Curve

My previous smugness has morphed into boredom. Not with my life (average) but with the Internet. Don't you ever get bored? It seems I always end up in an Internet rut, finding myself time and time again on the same time of websites.

Looking over my browsing history from the last three days, about two-thirds of it is homework-related stuff ("Regeneration in compound eyes of Crustacea", for example) and the rest is a mix of recipe blogs, articles, movie summaries and trailers, English tabloids*, nutrition and muscle-building advice, videos of meerkats, social networks and snark forums.

Do you see how much wasted time that is?!

"Wasted" is relative, I suppose. Obviously any amount of time that I spend browsing around is benefitting me in some way, otherwise I wouldn't do it. But there's a point where the cost of time invested exceeds the benefit of stress-relief and entertainment.

I borrowed a cost-benefit curve from here. I don't know why it's talking about hamburgers, but imagine that the benefit is entertainment and the cost is time– a limited resource. See, the point of maximum returns isn't the point where the benefits and the costs cross near the top. The optimum is much lower, where the distance between the lines is greatest (at the mark of two hamburgers, in the above graph). You get the most returns for your investment.

This post started out making sense to me, but it's degenerated into a messy unloading of the brain. Also, I've always like cost and benefit curves. There's just something about them that appeals to me, and I suspect it's to do with my laziness. You do best when you don't give it your all.

I remember the first time I came across them was during a talk this one guy gave us about overfishing by individual fishermen and small (local) fisheries. People were fishing to the point where the cost and benefit curves intersected, and he said that he had been frustrated when he'd first started working on the problem, from a conservation point of view. Didn't the fishermen understand that if they overexploited the fish, they'd have no more resources in the future? How could he make them see? And then someone told him something, and it changed his entire perspective on fish and many other things: The fishermen weren't stupid. They knew the species they were fishing would die out. But they needed money, and they needed it NOW.

And with that, I say good night.

P.S. I saw a movie the other day where it was pointed out that mexicans have an ideal that you're not worthy of happiness until you've suffered enough to deserve it. I think this applies to many cultures, not just mine. I mean, religion. Right? GUILT!

That was disjointed. I could probably make that fit together, but I want to go to sleep. Use your imagination.

It got me thinking. It also reminded me of the time when I got all frustrated and said, "Why've I got to be happy, anyway? What's so great about being happy?" and my psychologist metaphorically patted my head and said that happiness isn't overrated and to calm down.

Smug

I feel snarky today. Snarky in a way that makes me feel happy and smug, not snarky-frustrated.

One of those times when I get tired of people complaining about how bad everything is and figure, what the hell, all I can do is what's best for me. At this point that means doing my Math homework and not eating any more graham crackers. These are easy things to do, because the homework is some easy-peasy limits and we ran out of graham crackers because I ate them all.

See?

Damn, I really feel good today.

I joined a new gym with about ten different instructors. The Wednesday guy is very good, one of the Thursday guys is good, the Monday girl is okay and everyone else oscillates between passable and really bad (Friday girl). Also, pushups are kinda dangerous because the gym floor gets incredibly slippery when it gets sweaty. My knees slide around in an entertaining way, but I don't want to do full push-ups because one of my hands might slide off to the side and I'd end up like Michael Jackson.

Of course, I could bring a yoga mat, but I'm too lazy to bring one with me on the bus at 6 AM.

Isn't it funny, though, that I'm early for the 7 AM classes at the gym, but was late for every single 7:30 AM History of Biology class? Well, maybe not funny. Telling, I guess.

I've been doing my nails a lot lately. Right now I'm wearing sparkles, only half of each nail chipped off and I have yet to re-do them.

I stubbed my two tiniest toes a few hours ago. The pinky still hurts, but luckily my nails are intact. I knew a girl whose foot slipped when her knee gave out (there's something wrong with her knees and apparently they do that every so often; she said she's had many surgeries, but will inevitably end up in a wheelchair by the time she's… I forgot how old. Maybe 35?) and her big toe's entire nail came right off. Augh! So I treasure my pinky toe's nail, although actually there isn't much of it. If I clip it, it's about 3mm long. But it's there, make no mistake.

Okay, Math.

Right.

Non sequitur

I didn't mean for this to come out feeling bland, but I guess that's how I feel at the moment.

I was doing some homework this week about neurotransmitters. It was funny. As I read about serotonin and depression, I was like, "Holy crap, this was me yesterday!". Horrible morning, slept all afternoon, woke up at night feeling better.

I love my Behavioral Ecology class, but the annoying thing about trying to talk about it is that within a minute many people veer the conversation over to humans and human behavior. Yes, humans are fascinating. But don't try to make comparisons between humans and other animals if you don't understand the animals you're talking about in the first place. Like in a book I read recently, where the characters had a long conversation about lions and lionesses and female power and it was mostly founded on a bunch of false assumptions they made about lions. If you want to talk about humans, then talk about humans. Don't drag lions into it and start making up fantastical analogies just because you think they sound cool.

I really am a stick in the mud sometimes. I was just thinking about that today. I was on the bus and I saw a kid reach into his book bag, pull out a microfiber cloth, pick some lint off of it and then wipe his glasses on it very carefully. "Kid," I thought at him, "there's a fuzzy hoodie on your lap. No need to be carrying around your microfiber thingy. Don't be a stick in the mud."

I think about this a lot, sometimes. It's very comforting:

I tend to think of human beings as huge, rubbery test tubes, too, with chemical reactions seething inside. When I was a boy, I saw a lot of people with goiters. So did Dwayne Hoover, the Pontiac dealer who is the hero of this book. Those unhappy Earthlings had such swollen thyroid glands that they seemed to have zucchini squash growing from their throats.

All they had to do in order to have ordinary lives, it turned out, was to consume less than one-millionth of an ounce of iodine every day.

My own mother wrecked her brains with chemicals, which were supposed to make her sleep.

When I get depressed, I take a little pill, and I cheer up again.

And so on.

So it is a big temptation to me, when I create a character for a novel, to say that he is what he is because of faulty wiring, or because of microscopic amounts of chemicals which he ate or failed to eat on that particular day.

It's from Breakfast of Champions, by Kurt Vonnegut. I added the emphasis so you'd know which parts to pay attention to, just in case you were temped to focus especially on the bit about goiters.

Every time I go to the study room next to the library I fall asleep. All the warm air rises up into that room, but it doesn't get too hot as the day goes on because there's a dome that the hottest air goes to. Today I was nodding off when a classmate from a few semesters ago sat at my table and talked to me so I wouldn't fall asleep. He told me he ate 16 tacos for lunch, which explains how he can run so much and be so skinny. Seriously, what little there is of his body is in great physical condition and he's known for running on and on, fast, and never getting tired.