Tag: Augsburg

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Systems theory = shit happens

Systems theory is the subject of the hour (because this is the hour when I’m doing homework… or at least the hour when I’d be doing homework if I wasn’t writing a blog entry). Basically, everything is related to everything else in some form. Ever hear of the butterfly effect? Six degrees of Kevin Bacon? We may not know how each thing connects to the other—what the interactions might be—but ultimately, you can always find a chain that leads from one point to another and all of those chains can relate back to their source (albeit by different means). Consider:

In baseball, Alex Rodriguez hits lots of home runs for the New York Yankees. Hitting lots of home runs leads to a bigger paycheck. A bigger paycheck gives A-Rod more money to buy steroids. More steroids leads to him hitting more home runs. It’s a reinforcing cycle that will probably only end when he retires. Or if George Steinbrenner runs out of money, which ain’t gonna happen, so probably when A-Rod retires.

So there are reinforcing relationships and then there are balancing relationships. In politics, Democrats and Republicans almost never accomplish anything for the sake of the citizens. The citizens don’t like what one party does, so they elect members of the other party. Nothing gets accomplished after that, so they elect members of the other party and the cycle continues. It’s a balancing relationship that leads to stasis, not progress. So maybe the title of this blog entry should be “Systems theory = shit doesn’t happen.”

I imagine there’s a long chain of potential factors as to why I don’t get my homework finished several days in advance, but this blog is probably one of them, so I should probably reinforce my relationship with my textbook and bury my nose back in it.

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“There’s a reason the empiricists died out.”

I’ve taking classes at Augsburg for less than a year, so that might be the reason why I’ve never felt such a strong compulsion to turn around and punch someone in the face before. When someone is so resistant to a rational concept and won’t shut up about it… [Insert strangling noise here.]

I don’t remember if I’ve mentioned Peter Stark in here before, but he was the instructor for my Leadership class and is striking back for Organization Behavior and Development. He’s a smart guy. Smart enough to know that you can only teach so much about system theory, quantum theory and empiricism in a four-hour class before people’s neurons start shooting sparks out their ears. He let us out 45 minutes early, but it might have been earlier if not for the douchebag who was intent on defending the concept of empiricism to the point of lunacy.

He seemed so proud of it, too. He didn’t openly state, “This is what [blank] said!”, but pointed out that he’d read David Hume, John Locke and a couple other empiricists. As he was doing so, I was thinking, “Congratulations on your Philosophy degree! I got one, too! Shut the hell up!” But of course, he wouldn’t.

And “but” was a word he was very reliant on. Peter would say something…

“But…”
“No buts!”
“But…”
“No buts!”
“But…”

The discussion (or lack thereof) keeps making me want to beat my head against a wall. Or beating that guy’s head against a wall if that was an available option. Here’s the deal: There is no empirical truth. Sensory experience is an individualistic process, something that goes on in your head. Someone else might see the same thing, but the way they perceive it could be completely different.

Assume there’s an object that’s purple. You and another person look at the object and agree, yes, it definitely looks purple. So what if you agree? Does that mean you’re seeing the same purple? No two brains are identical, so no two people are guaranteed to experience “purple” in the same manner. If you’re an empiricist like this guy? Everyone does. Period.

If you need another example, consider speed. Sprinting the 100 meter dash. Biking down a mountain at 55 mph. Driving a car at 150 mph. Flying a jet at… a really fast speed. Your proximity to other objects. Running into the wind versus being in an enclosed space. All of these variables influence the way you experience speed (feeling the wind, seeing passing objects, tasting the dust that people are leaving in your face, etc.). So which one is the correct one? Which one is “fast”?

Hume and Locke lived in the 18th Century—you think they had the same standards as you? If there’s such a thing as an “empirical truth”, they’d enjoy a smooth drive through the countryside like you do instead of spending the entire time screaming their lungs out. It’s like saying there are an infinite number of possibilities in any given situation, but there’s one “correct” one.

“But…”
“No buts!”
“But…”
*WHAP!*

According to empiricism, the pain I’d feel in my fist combined with the whining I’d hear from his mouth would have made the situation much simpler and a lot less irritating. And that’s the truth.

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IOGT Camp aftermath

Yesterday, I finally got home after a week and a half at camp. It’s always a little tough getting back into the swing of things at home, which is probably why I haven’t tried posting anything until tonight.

Incidentally, there were several times when I thought yesterday was Tuesday. I don’t know why, especially since I’ve had classes on Tuesday nights for the last three months. I ended up having to take an Accounting exam on the Tuesday of camp, too, which made the first half of camp more interesting.

For one thing, it was a lot easier to get the kids to be quiet the first night. Last year, they kept whispering to each other until about 2:00 in the morning. This year, I told them all that I needed to study for my exam and I wouldn’t be able to focus if they were making noise. I got some ridiculous protests like “But I talk in my sleep!” That’s when I busted out an angry (and truthful) “These are not a good few days to be testing my patience!” They got quiet a lot faster than last time.

