Trick Question Math

Some stuff we came up with at dinner tonight (yes, I come from a family of geeks, and I love it), finally perfected by myself.


How many of those asked this question give an incorrect answer?


For starters, if you all were to answer 0% that would make 100% of you correct.

The formula for a correct answer is as follows: Where Sa (for same answer) is the percent of people making the answer and A is their answer, if Sa - A = 100% then A is correct.

Still, bet you can't think of the great formula for best guessing, now, can you?


Here it is... Where T is the total number of people asked and B (for brainy or best) is the number of people you think will hit upon this formula, the accuracy of B will determine whether you guess right if you calculate the answer as 100 - B/T*100.

It's about time.

Finally, everyone else is back on Sane and Normal Time, like I've kept my clocks all along; no more adding an hour mentally to account for the world's silly notion that you gain time by taking it off the other end of the day and pretending our sleep cycles and such don't notice.

Yes, I know I'm weird.

Someday I'd like to have a fantasy world in which exist creatures called withals.

See, then a monster who is a human transformed into one of those would be a werewithal.

Virtually self-evident fact: the Holy Spirit, being God, directs us toward God.

Logically it must then follow that in the case of any spiritual "gift" causing trouble either it is not of God or else we are seriously screwing something up.

Now, I've heard stories of "Charismatic" stuff I wouldn't trust. I've also heard of Saints doing all sorts of miracles. How do we tell the difference so that we can work toward something like this? After all, we are to pray that all are united to the fullness of Truth in the Church even as we maintain that some things cannot be a part of such unity. Given basic knowledge about God's working through us, such as the history of miraculous gifts in the Church's Saints, it's clear there are at least some genuine charisms. Well, the Catechism says that we have to bring seeming spiritual gifts to the Church for evaluation and organization -- that is, the grace of state of the priesthood is our #1 aid in discernment of charisms. Unfortunately, finding priests who even believe God works like that anymore can be difficult. However, they are out there. Fr. Al, for example, would discuss things like whether the gift of tongues is to be used in what situations. (He's the founder of the organization I just linked, btw.) And he was no ungrounded Charismatic; he said Mass in Latin, emphasized altar boys, and pastored a church with a high altar and communion rail (always making use of the latter and making use of the former at special occassions). After priests, one thing we can look to organizations such as Presentation Ministries or the Siena Institute, if there are any in our area; and if there aren't, we should discern whether we are called to found one (almost certainly with priestly help and oversight from the Church hierarchy, of course). Besides that there is, as some insightful readers probably thought of with the earlier mention of Saints, an incredibly vast "library" of sorts in the Saints' writings. St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa de Avila, St. Julian of Norwich, St. Francis de Sales... There are so many, well known and obscure, long ago and fairly recent who wrote on the spiritual life that most of us would be hard-pressed to read it all in our lifetimes.

Don't let our human tendency to stumble discourage you... Through His Church Jesus Christ offers us everything we could possibly need to come to fullness of life in Him. Whether we've never tried to use it, or are trying our hardest but of course still imperfect, or have tried and failed to keep it up once or many times, we should all be seeking to become better instruments of God.

"Do you remember the time / When simple things made you happy?"

I haven't checked Wikipedia, but if my research is correct, this, titled "The Best Is Yet To Come", is apparently the ending theme to Metal Gear Solid, one of the greater literary videogames thus far that I have unfortunately no first-hand experience with due to growing up with Nintendo rather than Playstation. If my research is correct again, what's below the vid is the English version of the lyrics, a solid translation though possibly with just a little filled out. Altogether I think this encapsulates something I've been feeling around for in the back of my mind for a long, long time.

The Best Is Yet To Come

Do you remember the time
when little things made you happy?
Do you remember the time
when simple things made you smile
Life can be wonderful
if you let it be
Life can be simple
if you try

Whatever happened to those days?
Whatever happened to those nights?
Do you remember the time
when little things made you sad?
Do you remember the time
when simple things made you cry?

Is it just me
or
is it just us?
Feeling lost in this world?
Why do we have to hurt each other?
Why do we have to shed tears?
Life can be beautiful
if you try
Life can be joyful
if we try
Tell me
I'm not alone
Tell me
We are not alone in this world
fighting against the wind
Do you remember the time
when simple things made you happy?
Do you remember the time
when little things made you laugh?

You know
life can be simple
You know
life is simple
Because
the best thing in life is yet to come
Because...
the best is yet to come

Looks like I may have been wrong.

The papers are at least consistent. Swine flu is a big issue right now in back-to-school season.

It looks like I'm blogging at a very nice pace now...

...but in reality, the past few weeks I'm composing these in sets of two and three and spacing them out with the scheduling feature.

