Toasty With a Chance of Wombel

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Just another Day

Well let us start with an interesting article, that shows life always has a chance, at least in Antarctica.

“BALTIMORE — In the frigid waters around Antarctica, below the floating ice shelves where all is dark, lives a most unlikely creature: a perky little shrimp like crustacean.”

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/57396/description/Ice_drilling_nets_shrimpy_surprise

So the last few weeks have been pretty big for me personally. I have a job opportunity coming up in the summer to move to New York and do electrical work for three months, pretty big step for me I guess, its like an apprenticeship kinda thing.I also would like to note that this system or whatever, needs some better spam protection, yeah big time. On another note, I took a somewhat, not really big step yesterday and deleted my myspace account and my facebook account, but than I decided that I still want my facebook, yeah I know.

So I found a poem that intrigued me, I usually don’t like poems, author: unkown.

“The loud sunlight diminished the vision

Once obtained

Forever sustained

By memories

Emotions

Nuances and notions,

Devotion, is among the recalling of these emotions

But then, bestowed upon us was motion

Thought releases

Environment scintillating back into pieces

The insistent reality has been redrawn

My mind is free, the dream is gone”

Here is yet another good article, since you have lasted through this much randomness, Gulf War Syndrome.

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/57073/title/Scientists_offer_compelling_images_of_Gulf_War_illness

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Notice

I am sorry to announce that I am cancelling the rest of my short blog, “The Bush Administration: Epitome of Failure”. I have realised over the last couple days that I do not have the time or the energy to “hate” upon the Bush Administration any more. I am going to take some time until I come up with something very nice to write about, hopefully it will be soon!

*I noticed the terrible, funny wording at the end so I corrected that sentence.

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The Bush Administration: A Look Back at the Epitome of Failure part 1

So my uncle died a year ago this last week. He passed away from liver failure; and being unable to go to the doctor until it was a serious problem because he was not insurable did not help. Furthermore, he needed a liver transplant, but was unable to receive one in time (I think we all know how the donor system works or doesn’t work I should say). It just got me thinking, what if the healthcare issue had been addressed by the Bush administration or what if Bush did not sign the ban on federal stem cell research. I began to think about all the failures of the former administration. I will try to take most of this in chronological order. So here it is, a look back on the epitome of failure.

Let us start with how George W. Bush got elected. I think we all know 2000 was not the most transparent election. Essentially the Supreme Court of the United States was the final deciding party on the issue. Bush v. Gore: The recount in Florida was cancelled because the method in which the ballots were being recounted were a violation of the equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment of the United States Constitution. The court also decided that there was not enough time to organize a new recount and that the initial count must stand. On top of that the court said that this decision only will apply once and never again. The completely ridiculous methodology of this ruling seemed to be a foreshadowing of the eight years to come.

Not many remember the George W. Bush presidency before September 11th, 2001. This might be because George W. Bush was hardly ever fulfilling his presidential duties before then. As of September 11th, 2001, he had been on the job for 250 days, and out of those 250 days George W. Bush was on vacation for 96. So up until September 11th, 2001, Bush had been on vacation 41% of the time. Wow I wish I had a job like that. Who was reading the memos? Like the ones that said, “Usama Bin Laden plans to attack the United States with commercial planes.” Oh yeah, I remember those memos were too vague to be considered by Rice, but of course that is a different problem worthy of a different paragraph.

Dick Cheney, former vice president to George W. Bush, has often said that the administration kept America safe for eight years. The audacity of this statement pairs well with its blatant warping of logic. September 11th was planned and carried out under George W. Bush’s watch. The fact of the matter is that the only major attack on american soil since the bombing of pearl harbor happened under the Bush administration’s watch. It has been proven now that these attacks were totally preventable. One example being the memos that were reviewed by Rice in August of 2001, “Usuma Bin Laden plans to attack the United States with commercial planes.” These memos were ignored, however, much like the rest of the nations problems at the time.

The above is just a small portion of what happened during the eight years after 2000. This is the first, introductory part in an upcoming series. The Bush Administration: A Look Back at the Epitome of Failure.

Next: Bush Tax Cuts and No Child Left Behind

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Confronting Ignorance Kindly: The Wombel Method

I saw the cap’n post a recent blog, “Alex’s Laws of Internet Argumentation”. I liked it a lot, and although sometimes arguments on the forums cannot be avoided, we all can make attempts to avoid negative confrontations. They usually stem from one of the following series of events:

Series of Events 1: Person A posts a piece of information that is incorrect or wrong, Person B corrects person A, Person A defends the original post.

Series of Events 2: Person A posts a piece of information that is correct, Person B attempts to correct person A when no correction is needed, Person A defends the original post.

Series of Events 3: Person A posts a piece of information that is in-correct, person B personally attacks person A, person A responds usually negatively.

Series of Events 4: Person A posts a piece of information that personally attacks a group, someone, or person B, person B replies to the post usually negatively defending that someone, the group, or himself.