As it turned out, all the nighttime studying and lack of naps paid off: I scored a 95% on the exam. Along with e-mailing me my score, the professor added a note of thanks for taking the class seriously. Mind you, he was the second instructor—he taught managerial accounting, whereas the first guy taught financial accounting—so he doesn’t know that the 95% should help compensate for the two exams I took earlier in the course.

I know that you (and the campers) may be wondering about the “lack of naps” comment. It’s true, I like to take naps during my free time there. Part of that is because I don’t sleep very well (me + cot + not-long-enough sleeping bag ? restful nights). Another part is because I’m the lifeguard and sitting on the dock in the hot sun for big chunks of time saps a lot of energy out of my body. When they start asking to go swimming half an hour early… HA HA HA! No.

Ironically, we always go to a waterslide on Thursday, which was the day it was cold and drizzly. That’s good for keeping lines short for the slides. Hell, it kept the lifeguard staff short—we outnumbered them 5-to-1 when we got there and they eventually abandoned the rapids ride completely (a bunch of short curving slides between splash pools). However, the cold and drizzle chased us inside for lunch and eventually led us to leave a couple hours early.

Lessee… there was one night I was glad I have some movies on my laptop. We had some nasty weather coming our way, so everyone headed for shelter to wait out the storm. I’m sure a lot of parents can confirm this: getting a bunch of kids together can get noisy. Trust me, they get noisier when they’re in a room where there’s very little space to move (and the enclosed walls probably didn’t help). Thankfully, I had brought my laptop to the shelter and we all started watching the movie “Up” until the weather let up a little. That’s when everyone left the building, started getting ready for bed and then the power went out.

I guess a couple branches fell down on a nearby power line, so we had electricity again early the next afternoon, but camp is a lot more interesting when you have to take measures like putting road cones on top of toilet lids as a reminder to not use them because there’s no power for the water pump. It turns out that pouring a whole bunch of water into a toilet bowl really quickly will make it flush itself, so we filled a large barrel with lake water and put it next to the outdoor bathrooms (vs. the ones in the cabins).

I’m sure there’s plenty more to write about, but I’m a little rusty after so much time away from writing. I suppose I could have written something while I was there, but seriously, that would have cut a big chunk out of my nap time.
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Okay, a couple more notes: thanks to aloe and occasionally wearing a t-shirt while sitting on the dock or teaching swimming lessons, I’m only peeling a little bit on the top of my left ear, my nose and the back of my neck/shoulders. Given that I didn’t put on any suntan lotion while setting up camp—putting out buoys and the swim area rope—that’s a lot of thanks.

And setting up the swim area was an adventure. We had about an hour to put out the buoys, which was a snap since Brent had made anchors for all four of them that stay in the water year-round. He attached a line to three of them, so after finding the first, we followed the line and then approximated the location of the fourth compared to the other three. Before Brent made his anchors and everything, putting out buoys could take an hour or two—this year, it was closer to twenty minutes.

When working that evening, the water was really smooth. Not so much when trying to put out the rope. It’s a small lake, but we had… three foot swells with white caps? When you’re trying to loop a rope over the top of a high-floating buoy to mark the swim area, that doesn’t help much. There were a few times when I wrapped my legs around the buoy and reached up to tilt it toward me—the waves were still going over my head. At some point, a wave rocked one of the buoys hard enough to give me a bruise on the inside of my right thigh. And at another point, a wave hit me smack in the side of the head and it took six hours to get the water out of my ear. Needless to say, that morning was an adventure.

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Do not taunt The Social Network

An old SNL sketch (Happy Fun Ball) popped into my head when I started writing this. Watch it and you’ll understand the title.

I watched The Social Network last night because my Accounting professor recommended it during a discussion about common stock. It was a good and somewhat creepy movie. At the end, the guy playing Mark Zuckerberg proclaims, “I’m not the bad guy.” I’m not entirely convinced, in part because he’s the leader of the evil empire commonly known as Facebook.

So as I was having this internal debate about whether Mark Zuckerberg is a major asshole, I decided to log onto the admin page here and look at some stuff. It wouldn’t load. Why not? I hadn’t written anything about his shitty behavior in the movie yet, but he decided to hack the network and preemptively shut down my blog anyway. What an asshole.

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Accounting on drugs

For those of you who have taken an accounting class before, you know how boring it can be at times. Our professor is trying to keep things as light and upbeat as possible, but I’m starting to wonder about him…

The accounting equation: Assets = Liabilities + Equity. If one side goes up, something on the other side goes up; if one asset goes up, another goes down and so on. “If my cholesterol is 120 and I’m doing lines of coke, maybe that evens out!”

And he has an interesting opinion about people in marketing, too. “Two things marketing people do. One, snort coke. Two, play the ukulele.”

Yeah, things could be… interesting for the remainder of the course.

