The Daily Cow

Similar to the law of conservation of energy and mass, there's another universal law just as applicable--to students.

When one form of procrastination is blocked, another takes its place. When Digg and Slashdot began to phase out, Google News reemerged in renewed prominence. When I chose to stop reloading Google News, FML and MLIA came into the picture. When I finally blocked FML and MLIA, Failblog staged another comeback.

Not to mention, Reddit has been slowly creeping into my procrastination arsenal since summer.

So all in all, blocking one means of procrastination won't help. You'll just find that an even worse means of procrastination comes into being. Therefore, I propose a new universal law--that of the conservation of procrastination.

Because the only way you'll procrastinate less is if your peers procrastinate more. (*shakes fist at Courtney* for getting me into Reddit) By the way, for the rest of you, be sure to frequent the websites I mentioned up there!

A California software company developed an iPhone application that amplifies and filters sound taken in from a microphone. ABC News thinks it'll be useful to the student stuck at the back of the lecture room. Somehow, I can imagine the teacher going up to a student listening intently to his iPhone in class and chastising his inattention, but I can't imagine it actually helping the student learn the material. If I had an iPhone, my first thought would not be to listen to lecture more closely...

Remember Blackbird? Now there's a website for black people to find black jobs for black people! Why do they need their own website anyway? There's no asiancareers.com.

In my edition of this novel by Herman Melville which was published in 1971, there is an "is" masquerading (sorry) as an "it" on page 103. It's funny that 38 years after the novel's publication, the publisher still hasn't fixed the typo. Anyway, that sentence with two consecutive "is"es greatly confused me. I'm surprised nobody else suffered the same confusion!

In response to the Microsoft initiative to explore the educational link to video games (basically justifying addiction to World of Warcraft because it "can encourage scientific thinking"), a junior at Fargo South High School claimed that "I've played a lot of puzzle-solving games and they actually help sharpen my brain," which by itself could be a respectable claim.

Then he continued: "My reaction time has actually gone up, thanks to playing video games." Somehow I doubt that those games sharpened her brain. I laughed when I picked up the irony of the statement.

If the Mercury News replaces the article, check this. If you laughed, please Digg this page.

The two main characters in a book I'm supposed to be reading for English (American Psycho) are named Patrick and Timothy. Coincidentally my two roommates share their names with those two obsessive-compulsive maniac-murderers. (Patrick also eats dead and rapes corpses) Should I be concerned?

If you've never heard of it, just know that it's a book full of weird characters with weirder fantasies:

While I stretch, the Patty Winters Show I watched this morning comes back to me. The topic was Big breasts and there was a woman on it who had a breast reduction since she thought her tits were too big--the dumb bitch. (P. 68)

I rerent Body Double because I want to watch it again tonight even though I know I won't have enough time to masturbate over the scene where the woman is getting drilled to death by a power drill (P. 69)

I come to the conclusion that Patricia is safe tonight, that I am not going to unexpectedly pull a knife out and use it on her just for the sake of doing so, that I am not going to get any pleasure watching her bleed from slits I've made by cutting her throat or slicing her neck open or gouging her eyes out. She's lucky, even though there's no real reasoning behind the luck. It could be that she's safe because her wealth, her family's wealth, protects her tonight, or it could be that it's simply my choice. ... Maybe it's simply that I don't want to ruin this particular Alexander Julian suit by having the bitch spray her blood all over it. (P. 77)

In my locker in the locker room at Xclusive lie three vaginas I recently sliced out of various women I've attacked in the past week. Two are washed off, one isn't. (P. 370)

We all are! Or so my Efficient Algorithms and Intractable Problems professor hopes. Number six from our very first problem set involves finding an algorithm to compute the values in a matrix (I'll spare you the details) that is at least an order of magnitude more efficient than the one Stanford professor Evergreen proposed.

Yup. This class is awesome. Everyone should take it with me. Yes, that means you!

Happy year, everyone, from the Daily ! This is our year. Let's make it a good one! (For my non-Chinese friends, the mandarin pronunciation of cow is "Niu", which is just a slightly accented version of "New" (English, obviously). Apologies for the terrible pun)

That's what they say before they kick you in your face.

Oil took a 7% dive yesterday as Israel pulled out of Palestine, temporarily mulling fears that the violence and warfare in the middle east will damage (or impede the production and export of) crude supplies. It was instability in the middle east that helped push oil to its peaks in the past few decades, and ironically it is the high oil prices that pay for the war appropriations.

Isn't it ironic that warfare in the middle east helps some oil producing countries? Perhaps that's one reason they're so eager to maintain their aggressive policies.