Did you know that DNA Polymerase both catalyzes the synthesis of DNA molecules and repairs strands? I know! How interesting! Does this fact play into your life at all? What about if 99% of the world's population died? 

You may remember a letter I wrote to my mom the other year when I went to the National Equality March.


Well, I got a message from her this morning. She is working with a few people to start a PFLAG chapter in Saline, conservative as hell, MI. (She also came out and gave two rousing speeches at the SAS board of education meeting.)

I love you, mama.

I was walking home with a sandwich in hand when I suddenly started contemplating how people tweet. Since I started using twitter, it has always been a restricted blog. It was a way to cram as much information as possible into a 140 character dose, like a blog reduction. I am not alone in this venture. I have seen stories, recipes, and general life updates. These types of posts are the "microblogs." These are great for the lazy blog readers. In three minutes, I can catch up on everything that happened in the past week.
What I realized today is that Twitter is an excellent opportunity to practice simplicity. The 140 character limit isn't a restriction within which I need to force the account of my day. Instead, it is a challenge to write whatever I want to say in the simplest form. My new goal is to practice simplicity when I tweet. . . at least some of the time.

As you know, I dearly love This American Life. I love it so much that I keep episodes and listen to them over and over again. So much that I enrolled in a minicourse on the Audio Essay. Well, I'm listening to episode #178: Superpowers, and this particular quote struck me:

"Typically, this is how it goes. People who turn invisible sneak into the movies or onto airplanes, people who fly stop taking the bus. Here is one thing pretty much no one ever says, 'I would use my power to fight crime.' No one seems to care about crime..."
"...Going-to-Paris man is not a superhero, and I have to say this drove me crazy a little bit, we are, after all, talking about super powers. Why not take down organized crime, bring hope to the hopeless, swear vengeance on the underworld, if only a little bit?"

Do we really need superpowers to inspire hope? I think not. Hope is a funny thing. Now I'm no philosopher, linguist, or sociologist; but I think hope is simply our belief that something will be the way we want it to be. Kind of like wishing, but hope has a little more wiggle room. When you wish for something, you are usually pretty specific, "I wish I had a bit more money," or "I wish things didn't turn out like this," or even, "Do you think we will make it to the top? ...I wish."

Hope, in a way, prepares you for disappointment, but gives you that little bit of light inside. "Oh, I hope so!" has a much lighter feeling than "I wish." People inspire hope, desire generates wishes. Hope gives you the strength to continue, wishing makes you realize where you are. "You cannot live on hope alone, but, without it, life is not worth living."



Go give some hope out today.

One of these days, I will transcribe some of my favorite sketches from I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again. Until then, enjoy this one I stole from wikipedia:

I have a dilemma. I like when people ask me about the nutritional contents of food and the kind of diet one should maintain to be a healthy person. That is not what people ask. People, take my mom for example, will ask, "Is this particular food good for you?" I always try to provide some kind of answer first. If the question is, "Is tofu good for you?" I might start by saying that tofu is made from a vegetable (which means nothing considering everything from show polish to cups can be made using vegetables), and that soybeans and tofu are often good sources of complete vegetable protein. I then try to get the interrogator to think about what it means for a food to be good or bad.

What does it mean for a food to be "good" for you?
Well, it must be a food that extends or enriches our lives in some way. However, there are now easy answers. No single food has everything that we need, what is worse, we don't even know all of the things we need to consume to lead happy, healthy lives (we think we do, but we don't). So far, a "good" food is one that has some chemical or substance that discourages a visit from the skinny fellow with the scythe. We must now ask the question, "Is any food that has at least some life preserving property considered good for us?" Probably not. An item that is filled with whey and calcium sounds like it could be a pretty healthy bone builder...until you realize it is Easy Cheese (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.10/start.html?pg=4).

Obviously, a "good" food is one that is more live preserving chemicals than life stealing chemicals. That means vitamins must be amazing! Wrong again. One can't live entirely on vitamins alone, we need carbohydrates, proteins, and fats. But wait, aren't those bad or something? No. We are just confused, and I haven't even begun to talk about the social aspects of food (for example eating regularly with the family often leads to better students http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1200760,00.html). That isn't a good source, but it just goes to show that food most definitely has a social aspect.

It's pretty clear to me that in the government's attempts to give health advice, big business's attempts to sell their products, big science's attempt to be right, and a handful or people's attempts to get rich (cough*Atkins*cough), the true meaning of "good" food has been completely lost. So next time you ask me whether bread or beans or nut bars or whatever is "good" for you. You know why my response is delayed: I think about everything I just wrote (and more) before I tell you that, "it is made from vegetables."

Brian and I want to make a grand project for next year and one of the ideas we had was to have a problem solving competition. The competition would be like a hybrid of Odyssey of the Mind and Science Olympiad-- teams of students would work together to solve problems. Teams would consist of students from different areas of study and knowledge bases. The problems they would solve would be crafted by university faculty or other students and would require knowledge of a variety of subjects to solve. Teams might be given a month to solve the problems and would come together to show off their solutions to a panel of judges who would determine a winner or something.