Series of Events 5: Person A posts something does not matter what it is, person B challenges the post either personally, or factually because of previous negative encounters between person A and person B or because person B extremely dislikes person A.

So to deal with the above situations, avoid negative confrontation, and gain the factual/moral advantage over your opponent, I introduce to you, the Wombel Method.

Wombel Method

Method: 1 Dealing with Factual In-accuracy
If one encounters a post that is factually in-accurate, one should correct the post in a constructive manner. Using a complimentary comment for the introduction such as, “Interesting post” than confronting the factual in-accuracy, “But I think you are somewhat in-correct on this.” Then explain why they are in-correct, explain what would be correct, and finally follow up with a “I hope this cleared up your mis-understanding on the topic.”

Rules pertaining to Method 1.
1. One should not correct a person’s factually inaccurate post if it has already been corrected by another person’s post, and no response by the author of the factually in-accurate post has been made yet. That would be rubbing it in.
2. If a person corrects another person’s factually inaccurate post in a negative manner, one should agree with the correction, but acknowledge that the author of the correcting post should be more considerate.
3. If a person has corrected a factually inaccurate post and the author of the factually inaccurate posts defends his post, one should reply kindly stating who they believe is right and why.
4. If someone corrects one’s factually in-accurate post, one should admit that they were wrong and thank the corrector for clearing up the misunderstanding.
5. If a person corrects another person’s factually accurate post, one should thank the person for attempting to help, but then kindly defend  their initial post with additional facts or by repeating the key facts that make their post accurate.
6. If person refuses to admit that they are factually inaccurate, and if it is obvious that the person is factually inaccurate one can choose to partake in one, two, or all of the following three options. First, refer to Method 3: Factual Overload. Second, Ignore the person. Third, report the person.

Note: The kinder you are the less likely for negative confrontation. It is un-natural to for a person attack something that is non-threatening.

Method 2: Dealing with Personal Attacks.
Do not personally attack someone. If one personally attacks someone they should apologise and direct back to the original topic. Do not respond to personal attacks from someone with further personal attacks. If one is a victim of a personal attack, first they should state kindly that they do not appreciate personal attacks, then direct the conversation back to the original topic.

Rules pertaining to Method 2.
1. If personal attacks continue further one can choose to partake in one, two, or all of the following three options. First, refer to Method 3: Factual Overload. Second, Ignore the person. Third, report the person.

2. One should not make an assumption about another’s belief system based of a single topic they are debating. This would include labelling someone as having a specific party affiliation, being part of a specific group, or any arbitrary label that attempts to define someone. By doing this one makes assumptions about another’s personal beliefs, usually in a negative connotation, thus constituting a personal attack.

Method 3: Factual Overload
If the person who is obviously factually inaccurate continues to defend their factually inaccurate posts and one has gone exhausted the listed steps in Method 1, then one should respond to the persons denial with a ridiculous amount of facts that supports their correction and/or disproves his/her statements.
If the personal attacks originated from a factual disagreement continue, after one has followed the listed steps in Method 2, then one should respond to each personal attack with a ridiculous amount of facts that reinforce their initial statement.

Rules pertaining to Method 3:
-One should site all facts and make sure they are from reputable sources.

Refer to here for a good example of Factual Overload

Follow these rules and you will avoid negative confrontation. If negative confrontation arises and you have followed these steps, you will always be in the right. And finally, you will always have the moral advantage over your opponent in a confrontation. This will allow you to feel better, make friends, and gain respect.

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Who dat ToastyWombel?

Unless you are truly curious about my screen name, don’t read this, it is ridiculously in-depth for something as simple as a screen-name.

I promised in my introductory blog that I would explain the origin of my name in a future blog. Well the future has arrived my friends! And Even though this blog might seem somewhat boring and narcissistic, it will give me a link to which I can direct anyone who asks where my name came from.

Lets start off with the history behind the name. The initial origin of Toastywombel dates back to Starcraft, an online real-time strategy in which I ultimately owned. I brag about it because it is quite possibly one of the few things I ultimately owned at. If you do a general google search of toastywombel you will find that my name is listed under a clan called Knights of Chaos. This is a clan that I founded back in 1999, it died about 2 years later which lead me to start another clan which turned out to be much more successful. Its name was Urbanchaos. Now to stay on topic I carried this screen-name through my Starcraft years (Up until 2006). It was around then I found interest in Youtube and Linux. I created a Youtube account under a variation of my original name, toasty187. However, if you visit my youtube channel, here, you will see that the title remains, quite appropriately, Toastywombel. I have an Ubuntu account under the name Toastywombel as well, but it is pretty inactive and thus rather boring to write about. . . So lets move on shall we?

