Catching sleep is no problem for me. I’ve been blessed with a wonderful 2nd period schedule this year and the last. I don’t pull all-nighters very often. I can’t even pretend that IB or anything else I do is demanding enough to make me lose sleep. Ha, I even have time to write on RogerHub.  But I still have sleep-related problems. I’m many-fold more productive and responsible after midnight, when I have the house all to myself. That’s when I do English essays that require deep thinking and concentrate harder on my work. Tumblr and Reddit have come to a standstill1, and most of the daytime distractions disappear. I wish I could get up early each morning and go take walks in the sunrise, but that’s not what’s going through my mind when the most annoying alarm sound in the… more →

I have been working with email systems for a little more than a year now, and in that time I’ve picked up some very useful and practically applied knowledge, which I want to share with you. So here’s How to stop email spam, in plain English. Q: Why have I not heard this before? A: Well that’s simple. There are a couple reasons. First, email services, which are websites like Yahoo and Hotmail, like to brag about their superiority at filtering spam. They attract customers by pretending that email spam is an unstoppable force, and then they tell you about all the things they are doing to filtering spam. They won’t tell you how to really stop the spam from coming in the first place, because that way they won’t make any money. Yes, even though getting an email address at Yahoo… more →

I saw a dead dog on Brea Canyon yesterday night. It was small and had these fair chestnut curls, suggesting that his owners had taken great care of him1, well at least until he was ran over. I’m not even know if he really was dead. The body was in the intersection, but located in such a way that it would only bother you if you wanted to branch off into one of the side roads, where all the warehouses are. Ha, bother. That’s all it really is. Naturally, nobody could be bothered to get out of their car and check, at the risk of holding up traffic and feeling the stigmas of the nonconformist. Whether he got to his safe spot in the road because somebody moved him, or because cars gradually knocked him out of the way, I hope it was… more →

Ever since I got my Kindle, it’s just been reading and reading all the time. It’s tough to describe in words, why it has such a profound effect, why I prefer it to a DS or a tablet1 or even a real paperback. Part of it is the form. It doesn’t smell like library books do. I don’t have to crease the page, holding it open. Part of it is having so many books with me where ever I go. Above all, it’s probably the associations attached to reading: intelligence, culture. But really, this is all it took? Reading is so much enjoyable with the device. If I didn’t have one, I likely wouldn’t bother reading much. I can freeze the oceans, fly to Titan, and ha, I can learn C on this thing. All the nonsense coming from the… more →

The principle of humanity, states that when interpreting another speaker we must assume that his or her beliefs and desires are connected to each other and to reality in some way, and attribute to him or her “the propositional attitudes one supposes one would have oneself in those circumstances” (Daniel Dennett, “Mid-Term Examination,” in The Intentional Stance, p. 343). [From Wikipedia on the Principle of Humanity.] It may be hard to imagine now, but if you ever find yourself with a distressing abundance of free time, reading about cognitive science and philosophy on Wikipedia will eat it right up. If there is any philosophical thought, more true than the Principle of Humanity1, then I haven’t discovered it yet. I’ll keep this short. Remember the Great Gatsby? “Whenever you feel like criticizing any one, just remember that all the people in this world… more →