to figure out how a VCR works by dropping one off a tall building and examining the rubble. Or maybe it would be more like dropping a VCR off a cliff onto a rocky beach where the remains are only there long enough for you to take a few pictures before the waves take the parts away. All you have to look at are some photos of what was inside. With both particles and VCRs, the harder you smash, the more the little parts inside come flying out and the better idea you get of what was inside. Dropping your VCR from the top of your bed isn't likely to be very informative.

Hadrons are things made of quarks. Quarks are the things that make up Hadrons (and tend bar on DS9). Seriously, that's the only definition for hadrons and quarks that will mean anything unless you take a handful of physics classes (which will in turn offer only slightly more knowledge on the topic, little of which is useful for this discussion). Hadrons which you are most familiar with would be Protons, Neutrons and perhaps Mesons. Typically in colliders it is the Protons that are accelerated, because they aren't virtually impossible to push (like Neutrons) and they have a lifespan of greater than a billionth of a second (unlike Mesons).

So, the LHC is a gazillion dollar contraption to get those protons moving just a little bit faster than colliders in the past, to hopefully get a little more information about what protons are made of, and stuff like that.

Now a question and answer session between me and me:
Q: So, will any cool discoveries come from all the money spent on the LHC?
A: If by 'cool discoveries' you mean something potentially useful to the average person, then No. If by 'cool discoveries' you mean something potentially useful at all, then No. If by 'cool discoveries' you mean something in any way useful to anyone, or anything even remotely intelligible to anyone without a Ph.D. in physics, then the answer would still be No. This is not the space program bringing us plastics, microwaves, cool pens and tang. This is particle physicists trying to understand how subatomic particles work. It will not affect your life at all. (Of course, I could always be wrong, but I bet I'm not.)

Q: So why did we (humanity in general) spend all this money?
A: The same reason we put up the Hubble Telescope, we study handedness patterns in polar bears, and we have sociologists. I guess we're curious, or at least willing to help pay for others' curiosity.

Q: So what about these black holes coming to destroy the earth?
A: Not gonna happen. Again, I could be wrong, but it won't. I haven't reviewed my Hawking books lately, but current theories for how everything works allows for the existance of tiny, tiny black holes. How tiny? They would have pretty much an infinately small event horizon. And they would have a super tiny mass (much smaller than the mass of a dust particle). So, there remains a possibility that these super tiny black holes could be created by the LHC. If they are, because of their tiny size, they could actually fly all over the place without even colliding with anything. Also, black holes evaporate. Big black holes could take billions of years to evaporate, but small ones go much quicker. So, these tiny black holes should be disappearing almost immediately even if they are created.

In summary, a tiny black hole, which may be possible (but may not) could potentially be formed which would be unlikely to hit anything, or to last for much time at all. Basically, I'm not worried.

One final point: Yes, the turned on the LHC the other day, but they didn't even collide anything yet. If anything causing the end of the world were to happen I would think that the actual collisions would be causing it, but of course the media won't be covering that which isn't likely to happen for a few weeks.

Alert! Warning! Alert!

We've got a big problem brewing here. I'm running short on decent pens. My last purchase of Zebra clicky pens has all fallen to a small design flaw. The plastic piece that screws into the metal shaft 2/3 of the way toward the tip is not as strong as it ought to be and is prone to breaking. Now today I've had the ink cartridge in my expandable pen self destructed. That leaves me with zero fully-functional high-quality pens at work. I'll have to dig around at home and see what sort of stocks I have there.

"Upgrades"

Last Friday my computer at work was "upgraded" to Office 2007 from Office 2003. Why? I honestly don't know. I had zero issues with Office '03. Others at work have been using 2007 for some time, but I have had zero compatibility issues. But I was, nonetheless, "upgraded" despite my protests. The result? In a few short minutes, I went from being the guy who everyone comes to with Excel questions to the guy who can't make a graph. Years of experience wiped out, because I can't even find the button to make a graph. Then I can't find the button to add a title, or label the axes, or DO ANYTHING!

So, is Office 2003 better than Office 2007? No. Nor is '07 better than '03. What Microsoft apparently can't understand is that I don't care where the buttons are, or what they look like, or how they are labeled. All I care about is that I be able to use the program. Once I've learned where all the buttons are, why on earth would you move them?

It's dangerous, I know, but I'm foraying into presidential politics on the blog today. Yikes.

