Brandon Notices

I reached the peak number of hours I spent in front of the TV about a year and a half ago, when the TV networks came out with five great, funny, exciting shows: Samantha Who, Back to You, American Gladiators, Million Dollar Password, and best of all, Pushing Daisies.

These shows were all cancelled. Back to You and Pushing Daisies were both cancelled mid-season, and were not allowed more episodes to allow plot lines to reach a conclusion. This is not a satisfying way to tell a narrative.

Unfortunately, TV networks these days are in it all for the money, and this requires them to continually air new shows in the hopes that they'll be huge hits. If one show quits doing so well in the ratings, another potential hit takes its place. When the number of viewers die down, so does the show.

The networks consider their viewers only as a huge mob; they give little consideration as to how their various individuals feel. I tuned into each of the above shows every time they aired, but I alone wasn't enough to keep these shows going. What else can an individual do? After seeing all my new favorite TV shows cancelled, I don't think I can trust the TV networks anymore. I don't want to invest my attention and devotion in new shows that I might fall in love with. How can I trust that the networks won't cancel them?

This is my current keychain collection. I have more than 200 keychains. You can click on the picture to zoom in. Let me know if you have a bunch of old keychains you want to give me! I want to have many more!

I'm at Bartell Drugs, looking at birthday candles. Why oh why are the nines a different color than all the other numbers? What could have brought this about?

I've noticed an annoying speech pattern lately. What it is, is people are using superfluously wordy noun phrases which usually result in the speaker saying "is" twice in a row. The previous sentence is an example of such a pattern. Here are a few more examples I found on the Net:

"...it is not a self help book. What it is is a sampling of what makes people happy and why." (Amazon review)

"Tell us exactly what happened this morning" — "What it was, was that the Beetle and the suspect in the car came and pulled in..." (KCAL 9 news report)

"The Cosmic Game comes across as fresh as a debut and surprisingly indifferent toward being the in thing. What it is is music for music's sake, all laid out with the utmost care..." (Music review)

I've seen it with and without the comma. These clumsy constructions likely come about because people lead themselves into their sentences before they know what they're going to say. It's redundant to include all those words. In most cases I see or hear, a simple noun would fill in rather easily as the sentence's subject. Usually, "What it is, is" can be simplified to "It is".

In the word game Quiddler, players are dealt a hand of cards, each with a letter or two, and the goal is to rearrange the cards so that they form words. On Saturday, I was playing the game with some relatives: Carla, Shelly, and Russell. In one round, Shelly played the word "ad." Russell challenged her play of the word, pointing out in the game instructions that abbreviations are not allowed, and that "ad" is an abbreviation of "advertisement."

We turned to the electronic Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (our family's agreed-upon dictionary—we use it for Boggle and other word games) and found it in there, of course. Russell, however, referred us to the entry in a large print dictionary for "ad," and pointed out that next to the word was an indication that the word is an abbreviation. He then referred us back to the point in the Quiddler rules that abbreviations are not allowed.

I understood his point, but my argument for allowing the word ran along the lines that while being short for "advertisement," "ad" has become a word itself through common usage. It seems that we all discussed this for no less than ten minutes, and Russell didn't seem to care that the word was present in the Scrabble dictionary because it's an abbreviation either way. It got to the point that Shelly withdrew the word herself and asked to just take the 7-point penalty. (The word wasn't even worth very many points!)

Phone reception at Fort Ebey State Park on Whidbey Island got bad at times. This is the strange message my phone gave me when it failed to make an outgoing connection: "Call failed please !!! Try again". This made it only more frustrating that I couldn't get a signal.

Jelly Belly regularly comes out with new flavors every now and then. Their newest flavor is Chili Mango! It is being added immediately into the Official 50 Flavors (no rookie stage!). I haven't had the chance to try it yet, but Jelly Belly describes it as "fresh mango with a sprinkling of spicy chili." Considering that Mango is one of my least favorite Jelly Belly flavors, as well as the fact that I don't really care for very spicy food, I don't expect myself to enjoy this bean very much. I'll reserve commentary until I've tried it myself, though. Jelly Belly has, however, posted a picture of the bean online. It looks to be a dirty orange color, which might be hard to tell it from some other orange beans, but it also seems to have some dark specks of color too.

