The weather is getting hotter by the day. Circuits this morning was hard to follow. I haven't gotten much out of circuit lectures lately. Hopefully I'll be able to cram the material into my brain by myself before the second midterm rolls around in a couple weeks. Ross had 2 tests today so we didn't watch a movie.

I've been planning on redesigning this photoblog again in order to put the stuff I write everyday in a more visible location. After basically finishing my math homework, I started tinkering with the design to put the text on the same level as the photos. However, I ran into some compatibility problems. In web design, it's a good idea to keep your content widths to 800px or below so people with low resolution settings can still view your website properly. The problem is, my photos alone take up 500px horizontally, leaving only 300px for everything else. 300px just for text is already pushing it, but I need to fit in the calendars and links too...

I abandoned the redesign and modified the homepage, making the text each day show on the homepage. You can now read what I write everyday without clicking the useless link on the bottom... Whee.

I was thinking today, of how many random things I learned as a kid, took to heart, and then later realized not to be true. When I was kid, I had a dream that I ran into my backyard, looked up at the sky, and saw planets like Jupiter and Saturn floating like enormous balls in the sky. The sight was amazing. However, I didn't really realize it was actually a dream while growing up, and I kept looking at the sky at nights, wishing the planets would pass near the earth again like it did that night years ago.

Another random thing I remembered lately was the weird bumps we got on our knees while crawling around on carpeted ground. They always itched, and when we asked the older children what caused them, they promptly informed us that it was spider pee. Like any genius child, I prudently tried to avoid scooting around on my knees when playing on carpet. Looking back at how often we got itchy bumps on our knees, I finally realize that spiders would need to produce impossible quantities of urine for what I believed to be true. Interesting...

The reason I don't like linking to external websites is my desire to keep this blog as futureproof as possible. This means, I don't want to look at an entry a few years down the road and find some broken links pointing to webpages that don't exist anymore. When I can, I try and mirror things onto my own webhosting. If I can't, I refrain from linking.

Joseph sent me a link to an article published on the Harvard Gazette titled "Is doing the right thing hard-wired?". The article introduces some pretty challenging philosophical questions and problems dealing with morality. Here's a quote:

"In one example, a runaway trolley is about to kill five people walking on the tracks. You can flip a switch that will send the trolley onto a sidetrack where it will kill only one person. Is it morally permissible to flip the switch?

Despite the fact that in both examples one person is sacrificed to save five others, respondents had no trouble distinguishing between the two cases. In the first case, 90 percent said it was OK to divert the trolley and kill one to save five, but in the second case 97 percent answered that it would be wrong to sacrifice a healthy person to allow five sick ones to live. Most people find it difficult or impossible to give a coherent explanation of why the two examples call for such different responses."

The article then goes on to argue why cases like this support an evolutionary view of how humans developed morality... Hmmmmmm... Any thoughts?

Berkeley is strange... They have a lot of majors that would make more sense if they ended with a B.S. degree, yet they're only available as liberal art degrees resulting in a B.A. If you take biology at Berkeley, you get a B.A. Physics is B.A. too. If I decide to go, my computer science degree will be a B.A. Argh!