We all know that much of the country doesn't thing very highly of President Bush. Pollingreport.com indicates that through the many polls done this year, Bush's approval rating has varied between 22 and 38 percent. Most of the results tend to fall in the 27-33 range. Congress, on the other hand, has an approval rating between 13 and 33 percent. (The second highest poll was only 28%.) My quick glance indicates that the average results are in the high teens or low 20's, and that in the last 3 months no result has been higher than 23%. The two major party presidential nominees and their running mates have a combined 63 years experience in congress. (35 for Biden, 25 for McCain, 3 for Obama and none for Palin.) Now my point: as we come closer to electing a new president, why have we chosen all of our options from a group of people that we nearly all agree are doing a terrible job?

(Possible answer #1: We are idiots.)

Male Bloggers

I'm not sure why, but guys don't seem to blog very well. I'm not sure why. Shannon certainly surpasses me in both posts and readership. Oh well.

On a nerdier note, I found a website today: projecteuler.net. If you don't know who Euler is, and how to pronounce his name, you can just stop reading now. For the rest of you, it's a site with a collection of computer programing math problems. They start from very easy to extra hard, and are meant as a way to learn to program mathematically. (Sorry folks, no fun stuff like double linked lists or other things I do not understand.) I did the first problem today in Maple in a couple minutes. (And Maple is weird for logic programming.) Of the languages I know, MatLab would be the best suited to all this stuff, though from what I've seen a fair number of the problems are large integer based, so the unlimited precision of Maple would come in handy there. Anyway, my point was, it could be a fun little project to work on.

And about now I realize that I already told Brett about this today, so I'm not sure who else out there could possibly care . . .

The Year of Living Biblically

No, not me, silly. It's a book. A.J. Jacobs (author of The Know-It-All wherein he documents his adventures in reading the entire encyclopedia Britannica) this time has decided to spend a year following every rule laid out by the Bible. Jacobs is Jewish, but not in any real religious sense. As he points out, about the only Jewish thing his family did growing up was to put a star of David atop their Christmas tree. Anyway, he sets out to obey as strictly as possible, not only the ten commandments, but also every rule from the Bible that he can, from blowing a horn at a new month, to stoning adulterers, to not wearing cotton and linen together.

Now, of course he can't quite always do it the way the Bible mentions, since many of those animal sacrifice practices would be illegal in the US, as would chucking boulders at people. (His solution for the stoning of adulterers is that the Bible never says how big the stones must be. He opts for pebbles.) But as much as this seems like it would be a book full of non-stop poking fun at crazy things the Bible says, it really isn't.

Through it all, Jacobs actually attempts to obey the spirit of the laws whenever he can. Though not a religious man at all, he does learn to awaken a bit of his spiritual side. He discovers that he enjoys prayers of gratitude, and that wearing white improves his mood.

After a year of living Biblically (about 9 months focusing on the O.T. only, and then a few months of adding the N.T. to it) he hasn't re-awoken as a Jew, nor has he adopted Christianity, but he feels that he's learned something important on the way.

The book is at times silly, and still has spots where can't help but poke a little fun at religions he doesn't understand, but he is generally very respectful. It's interesting, though not as good as "The Know-It-All" in my opinion.

Olympic Love

This continues to amaze me, so I continue to blog on the topic: Utah Loves the Olympics. America agrees that with Phelps done swimming, that's no reason to quit watching (79%). But no one believes that quite so emphatically as Utah (87%). Once again, Utah turns out the highest pro-Olympic totals in another ESPN poll.


I've been trying to figure out why Utah is so . . . Olympic. The only idea I can come up with has to do with the sampling of the voters. Let's assume there is a constant percentage of Americans who really love the Olympics. That would mean that Utah keeps coming out first in these polls not because we love the games more, but because of the sampling method. My theory (I'm not saying it's a good one, it's just the only one I have at this point) is that the Olympic loving people in other states are being drowned out by the hordes of other non-Olympic people going to ESPN.com to check up on their local MLB or NFL team, or their favorite NASCAR driver. In Utah, there isn't a pro team that does anything this time of the year, so many Utah sports fans are in a somewhat dormant state during the summer. This results in the Olympics fans being more noticeable in online polls. (I hope that made sense. I just rewrote that explanation like 5 times.)

Anyway, does anyone else have an idea why Utah loves the Olympics so much?

Phelps

Yes, we've all been watching Michael Phelps win gold metals every night for the last week. He's been destroying people in half of his races, and he's been ultra-opportunistic (or ultra-lucky) in the others, and he's won every time it counted. America has, in general, been quick to declare Phelps the best Olympian ever. But is he? As usual, such a subjective claim can be difficult to pin down.