Now onto the origin of the name. Within the first few months of starting my Starcraft clan (Knights of Chaos, listed above) I carried the name Problematic. Well ironically enough that name proved to be problematic, for I ran into several people with different variations of essentially the same name. Individuality is hard to find on the Internet supposedly, but I did not want a name with three digits after it or all randomly spelled simply because someone else had already acquired it. So taking a few minutes to think, and contemplate the most random, individualistic, yet simple screen name I came up with, toast! Now toast by itself is not really random or individualistic. It is simple though, but a little to simple. Therefore, I thought of additions to toast, and it came to me wombel! I decided to add a “Greek I” to the end of toast and thus came Toastywombel.

Rather anti-climatic I know, I could lie and say that the ghost of Tesla came to me and said, “The shall be dubbed as toastywombel and shalt go forth extending thy knowledge upon the peoples of scienceforums. . . .dot net!” Yeah. . . that sounds good, lets just say that happened.

Finally defining what the name really means. Lets break the name down:

Toasty:
1) Heated or toasted in an oven or toaster
2) Slang for drunk or intoxicated

Wombel: Not a real word, but womble is a real word which has several meanings:
1) The Wombles were created by author Elisabeth Beresford, originally appearing in a series of children’s novels from 1968.
2) The Wombles is a stop motion animated British television series made in 1973–1975. Further animated episodes were made in 1996–1997.
3) The WOMBLES (White Overalls Movement Building Libertarian Effective Struggles) are a loose anti-capitalist group based in London that once dressed in white overalls with padding and helmets at protests, mimicking the Italian group Tute Bianche.

So according to terribly flawed logic, one could take any combination of the definitions for toasty and put them with the definitions of wombel or womble I should say and that would describe me.

Personally I like: A intoxicated member of a loose anti-capitalist movement based in London who wears white overalls with a helmet at protests while mimicking Italians.

Yeah that is the good stuff.

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I wish I could engage in sexual intercourse with every girl in the world.

Not seriously guys, but some of my friends and I were listening to a song of a similar name today. You know the one by Lil Wayne, “I wish I could F*** every girl in the world!” If you don’t here is a link to the song (I personally am not a fan). I thought of the idea and hypothesised that it was physically impossible or extremely in-practical. One of my friends actually thought it could be possible, so I decided to bust out the arithmetic and see who is right.

It has been estimated as of 2007 that there are 3,301,112,087 women in the world. According to Wiki-Answers.
Also according to Wiki-Answers there are 2.2 billion children in the world as of 2007. Assuming 51% are females, that leaves us with 1.122 billion females who are under 18 we must subtract from the 3,301,122,087, because of course we want this to be legal guys. This leaves us with 2,179,112,087 females that the person would have to engage in sexual intercourse with.

Now if the person engaged in sexual intercourse with each of these women for one second, just one second that would take 2,179,112,087 seconds. Then to convert into years we would have to take 2,179,112,087/60/60/24/365, when its all said and done its 69.099 years. That is around 69 years and 1 month.

However, We have not factored in population growth which is about 1.3% according to google answers. That means that the population doubles every 54 years. So if there were 2,179,112,087 adult females on earth as of 2007 then there would be roughly 5,568,842,000 by 2069. That is another 3,389,729,913 un-accounted for women, assuming all the women that the person has engaged in sexual intercourse with are still alive. So thats an additional 3,389,729,913 seconds, which is an additional 107.48 years. Then one would have to account for the population growth in that time period, but lets not and say we did.

Pre-Conclusion: To engage in sexual intercourse for 1 second with every legal female living on the planet right now, would take 69 years and 1 month roughly of non-stop sex. Assuming the person goes through puberty at age 10 (which is extremely early but not impossible) and starts from there he would have to live till 79, which is not that crazy. However, If you factor in that the average human sleeps for 1/3 of his/her life, he would have to live to about 105 years of age. Furthermore, he would be confined to a life of sleeping and sex only (I know some of you men are thinking, “Whats so bad about that?”). But remember the 105 year life-span is not even including time to eat chips, drink beer, or watch Sunday Football. Also, in the time it would take the him to accomplish that goal, it would take another 107.48 years of non-stop sex to catch up with population growth. And all this is based off of the assumption that he is having sexual intercourse with one adult female per-second. Wow, someone is going to need some crazy Viagra!

Final-Conclusion: It is impossible to have sexual intercourse with every girl in the world.

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ZOMG its a Blog!

Well I guess this is my first official blog. Its Rather anti-climatic considering all the hype. I was expecting some explosions or at least some sort of prize. Ha Ha, I’m just joshin’ you. This blog will look to cover scientific topics or should I say cover any topic in a scientific way? Yeah I think that sounds better.

This little blog site will be organized into three pages.
Tactfully Toasty, which is where my blogs will be.
Wickedly Wombel, which is where I will post links to interesting things I may have mentioned.
About Me, please tell me you do not need a summary of what this page is about.

Anyway hopefully what I have to say is interesting, and hopefully something interesting will come to mind soon so I can say it.