muckup!

Just reasserting that Avengers was bloody hectic =D

Okay time to collect lots of Facebook albums here for easy clicking =P

Abbirami
Amanda
Amy
Anu (Amelia's photos)
Clarence
Crystal
Gina
Jason
Jeff
Freya
Laura Jane
Max
Sharon
Shelley
Steven Xu

Those are the ones that appeared on my newsfeed - plox link us if there are some I haven't discovered yet!
Also I'm not 100% sure the links for FB work like this so this could be totally useless :L Okay yay it works as long as you are friends with them (ty Max for confirming)

yolo!

Term 2 biv was our last biv

It made me happy because
a) We (mainly Brian) managed to obtain stores such as 77-sets and 11x11 tent and the such.
b) We managed to obtain a Sandra (I guess Sandra managed to obtain herself) to play Last Post and Rouse (better known as "Reveille") for us, which is something that I'm quite sure will be difficult to obtain for future years. And with 98% certainty that no other unit would have a bugler hehe. Except for Band Cadets trolol.
c) We did yolo things like sleep in a 11x11 (that's about 4m x 4m, and is meant as a field HQ, and not for living quarters. Because YOLO) tent, and pee in the bushes as we walked along the path. (A lot of fun things have something to do with urinating it seems)
d) We said yolo as often as possible in order to piss people off.
e) CUOs had so much time to dick around with Nerf guns.
f) We discovered that 100 minutes is the exact amount of time it takes to get sick of radio duty and go "fuck this shit I'm playing Nerf". Both Brian and I radio duty'd for 100minutes before we went "wtf how long have I been here for?!"
g) It's the best thing ever when we say "get them off the bus and the packs onto the shoulder" to someone, and then within a minute or two everything is working. It's so awesome to watch!
h) I think I gave about 3-4 1-liner orders in total before all the camp was packed up and ready to go. Like above, it's pretty amazing to watch.
i) It's the best thing ever to see people happy because of something that we devised. It's like "play, my minions... play".

I cbf thinking of more I'm too tired. My eyes are itchy from the smoke, and I have either sunburn or normal burns from the campfire mixed with the unholy cold air. So no more staring at the very white minimalist Blogger UI =P

i thought he was a terrorist

HOLY FUCK I FINISHED THIS POST AND WAS LINKING SOURCES AND THEN CHROME FREAKING CRASHED AND ONLY MANAGED TO AUTOSAVE LIKE 8 WORDS. WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH GOOGLE. OKAY THIS IS ALL RETYPED.

In that questionnaire story today, I was reminded of my wondering before about whether Christianity would be so damn popular in America if they found out that Jesus was most probably not white. And that his appearance is most probably Lebanese/Jordanian/Syrian/Palestinian/the like. I'm sorry but I cannot imagine mainstream whites worshipping someone who isn't perceived as white. Thank God for all that white Jesus marketing, I guess.

Okay now I'm retyping the main body of the post again and thanks to the crash I'm like twice as pissed off so bear with me. I'll probably structure it better this time around though.

Backstory:
We were discussing the Education Rebate. You know the one where you can essentially get a laptop for half price if it's for "educational purposes" and "not porn and Facebook". Now I was recalling that, if the household income was greater than $100,000 then the family will not receive the education tax refund.
So the ignorant dumbshit in question (we'll call them FID for "Fucking Insensitive Dickbag") then goes and says "You know 100k is shit, right". That's pretty much verbatim. If not, the association of an $100k income with the word "shit" is definitely undeniable.
This is loud enough for the whole class to hear, mind you.

Allow me to pause for a few moments to collect my thoughts.

The Numbers:
I will firstly need to present to you some facts. The median household income (as of 2008-2009, and also off wiki... I couldn't be bothered reading ABS) is $66,820. For some reason the state median is the same number. By the definition of the word "median", if you earn a somewhat "somehow worse than shit" income of $66,820, you are wealthier than half the fucking country. This is no mean feat in a country with the 14th highest quality of living, if GDP per capita is anything to go by.
Unfortunately I could not find the standard deviation or mean income so I can't really say that $100,000 a year would make you the top x% most wealthy in the country, but allow me to quickly calculate just how much $100,000 is. It is 149.66% of the median, and if we look at something like a standard distribution curve, I will make the (quite unfounded, unfortunately, but at the same time quite conservative) estimate that that would leave you in the top 10% of families if you earned 100k a year. Note that if $100k is "shit", we'd have a fair way to go to get to "decent", a tad more for "satisfactory" and then some more to "good". By the time we reach "good" we're probably somewhere around $200,000 I'm guessing, which happens to be more than 3 times the national median. Haha, all those idiots living off 70k a year, right?
This, my friends, is either extreme privilege, or extreme ignorance.

