A few of my more recent obsessions

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.

Colorado mother gives newborn amazing creative name

BOULDER, CO- In a stroke of linguistic brilliance, Boulder mother Tracy Potts decided to name her newborn son Kaieydein, making her the harbinger of the future of American culture.

"At first I thought it was just, Caden, and I was about to write it down, you know, C-A-D-E-N, but then I remembered I'm supposed to ask the mother how she wanted to spell it. So I did," said Jackie Phellps, the attending nurse at Potts' delivery.

Apparently, Potts had other plans. "Well, I don't really remember what really happened to be honest, all that morphine and nitrous. All I do remember is not being sure which way I wanted to spell it. 'Cause there's like C-A-D-E-N, or K-A-I-D-E-N, or K-A-Y-D-E-N, just so many ways."

For privacy purposes, Kaiedein was not photographed.

In her opiate-induced stupor, Potts stumbled across the greatest breakthrough in nomenclature since the mid to late-1800s when people began thinking outside the box and stopped naming their kids the same thing for a few dozen generations before moving on to a different Biblical figure. "Things like this just don't happen every day. As a linguist with a Ph. D. in American nomenclature, you can only dream that something like this can happen within your lifetime.

"This will definitely be a boon for the linguistics department. Nothing has spiked interest in baby names like this since the 80's when women decided all the sudden they wanted to name their baby girls something as androgynous as possible, like Bobby." said Dr. Thomas Miller, head of the University of Pennsylvania Linguistics department. Dr. Miller also stated he is planning on making this a last-minute addition to his upcoming linguistics and naming text, Spelling is for Dweebs- The American Way of Doing Stuff Like Naming Your Kids and Cheating in Scrabble.

Yet not every sociocultural advancement is without its detractors. "That's just dumb," said 22 year-old college junior Trent Blackfoot. "He'll probably just end up getting made fun of his whole life."

"What is important to understand about children who get made fun of, is nine out of ten times, it is out of jealousy," says Psychiatrist George Livingston. "It will certainly be hard growing up around children whose lack of parental genius is made obvious by the conventional spellings of their names, but eventually the children will learn to appreciate and accept Kaieydein as the product of unbridled brilliance without seeing him as a threat."

Potts says she has big plans for Kaieydein, like somehow explaining why his name fails to follow the most basic rules of spelling, but for now she says she's just going to focus on loving him for who he is. "I can't really remember how his name is spelled, but it's written on his wrist band. But I guess I love him anyway or something" •



Tyler McCord is the Editor-in-Chief of A Creatively Titled Blog.