Along with Chili Mango, Jelly Belly is adding four other established flavors to the Official 50 Flavors mix: Pomegranate, Sunkist Lime, Mixed Berry Smoothie, and Sour Cherry. Mixed Berry Smoothie, I recall, is very good, and very smooth, and happens to be my favorite of the Smoothie Blend mix. Sour Cherry is also pretty damn good, and it's my favorite of the Sours mix. When Pomegranate was first introduced as a rookie in 2007, I originally dismissed it as Jelly Belly jumping on the health-consciousness bandwagon, but when I tried it, I was pleased by its sweet flavor and slight tartness. (Açaí Berry, which is also based on one of the healthy fad fruits, won the recent flavor vote, and Jelly Belly will be making it a rookie flavor too before long. Sigh, I voted for Honey...) I'm unfamiliar with Sunkist Lime, since I haven't tried the Sunkist Citrus mix but I bet it has a strong, sweet flavor.

To make room in the Official 50 Flavors (Why stop at 50? Variety is the spice of life!), Jelly Belly is retiring five older flavors. Jalapeño is being hurled out, with the door slamming on its butt. Good riddance. Grape Jelly is also gone, which might sound like bad news for the grape crowd, but as long as Jelly Belly keeps making its Soda Pop Shoppe mix, Grape Crush will pass as an alternative. Peanut Butter is also being retired. This is fine by me. For some reason, it reminds me of the Bertie Bott's Ear Wax Bean. I wonder if the peanut-allergic community is celebrating this bean's retirement. Café Latte is gone too. It was hardly one of my favorite flavors, mainly because I'm not really a coffee person. For the coffee aficionados, Cappuccino is still in the mix. Lastly, Caramel Apple is gone, which isn't a huge hit, since Jelly Belly also already has Green Apple, Red Apple, Pineapple, Sour Apple, and Cold Stone Apple Pie. Uh, cross out Pineapple. But still, my Jelly Belly Carnival won't be the same with only Cotton Candy and Caramel Corn...

I am recalling some older flavors Jelly Belly experimented around with. Cinnamon Toast was the most delectable bean I'd ever had. It was sweet and sugary, and even tasted better than the real thing (trust me, I did a taste test—it wasn't a blinded test, though). C'mon, Jelly Belly, please bring this bean back!

I signed into Twitter a few minutes ago to see what was new with all the people I'm following. One of my friends posted about an Amber Alert, giving a brief description of the suspect's vehicle and license plate number. Twitter's a great tool to quickly spread urgent information like this, especially because it takes little effort to help propagate the information. All you have to do is copy and paste!

But I've read online that some people will post false information in such an alert on Twitter, either to see how fast a fake report might spread, or for more deceitful means, such as linking to a website to sell junk or spread computer viruses. I decided to check my friend's tweet against the Amber Alert information posted on the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) website. I found information on the site which seemed to match my friend's description, but the license plate was off in one place!

It's great that Twitter allows for fast distribution of information, and I applaud people for passing along information which may turn out to be very helpful in rescuing these children. However, this is a clear example of how social networking sites like Twitter can also assist in spreading misinformation. The license plate number became a Trending Topic on Twitter, which means that it was among the most-tweeted terms on Twitter. People need to make sure to double-check information against a credible source (the NCMEC site for example) before reposting it.

This is from the cover of the menu at Sabor a Mèxico in Mukilteo. I'm a bit confused about when they open on the weekend. That's okay, I'll just stay home.

Look what I made! (This is something Charlie Brown would yell.) I bought it at Hallmark. It used to say "LAUGH".

I wish people would stop complaining about the heat! Does everybody really want to go back to this situation???