And I'm not fucking finished yet:
The reason I labelled FID as such is because there will be some people in the room who do not even reach the $100k range in income. You know what? Fuck that. Everyone in the room except for a maximum of 5 have families earning less than 100k. There is clear evidence for that in how many people talk about claiming their education rebate.
Not only are there people who don't earn $100k a year to offend, there will be kids whose families are on freaking welfare who have to deal with pricks telling them (albeit indirectly) that $100k is some shit quality of life.
I don't know why FID thought it would be appropriate to make such an assertion but it is indeed saddening. I can only hope that it is not representative of the views of the rest of people.

And you know what? I wasn't even fucking wrong. If you'll take a look at this site you'll discover that you'll need to receive Family Tax Benefits A in order to receive the education tax refund. A little digging into this site found that $100k wasn't really a far cry from the actual figure.
If a household has 2 kids both in high school, the maximum income you can have is $107k before not receiving FTB-A (and hence education rebate)
If a household has 2 kids, one in high school and one in uni, then the max income for the family is $109k

And in conclusion:
- Money is not free flowing for a majority of the people we know.
- Man, FID is a dickweed
- And I'm still interested in seeing some reliable stats for any other displays of my personal displays of privilege, say in sexism, in which my (mis?)conceptions may be disproved readily by stats (preferably something believable and not some unsourced blog post). I would appreciate that

Also I couldn't be bothered checking over the post so there may be grammatical mistakes or something. Deal with it please :L

assortment

Things that are so awkward and needs a social resolution
1) When you are walking in opposite directions, and you nod a brief greeting. Sometimes, the eye contact is held for a fraction of a second too long and it's so weird because you don't know whether they intend on talking but you're both walking so fast so fuck that.
2) When it's like 11.30AM and it feels stupid to say "Good morning", but it is not yet a "Good afternoon", while at the same time it's politer than a "hello". Also when the fuck does the "evening" start?!
3) When someone compliments something that isn't quite yours to claim credit of. Recent example is about my laptop. See, if the comment was "I like your laptop", I guess I could say "thankyou" as they were somewhat complimenting my taste in laptop chassis. If they said something more specific like "Your laptop is so pretty" or "Wow that laptop is so thin" I have nfi what to say.
It's not like I made the laptop. I merely purchased it. The compliment is not really for me because in honesty I have very little to do with how the laptop is. Exhibit A:
"Your laptop is so thin!"
"Thanks!"
???
Makes no cents (this is an ultimate pun holy crap I feel so clever)

And also lastly I really dislike reading "all but..."
See, I like it (and it makes sense) when people say something like "I splashed acid on all but one of the adorably fluffy rabbit's faces", because that means all of them but one (all of them except one) are having their faces melted.
But then the one I dislike is "Their faces all but vanished in a matter of seconds". Like where the fuck is the logic in that? Their faces did everything except vanish? I can assure you, their faces melted first and started stuff like nibble carrots later. Much much later. And it confuses the hell out of me every time I have to read something carefully (e.g. science comps, UMAT, etc). Especially in UMAT, where they mean polar opposite things in S1 and S2.
A quick Google of "all but" found that it should mean "almost". So "all but ruined their facial tissue" would be like Harvey Dent, rabbit style. Now I hate it even more. The intuitive interpretation of "all but ruined their facial tissue" implies 1% ruined bunny face, and 99% other stuff. The look-I'm-the-special-kid-called-English interpretation is somehow 99% ruined face and 1% something else.

a quip

You want something done, you do it yourself.