I hope no one misconstrues my remarks to imply that Phelps hasn't had an amazing set of swims. He clearly has. But when considering "best ever" sorts of declarations, the task becomes one of comparing people who have all done incredible things; they're all terrific.

Here's an article from the AP (via the Deseret News) that brings up a few reasons why Phelps may not be the greatest ever. The most significant thing I realized in reading the article is that the vast majority of the US, like myself, is quick to declare Phelps the best ever, despite knowing very little about any Olympic history further back than 20 or 30 years ago. Does anyone reading this know anything about the first 50 years of the modern Olympics? Name a single athlete who competed? Ok, now name one besides Jesse Owens.

Anyway, I would suggest that the more we might delve into Olympic history, and the more we learn about past games, we would find more and more athletes who would amaze us, and who ought to be considered in our discussions of greatness.

Finally, why do we feel compelled to pick someone as the greatest ever? Why can't they all just be great?

Tagging

Where would the blogosphere be without tagging to keep people busy? Via Shannon . . .

1. Did you date someone from your school?
Nope. I followed the Shannon dating plan of not dating. Anyone. Period. I'll tell you about the 2 dances that I went to in HS and the circumstances involving my going if you want.

2. What kind of car did you drive?
1987 Chevy Cavalier named "The Skunk" and a 1987 Plymouth Sundance, later named "Pansy: The Car Who Can't".

3. It’s Friday night...where are you?
I think we did the same thing every week. Basketball at Kevin's church, because his mom was the RS Pres and had keys, followed by a quick trip to 7-11 for massive re-hydration, followed by N64 at Mark's house where we played football, or WWF vs NWO or something like that.

4. Were you a party animal?
Does basketball, 7-11 and video games make me a party animal?

5. Were you considered a flirt?
If you caught me in the right mood, I might acknowledge that girls did, in fact, exist. If you kept me up until 2am and fed me tons of sugar, I may have admitted actually liking one. And that is about as far as any of that went.

6. Were you in band, orchestra, or choir?
No, no and no.

7. Were you a nerd?
Of course. Kenny and I just about staged a protest over not being Sterling Scholars.

8. Were you on any varsity teams?
No, varsity is for dummies; I was on Honors. (I hope Suzanne still reads my blog, so maybe, just maybe, someone will get that.) My sole extra-curricular was Academic Decathlon.

9. Did you get suspended/expelled?
Nope.

10. Can you still sing the fight song?
As much as I ever could: "Through all the seasons of the year . . . . . . . . . mumble mumble . . . . . . clap clap . . . . . . clap clap . . . . . . . . . ROLLING HILLS!"

11. Who were your favorite teachers?
Herlin, Merrill, Brinton.

12. Where did you sit during lunch?
Summer months outside near the tennis courts. Winter we spent on the floor in the history hall.

13. What was your school's full name?
Hillcrest High School

14. School mascot?
The school constitution states "the school mascot shall be a "husky" dog." I'm not sure what those quotes are supposed to mean. I'll leave you to judge.

15. Did you go to Homecoming and who with?
No. In my defense, I was only 16 for Homecoming my senior year, so I only went 0/1.

16. If you could go back and do it again, would you?
I think so. Maybe not for three years, but it was a blast. I didn't try, I goofed off all day, no responsibilities!

17. What do you remember most about graduation?
Wondering who on earth all those people in my grade were. I swear I'd never heard of them, nor seen them. Also, it was long.

18. Where did you go senior skip day?
Murray Park to play Frisbee in the rain.

19. Were you in any clubs?
Nope.

20. Have you gained some weight since then?
Since the beginning of high school or the end? I'm up about 15 pounds since HS, but I probably gained 30 during HS.

21. Who was your prom date?
Haven't you gotten it through your thick skull yet that I didn't date?

22. Are you planning on going to your 10 year reunion?
Sure. Not that I expect to be excited to see anyone there, nor do I expect anyone there to be excited to see me. But we'll probably go. If nothing else to get out of the heat for a weekend.

It's not a fluke

Another espn.com poll has found Utah to be the state most devoted to watching the olympics every day. 55% of the US will be watching each day, but 68% of Utahns are planning on doing the same, more than any other state. Again, WY was the other top state. And to North Dakota: Most of the country already has pretty lukewarm feelings towards you, I think it would be a good idea if you showed a little more support for the Olympics.

