Now that the election is over, I thought I’d share a few thoughts.

One: Stephanie and I went by our polling place at 6:30 PM on election night, just to see what the line was like.  There was literally no line.  We could see inside and there were some booths that weren’t even occupied.  No more waiting in line in the cold for ninety minutes to vote early for me.

Two: As a general rule, I don’t like to hear other people’s opinions of politics.  Especially the opinions of people with extremely strong opinions.  That said, I’ve been surprised and impressed with the mature, sensible way most (but not all) of the extremely conservative people I know have reacted to the results of the election.  Just one example: “My man didn’t win, but I will now support this man as my President.”

I haven’t made a post in quite a while (over two weeks).  For those of you who have been eagerly anticipating something deep and moving, I have to apologize, as this post is decidedly meh.

I am sharing a comment on Yes Man, Jim Carrey’s newest movie.  If you haven’t seen the trailer, I’ve conveniently posted it below.

Here’s the thing.  I’ve already seen this movie.  Except last time the guy lied all the time, but now he says “no” all the time.  And last time magic forced him to change his behavior, whereas this time he experiences some kind of enlightenment.  Other than that, I think it’s the same movie as Liar Liar.  While Liar Liar taught us the importance of telling the truth, Yes Man will teach us the importance of giving in to peer pressure.

I think I’ll say “no” to this one.  (See what I did there?  I’m so clever.)

I found it very ironic the way the title of my last post was displayed after being imported into Facebook:

Remember when Dane Cook was funny?  That’s what Stephanie and I were thinking when we watched his new special on Comedy Central the other day.  Maybe it’s harder to write funny material when you’re not stealing it.

American Gladiators is back on TV.  (Or would proper grammar be “American Gladiators are back on TV?”)  In any case, Stephanie and I caught the show last night.  It’s kind of like you remember it, except with less stuff happening and more people talking.  In other words, just what you’d expect in today’s post-Survivor reality TV format.  I guess they want you to care about the contestants so they spend time talking about them?  I don’t—I just want to see people get jousted so hard their fingers come off.  And some of the gladiators are clearly trying to make names for themselves (ahem, Wolf, yeah it’s really cute how you howl whenever the camera points at you, but you look like an idiot).

Maybe I’m remembering American Gladiators through the rose-colored lens of memory.  In fact, I know I am.  I was, after all, twelve years old at the height of the show’s popularity.  Still, the new show isn’t entirely without its good points.  For one, the lady gladiators aren’t quite as scary (i.e. manly) as they used to be.  Another improvement is the updated Eliminator, which is now incredibly grueling.  Somehow moving the uphill conveyor belt to the end of the competition makes it a hundred times more difficult.  When the contestants finish, they are barely able to move.  I don’t think it will be long before someone finishing the Eliminator just throws up right on Hulk Hogan’s legs.  That would be hilarious.

I’ll probably keep watching, at least for a little while, although I’m not sure if I would be doing so if there were other shows on TV.

A few weeks ago I started playing through Resident Evil 4 again.  This is just a quick post to say—regardless of my earlier comments—that I have enjoyed the game way more on my second time through (I’m about 90% through now..).  The factors contributing to this are probably:  a) I knew what I was doing and what to expect; and b) you get to start with the weapons you had when you finished the game last time.

There is also a weapon which is opened up after beating the game (I won’t spoil it), which costs a million pesetas.  About two-thirds of my second time through I had saved up enough money to buy it.  It’s actually so powerful it makes you feel like Kramer in that episode of Seinfeld where he was taking Karate with a bunch of ten-year-olds.  Or like Dwight that episode of The Office where he did exactly the same thing.

If anyone is picking up the Wii port who never played through the game before, my only suggestion would be to read the weapons upgrading FAQ on GameFAQs before you start spending money buying/upgrading weapons.

It is said that anyone who was alive when President Kennedy was assassinated still remembers where they were when they heard the news.  I think it is safe to say that my generation will have the same experience when remembering the events that unfolded six years ago today.  What follows is my account of that day.

It started out as a normal day a few weeks into my sophomore year of college at NC State.  Garrison and I set out bright and early from 508C Sullivan Hall to Daniels for our 8:05-9:20 Discrete Math course, where we met up with Jason and Nate.  After being bored out of our minds for an hour and fifteen minutes, the four of us headed over to The Atrium for breakfast.  I think I had Chik-fil-a that morning.

