Last night I dreamt I was eating mayonnaise and when I woke up all my mayonaise was gone

True story. When I was a missionary in Albania one of the guys with whom I served was very prone to sleep talking, walking, and all kinds of fun stuff. One night I woke up and could see a light coming out of the refrigerator in the kitchen and then a little later the guy with whom I was serving, for reasons of anonymity we'll just call him Toni, went back to his bed and fell asleep without saying a word. The next day during lunchtime Toni opens the refrigerator and asks me what happened to all of his mayonnaise. I remind him that I don't eat mayonnaise and then tell him what I saw the night before. He then shakes his head and says unconvincingly, "No, that couldn't have been what happened um..."

And that's why you don't buy mayonnaise kids.

Get Partially Real

So this past week I had 'midterms', even though the quarter is ending in less than three weeks, in Partial Differential Equations and Real Analysis. Some of you may be saying to yourselves, "Oh Billy, having midterms this late in the the quarter isn't that strange, sometimes teachers like to have two of three midterms and so one of them ends of happening later in the quarter if they're spread out evenly." True that, I agree. Both of these however were the only tests we've taken this quarter and so they were more like finals than midterms.

My real problem stemmed from over studying for one midterm and under studying for the other. PDE's is a relatively easy class and so I didn't take much time studying for it, while real analysis is usually always killer. Oh well, better luck next time I suppose.

Hellboy

Right now Ally seriously wants to kill me because I'm watching the trailer for Hellboy 2. Imagine what will happen when it comes in the mail from netflix...

Abortion

Ally and I were recently talking about abortion, since it poses so many interesting ethical questions, and the conversation ended something like this:

Billy-"I think if someone could make a clone of himself without a brain and the clone just lived on life support, then it would be okay for someone to use the clone for spare organs, limbs, etc. "

Funny how easy it is to get off topic like that. Its just that abortion really brings up so many questions such as 'what is life?' and 'what role does science play in defining the matter?'. I was thinking about how in many countries and states the general rule for how late is too late to abort is 'If the fetus can survive outside of the mother's body then its too late too abort.' (hold on because now things are going to get a little sci-fi). What about the day when science will be able to create a test tube baby and nurture through its entire gestation period, will abortion not be allowed because technically the fetus could survive outside the mother's body any moment after conception? It just seems to me that we're defining when its okay to terminate a potential human life by how advanced our medical resources are. Personally I think that just goes to show the lengths we go to as a society to get around answering a philosophical question like 'when does life start?'

Naturally the test tube baby idea led us to talking about cloning and whether or not it is right to clone one's self and then use the clone for 'spare parts' in a manner of speaking. I felt that it is the mind which defines us as human. Since having a brain seems to be a necessary, but perhaps not sufficient, condition for the existence of a mind, then if the clone had no mind then there would be no crime in using the body for any purpose we saw fit.

Anyway, that's the kind of conversations I have with Ally sometimes when we're lying in bed trying to go to sleep. Just thought I'd throw that out there.

Minesweeper and the Beach

I just finished a game of minesweeper on expert. The reason I'm happy is because the game almost always ends this way, there's two spares left and only one of them is a mine. Guess which one always gets picked. Like not just most of the time, but an unreasonably high amount of the time.
Anyway, today Ally and I went to the beach to celebrate Jay's birthday. Jay and Rosie are another couple we met at the institute a while ago. They're a pretty cool couple. Jay's an EE major who plays guitar while Rosie just got her degree in history and is substitute teaching. Teaching sounds like a really rewarding job to me. In the past I've done a bit of tutoring and its something I enjoy quite a bit. The higher the level of the math the more rewarding it feels. Sometimes I think being a university professor is something I would enjoy a lot. However I feel uncertain about doing that since I still haven't really had any good research experience and I'm not sure how easy it is to find jobs like that. Its something I guess that's been weighing on my mind a bit and I just wanted to get it out. Oh yeah, and the other little concern, I probably wouldn't make that much and et I will be in a good deal of debt from school. S'ka gje.

My First Time...again

So this is not my first attempt at a blog. I tried the live journal thing and it was just too tricky having to um.. what's the word? Oh yeah, write, It was too difficult to write in it. So I'm thinking this should go a lot better. I guess only time will tell.