Maybe I Should Take More #selfies Because I'm Kinda Hot And It'll Get Me More Likes And Followers

Maybe I should take more #selfies because I'm kinda hot and it'll get me more likes and followers

I use yellow sticky notes as bookmarks for the books that I read.

You should try it, it’s easier when your bookmark doesn’t accidentally fall when you open your book on the bus and lose your place in the book!

This one no longer sticks after being used in 4 books. The black dots are ink stains on the glue strip.

Isn’t this awesome? 😊

The math of suing all homosexuals

Articles telling of a Nebraska woman suing all homosexuals in the world are making the rounds. While we all ridicule her for various (totally legit) reasons, I would like to add one more to the mix.

Let’s work out the math of suing all the homosexuals in the world. Of course, when someone gets sued, the courts must make an effort to have that person present and be able to defend themselves. We start by making some assumptions on the number. Assuming approximately 7.2 billion people currently alive in the world [1]. Assuming the lawsuit is targeting adults and teenagers only (15+) which are 74.22% of the world’s population [2] we are left with 5.3 billion people. There is little academic consensus regarding the prevalence of homosexuality in the population, but even with a very conservative estimate of 1%, we are left with 53 million people who are getting sued.

We would need to hear testimonies from all defendants. If we can cram one testimony every 5 minutes, for a full 8 hours court session a day, 250 working days a year, the courts can hear 24,000 testimonies a year, making the court case, at the very least, 2,208 years and 4 months long.

Meanwhile many people will be required to take long flights and stay at a hotel for their court session, which will boost gay tourism to Omaha (which houses the largest federal court in Nebraska,) easily making Omaha the new Gay Mecca. But this will come with a terrible environmental impact, as even with the world’s largest passenger airliner, the Airbus A380, which provides seating for 853 passengers in an all-economy class configuration (and we all know a lot of gays will refuse to fly economy), we’re talking about at least 62,134 flights to Eppley Airfield (which would have to be upgraded to accommodate international flights.) With an average of 75 grams per passenger per 100 km [3], and assuming an (again, conservative) average of 5,000 km long flights for 3,198.75 kg of CO₂ emitted per flight for a total of 198,751 tonnes of CO₂. For comparison, a person in the most polluting country in the world, China, produces about 4.55 tonnes of CO₂ per year [4] [5]. Our parade of gays will produce 266.67 tonnes of CO₂ per person. We have yet to prove whether the gays are responsible for the world's natural disasters, but if the courts hear this case they'll definitely be responsible for an environmental one.

Daybreakers

I recently watched a movie called Daybreakers, a complete spoiler of this movie follows: It's about our world, ten years after a virus started converting humans into vampires. By the start of the movie 95% of the world's population are vampires (the classic kind: immortal, no heart beat, burn in sunlight, addicted to blood, humans convert into vampires when bitten, starvation results in madness.)

The remaining human population is being hunted by the US military for food and put into blood farms that look like an exaggerated but not unrealistic version of dairy/meat farms, but supplies are running low and corporations are competing to find a blood substitute that doesn't rely on humans.

It's not a good movie. They created an elaborate and interesting world but the movie lacks suspense, action, drama, or convincing acting. The atmosphere is very realistic, with many vampires finding themselves in a reality which was forced upon them. They're incapable of living without betraying their ideals. Some vampires refuse to drink human blood, preferring animal blood, but these have all been extinct by the time the movie started.

The most interesting part is that two cures are found for vampirism; The first one, in which a vampire was almost burned to death by the sun but was saved by falling into a river, and was turned back into a human due to the UV radiation. The other cure, with more long term consequences, in which a vampire who drinks the blood of a vampire-turned-human, is converted immediately back as well.

The movie ends with the hint that the vampire population will soon perish, because the remaining vampires will try to drink the blood of the increasingly larger human population which will convert them into humans themselves, or die of starvation.

I'd like to see a movie that starts ten years after Daybreakers ends.

Think about it. A world war is inevitable because the entire world will undergo a shocking restructure. Entire infrastructures would be destroyed and rebuild. Years of starvation would follow until the pre-vampire era food industry would be reinstated, albeit now completely vegetarian due to the animal extinction. Those who controlled the human farms will be seen as ex-slavers. There will be two classes of humans: Those who were never turned into vampires and those who had. The humans that were hunted and farmed will be that world's holocaust survivors, but this time 95% of the world would be their Nazis. I feel like this would be a much more interesting movie! Would the never-turned population be treated as heroes? would the once-vampire humans feel remorse and shame?

Subway

On my first day in Vancouver, less than a week ago, I took my lunch break from all the bureaucracy in a Subway. I got a small sandwich and got on with my day after five minutes. The person at the counter was impatient and rude. It didn't help that she had a thick accent that I had trouble understanding. It also didn't help that I was tired, jet-lagged and preoccupied, and I was stuttering and it must have been hard to understand me as well. Our short interaction ended with a disapproving, almost judgmental facial expression on both of us.

Today I passed in front of the same Subway. It was permanently closed.

I shouldn't have been so quick to judge; she had a good reason to be impatient and rude... she must have been stressed about the impending close-down of her workplace. You can never know why someone is acting up. Was she relocated to a distant branch? Was she laid off?

Picking a lab desk

I started going to weekly research meetings in the Software Practices Lab (SPL), which is the lab that I intend on joining and doing my research in after I finish with my courses (maybe even before?)

There are twelve personal desks in this lab, numbered on top in the following diagram:

Given the choice, I would prefer a desk where I wouldn't have my back to the corridor, so either 3, 4, 7, 8, 11 or 12.

But, given that I'm me, I won't be satisfied with a finite set of six numbers. I need to math it.

Wolfram|Alpha to the rescue! The series we want is:

Because… you know… this is preferable to doing stuff I actually need to do.