iBlog
Today was freaking horrible. Therefore, I shall focus this blog on three things that have nothing at all to do with my life at the moment.
1. Seriousness: Steve Jobs
I credit Steve Jobs with the initiation of my love of music.* The second generation iPod mini (with colors silver, blue, pink, and green) came out in 2005 and I remember my dad asking me if I wanted one. I pretty much had no interest in it. I had a grand total of five music CDs and a rockin’ portable CD player decorated in stickers. Why would I want to change that?
He got me one anyway, though, for Christmas 2005. Enter iTunes plus a $50 iTunes gift card for my birthday two months later and I was suddenly introduced to the fact that I now had the power to find ALL THE OBSCURE SONGS I’D EVER LOVED. It took like two months for my meager 40-something-song library to grow to 400+. The portability factor—along with the fact that I could now purchase songs individually and therefore didn’t have to weigh the pros and cons of buying a whole $15 CD for just one or two songs—made me want to listen to music.
Haha, and now look where I am.
So I thank you, Mr. Jobs, for your business sense, your inventive mind, and your desire to continually make/improve portable media products for gadget lovers like myself. If I had any extra money at this time, I would upgrade my current iPod (I need a bigger one, haha) in your memory. But that will have to wait until I’m not dirt poor.
RIP.
Found on Imgur.
2. Creepiness: Googol
So remember when I blogged about Google’s Profiles and how it was freakishly similar to the product Google Face as I described in my NaNo Googol written last year (last part of this blog)?
Well, if Google merges with or takes over Apple within the next year or so, then I FREAKING CALLED IT AGAIN.
What I wrote:
“After the death of Steve Jobs in the early 2000s, Google’s founders felt there to be no other option but to approach Apple with a merger deal, offering them almost any stipulations they desired in exchange for being able to essentially mix the two companies into one giant hyper corporation that would push the limits of the known size of any company that had ever been in existence. […] Of course, prior to his death, Jobs had anticipated Google’s future moves. He knew that the corporation in charge of providing internet goers everything from facial recognition to “street views” of Pluto to basic search would not be so quick to pass up a merger opportunity with any company they thought was and would continue to be a successful internet partner. […] He knew a merger with the giant that was Google would most likely require sacrifices on the part of his own company. These sacrifices, however, he was not too willing to make. The impression Clarke gathered from the literature was that Jobs, in a somewhat secret move several years before his death, had created and documented several heavy handed stipulations and bargains that would have to be met in order for any sort of posthumous merger to take place.”
Including, as I go on to describe, a redesign of the Googleplex to match more the style of Apple.
Fun times.
3. Silliness: I Gotta Feeling
I’m not into hating specific types of music and I actually like this song, but this review is pretty great.
30-Day Meme – Day 6: Your favorite music video.
Oh crap, that’s tough.
I love The Music Scene by Blockhead because OMFG COLORZ:
But I think my favorite music video has to be for White Winter Hymnal by Fleet Foxes. Watch this and tell me it’s not the most beautiful, sad thing ever:
I could watch that over and over and over and over.
That is all.
*Actually, such a statement is a bit of a misnomer. I’ve always loved music in the sense that I’ve loved playing it…I guess I should say that Mr. Jobs initiated my love of listening to music in general.
Blameworthiness and the Anonymous Judge: An Analysis of FML Categories
Introduction
The website Fmylife was created on January 13, 2008 and serves as a blog for people to post anecdotes relating to unfortunate goings on (either by their doing or others’) in their lives. The stories that are published allow readers of the blog to essentially assess the placement of blame for each anecdote. As Wiki so succinctly puts it, “anybody who visits the site can decide if the writer of each anecdote’s life indeed “sucks” [‘fuck your life’ or ‘FYL’] or if he or she “deserved” what happened [‘you deserved it’ or ‘YDI’].”
The FML posts belong to one of seven categories: Love, Money, Kids, Work, Health, Miscellaneous, and Intimacy.
Party on.
Anyway, me being me, I wanted to see if people rating the FMLs rated them differently (FYL vs. YDI) depending on the category of the FML. That is, I wanted to see whether people assigned blame (quantified by the number of YDIs voted) to the anecdote poster differently depending on what category the FML belonged to.
Hypotheses:
a) People would assign blame to the poster more readily when the anecdote belonged to more “personal” or “individual” category (Money and Health, maybe Miscellaneous).
b) People would be more willing to say FYL to the poster if the anecdote is from a category that involved other individuals (Love or Kids or Work).
Methods/Procedure
Utilizing the “random FML” button, I acquired a random sample of 30 FMLs per each category, save the Intimacy category (‘cause FMLs from that category are not included in the random search). I noted the number of FYLs and the number of YDIs for each anecdote and then computed a paired t-test comparison of mean differences for each category.
H0: µFYL = µYDI for all categories. This means that there is no significant difference between the mean number of FYLs and the mean number of YDIs, regardless of the category.
Ha: µFYL < µYDI for Money and Health categories (meaning most people would assign blame to the poster) and µFYL > µYDI for Love, Kids, and Work categories (meaning most people would NOT assign blame to the poster).
Analyses were done in R. All t-tests were performed under the assumption of unequal variances, as was indicated by the Levene Tests for each group (performed using the lawstat package in R).
Results
Love: t(29) = 5.04, p < 0.0001*
Money: t(29) = 1.76, p = 0.09
Kids: t(29) = 4.24, p = 0.0002*
Work: t(29) = 3.85, p = 0.0005*
Health: t(29) = 1.601, p = 0.06
Miscellaneous: t(29) = 0.922, p = 0.3641
*significant at the 0.05 level
Conclusion/Discussion
So what does this mean?
While the results were statistically insignificant for one “individual-based” groups Money and Health (and Miscellaneous, but I didn’t have any specific hypotheses regarding that category), my second hypothesis received statistical support!