Is that cheating? Well, it's an improvement on my previous blogging rate habits...

If space aliens abducted all the grownups...

...I'd let them, and even try talking to the aliens just in case they're actually sane.

Consider.

Grownups complain their heads off about what's becoming of the world and how principles are going down the drain.

Now, ever try to stand by your principles? You get called childish, laughed at, and possibly worse depending on the circumstances.

Meanwhile, to distract themselves from this their obvious hypocrisy, grownups wonder to each other why the youth of today are even worse than they were in their own youths (assuming, of course, that they haven't shaded their memories golden out of pride or who knows what else).

I am an adult, or will be as soon as I can get through the freaking system that you previous generations, grownups, set up, in order to get a job and be self-sufficient. I'd appreciate being treated as an adult. However, if I ever fall prey to that idiocy that too many adults call "growing up", God help me, I'm liable to hate myself worse than a fly hates a flyswatter.

It's a fine but invaluable distinction.

Watch me make a (semi-)political post in the middle of the wrong political issue...

I realize the Korean Missile Crisis has been pushed out of the limelite by a series of random political events (porkulus, health uncare, Ted Kennedy's death, name whatever happened this week that I ignored), but in the interests of both humour and keeping genuine problems on people's minds instead of whipping their brains around like something from Nietsche, Kafka or Farenheit 451...

There's a part in Final Fantasy VIII where intercontinental missiles are headed for the goodguy base, and the heros go down to the base's basement to try utilizing some mechanism built into it in its earlier days as a special war shelter, which is so old that nobody even knows what it does. There's a scene where they get down there and activate it and... the whole base takes off into the sky, just in time to escape the blast of the missiles (it flies out of the cloud of dust raised). I was looking at the comments on a YouTube vid related to this scene and found the following.

coolmikeol
Hey if missiles are heading toward Japan because of NK, then too bad Japan couldn't move like Balamb Garden can. Well hopefully NK is launching a sat and not anything else.

Heartofdesire
You don't know that Japan couldn't move. I'm betting that they have an ace up their sleeves.

aelegent
lol yea probably

Scaash
Thats a creepy thought but I wouldn't put it past them. They are the ones thinking of creating a whole city into one HUGE tower. I saw it on Super Structures

teqrevisited
Haha imagine if Korea did that and the whole of Japan just ripped out of the sea and floated off. Would be awesome :D.

Hey, it isn't whipping brains around to show that things are connected... especially humourously... (besides, wouldn't you, too, love to see Japan fly?)

It's evil 'cuz you updated it.

Although I've heard Mozilla Firefox praised to the skies, I haven't got around to trying it out yet. That's just 'cause I'm lazy. Consequently, I've stuck with what I happen to be used to: Internet Explorer. This despite the claims by everyone I know that it's evil-ly buggy. I could not stand myself if this led me not only to not get around to trying a new browser but actually led me to dislike other browsers based on that unfamiliarity, for the simple reason that then it'd be hypocritical of me to attribute most people's dismissal of Macs as counterintuitive to a reaction of Windows-formed unfamiliarity with Macs' hyperintuitivity[/ness?]. Fortunately, I don't expect to have to deal with such a problem; every time Windows upgrades something, readjusting is almost as big a deal as it would be if I were readjusting to a whole different company (and add together multiple upgrades and it's an equally big deal), so there.

Anyway, I finally found out what was so buggy about Internet Explorer as to constitute evil. Some features of the University of Cincinnati web site won't function on IE7 or earlier. So, the first thing I did was check just how much adjusting IE8 will take, to gauge whether now is the time that my laziness will be no big deal to overcome for Firefox or not. (Incidentally, I'm not so big on Google as to make my whole internet experience Googlified, so I really don't think I'll go for Chrome, thank you. It's bad enough that Google's both my search engine and my blogging device.)

Well, it's quite obviously time, because Internet Explorer 8 is only mildly changed in layout type stuffs, but heavily changed in the s...l...u...g...g...i...s...h...n...e...s...s... department, and is immediately showing signs of being glitchier than IE7 (and no, I'm not talking compatibility with IE7-based web designs, I'm talking about the browser randomly giving me trouble).

This weekend's project: install and adjust to Firefox.

But before I do that, a word to all you IE-is-eeeeeevill! people: don't you know you're not supposed to "upgrade" non-Macs (or at least anything remotely affiliated with Microsoft) if you can help it? Sheesh. I found your real problem so fast, you could've all been enjoying relatively functional earlier IE versions if you'd simply bothered to have some common sense. Well, actually, the real problem is Microsoft -- and our somewhat justified hate thereof... but still, for bothering to hate it, you could at least learn how to minimize its damage.