Also, do you think people would hate each other less if there was no internet?
I was reading an article (since lost the link but I'm sure a quick Google of "facebook news feed optimisation" will bring up a similar one) on information tailoring on Facebook, that is, if you seemed to be reading more articles on, say, right-wing politicians, then your newsfeed will return more items on right wing politicians, including more "news" articles as well as status updates and wall posts.
Which is like confirmation bias that you can't even help.
We can only pray that Google is a non-biased way of searching for information. But the Google-cookie-based-ad-streamlining makes me not so sure that the first page of Google results is so unbiased after all :S. They can tailor ads, they can tailor results too, can't they :L

This may also explain the startling lack of "omg I love God and Jesus and the Holy Ghost. Like this if you want to go to Heaven and ignore if you want to go to hell <3<3<3" posts that I've seen on my Facebook newsfeed recently. Or are people just not posting that any more. WHO KNOWS. CONSPIRACY, NOTHING IS REAL.

work it harder make it better

=O
I spent at least 5 minutes of that test checking over the fact that we had to use freaking 690mL of BaCl solution to precipitate 5g of the fertiliser wtf.


Also can you imagine Roman people with pimples ahahahahaha. Because variola means pimple in Latin. I don't know why it's hard to. I can only imagine Julius Caesar or gladiators.


Also, we have abandoned the ideal of a "fundamental understanding", and instead replaced it with a rather defeatist "because HSC" for any phenomena in science that we cannot explain.
I don't remember the example from Chem we had today but it had something to do with saponification. I asked "why" to something I asked "why do non-ionic detergents not lather?" (thanks Max) and the answer was "because HSC".
A good example for "because HSC" is the ionisation of sulfuric acid. It ionises both at the same time because HSC that's why.
Previously, I asked "why" often in Phys. Such as "why does Planck's hypothesis mean that the UV catastrophe is solved?" to which Mr Khoury basically said "because HSC that's why".
And one for the Bio folks - why does the mRNA transcribe only from one side of the DNA, which happens to be the side that has all the right bases to be read off nicely by the tRNA? Because HSC that's why.

It feels so good to look at a physics data sheet and understand what the fuck is going on. Back in year 11 when all we used it for was like F=ma and v=ut+1/2at^2 and shit, we'd look at the relativistic equations or gravitational attraction and go WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT MONSTER. And also look at random constant like Planck's and Rydbergs and go "what the fuck would you ever use such a gay number for". On a similar note, Max and I were talking about how good it is to be able to understand and more of what goes on on Wikipedia. Before that shit could've been written in Narnian for all I knew.



Oh btw
"What's he wearing?"
*obscene coughing gesture* I hope I can remember what these mean when I look back

eshays bro

Hello children who read regularly, through thick and thin. I'm here to share a list of essay words I just compiled for myself, grouped into different brackets of synonymonity - feel free to suggest your own!

Explores
Questions
Challenges

Establishes

Emphasises
Underlines
Underscores
Illustrates
Highlights
Exemplifies
Accentuates
Epitomises
Demonstrates
Manifests
Portrays }
Displays } These are rather shitty and weak as discussion words
Shows   }

Represents
Parallels

Reveals
Exposes

Contrasts
Juxtaposes


Remember, kiddies, the marks for sophistication are not in your use of thesaurus'd words, but rather in your effective analysis of the text. It's better to use a simple word that you know the precise usage of, than thesaurus a word that sounds incompetent in the context of your sentence.
See I just thesaurus'd "awkward", and came up with the more impressive sounding "incompetent", and I hope you can agree with me in that "awkward" portrays my point better than "incompetent" does. Never forget that English teachers know more English words than you do, and hence see through thesaurus-bullshittery :P

I was going to post something else but I have forgotten so I'll leave you with that.

ipood

At athletics I lost my Sennheiser CX300's =O
At the same time, I lost my adaptor cable for my iPhone case but that's not too bad seeing as I never use my phone for music anyhow.

I reverted back to Apple earphones for the time being. They sound bad. If you can hear the difference between 320kbps and 128kbps it means you are not using Apple earphones. Or possibly it's just the difference between in-ears and earbuds. When I'm on Apple I am quite certain I lose all my bass and the mids are bit stronger than what I'm used to. Plus earbuds are uncomfortable.

I discovered the id America Sparks, which are very pretty earphones, though I have nfi as to the functional ability of them. So I'm being superficial.

Omgah the Aluminium Silver!!! So difficult to hide in class

But they are 60 dorrar =(. Plus shipping. I'll probably another set of Senns from Ebay after exams cos they're tried and tested to be good enough

NTS: They sound shit out of the box. Must break in.