That is, at the 0.05 level of significance, significantly fewer readers place blame on the individual FML poster in the categories of Love, Kids, and Work—categories that were deemed by me to be those that involved the actions of others more than just the action of the individual poster.
So I guess we can very loosely conclude based on my oh-so-scientific way of categorizing the categories (haha) that people who vote on Fmylife tend to assign blame more readily to the individual poster when said poster’s anecdote belongs to a category that includes more individual-based actions than when the anecdote belongs to a category that includes the actions of others.
YAY STATS!
30-Day Meme – Day 5: Your favorite quote.
I’m not much of a quote person, but I still really like the quote I used in my senior yearbook: “become who you are,” as said by Friedrich Nietzsche. It’s such a simple quote and kind of sums up what I think life is all about.
Haha, I don’t have much more to say about today’s meme entry.
Politickin’
Well here’s something I’d never thought I’d say: I have respect for a Republican politician.
Today I had nothing going on but TA-ing Logic for an hour in the afternoon, so I spent the morning and afternoon watching CNN. I happened to catch New Jersey governor Chris Christie’s speech announcing that he wasn’t going to make a run for the President of the U.S.
I don’t know much background about Governor Christie, but I have to say that I was impressed by his speech and his overall presence at the news conference. He’s a very eloquent speaker and, though he disagrees with Obama and gives him a few jabs, I don’t think he ever went out of line when criticizing the President. I also think he handled the barrage of “are you SURE you’re not running?” questions the reporters kept throwing at him very well. He didn’t get too frustrated and actually had some fun with a few of the reporters.
Anyway. This was the first time I’d actually been impressed by a politician in awhile, though that is probably in no small part due to the fact that I don’t follow politics in general. Governor Christie’s poise and lack of scumballness impressed me.
Haha, okay, that’s all.
30-Day Meme – Day 4: Your favorite book.
As much love as I have for Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and, more recently, Nobokov’s freakishly enchanting and incredibly well-written Lolita, my favorite book still has to be Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny. For a Pulitzer Prize-winning book, I’m shocked at how few people have even heard of it. The Caine Mutiny tells of a fictitious mutiny on the USS Caine, a minesweeper/destroyer deployed during WWII. Wouk paints the drama of the mutiny with a palette of quirky characters whose interactions with each other seem simultaneously forced (after all, the crew of the Caine is dealing with a mentally unstable captain) and completely natural. The mutiny itself, the way it’s written, will make you speed read through it as you’re carried along by the drama. The fact that Wouk has several lines of “wooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!” and “whooooooooooooooooosssssssssssshhhh!” to simulate the storm the Caine gets caught in makes the book that much more enjoyable. Haha, it’s hard to explain exactly why this book rocks my socks, but it does.
So go read it.
Crappity Crap Craptastic Crapperton
Blaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah I want death.
You get 30 Day Meme and ONLY 30 Day Meme before I pass out in a heap of neurosis.
30-Day Meme – Day 2: Your favorite movie.
I’m not a movie person. There are approximately seven movies in existence that I would willingly suggest watching if I were in the position of HAVING to suggest a movie for lack of better alternative ways of wasting time.
But one movie I could watch again and again and again (and have) is Apollo 13. Why?
1. Tom Hanks. He’s badass and, in my opinion, one of the better actors out there.
2. Kevin Bacon. See above, plus the fact that he also starred in Tremors as a random cowboy makes me laugh every time I see him as an astronaut in this movie.
3. I have a thing for movies about space. From the more “accurate” movies like this one to the all-out corny “AMERICA, FUCK YEAH!” movies like Armageddon, space movies have always been of interest to me.
4. The soundtrack. Particularly the track “The Launch.”
Listen and chill.
TWSB: Who Let the Dogs Out? Boston Dynamics, Apparently
OH GOD THEY’RE BACK. And with their scariest rendition of “dog” robots yet.
Bigger.
Stronger.
Quieter.
Ready to STOMP YOUR SOUL!
“When fully developed the system will carry 400 lbs of payload on 20-mile missions in rough terrain. […] AlphaDog is designed to be over 10x quieter than BigDog.”
Every time those guys push or kick it I expected ROBOT RETALIATION! Then I saw it right itself and I felt the need to run. Fast.
Here’s an article that expresses a similar degree of “OMFGWE’REALLGOINGTODIE” as me.
30-Day Meme – Day 1: Your favorite song.
Hahaha, I think we all know my answer to this one. Sleepyhead, by Passion Pit, is what I take to be the epitome of musical awesomeness. Here are the reasons I like it:
1. It’s short. I don’t know why, but I’ve always been a fan of shorter songs over longer ones. Sleepyhead clocks in at just under three minutes. I think I tend to like shorter songs because they’re harder for me to get sick of.
2. Good tempo + good beat. Any song with a steady, unwavering time signature is always a winner for me. I don’t like songs that have a great momentum going on and then break things down by either losing the back beat, slowing down, or having the singer stop their singing to rap/talk/go to the bathroom. Sleepyhead stays the same through its duration. That makes me happy.
3. That FREAKING CHORUS. I admit that I didn’t automatically like Sleepyhead when I first downloaded it as an iTunes freebie back in February of 2009. I remember my first listen through and thinking “okay, this song has a nice beat, but there’s nothing too special about it.” Then it hit 1:21 and I fell in love with the chorus. I still love the chorus. I NEED the chorus. I would make sweet, sweet love 24/7 to the chorus.
I would also make sweet, sweet love to the following remixes, which heavily utilize warping the chorus into new and fantastically shocking eargasm-giving sex toys: Cillo, Jazzsteppa, Neo Tokyo.
Haha, okay, I’m done.
Eigenblogger 