This is from April 2 of this year. I found it odd and downloaded it to my computer. I've stumbled across it again, and I thought I might share what's possibly the strangest Marmaduke comic I've ever seen. WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON???

I've noticed that many newer video games don't seem to have time limits, but there's something about them that has been bugging me.

Think back to Super Mario Bros. The timer for each level would typically start with a few hundred "seconds," even though it always ticked down much faster than that. When the timer reached 100 or so, the music would speed up, causing a great deal of panic for the player. When the timer reached 0, Mario would die.

I understand that this just is a gameplay device to add some challenge to the game, but why does he die? By what mechanism is Mario killed when the time runs out?

I was at Walgreens yesterday, looking for a new portable FM radio. Instead, I bought a calculator.



The TI-30XS Multiview Calculator, normally about $22, was on sale at $15, and it looked cool, so I got it. It has a neat feature called MathPrint mode, where it displays mathematical expressions in a more natural way (like how you write math on paper) rather than relying on a bunch of parentheses and junk.



On the left above, you can see a particularly complicated and useless expression as it would have to be typed on the TI-84 Plus Silver Edition. It has a lot of parentheses, and it's kinda hard to see what's going on. On the right is how the expression looks on the TI-30XS Multiview Calculator, with the MathPrint mode on. It's obviously a lot easier to see what's going on. (MathPrint can be turned off so that expressions can be typed in the classic mode.)

The TI-30XS also automatically simplifies fractions and roots. The first picture in this post has two examples of it doing this. On a different calculator, the answers would instead be displayed as decimals. There's a button you can simply press on the TI-30XS to convert these fractions or roots to decimals and vice-versa. It seems to be called the answer toggle button, and the button looks like this ◄ ►. There are two ways to input division: as a stacked fraction, or simply using the ÷ sign. The stacked fraction will try to give another fraction as an answer; the ÷ sign will yield a decimal answer.

  

You can see in the picture above that the calculator is also pretty smart with trigonometry. The TI-30X IIS on the left above calculated the sine of π as an ugly decimal. The TI-30XS is smarter than that, though. It displays the answer in exact terms using a fraction and a root, as it should. By pressing the answer toggle button, this can quickly be converted to a decimal, too.

So the TI-30XS seems to be able to do everything the TI-30X IIS can do, but there are still a few gripes I have with it. The answer toggle button is right above Enter (=), which is where plus usually is on TI calculators—the +, -, ×, and ÷ buttons are all moved one button up on the calculator, which takes a little getting used to. I keep pressing the answer toggle button when I mean to press plus.

Another issue is that there doesn't seem to be a way to wrap fractions or roots around expressions you have typed already. For a simple example, say you've typed 4, but then you realize you need to take the square root of 4. On the TI-30X IIS or the TI-84, you could move the cursor back in front of the 4 and insert a square root symbol. If you try to do that on the TI-30XS, though, it'll put a square root radical to the left of the 4, but there'll be a blank inside the radical, waiting for you to type in a number to go under it. The 4 will be to the right of the root, implying multiplication. I suppose you could work around this by raising 4 to the 1/2 power, but that seems imperfect.

Overall, it's a snazzy little calculator with a bunch more features I didn't even mention. The colors are bold and modern looking, but one of my friends said it looks like a child's toy. It's pretty thin (even more so without the cover slide case) and fits comfortably in the hands, and the buttons repsond well. (I think the TI-30X IIS is a bit too narrow to hold comfortably, and if you try to press a button before releasing the previous button, it'll ignore the second button press.) I would recommend to anyone looking for a cool calculator.

This is a sign I saw in the Mukilteo Walgreens parking lot. What I find interesting is that this Walgreens has a one-hour photo lab, but they apparently insist that you leave before your pictures are done. Walgreens seems to be really serious about the 30-minute limit: they have a half dozen or so of these signs posted in the parking lot. The parking lot was mostly empty, so I don't see what they're worrying about.