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#madwriting

The title comes from a couple of female scientists on Twitter who… I’m not sure if they had writer’s block or needed inspiration to sit down and write or what—all I know is that they came up with the idea of “#madwriting”, which basically consists of a bunch of people sitting down and writing as much as they can in 30-minute bursts (and they’re very forgiving if you run past that time). In the past, I’d been okay just watching the Twitter updates, seeing the “And….. write!” tweets, etc. This time, I decided to join in, if for no other reason than to say I did it.

There are actually a few good reasons for me to participate. Given that a lot of the people doing this are trying to write papers or theses, I could have used the burst of speed and energy to work on a paper for school. Unfortunately, I don’t have a topic to write about—there was a long list and we were supposed to send the prof a note with our top three choices (plus an alternate or two… as many as we wanted, really). I made my list and sent it to him on Tuesday night. The problem is that I sent it to the wrong e-mail address.

Consequently, he never got the message and I still don’t know what the topic of my paper is. Shit.

But like I said, I wanted to participate. Plus this is a good way for me to not do the reading that’s sitting next to me. What’s one or two hundred pages between friends? A lot to do before Tuesday night, really, but who’s counting?

So since I can’t write about school, what have I got? I dunno, but along with the paper and thesis writers, there are bloggers out there who manage to come up with material for their 30-minute #madwriting session, so I damn well better be able to come up with something.

Hmmm… I suppose I could write about soccer today, but I imagine people are bored with reading about my epic struggles with playing and playing through injuries. I’m not sure why my shoulder is continuing to hurt, but I’ll be seeing a doctor or chiropractor or someone soon. I sent in a form to the insurance company indicating that I would have future expenses, so I imagine my body will be ready for treatment as soon as the insurance is.

But the weird part is that the shoulder bothering me isn’t the one I went to the doctor about—I strained the muscles in my neck and my left rotator cuff. You’d think that was the problem area. All the physical therapy has helped that side heal pretty well; the problem has been my right shoulder. There’s a thick muscle fiber in there that’s just a giant lump and doesn’t want to go away. Consequently, when I try to take long throw-ins, it protests. Loudly.

I made one or two that were fairly short during the game, which wasn’t a big deal. The first and the last… I put a lot of distance on those and came out right away. My shoulder was not pleased. After standing on the sideline for a couple minutes, it felt okay again, but I don’t want that to be a chronic issue. It’s bad enough that I occasionally twist my knee the wrong way and have to step off the field for a bit—I can’t have more parts of me breaking down.

Thankfully, my fingers are still doing okay, so I can sit here in bed with my feet propped up and laptop in my lap, typing away for no good reason with no specific goal in mind. Man, that pisses me off… I wish I’d gotten in touch with the prof earlier so I could be working on a paper.

Then again, this is kind of typical for me. Back at Kenyon as an undergrad, I’d get close to deadlines on papers and find any excuse I could to write someone other than my paper for class. Hell, that’s when I’d be most productive. “I’ve got a 10-page paper due tomorrow afternoon—time to write another essay about absolutely nothing!” Dunno why that’s the case. Maybe it’s because I didn’t like the work very much, didn’t have the focus needed to work on something that took brain power… riiiiight.

But right now, I have reading that I should be doing, so this isn’t that much of a transition. I suppose nowadays, I’d be more likely to surf around on YouTube or Facebook instead of writing—less brainpower required, more entertainment. I suppose that could be part of the issue. More immediate returns for writing fun stuff (it’s fun), whereas doing actual work isn’t as much fun. I don’t enjoy it as much. Especially when the book I’m reading is boring and putting me to sleep.

Why didn’t I get to bed until 5:00 in the morning? Paradigms. It could be intriguing at times, but when the author started making predictions about the future, that’s when I started to fade. When I’m lying down comfortably while trying to read, it becomes less of a “tired head bob” and more of a “tired book flop”. Eventually, I had to give up and start doing some work on here.

Yes, that’s right, I’m still working on the blog. Not so much anymore (see: this entry), but I still have plenty of entries that could use tags, especially in the “Beauty and the Geek” category. I want to break things up into seasons as opposed to just “Beauty and the Geek” and make the readers sift through everything to find stuff. That’s right, I’m doing it all for you.

So I spent time tagging as well as copying and pasting entries into Word files on my laptop. I started doing that many years ago, which came in handy when shawnbakken.com went down and I lost everything. I still had all the entries backed up on my hard drive, so while it took me a long time to finally get everything reposted (see: earlier this month), it got done. Same thing last night/this morning: copy and paste the content so I’d have it available offline. Tag, then write down the entry dates in a Notebook file (which stretches back to 2003). It doesn’t sound that bad until you consider I had to start midway through PerBloWriMo. Half of December plus all of this year… I think I went through 70 entries. Took a couple hours, fried a couple brain cells, didn’t require any reading from Paradigms. Awesome.

And that’s time. 30 minutes of… I might call it blatherings, but I thought “Musings” sounded like a better category title. Regardless, I haven’t the slightest idea of everything I wrote in here. Hopefully, at least some of it makes sense. If not… I could be in trouble for that paper due Tuesday night.