January 2006

01.26.2006
Traditional Forms of Calculus
While the rest of the ASU community enjoyed what is known as "Winter Break" last month, I got to suffer through class twenty hours a week. And not just any class, mind you, but a particularly stifling one called "Information Technology Valuation," comprised entirely of boredom peppered with the occasional frustration. For instance...

Boredom: During one class period, we talked about evaluating investments in servers and so forth by determining a company's profit and how it is impacted by the returns on the investment...

Frustration: So, the professor began by explaining a simple formula for deriving the profit of a product line, and I quote, "To determine profit, you must subtract the cost from the price using traditional forms of calculus."

This elicited a mental chuckle from me, as simple substraction obviously has nothing to do with calculus. Suddenly, however, every head in the class shot up. People all around me began whispering to one another, "But I don't have a strong background in calculus! I don't get this!"

Being the Good Samaritan that I am, I decided to help the aging business leaders around me. "Look," I said, "It's not actually calculus. It's just simple subtraction - price minus cost." One of my classmates gave me a bewildered half-smile and replied, "I don't really follow you. You see, I haven't got a particularly strong background in calculus."

At this point, I overheard the professor reiterate, "Now remember, to determine the profit, you simply subtract the cost from the price. This is a traditional form of calculus." Somebody behind me whispered, "I can't follow this! I didn't even take calculus in college!" Boy oh boy, I was ready for Allen Funt to pop his head in the door and announce that I was on Candid Camera. When that didn't happen, I went home and, in order to purge these stresses, did this for 90 minutes:

01.11.2006
Now For Something You'll Really Like
Cy, short for Cyclops, a kitten born with only one eye and no nose, is shown in this photo provided by its owner in Redmond, Oregon, on Wednesday, Dec. 28, 2005. The kitten, a ragdoll breed, which died after living for one day, was one of two in the litter. Its sibling was born normal and healthy.

Medical authorities have a name for the bizarre condition - "holoprosencephaly" causes facial deformities, according to the National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke, part of the National Institutes of Health. In the worst cases, a single eye is located where the nose should be.

AP regional photo editor Tom Stathis said he took extensive steps to confirm the one-eyed cat was not a hoax. Stathis had owner Traci Allen ship him the memory card that was in her camera. On the card were a number of pictures, including holiday snapshots, and four pictures of a one-eyed kitten. The kitten pictures showed the animal from different perspectives. Fabricating those images in sequence and in the camera's original picture format, from the varying perspectives, would have been virtually impossible, Stathis said.

Meanwhile, Cy the one-eyed cat may be dead, but it has not left the building. Allen said she's keeping the cat's corpse in her freezer for now, in case scientists would like it for research. Too bad he'll never get to grow up like a normal cat and do this:

01.05.2006
Incredible Eagle Declares Nuclear War
That's my new year's resolution, but it stops there: nothing beyond nuclear weapons. The Incredible Eagle has previously been warned by Eros not to push the envelope much farther when it comes to "explosions". As it stands, the only explosion left nowadays is the solaranite.

Solaranite does for the photon what fission does for the atom, but is infinitely more powerful. And more to the point, unlike nuclear fission, the solaranite reaction is uncontrollable; it will spread inevitably to everything touched by the light of the star from which it was triggered - eventually, that is, to the entire universe. For obvious reasons, Eros's people don't trust us with that knowledge, and if they can't reason with us, then they will destroy us for the good of all life everywhere. It seems like a reasonable enough position to take.

Unfortunately for the universe, when American officials received this information from Eros himself, they refused to hasten to Washington and apprise the President of the immediate threat facing civilization. Rather, they slapped Eros around, wrecked the Jacob's Ladder that controlled his re-animated zombies, and blew up his flying saucer. I think Eros said it best: "You see? You see?! Your stupid minds! Stupid! STUPID!!"

These events were later recorded by documentary film-maker Ed Wood. Unfortunately, Wood did us all a disservice by allowing his actors to refer to the aforementioned explosion as both "solaranite" and "solarbinite" interchangeably throughout the re-enactment scenes. On the other hand, it was the Incredible Eagle's repeated viewings of said documentary that finalized the decision to pursue nothing beyond a nuclear arsenal. And you had all better thank Eros for that.