Being able to type flawlessly, without error, is a great skill to have, but for most people, the only way to decrease the number of errors is to also decrease the speed of typing. Thank goodness for the backspace key. With a single press, you can delete the last letter you typed.

The problem with this is that maybe you made a typo early in a word, but you didn't notice it until after you finished typing the entire word—for example, "spgahetti". You could backspace all the way back to the P and then start typing again: "aghetti". But that requires 7 backspace presses. You could move your hand to the mouse and highlight the errors, but it takes time to follow through with that.

One easy option is that you could simply press Ctrl + Backspace* and delete the last word entirely. "But then I have to type the whole word all over again!" you whine. Well, it isn't so bad. First of all, I find it hard to gain typing steam having to start typing in the middle of a word. Typing "aghetti" doesn't seem as natural as typing "spaghetti". Second, perhaps forcing yourself to retype the word will give you practice typing it correctly, particularly if it's a word you find yourself misspelling all the time.

After a while, it doesn't feel weird typing Ctrl + Backspace (especially if you use the left Ctrl key), and with practice, this is a very efficient and natural way to correct your typos.

*I use a Windows machine; I don't recall how this works on Macs, and I don't care to look it up. Also, some programs are stupid and for whatever reason don't support this, instead doing nothing or typing a dumb box instead.

I got to the university faster than usual this morning, so I was half an hour early for my 8:30 class in the Electrical Engineering basement. I sat down in the classroom, but decided that instead, I should walk around outside. I walked up to Drumheller Fountain. I noticed that the water was insanely calm, and I could see some insanely undisturbed reflections.


Reflections in Drumheller, facing toward Red Square.


Bagley Hall and its reflection in Drumheller.

There were no ducks in the pond. If it weren't for the fascinating reflections, this fact would have disappointed me. Actually, the reason the pond was so calm was because the ducks weren't in it. (They must have been asleep still.) Also, it probably helps that the fountain wasn't running.


The EEB, Guggenheim, and smokestack.

I checked back after my classes four hours later to take a comparison shot. Ducks were frolicking in the pond now, making tiny-enough waves to completely ruin the awesome calmness.


Tiny waves in the fountain, later in the afternoon.

Does anyone know what the deal is with the floating crocodile heads? They look like the result of some people just having fun, but I thought they would have been gone by now.

I was at Safeway this evening, looking at the huge variety of toothpaste products, trying to choose which one to buy. I was looking at the price tags, and noticed something very irritating.


This Crest Whitening Plus Scope Toothpaste has a red sale tag, and it says that the box of toothpaste costs $2.99. It also displays the toothpaste's unit price: 37.4¢ per ounce.


This Colgate Total Advanced Whitening Toothpaste also has a red sale tag, and it is the same price, at $2.99. The unit price is displayed on this price tag too: $8.26 per pound.

Wait! Why does Safeway give the unit price for the Crest in cents per ounce, but gives it for Colgate in dollars per pound? These are not compatible!

It should be that I could look at the price tags for both the Crest and the Colgate and be able to compare them very easily. But I can't do that, because the units are incompatible! I would have to pull out my calculator and multiply the per-ounce price by 16 to compare them. (Incidentally, the Crest toothpaste contains 8 ounces of toothpaste, whereas the Colgate has 5.8 ounces, so you get more toothpaste per dollar with the Crest.)

AUGH! I shouldn't have to do this! I thought the point was to give customers the opportunity to quickly compare the price per amount of something without having to whip out the calculators!


This last example makes the whole situation even worse. This 6-ounce Colgate Max Fresh Toothpaste has a red tag price of $2.49. Unit price: $41.50 per 100. Per hundred of what? From what I can tell by shaking the box, there seems to be only one tube of toothpaste in it. If I bought 100 of these boxes, that would cost $249.00, not $41.50. I thought about this a moment and did some calculations to check: Safeway means that this toothpaste costs $41.50 per 100 ounces! Why??

Safeway, you're driving me crazy!

