Blessed by the Potato

Greetings loyal readers. I want to give you fair warning that this post will contain what is for many people too much information.

You’ve been warned.

Seriously now, I’m going to talk about my pee in a bit, so skip this post if that bothers you…

Ok, so I was at my parents’ for the day, and my dad is still recovering from chemo, so there are a ton of mega vitamins around. A bottle for a multi-B vitamin, some giant vitamin C pills, some vitamin E & D tablets, as well as some echinacea and other herbal junk… the only one missing was A, I think. I usually take a multivitamin at home (Flintstone’s :) since I don’t eat properly at all, but don’t actually seem to need much excess vitamins (I think my system really aggressively absorbs anything I put in it), but my parents only had these crazy grown-up ones. So, I took an individual C, D, and E vitamin, each of which was easily twice the size of my combined multivitamin.

Then, I got a sugar craving, and there wasn’t much sweet in the house. I had to get lunch and money too, so with 3 trips I could justify taking the car (rather than walking, don’t know why I was feeling so lazy, the weather was gorgeous) and got cash, a sub, and stopped at the pharmacy for some snacks. What I really wanted was a pack of Runts, but they didn’t have any. Their whole candy section was depressingly low on stock. I saw some sugar-free hard candies and figured they’d be kind of close to Runts (they were hard and fruity, and that’s how sad the candy section was), and I figured they wouldn’t draw as much flak from my parents (who really want me to stick to my diet since I look like crap).

They tasted pretty good, actually — they were sweetened with a combination of Splenda (sucralose) and another artificial sweetener that I’ve forgotten. There were only 3 flavours, all sour citrus (lemon, lime, and grapefruit) but none of them were overly tart, the sour was very subtle. After I ate about half the package I started to feel really ill and bloated. The stupid things gave me terrible gas pain and I started burping like crazy — so loud once that I scared the dog! Despite all the, er… pressure relief, the bloating was actually really painful/crampy.

That wasn’t all that fun, and I remembered why it was that I distrusted all manner of bizzare, expensive replacements for sugar. Going to the washroom later (I told you there’d be pee) I noticed that my urine was a crazy shade of neon yellow: it looked pretty much just like Moutain Dew. Ever since I had my kidney stone I have to check pretty much every time I go to the washroom to make sure I’m not too dehydrated (or cloudy, or bloody, which is always fun because sometimes when I was passing the stone the pee would be bloody before it really hurt, so I’d see it and be like “oh, shit, this is going to really fucking hurt in a second” and then it would, though most often the blood was actually from the previous round of pain). So I see this and immediately start to worry that the sucralose has somehow made it out of my bloodstream through my kidney, and that no good could possibly come of that.

Turns out it was due to the other thing I ate at my parents’: the B-vitamin complex. It had way, way more vitamin B2 than my body could use in a day, and the excess is naturally expelled by the kidneys and turns your urine freaky bright yellow. Thank goodness for Google, with my history I could have hypochondriacated my way into an emergency room for that one!

PS: I hearby coin “hypochondriacated” as a verb, and you must pay me a dime every time you wish to use it.

After Finch had a huge amount of roadway washed away in a flood last year, Sheppard just had a giant sinkhole form from a broken water main and will close the road for a long time to come…

With games being so expensive, myself being so poor (particularly through say high school), and the number of truly fun, long-lasting games few and far between, it’s not much of a surprise when I tell you that I’ve pirated my fair share of games. The last few years I haven’t been to anywhere near the same degree: partly because I’ve got a bit more money to spend on them, partly because instead of “trying them for free” I just don’t bother at all with games I don’t think I’ll like, and partly becuase I just don’t have time for more than the one or two games I have installed right now.

Like many others, I’ll often buy a game that I really liked after trying it out… I first got WarCraft II, Command & Conquer, and Civilization III and IV as less-than-legal copies.

But three weeks ago, I took an interesting step: I set out to get a cracked copy of a game I already owned. Yes, when it came out I downloaded CivIV since I really wasn’t too sure of the transition to 3D models and the required processing power (and it still bogs down sometimes even on my desktop system; large and huge maps simply aren’t an option for my laptop). But it was a lot more fun than I was expecting, so I went out and bought it at Christmas…

However, I don’t usually have much time to play when I’m at home here in London; a lot of my gaming now is done on my laptop when I’m visiting my parents and everyone’s gone to bed. And I’m just sick of having to keep track of where my CDs are for the games I want to play. I often break the jewel cases in my bag, which makes me afraid for the CivIV disc since it only came in a paper sleeve. Transporting it almost every weekend has me worried that I’ll lose it. And finally, the CD drive on my laptop is really loud (it drains the battery too, but I only ever play plugged in). So, I went out into the dark corners of the internet and found another cracked copy and reinstalled it on my laptop so I don’t have to worry about the discs.

