Things I currrently care about, by percent

Another reason why I spend too much time on/ thinking about Wikipedia

I found out today that going to any random article and clicking the first link on the page (excluding parenthesis) will always lead you to the Philosophy page. (try it!!!) I found this interesting and wanted to know why. Here's what I came up with. I call it the Network Theory of Abstraction. (That'll be in textbooks in fifty years give or take)

- The first sentence in Wikipedia articles introduces the subject to the reader on the most basic, broad level, that most readers should be familiar with.
- This lends itself to a pattern of increasing abstraction
- Philosophy is the 'end of the line' of abstraction.

Anyway, I just thought this was really, really interesting, and it kind of makes me wonder what other kind of statistical patterns we could find if we could collect and organize all the data on Wikipedia? So at this point you may be asking, "so what"? This is important because no other collection of knowledge has even come close to 1) the sheer volume of information and 2) the internal consistency and inter-correlative nature of Wikipedia's content.

In English: I love Wikipedia.

Hey girls

ADD is not an adjective, and other assorted grammar gripes

ADD is not an adjective.

Neither is OCD. Both are mental disorders, which constitutes status as a noun.

"You guys" is not grammatically necessary.

The word "you" in the English language can mean an individual, or a group. If it isn't obvious whether you are referring to the group or an individual, there are a multitude of creative ways to imply whom you are addressing, which can really spice up an otherwise dull conversation. And, no, that abomination that goes by the name of "y'all" doesn't count.

I and me.

"These are some pictures of Jan and I."

NO.

How many times have you said "These are some pictures of I?" That's what I thought. I distinctly remember having an argument with my first grade teacher (Mrs. Krosen, for the record) about how she was wrong that you always use "I" when mentioning two people in such a manner. They way to determine if you need to use "I" or "me", is take the other person out of the sentence and write it just like you normally would.

We suck at direct/indirect object stuff.

Let's face it: we suck at knowing when to use who, whom, that, which, etc., so we've come up with some pretty creative ways around this, most of which are more wordy and inconvenient than that which we were attempting to avoid in the first place.

Feminists are to blame for the improper use of "they"

Somewhere in the deepest, darkest depths of the 80's, conspiring women decided than the gender-neutral "he" was responsible for the disparity in wages between men and women, and the way to combat this was to force the world to use the tongue-twisting phrase "his or her" when referring to an individual of indefinite gender. Seeing as this was both impractical and just plain stupid, people decided to use the word "they" for the gender-neutral pronoun:

"I don't know who was on the phone but they said to call them back"

Wait, wha? Were you talking to more than one person? Because last time I checked, "they" referred to more than one person. Thanks, ladies.

Cause and effect

It doesn't take a genius to know that the nature of the human mind is frail before the complexity that is our Universe. One topic that I've been giving much thought lately is causality, more casually known as cause and effect. An inquiry into this topic sheds a little light on how fundamentally blind we are to the nature of... uh.. everything.

The water is boiling. Why?

The water is hot. Why?

The water's molecules have a greater density of kinetic energy than the surrounding particles. Why?

The water is on the stove, which is hot. Why is the stove hot? and why is the water on the stove?

I think you guys see what I'm getting at. It is an unavoidable conclusion that every observation is a question, simply by asking, "why"? So at what point along the infinite line of "why's" do we find a satisfactory answer? When we ask "why" and can't even think of a possible answer. This is when we assume we have found causation.

So, is this true?

In a few words: yes and no. Every point along the infinite "why and how" curve is a valid answer to "why did x happen".

So, now that I've managed to fill your head with an amorphous amalgam of aimless abstraction, here's the *ahem* conclusion of this post-

Science seeks to find the "why" behind natural phenomena; inevitably, this will only lead to an exponential increase in the one area of knowledge we can be sure about- what we don't know.