Assorted Thoughts 42: Over A Year In And Still Only 600 Pageviews Edition

• I recently spent at least 30 minutes doing surgery on a mechanical pencil.  That might sound weird, but this is a pencil that I've had for six years now.  It got me through my undergraduate education, so it's special.  That probably doesn't make me sound less weird.
• Another thing I legitimately have nightmares about: hooking up with vacuous women.
• I like how I don't have to violate my personal ethos about not following celebrities on Facebook, because enough people I am friends with reshare George Takei's posts that I get the full effect anyway. 
• While everyone else in the department seems to be getting sick, I've so far remained untouched.  I can only assume it's because any bugs that do get in my system die horribly under a deluge of coffee, Dr. Pepper, and Mountain Dew.
• In any multiplayer online first-person shooter, the worst people on the server are almost invariably the snipers.  This is for one of two reasons: either they're way too good at the class, making the game broken and unfun ("Oh hey, I'll look around the corner to see wha- dead.  Let me try another route!  Walk past this window... and dead.  Can I leave the spawn?  Look, and dead.") or they are blithering idiots who don't realize that you can't just hide and snipe forever (missing almost every shot), but instead need to actually try to capture objectives.
• Sir Campsalot is the bane of my existence, not because I hate campers per se, but because I actually try to do shit and they just hang around and be useless.
• I find that a good rule of thumb is that if the internet is making a site out to be a big thing and it's awesome and everyone should do it, don't. This is especially true if CNN is profiling the site.
• I want to put together a computer statistical package called Unethica.  What you do is input all your data and press one big button marked "FIND ME SIGNIFICANCE."  Then the program throws every statistical test known to man at the data and spits out the most significant result it can find.  If it can't find anything significant at all, it just displays the dog from Duck Hunt and plays a loop of mocking laughter.

Assorted Thoughts 41: I Have Neglected This For Two Whole Weeks And I Feel Terrible About It Edition

• The yard and bathrooms of a house rented by three graduate students both serve as intriguing examples of a tragedy of the commons.
• The only way to describe my state of mind upon seeing someone with steampunk goggles upon their person is "barely contained homicidal rage."
• The best possible measurements are those of undulation rates (in hertz).
• I would probably kill my firstborn for a p value of less than 0.001.
• My oceanography professor said that for modeling purposes, you can think of the ocean as a "series of cubes."  It was hard not to cackle uncontrollably.
• Great name for an indie band: Beatnik Stats Club.
• My proposal for a World Peace Day: turn off the ability to comment on every website.  That single act would be the greatest contribution to civility in discourse since we realized that you didn't have to punctuate your speech using sharp rocks.
• If you're going to cross the street wearing big headphones, you deserve anything that happens to you.
• How to finance your time machine research: 
1. Go back in time
2. Invest in Microsoft
3. Use proceeds to fund research into how to go back in time and invest in Microsoft