I know game companies don’t generally have games that work without the CD’s, since a CD read is one of the better anti-piracy methods (it’s fairly difficult to copy a disc with something like safedisc on it, and it’s not nearly as invasive as driver-level or registration-check-on-startup methods), and without that it becomes far too easy for even casual pirates to copy games by simply lending their CDs to their friends. However, I think it might be something they have to consider as gaming on laptops becomes increasingly popular…

The adage is often misinterpreted. People take it (and the related Carpe Diem) to mean they should grab life by the balls and live it to the “fullest”, bugger the consequences. All too often, “fullest” is taken to mean “most fun”, all the sorts of things you wish you could be doing right now instead of work, or reading my website. The sorts of things you think you may wish you had done more of if it were indeed your last day. However, I suspect most people won’t necessarily wish they’d spent more time drunk or on a rollercoaster or out whoring around. They’d probably wish they called their mother more, or read with their kids, or went for a bike ride with their friends. I’ve thought about it, and I think that if I were lying in a hospital bed knowing it was my last day, I would ask for a laptop, and I would write. I would do my very best to take what wisdom I’ve collected in my life, and set it down for others who follow¹.

As another Earth Day passes by virtually unnoticed, I tell people not to live selfishly, bugger the consequences. As Frank Herbert said “The highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences.” Still, live each day as though it were your last, but don’t just go thrill-seeking.

Rather, don’t put important things off for another day that might not come. Make your mark on the world, do the meaningful things that will be your legacy.

With God above and the Potato below, I hope there is an afterlife. I pray for it (and moreover, pray that it will be pleasant). I want to watch over humanity, and hope my descendants live on through the end of time, populating the stars and mining the secrets of the universe…

…however, I doubt that there is one — or if there is, I do not think there is any return, no (meaningul) influence extended from that realm to this one. Its existence cannot be relied upon. So if you seek immortality, you must earn it here and now, in this life. After you’re gone, all that will remain are your works and your offspring. It is my religious belief that our duty — our sole duty when all is said and done — is to improve the world around us just a little bit. To fight back againt entropy; to plant trees under whose shade we do not expect to sit, and to raise our children to be better people than we ourselves are.

So, I propose a new saying: “Live each day as though it were the first in the life of your new child.”²

Most of us, not having experienced that day, don’t really know what it’s like (the closest I can come myself is the birth of my baby sister). But we can imagine it: the feelings of joy, hope, and responsibility. Which brings me to another phrase I’ve coined just now: “what would Daddy do?” Again, I’m probably a freak amongst my peer group for thinking of these sorts of issues, but I have to wonder: would I want my son³ doing the same stuff as me? Would I be able to tell him of my experiences in this life and be proud of it, and not be shamed into lies of omission? Would I ever have to face being a hipocrite, telling him not to do things I used to do all the time myself? Would I want my daughter to date a guy like me? It’s sort of like trying not to make my mother ashamed of me, but somehow it seems more important when I think about it this way around. Perhaps that has something to do with the weird little things that make my mother ashamed of me, like when I wear a hat indoors, or sleep in past noon…

Footnotes:

1. Then, I’d probably load up a game of StarCraft to try to take my mind off things.
2. And I don’t mean running around like a crazy person and screaming with labour pains.
3. No, Wayfare isn’t pregnant. I really do think of these sorts of crazy things just out of the blue.

Greatly contributing to my various moments of weakness lately was the fact that I bought a box of 12 Mars bars a few weeks ago. Interestingly, they were all contest wrappers, with a 1-in-6 chance of “winning instantly” yet in 12 bars, I didn’t get a single winner. That got me to thinking that maybe they rigged the contest so that winning wrappers aren’t put into bulk packages (since the profit per bar is lower). It’s a type of manipulation that’s been done before — Tim Horton’s, for example, only has cars in it’s roll-up-the-rim contest under large or extra-large cups, and regionally skews the odds.

But rather than bandying about useless speculation and rhetoric, let’s go to the statistics! The Chi-Squared Test allows us to determine whether the observed frequency of a sample differs significantly from the expected frequency of the population. In other words, we know that in any realistic sample we’re not going to get the expected frequency of winners: for every 12 Mars bars, we won’t always see 2 winners. Sometimes there will be 1, sometimes 4, sometimes none, and if you’re really lucky, all 12 could be winners. With statistics, we can see what the odds are that our difference from the expected frequency is due to random chance alone (unfortunately, it will never tell us definitively that shenanigans are afoot — but we can take the probabilities and make up our own mind).

So, our expected frequency, E is given on the package as 1/6, or 0.1667. Our observed frequency O is 0/12, or 0. Then, we find the Chi-Squared statistic which is (O – E)²/E = 0.1667.

We do the same for the non-winning bars, O = 12/12 = 1, E = 5/6 = 0.8333. (O – E)²/E = 0.0333.

The total is 0.2000. For a single degree of freedom Chi-Squared, this is merely unfortunate, and not different enough to suspect shenanigans (a greater than 10% chance that this was due to chance alone).

But I’m keeping my eye on you, Mars-Effem, Inc.

Yes, yes I will do nearly anything to procrastinate when the mood strikes.