out of the blue

I'm a occasional Facebooker. I accept many friend requests, but I can't remember when I last made one myself. Some of my closest friends also have this strategy. So, today, I added Cami and Becky and Aaron, along with a few others. I thought it was a shame that I have a bunch of Facebook "friends" who I don't know or care to know as much as many of my actual friends. Don't expect this to mean I will use Facebook more: I won't. Henceforth, I will go back to my usual ways.

I feel like an addicted man who has been denied his pleasure for a month, finally getting back on it. I'm back in Spokane with my computer.

Chinese facing shortage of wives

China will have 30 million more men than women by 2020 making it hard for them to find wives, a report says.

Mexico leader in tortilla pledge

Mexico's President Calderon vows to tackle the soaring price of tortillas, the flat corn bread which is a diet staple.

Also, Making Light posted a list of all hamster-headlines in the BBC in the past few years.

Some of my favorites: Apparently deceased hamster revives, gnaws hole in coffin, tunnels out of grave, and finds its way home; Bus company apologizes for charging hamster 10p for ride, issues lifetime bus pass; Oldest hamster food cache found. (Miocene, 17 million years old.); Man jailed for 60 days after drop-kicking ex-girlfriend’s hamster.

So, you may remember Aaron Brown's post about torsion of the testis. I assumed that it was a morbid way to kill someone, but I was wrong. Most people have some structure that keeps their testicles from moving around too much. Overexcited genitals can get themselves into trouble without such structures. Apparently I'm some mutant freak: through some genetic aberration, I got gypped. Here's how it went.

On Saturday I was feeling great. I was enjoying the weekend at the coast, and I was ready to go back to Spokane to get some stuff done before school started. Sunday morning, I started feeling some pain in my lower abdomen, but I shrugged it off. It was something that happened a few times a year, and I figured it was a normal sort of pain that everyone got. When it didn't fade like usual after an hour or so, I began to worry a little. But it wasn't until a few hours later that it hit its peak, with me doubled over in pain. We decided to go to the hospital. I got a nice long ultrasound (before the painkillers kicked in), after which the doctor came in to give me the news.

"You have a twisted testicle." My first reaction, naturally, was to laugh. It wasn't a terribly funny joke, but it was certainly unexpected. After a moment of reflection, though, I realized that he wasn't joking. He continued, "Your left testicle has no blood flow. We're going to rush you to Portland for surgery." Wow.

So they gave me a nice big pain reliever, and I got back to Portland an hour or so before my parents, which was unexpected. We apparently hit 93 miles an hour (which isn't technically legal, even for an ambulance), but when we got to the hospital it took about fifteen minutes to figure out where to send me. Talk about a weird contrast.

They eventually sent me directly to the operating room, where they had me slide off of the stretcher onto the table, after which I remember absolutely nothing. I know they gave me a combination anesthetic/amnesiac, which knocks out short term memory along with you. While I'm completely out of it, they right my nether regions, throw in a few more stitches to keep them there, and sew me back up. Next thing I know, I'm in the recovery room, and they send me to my hospital bed.

Now, I've been amused throughout the entire process, but at this point I finally get to talk to other people. I call Becky and tell her that I won't be flying in the next day, I call Josh to tell him I won't be on his flight. I call Nathan and tell him (and Eric and Aaron) to come visit me, and finally call Sarah and tell her all about it.

"Hey, Sarah, guess where I am!"
"Uhhh, your house?"
"Nope."
"Nathan's house?"
"No, but Nathan's coming to visit me."
"Okay, I give up."
"I'm in the hospital!"
"What?!"

That was fun. Anyway, Nathan and friends visited me and we laughed about the whole situation for a while. He climbed into my hospital bed at one point when I vacated it and tried calling his mom to tell her he was in the hospital, but nobody answered. After they left, I managed to get a decent amount of sleep between when the nurses came in to check on me. I got a bit more pain medicine that morning at 6:00, but I haven't had any more since.

So, at the end of it all, I didn't lose anything important, I got a quick ride back to Portland, and I enjoyed the strange embrace of anesthesia once again. Although I certainly wouldn't choose to go through such an experience, I think I made the best of it.

The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit—and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains.

And the smell of rot fills the country.

Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates—died of malnutrition—because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.

The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quicklime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

I like the feeling when I begin to read a book, and by the time I'm 20 pages into it I realize that I am in fact rereading it rather than delving into a work entirely new to me. I am currently in the middle of Douglas Adams' The Salmon of Doubt which I first found on someone's coffee table at a party thrown by one of my parents' friends a number of years ago and then promptly forgot about (being a long party, I had a few hours to spend reading in a corner). Here's a wonderful piece from it:

FOR CHILDREN ONLY

You will need to know the difference between Friday and a fried egg. It's quite a simple difference, but an important one. Friday comes at the end of the week, whereas a fried egg comes out of a hen. Like most things, of course, it isn't quite that simple. The fried egg isn't properly a fried egg till it's been put in a frying pan and fried. This is something you wouldn't do to a Friday, of course, though you might do it on a Friday. You can also fry eggs on a Thursday, if you like, or on a cooker. It's all rather complicated, but it makes a kind of sense if you think about it for a while.

It's also good to know the difference between a lizard and a blizzard. This is quite an easy one. Though the two things sound very much alike, you find them in such very different parts of the world that it is a very simple matter to tell them apart. If you are somewhere inside the Arctic circle then what you are looking at is probably a blizzard, whereas if you are in a hot and dry place like Madagascar or Mexico, it's more likely to be a lizard.

