Action Figure Daniel

Author: Daniel

  • Roommate (non-Chinese) Fire Drill

    The evidence is plain and clear. In fact, it happens so often that we have a place on our counter to indicate it. The dreaded FIRE DRILL. No, this isn’t some process imposed upon us by some overlording and highly paranoid apartment manager. This is a process imposed by neccesity, fostered by roommates cooking. The Fire Drill goes something like this:

    1. Roommate decides to cook (stove or over, doesn’t matteer).
    2. The food items are selected, prepared and then the cooking begins.
    3. Distraction insues and smoke begins to build. The nature of the distraction doesn’t matter, just that it happens.
    4. Once enough smoke has built up, the Living Room smoke detector goes off. The detector is designed to get you out of the smoky building so you don’t die. To make this happen more efficiently, the one alarm that can actually detect smoke, the Living Room, convinces all the other alarms (I think they use telepathy for this) to raise the alarm. Within seconds the whole apartment is blarring with the warning of impending doom.
    5. The nearest, and most able roommate (not all are equally capable of this feat) swiftly climbs a near by bar stool and skillfully dismounts and disconnects the smoke detector (it’s all in the wrist).
    6. The smoke detector is then placed on the kitchen counter as an indicator that the fire alarm still works.
    After months of this, I am still really bad at these fire drills. Maybe I don’t try hard enough.

  • Cow Farm After an Alien Invasion

    Toward the end of last semester, I started receiving what I deemed an exorbitant number of emails (six in two months) from the university Book Store that all said the same thing: come buy your books from us. Their level of desperation has nearly solidified my resolve to avoid buying books from the Book Store as much as possible (instead, I rent the books and that ends up being far less expensive than buying them and selling them back and it’s easier on my cash flow), but that isn’t what this is all about.

    Since I had six opportunities to view their emails, that general pattern started to sink in and instead of simply reading the distastefully colored email, I began to see something entirely different. I was finally bored enough in my science class to illustrate the email the way I saw it. I would suggest starting with the Original Version and then progressing to the Full Version. The Full Annotated Version is a bit of overkill, but I was bored, and overkill is what happens in Alien Invasions anyway.

    The Documents:

    Original

    Full

    Annotated

  • Late night philosophy

    Daniel: Oh, Wisdom.

    Wisdom: Yes?

    Daniel: Is perfection too much to ask?

    Wisdom: In this life, yes. But we strive for it. In the next life, not so much. It is more expected there.

    Daniel: Why do so few people seem to even be trying?

    Wisdom: That’s one of the hardest things to deal with in this life: watching people succumb to less than their potential.

    Daniel: This must be what the prophets feels like, but on a much grander scale, when he hears about all our “time wasters” that are really “perfection distracters”. And thus we, as a race, fall so far short of what we could be–all so we can laugh at a joke a little too crude, sigh at a love story a little too immoral, be entertained by media a little too lowly and in general embrace a world a little too inferior. I suppose it is mostly a function of laziness. This makes maxim about to mastering time before we can master timelessness. It takes a lot of work to fill our corporeal life with worthwhile things.

    Wisdom: Yes, indeed. Now it’s time for bed.

    Daniel: Okay, thanks for talking. Good night.

    Wisdom: Night.

    Daniel: Yes it is. (laughs to himself, then out loud)

  • Wall Drawings

    I have been, on occasion, accused of being juvenile because (at least in part) I love to draw on walls. Though, I understand the general relevance of the argument, I would like to point out, in my defense, that
    1. I generally keep my wall drawings within the space provided by the giant white board in our living room (which I believe is mine, but I’m not quite sure).
    2. My drawings are far more sophisticated than a five-year old’s: I use shapes, colors AND words.
    3. In addition to using the aforementioned, I also title the drawings, adding another level of general “coolness”.
    4. Wall drawings effectively communicate to the whole apartment, at once and at their leisure, what is on my mind.
    5. Wall drawings are the only remaining evidence we have that some cultures ever existed, thus I am helping to preserve a time-honored tradition while leaving potential messages for future generations.
    My latest wall drawing was called “Quorum Sending Embedded [or Evidenced] Within Swarm Intelligence (written in Blue):
    (Click for a large, legible, version.)

    It shows a bee doing its waggle dance and a simple illustration of ants using quorum sensing and swarm intelligence to switch from foraging to caring for the larva.

  • Arguments I don’t understand: Black and Brown

    One argument that I still cannot wrap my mind around (mostly because no one can offer any credible guidance) is that black and brown clothes (or shoes) do not go together. My thinking goes like this W{*} = K{*} (mathematical for “white goes with everything” equals “black goes with everything”, where I use the crazy definition of everything to mean “every reasonably conceivable color”).

    Here is my hang up: if black goes with everything, and brown (for example, #8B4513, Saddle brown, as shown below) is part of everything, then doesn’t it stand that the two can be worn together?

    Tell me, is this offensive?

    Well, is it?

    I could get the argument if it were more along the lines that putting two non-vibrant, non-energetic, non-exciting colors together can make one seem uncreative, deadpan, and boring, but I have yet to hear that argument. And, there are times which such colors should be worn: when attending funerals, when mourning the end of autumn (when all the leaves start rotting and are black or brown), or when you don’t like someone very much and you want them to think you are boring in hopes they find someone else to hang out with (this one doesn’t work so well, so use it in conjunction with other tactics). So, until I hear a better reason why black, that color that goes with everything, doesn’t go with brown I’m still wearing them together.