We sat down to eat as a nearby TV projected CNN images at us, but there was no audio.  If there was a crisis you couldn’t tell it from looking around.  There were no groups of people standing around staring at televisions screens.  I, too, wasn’t very concerned.  At this point only the first plane had hit, and I was unaware of just how wide the building was.  This led me to underestimate the size of the hole: it just looked to me like some kind of small propeller plane had crashed into the building (remember that there was no video of the first plane hitting the building for several days).  I thought it was an unusual event which probably claimed the life of the pilot, who was probably the only person in the plane.  I wondered if the people inside had time to get out of the way or if any of them were injured, and why someone would be dumb enough to fly a plane so low in the middle of Manhattan.  I concluded to myself that it must have been a poorly planned stunt by a thrill-seeker.  The idea that this was no accident had not yet crossed my mind.

Since there were only thirty minutes between classes, I had to practically inhale my food, leaving me with little time to ponder the events on TV.  I quickly headed off to Winston for my 9:50-11:05 Philosophy course.  I overheard a few people talking before class about how a plane had hit the World Trade Center, but I didn’t hear anyone say that a second plane had hit yet or that it was a terrorist act.  Still thinking that it was a small plane, I wrote this off as your typical overreaction to unusual but ultimately insignificant news.

After class I walked back to the dorm room, and when I came in Garrison said “the towers are gone.”  “What?!”  “The World Trade Center towers.  They’re both completely gone.”  I think I sat down and watched the news for a while, trying to comprehend how it could have possibly happened.  The towers had always been there.  How could they have both been destroyed in the hour and a half since I had seen one tiny hole in one of the towers?  After a few more minutes of Fox News it became abundantly clear that this was more than an accident made by some idiot in a small plane; this was a deliberate act by several idiots in two very large planes.

I don’t remember much of what happened for the rest of the day.  I peeled myself away from the news long enough to take a shower, and for some reason I distinctly remember trying to make sense of it all in while I was in there.  I guess that happens when there’s no computer or TV to distract you.  Later that day, our 2:35-3:50 Linear Algebra class was cancelled (as were all classes).  The next time the class met—just two days later—the professor made a way way way too soon 9/11 joke.  To help illustrate something about vector math he had drawn an airplane on the board, in front of which he proceeded to draw a tall building and cackle.  Amazingly, Garrison, Jason, Nate, and I were about the only ones in the room who didn’t laugh.

everything is gonna be alright, be strong believe

Last week I posted a late-night rant on ocular dominance, and since then I’ve read some Wikipedia pages that were kind of interesting.  It seems I was right that there is almost no correlation between dominant hand and dominant foot; however, there is a weak correlation between dominant eye and dominant hand.  I also determined that I am right-eyed.  This makes me like about 60% of the population, in that I’m right-handed, right-eyed, and right-footed.

The ocular dominance test I took before was some variant of the “Dolman” method, which doesn’t work for me because I am too conscious of what is being tested.  But the following test worked for me:  Look at something far away with both eyes open, and then point at it with your index finger extended at full length.  Obviously, you’ll see two index fingers, but you’ll naturally use one of them for pointing.  Once you’ve done this, if you close your eyes one at a time, the one that sees the finger lined up with the object you are pointing at is the dominant eye.  For another variation, if you find that you are pointing at the object with the index finger on the left, you are right-eye dominant, and vice-versa.  When I first did this, I thought that I was favoring my right eye just because I was pointing with my right hand, meaning that lining up my right eye won’t leave the other image of my hand blocking my view.  But when I tried the same test using my left hand, it was still more natural to line up with my right eye.

There were several interesting theories as to why left-handedness would develop in right-handed populations.  Most of them focus on the advantage the left-handed person would have in combat, since the right-handed opponent would be less practiced against left-handed combatants (and for that same reason left-handedness is more common in boxers and baseball players than in the general population).  But there isn’t a good theory as to why we aren’t all ambidextrous, or why there aren’t any isolated left-handed populations.

So back to my original hypothesis: when you go quickly from dark to light, you instinctively close the dominant eye and squint the weak eye.  Yesterday Stephanie and I were leaving a restaurant with some friends in the middle of a sunny day, and as we walked outside I noticed everyone except Stephanie was closing their right eye, but Stephanie was closing her left eye.  I later had her do the test to determine dominant eye (without saying why exactly) and it was indeed her left eye, which is consistent with my theory.

Now for more hypothesizing, Stephanie and I both have weaker vision in our dominant eye.  Is that a coincidence, or is it because the dominant eye is stressed more?

It’s nearly midnight and I am tired but having trouble sleeping, so I decided to get up and do something other than try to sleep.  When I opened the fridge to get something to drink, I thought about the fact that whenever my eyes are adjusted to the dark and I suddenly expose them to light (turning on a computer screen, opening a refrigerator door, turning on a light), I always completely shut my right eye, and squint my left eye.  I’m not sure why this happens—is it related to one eye being the dominant?  It could be that my right eye is the dominant eye and I am instinctively protecting it from the damage of bright light.  Or it could be that my left eye is dominant, and I am instinctively using the better eye.  I’m not sure because I don’t know how to tell which eye is dominant.   (incidentally, my vision in my left eye is much better than the vision in my right eye, but I don’t think that is related to dominance).

