11-year old genius, my ass

From the 11-year old graduating from East LA Community College:
"I feel it's a waste of time playing video games because it's not helping humanity in any way"

Yes, but so too is martial arts. (unless perhaps, you go into special forces. Let's not even mention his goal of being a movie actor...) For mental well-being, people do all sorts of activities to relax. Sure, some of them help humanity (volunteering at a homeless shelter, for instance), and some of them don't (yoga, television, video games). To take a stance on video games when you yourself are engaged in activities that don't help humanity is simply hypocritical.

Of course, calling an 11-year old a hypocrite is just plain silly, but when you're being put on a pedestal for graduating from college early, I feel justified in attacking your narrow view of the world.

And just to be clear, graduating from a community college when you are 11 is NOT a big achievement. I have no doubts that this kid is gifted, but to claim that he has thoroughly mastered any academic subject is a bit of a joke. The 14 year-olds making groundbreaking achievements in mathematics are geniuses; all this kid has shown is that he can read and recite from textbooks. His description of wormholes clearly demonstrates a lack of deep understanding of the topic.

things that make me sad

1) Jeremy Jackson's paper in August's issue of PNAS concerning ocean biodiversity, first seen here and brought up again here.

See especially table 1.

2) The fact that the major news media have way more coverage on the bigfoot hoax.

Back from the Future (3 time zones to the East)

After three somewhat restful weeks at home playing video games, wishing I could order Food Network direct to my computer, sleeping in, and doing some reading, I'm back in SD with glorious broadband internet. One thing I noticed is that modern websites do not optimize for dialup bandwidths anymore. I may have one of the few websites that is still mostly handcoded with fast loading for you modem people. (But seriously, why do some sites have 100+ KB worth of javascript?)

Anyway, I have a huge backlog of restaurants to cover:

1. Ba Ren (part I)
2. Ba Ren (part II)
3. Oriental East
4. Sushi Siam
5. Fu Shing Cafe
6. Joe's Shanghai
7. Jean Georges Nougatine
8. Yum Yum 3

Outside of Ba Ren, the rest are east coast restaurants, some in the MD area where my family lives, and some in NYC, where we spent a couple of days. I have some shots of the city at night from the top of the Rockefeller building, but I had to turn up the ISO all the way to 1600, so the sky has a very strange grainy yellow/orange/black look to it. I also spent some time window shopping (stuff is expensive in NYC), but did pick up a nice shirt and mug from the Nintendo World Store.

I also have some shots from our New Year's day hike up on Mount Sugarloaf. We didn't stay till sunset, cuz it was really windy (and thus cold) up at the top. If I had a tripod, I could have taken adventage of the HDR-exploitable conditions, as the sky was really bright, but the ground forest was really dark, so I had to compromise between capturing detail on the ground vs. in the sky. Other shots turned out a little bit nicer, once I was able to get some shots of the forest that the sun was shining on.

Anyway, hopefully I won't be lazy and can get those restaurant posts up over the next couple of weeks.