I think it was great that ABC took the risky decision of putting Pushing Daisies on in the first place. Taking risks is a great, but scary, thing for such a huge network to do. Most of the time, it seems that networks don't go for the risky shows because they know what their audience likes already. But when a network takes a chance and goes with a risky decision, it can pay off.

That said, I'm disappointed with how you, ABC, are handling the consequences of the risk you took when you chose to air Pushing Daisies. I really appreciate the risk you took: I really love the show. I'm sorry that Pushing Daisies didn't get the large number of viewers you were hoping for, but it's wrong for you to pull the plug on the show.

Your actions have consequences! Cutting the show short, mid-season, is a cowardly thing to do. You gave the show the go-ahead in the first place. In doing so, you created a contract not only between yourself and the studio making Pushing Daisies, but also innately with your audience—especially the show's greatest fans. You should be obligated to allow the season to run its course. Cutting the show short is disrespectful to the production companies and the audience who also went into this risk with you.

You need to give Pushing Daisies some more episodes, not as a chance for the show to pull in bigger numbers, but as an opportunity for the show to reach a conclusion. (Kristin Chenoweth, who plays Olive on the show, has reportedly said that the show, as is, will end with a cliffhanger and loose plot ends.) You allowed the show to be on TV in the first place. Shouldn't you give your viewers the chance to watch the full story to its narrative conclusion?

My understanding from what I've read is that one of the problems with Pushing Daisies is that it isn't the kind of show that a person can just sit down and zone out to. A viewer really has to be paying attention in order to understand and appreciate the show, especially when the characters talk fast. It's a show you really have to think about. And thinking, unfortunately, seems to be something which is lacking in the United States these days. This means that large numbers of people might watch Pushing Daisies, but they won't get it, so they won't tune in next time. The show's ratings were good to start with, but they started to drop.

The problem is that if these people aren't watching Pushing Daisies, then ABC isn't getting the ratings the advertisers want. In other words, Pushing Daisies is too smart for television. So ABC cancels it and replaces it with something that the masses can understand, like more reality shows, or perhaps another spin-off featuring characters from poorly-written car insurance ads. Television becomes a reflection of society: it airs what the masses want to see. This is bad because people want to see stupid stuff. I know that America's Funniest Home Videos shows a lot of stupid stuff, like old women falling down, or men getting hit in the groin.

I'm reminded of an episode of Dinosaurs, which aired on ABC. The lead character, Earl, becomes a network executive and since he's a pretty stupid dinosaur, he chooses to air only stupid programming, such as The Happy Colors Show (and maybe a show about cavemen... I don't remember). As a result, all the dinosaurs become stupid and they quit thinking. Earl decides that he should air smarter programming. He airs educational programming, and everybody learns new skills and puts them to good use. (Also, everyone stops watching TV...) I guess my point here is that society becomes a reflection of television, as well.

So it's a vicious cycle. Stupid programming leads to stupid viewers, which leads to more stupid programming. As I mentioned above, thinking seems to be a problem in this country, which means that stupid programming will likely prevail on television. But adding some smart programming, like Pushing Daisies, can certainly help to avert this problem, and it also lends ABC the credibility of maintaining intelligent programming. ABC needs to make the decision between airing smart programming or stupid programming.

It seems that ABC is going with the stupid decision.

I'm taking Math 300, where we deal with all sorts of math reasoning, proofs, and logic. I got back one of my homework problems. The question was this:

A certain island is inhabited by two tribes of people. The members of one tribe always make true statements, and the members of the other tribe always make false ones. (And they are all skillful logicians.) The natives all know who is a truth-teller and who is a liar, but a visitor cannot tell the truth-tellers from the liars just by looking at them. . . . Suppose you meet three natives — A, B, and C — and the first two make the following statements:

A: B is a liar.
B: If A is a liar, then so is C.

Using only this information, figure out whether A, B, and C are truth-tellers or liars, and explain your reasoning.

And I made a rather careless mistake, right at the end:



Ack! I lost one point out of ten for this...