Thursday, November 20, 2008

Re: A Defeatist Throw Down

Pick up the slack, eh? Well, that was a over a week ago and I am now blogging again.

Whaddya know, when you're busy you don't give as much time to hobbies as when you're not. I blog today after a test last night and a quiz shortly preceding that, and I'm still working full time. Getting a test done is like a weight off my shoulders every time. I hate the tension going in and LOVE the relaxation coming out - provided I was happy with the performance, of course. Last night's was harder than the rest and I definitely sullied my 100 average for the course, but I found it more satisfying. There were a couple questions I simply did not know know until I sat there and stared at a blank page for about ten minutes, started the problem incorrectly, suddenly realized something, then started over. The "click" is what it's all about. It's like a drug. I want more.

Aak and I got into a fight the other night about politics. I was arguing from a position of how I don't know and I probably can't know anything, and he was saying that I can and do know more than I think I know. Maybe. I acknowledge that the convo. got extremely unfocused on my part because I didn't have a defensible argument. I did get downright enraged at one point because of how he was making a particular point. He was making the point that a person in a position of influence has to make decisions based on partial information. The conversation went something like:

A: Did you see An Inconvenient Truth?
H: Yes.
A: Did you see that graph that he showed?
H: Yes.
A: What if you were president and someone were to bring that info. to you and ask you to make a decision on [given issue] based on that information?
H: Well, I'd ask for clarification or further...
A: ...pick one...
H: ...uh, well, I don't remember that chart off hand, but I remember it being ridiculously cherry picked and biased...
A: ...pick one...
H: (getting annoyed) ...Aak, I would need further expla...
A: ...pick one...
H: ...look, you realize that I would need to ask knowledgable advisors who I trust and would respond to ques...
A: ...pick one...
H: ...You're really starting to piss me off...
A: ...pick one...
H: ...Dude, what's your pro...
A: ...pick one...
H: ...AAK! YOU'RE BEING A [very disagreeable individual]!!!...[Further yells, screams, and expletives]...

The conversation is getting me in a tizzy as I think about it now.

Subject change.

Why do some lighters have two chambers in them? Is it because when It gets low, there's less room in the wick-feeding chamber to spread out at the bottom, so it's pushed upwards along the wick and you get a little more life out of it? If so, then why two equal-sized chambers? Why not one chamber about the width of the wick and one frickin' 'uge chamber to contain the reservoir? Perhaps another explanation: is it so that the divider can take up more space and they can fill the lighter to the same level with less fluid and you have to buy a new one sooner? Planned obsolescence? Unfortunately for this boggler I don't smoke, so I don't have an extensive sample set of lighters to keep this inquiry open over time.

4 comments:

chovak said...

Wrong again, hatandcoat, mwahahahaha. I was making the point that you, I, and every individual voter must make decisions for the country based on partial evidence. This was to argue against your paralyzing doubt about top-secret information that we can't know about that would say, for example, that the Iraq war is worth continuing for a hundred years. We can only base our decisions on the information we have, not on the information we might not have.

Missy said...

As one of Districted's 2 readers, I say bravo to any non-bike related content

chovak said...

And here I was thinking I'd turn Districted into yet another DC biking blog.

Hatandcoat said...

I actually have to hand it to him. Aak gets all sorts of play from some DC blog finder page. >2 readers.