Why so glum?

Here’s an excerpt from an article I found that really struck a chord with me:

“Modern day Americans are often trapped in lousy, disappointing, soul crushing careers. If they are not divorced already, their marriages are on the rocks. They live far outside of their means, rack up thousands of dollars of debt, and then they work overtime to pay for the toys they never have time to play with. They dedicate their lives to pleasing ungrateful children who won’t amount to much more than they did. Hours of their downtime is spent in front of the television, switching from reality show to reality show, because it is easier to watch other people live life than it is to live their own. In a rare moment of creativity, they might write a secret out on a postcard and send it to a website because they don’t have a single person in real life that they trust enough to share their fears with. They feel all of this on top of the usual human maladies of sickness, death and grief.

To be perfectly honest, I would think it was weirder if most people didn’t entertain thoughts of suicide.

The majority of people aren’t sad because there is something wrong with their brain. They are sad because their lives suck. But rather than admit that to themselves, they run to the Doctor and beg for a diagnosis that alleviates their personal responsibility in this regard. After all, if a man in a white coat tells you’re broken, you never have to worry about fixing yourself. The sad reality is that they’ll spend the rest of their lives switching medications and wondering why nothing they take works and cures their disease. Never once do they consider that the disease is their life and true healing will come once attempts are made to repair it.

If you are sad right now, I want you to consider that perhaps there is nothing wrong with you. Perhaps you are seeing things the way they ought to be seen. Maybe there is just something wrong with the world right now? Instead of popping some pills in the hopes that they will put us on a perpetual even keel, maybe instead we should figure out what is wrong with our society…and fix it.”

Full article at Violent Acres

Recipe: Scrambled Salsa

I’m a broke college student, and often find myself scrounging through the kitchen for my last bits of food at 4am. tonight i came up with something that was surprisingly tasty, all with random bits of my roomate’s food! heres the recipe:

Scrambled Salsa (serves 1, time: 10min)

Filmtrust: Trust Based Film Recomendation Social Network

Right now I’m taking CMSC498N: Small Worlds, Social Networks, and Web Algorithms at UMD. In the class we basically study the structure and growth of various social networks, and what kind of information we can extract from them. Anyway, my professor Jennifer Golbeck is a PHD on the subject (shes hot too, a rarity in the CS department), and created this social networking website:

Filmtrust

The basic idea is that in traditional movie rating sites such as IMDB the rating of a movie is given as an average of every person that rates it. You might think this is a perfectly logical way of going about things, which it is, but what if the site could give you a rating personalized based on your specific tastes? Thats what this website does, based on trust relationships between you and your friends. This is basically how it works:

You rate a bunch of movies, and have a bunch of friends on the network that rate movies too.

To each friend you assign a “trust” value from 1 to 10 based on how much you trust their taste in movies.

When you look for the rating of a movie you haven’t seen, the site will give you a weighted average of the rating of the movie based on your friend’s ratings and how much you trust their opinion. So if 3 of your friends gave “Old School” 4 stars but you only trust them on a 2 level, and you have one friend who you trust a lot who gave it 0 stars, the rating will be very low. In addition, if you trust a friend, and they trust another person you don’t know, that persons rating will also be calculated into the average.

So as you can see, its a pretty accurate way of finding movies you are likely to like. The networks not very big yet, but if it caught on I think it could be a pretty awesome thing. Best of all, its for a research project and non-profit, so no annoying popups or ads of any kind! Anyway, you should join, so I have more friends on it. My username is mrmartini888, so add me. Heres the site again, in case you missed it:

Filmtrust

Amazing Beer Tricks

for some reason my friend Greg became obsessed recently with popping the bottom out of a beer bottle by hitting the mouth of it with your hand while it had water in it. he said he’d seen someone do it online. after all trying it for like a half hour we all thought it was impossible, but then Joey was finally able to break it. after seeing that, we all were eventually able to do it (except for Greg, ironically). it’ll be a fun party trick to use at some point, as long as the host doesnt care about shattered glass all over their living room. it got me thinking though, theres gotta be a ton of crazy beer tricks you can do, and they’re probably all chronicled on youTube. so, heres what I found:

(oh, and uh try these at your own peril)