Mr. Option's New Writeups

Dead Alive (idea)

2001-04-08T03:52:53Z

Yeah, this was the one with the crazy priest. You know, the one in the suit-jacket with the purple cape? Who said, "Stand back, boy! This calls for some divine intervention!" And then he does this flying leap and starts kung-fu fighting the zombies. While shouting "I kick arse for the lord!" And the organ music. Yeah, that one.

Damn this was a great movie.

Readers note - the director, Peter Jackson, and the screenwriter, Stephen Sinclair, have put together another little New Zealand-made production which some of you may be familiar with: Lord of the Rings. So there may be some hope for it yet.

Paquita: "Your mother ate my dog!"

Lionel: "Not all of it."

The Three-Fifths Rule and the 2000 Election (idea)

2001-04-06T15:27:50Z

In 1787, desperate to broker a compromise between the pro-slavery American South and the more moderate American North, the framers of the American constitution put forth the notion that, for purposes of representation and taxes, one slave would count as three-fifths of a free man.

For those not familiar with the issue (I'm told they're not very reliable about teaching this anymore), I'll refer you to the copy of the constitution in the database, Article I, paragraph 3:

Representative and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this Union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three-fifths of all other persons...

Very few Americans are unfamiliar with the debate over the legitimacy of George W. Bush Jr.'s…

everything is natural (idea)

2001-04-01T18:31:13Z

It's true. Think about it:

Air pollution? natural.
Nuclear power? natural.
Subways? natural.
RU-486? natural.
Test tube babies? natural.
Chemical hair dye? natural.
Manned space flight? natural.

Face it, everything we do is part of nature's plan. Your brain evolved naturally, so every thought you have? Yup. As pure and natural as a mountain spring. All of society is just made up from the natural interactions of ordinary human beings - so political corruption, mob mentality, serial killers, the Academy Awards, homelessness - 100% all natural. All of modern science and industry evolved in a straight, simple little line from mud huts and scratch agriculture - it's no less natural than boiling roots and picking berries.

In fact, come to think of it, nothing is unnatural. Nothing at all.

All of this is just, of course, a rhetorical exercise, and an important one, because we, as humans, have, across a…

natural crap (idea)

2001-04-01T16:37:25Z

Indeed, "holistic", "natural" or "homeopathic" medicines do have a long and distinguished history over the course of human development, and certainly have inspired modern medicine. Currenlty popular examples include substances such as Golden Seal and St. John's Wort; other examples of natural medicine with long histories include:

Some of these have their roots in the distinguished practice of Galenic medicine, notable for its codification of the four humours, dating back to around 100-200 CE. We shouldn't judge him too harshly, of course - Galen was the first physician to include checking a patient's pulse in his diagnostic techniques. Progress in medicine is incremental, as with all things.

I would furthermore like to be perfectly clear on two points.

There is no

…

Gas is not really that expensive (idea)

2001-03-20T04:24:36Z

Gas is not cheap for reasons altogether different.

In order to properly consider the price of gasoline, you must not only consider its price at the pump. You must consider all of its collateral effects.

Its price in your taxes, for one.

The cost of gas is the cost of maintaining a delicate geopolitical situation. The face of the middle east today, and the plight of its people there, is bound intimately to its supply. Foreign aid to Israel alone totals over 3 billion dollars a year - that's just last I checked. But that's a drop in the bucket against our investment in military presence in the area, bases, foreign aid and loans, naval operations, air force, special trade considerations, and other political and economic concessions to the cartel which controls the oil supply.

The costs of gas includes a surcharge of tens of thousands of lives per year in military conflicts that arise over the world's crude oil supply. This includes the deaths and suffering…

defragment (idea)

2001-03-18T15:03:56Z

Term frequently applied to filesystems on computers.

Data is usually stored on your hard drive in blocks. The blocks for a particular file need not be in order, or together on the disk (contiguous). In fact, over time, they are likely to end up out of order and scattered, as files are moved, deleted, copied, replaced, and the free space on your drive becomes fragmented. The computer will then happily break up your files into thousands of tiny pieces to fit them in and you'll never know the difference - except in terms of speed (and possibly, equipment wear), as the hard drive whirs and clicks all over its recordable surfaces to reconstruct your data. Also, cache locality is reduced, so more physical reads/writes are likely to happen per file operation.

Defragmentation is therefore a maintenance process some people perform (via a defragmenting program such as the one in Norton Utilities, or Windows' built-in disk utilities) on their hard drives which "organizes" the data on…