Utah loves the Olympics

Apparently, Utah loves the Olympics. This poll data is from ESPN.com. The image is hard to see (click on it and you should get a bigger one if you want to see the numbers for yourself) but 37% of respondents indicated that they would be watching the Olympics rather than MLB, NASCAR, NFL or Golf this weekend. But 65% of Utahns voted for the Olympics. The only state to score higher was Wyoming with 67% (but with only about 2 dozen respondents, so UT and WY are clearly undifferentiated in the +/-).

Utahn or not, we'll be watching the opening ceremonies tonight as part of Shannon's birthday celebration. For the 1-2 readers I have who don't also read her blog, make sure and wish her a happy birthday.

Yogurt

Yogurt is clearly something meant to be eaten with a spoon. So why does Yoplait make their containers such that the top is the smallest end? It gives minimal opening to reach into the space. Doesn't it make more sense to provide a bigger opening for the same size by essentially reversing the top and bottom dimensions like all the other yogurt producers do?

And what's this? Evidently in Turkey, Yoplait does reverse their dimensions!

Things not to get Shannon for her birthday:

Funny that Cheryl should suggest a pedicure for Shannon on her birthday. I'm inclined to think that she won't want one, seeing as how she broke her toe this morning!

Yes, that would be a spiral fracture of the first bone of the 5th toe in her right foot as a result of trying to leave her toe outside the bathroom while the rest of her went inside. The good news is that the Dr. decided that she won't need a pin to get it to heal right. I'm sure Shannon's blog will have a few more details soon.

Birthday List

Shannon's birthday is in another week or so. She hasn't created a list of any sort (at least, not that she's let me know about) of what she would like. So, here's where you get to help me out:

What does Shannon want for her birthday? (feel free to be creative)

Not that any of you will know . . .

This question has been rolling around my brain for months. There is a beer commercial, for Michelob Ultra as it turns out, which indicates that "Your life has more than one dimension, so should your beer." I understand that my life has "more than one dimension". It has 3 physical dimensions (or 4 depending on how you want to count them) but really it's a metaphor in that my life has various, somewhat independent aspects.

[Aside: now I am currently considering whether or not different activities in my life could truly be considered orthogonal, and thereby constitute different dimensions. It seems to me that orthogonality should be a requirement of multi-dimensionality, though perhaps they need only be linearly independent. This is going to require more thought.]

Anyway, what I can't figure out is what it could possibly mean for a beverage to have "more than on dimension." I've never had any beer, let alone Michelob Ultra, and I realize that most, if not all, of my readers can't intelligently comment on beer, but still: what could this possibly mean?

How many dimensions does milk have? Kool-Aid? Could orange juice possibly be multi-dimensional, one for the liquid and one for the pulp?

And now, as a first for my blog, I present you with a beer commercial:

Nearly a month ago Emilie used the insurmountable power of "tagging" to hereby force me to take pictures of my house, messy or not. It took a while, but I did it. (More quickly than most of the other people she tagged, I might add.) Evidently the rules are that you have to take pictures of things in their current state. No cleaning, straightening or wiping of noses. Think of yourself as a National Geographic photographer of your own life, duty bound by your journalistic code to be accurate and true-to-life. Emilie specifically said that I had to take 10 pictures, but then only posted 9 herself, so I was forced to make up my own 10th thing.

Favorite Shoes
I spent a fair time trying to figure out what those would be. I finally decided that it must be the shoes that I would be most bummed out if they broke, and since I just had a pair break and it bummed me out. Here they are.

Kid #2
This is not, in any way, to be construed to be any sort of announcement. This is simply the best I could do. I figure that if my second child were to have any physical location, this would be it. Come back in a few years for a better picture.

Closet (mine)
This is actually quite clean. Of course, I wasn't instructed to take a picture of the pile of clothes on the floor just outside the closet.

Fridge
A bit fuzzy. But if you look close, you might be able to see your picture on it

Kitchen Sink
Hey, the rules never said I had to take good, sharp pictures of anything.

Toilet

Laundry Room(a)
No possible picture can be taken of our entire laundry room, so you get a bonus 11th picture.

Laundry Room(b)1st Kid
The order of these pictures confuses me. Why is kid #2 first, and why are the two not together? Also, why don't we call this one kid #1?

Favorite Room
I've decided this is the "Starcraft Room"
Bed
I decided that the extra picture to bring the total up to ten (excluding the bonus picture of the dryer) should be my bed. Thankfully, Shannon makes it for me.