This animal is a lemur. There are lots of different kinds of lemurs, and they nearly all live in Madagascar. Madagascar is an island—a very large island: much, much larger than your hat, but not as large as the moon.

The moon is much larger than it appears to be. This is worth remembering because next time you are looking at the moon you can say in a deep and mysterious voice, "The moon is much larger than it appears to be," and people will know that you are a wise person who has thought about this a lot.

This particular kind of lemur is called a ring-tailed lemur. Nobody knows why it is called this, and generations of scientists have been baffled by it. One day a very wise person indeed will probably work out why it is called a ring-tailed lemur. If this person is exceedingly wise, then he or she will only tell very close friends, in secret, because otherwise everybody will know it, and then nobody will realise how wise the first person to know it really was.

Here are two more things you should know the difference between: road and woad. One is a thing that you drive along in a car, or on a bicycle, and the other is a kind of blue body paint that British people used to wear thousands of years ago instead of clothes. Usually it's quite easy to tell these two apart, but if you find it at all difficult to say your r's properly, it can lead to terrible confusion: imagine trying to ride a bicycle on a small patch of blue paint, or having to dig up an entire street just to have something to wear if you fancy spending the evening with some Druids.

Druids used to live thousands of years ago. They used to wear long white robes and had very strong opinions about what a wonderful thing the sun was. Do you know what an opinion is? I expect someone in your family has probably got one, so you could ask them to tell you about it. Asking people about their opinions is a very good way of making friends. Telling them about your own opinions can also work, but not always quite as well.

Nowadays most people know what a wonderful thing the sun is, so there aren't as many Druids around anymore, but there are still a few just in case it slips our mind from time to time. If you find someone who has a long white robe and talks about the sun a lot, then you might have found a Druid. If he turns out to be about two thousand years old, then that's a sure sign.

If the person you've found has got a slightly shorter white coat, with buttons up the front, then it may be that he is an astronomer and not a Druid. If he is an astronomer, then one of the things you could ask him is how far away the sun is. The answer will probably startle you a lot. If it doesn't, then tell him from me that he hasn't explained it very well. After he's told you how far away the sun is, ask him how far away some of the stars are. That will really surprise you. If you can't find an astronomer yourself, then ask your parents to find one for you. They don't all wear white coats, which is one of the things that sometimes make them hard to spot. Some of them wear jeans or even suits.

When we say that something is startling, we mean that it surprises us a very great deal. When we sat that something is a starling, we mean that it is a type of migratory bird. "Bird" is a word we use quite often, which is why it's such an easy word to say. Most of the words we use often, like house and car and tree, are easy to say. Migratory is a word we don't use nearly so much, and saying it can sometimes make you feel as if your teeth are stuck together with toffee. If birds were called "migratories" rather than "birds," we probably wouldn't talk about them nearly so much. We'd all say, "Look, there's a dog!" or "There's a cat!" but if a migratory went by, we'd probably just say, "Is it teatime yet?" and not even mention it, however nifty it looked.

But migratory doesn't mean that something is stuck together with toffee, however much it sounds like it. It means that something spends part of the year in one country and part of it in another.

—Douglas Adams

Spent another day primarily reading: spin-the-head mixture of Philip K. Dick sandwiched with Kerouac directly after Tortilla Flats with some light Zelazny alongside. Dick's uncertain realities mixed with Kerouac's stream-of-consciousness narrative—period-bare prose—after Steinbeck (who is an undeniable stylist, though more conventional than Dick or Kerouac) was a confusing mixture. Kerouac's Subterraneans and Dick's VALIS were so eerily similar (not narrative, but on some fundamental, subconscious level of my brain) that I am still having trouble untwining their strands, what was from Kerouac's beat drug scene, and what was from Dick's riding of California counter-culture wave that was influenced by Kerouac. I don't even know much about the two writers and how culturally they were related, but that's how it seems to me. Anyway, it was a crazy ~450 pages of reading today.

Yes, I'm crassly materialistic. So what?

Books

• The Butter Battle Book, Dr. Seuss
• Notes from a Small Island, Billy Bryson
• The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien (Alan Lee illustrated edition)
• Neon Vernacular, Yusef Komunyakaa
• Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot
• Selected Poems, Czeslaw Milosz

Music

• Piano Man, Billy Joel
• The White Album, The Beatles

DVDs

• Firefly
• Serenity
• Love Actually

Computer Stuff

• 1gb usb flash drive
• CD-Rs
• DVD-Rs

Random Stuff

• Awesome shirt
• Candy

Mike Libby likes bugs. He grew up dismantling appliances, and now he disassembles old watches and circuit boards only to assemble insects. They're very pretty.

I just finished my final essay for Philosophy of Technology and e-mailed it to my professors along with the digital sources. It's a bit idealistic, but I think it's an interesting argument. I uploaded it in nice html form here:

Open Source as Human Endeavor.

You can also download the Word document. It's not a perfect essay, and I freely admit I might have some things wrong, but I'm proud of it. I would be happy to hear criticisms so I can improve my writing style, or my knowledge.

The page isn't terribly nice to Internet Explorer, although it doesn't use anything terribly advanced. Again, don't use Internet Explorer in general. It's a pretty terrible browser.