I’ve read descriptions of how to test yourself to identify your dominant eye, but they never seem to work for me.  As I recall, they all say something about looking at something far away and then covering up one eye, and if you still see that object you are looking with your dominant eye.  That may not be exactly right, but the problem I always had with the test was that I got the same result for either eye, so either I didn’t understand the test, or I have ambidextrous eyes.

I think I’ve read that dominance in eyes and feet are in the same ratios as hand dominance; about 10% left and 90% right.  I think there’s also no correlation between them (i.e. being left-handed doesn’t make you any more likely to be left-footed).  But this is all coming from memory and may be completely incorrect.

Or maybe the test doesn’t work because my refocusing abilities are just good; I am one of those people that can look at a Magic Eye image and see it almost immediately, without having to hold the book to my nose or anything.  It’s a skill I remember realizing when I was around seven or eight, and I would look up at the the bottom of the top bunk which was supported by cross bars and by something resembling stretched out steel wool, in a very regular pattern.  I found that by adjusting how far I thought the top bunk was from me, I could adjust how far it looked like it was.  By crossing my eyes a little I could make it get closer to me, and stick out my hand until it was “touching” the bunk, even though I wasn’t touching anything.  The bed would be in focus, and my hand would be blurry.  Then I could push my hand even further, “through” the bed.  It also worked in the other way, if I loosened my eyes as if to look through the mattress, it would get farther away, and I could stick my hand out to it but my hand would bang into the “real” mattress before it got to the place where I could “see” it.  Not that I think this is some elusive skill for which I should be praised.. I mean it’s only slightly more useful than being able to roll your tongue.

Well, if any of this has made sense to you.. I am surprised.  This is the kind of random crap that goes through my mind when I can’t sleep:  when I’m tired, but I just can’t shut my brain off.  And what you’ve just read is kind of a stream-of-consciousness exercise.  Well I left out the thoughts that are just ruminations of everything that I have done or said to anyone in the last week or two and whether or not there was something else I could have reasonably said or done that would have led to more desirable outcome for any or all parties involved.  But no one wants to read those thoughts anyway.  I’m going to try to get some more sleep now.

same old decent lazy eye fixed to rest on you (aim free and so untrue)

Spoiler warning: If you haven’t seen any of Lost’s third season yet, this post will contain spoilers.  If you are caught up but prefer to not know anything about season 4, even if it comes from the writers and is vague, you might consider this post to contain spoilers.  Read at your own risk.

I think I am now a new level of nerd.  I am blogging about something that happened at Comic-Con.

Lost creators Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse held a panel discussion at Comic-Con, and you can download the audio of the event, if you are interested.  There is probably video of it out there on your tubes, if you prefer.  In any case, I’ll outline some of the things I found intriguing.

• The show doesn’t start till February, but runs for sixteen straight episodes without reruns.  This isn’t new information, though.

• The filming for season 4 starts in a few weeks, giving them a lot more time to work on each episode.  This also means most of the season will be written, and a good deal of it filmed, before the first episode airs.

• Harold Perrineau (Michael) will be returning to the show in season 4, as an actual cast member (i.e. you won’t just see him in flashbacks).  Michael was never one of my favorite characters, but I am hoping this means Walt will be back in some form.  This leaves one to wonder if Michael actually got off the island and is now returning (with help?), or if Ben lied and Michael will, like Desmond, somehow crash back into the island.

• There will be more flashforwards in the final three seasons.  Starting around 22:30 in the audio, they say:

  At the end of season 1 we sat down and said ... this flashback device is not going to work forever.  The minute that we stop showing the audience revelatory moments from these people’s lives, and the minute that it starts feeling like we’re making it up as we go along, ... we knew that we were going to have to switch gears, and the way that we would be switching gears would be with flashforwards.

• The season 3 DVDs come out in December.

• At some point we’ll find out why Ben was heading across the island when he got trapped in Rousseau’s net (which was indeed an accident, not a plot to invade the survivors’ camp).

• They hope to get to Libby’s story in season 4 at some point (they’ll tell it in flashbacks).

• They haven’t told us about Rousseau’s story yet, because they’ll have to reveal other things that they haven’t gotten to.  We should learn about her in season 4 or 5.

After the discussion, they showed a new Dharma Initiative orientation film, for a new station, “The Orchid.”  This can now be seen on the official website.  You can find some discussion of the video, including screen caps of the frame jumps, by navigating your web browser to the destination of this hyperlink.