Las Vegas

So I went to Las Vegas this past weekend with Michael and his mother. Not my first choice of travel destination ( or chaperone, for that matter) but it probably wouldn't have looked very good for me to say "No Mrs. Breitweiser, I'd rather not go on a free trip with you because you drive both Michael and I crazy, thank you," so I reluctantly elected to go. Have you ever been to Las Vegas? I think if I had to vote, I would say that it's the worst large destination type city in the world. Or maybe just worst city in general. My expectation was that the city would be flooded with hordes of good-looking twenty and early thirty somethings, with a scattered number of exceptionally wealthy Europeans and maybe some Asians thrown into the mix. This was not the reality I encountered. The people there are the severely overweight and the scantily clad. The middle aged and above trying to recapture some really sad aspect of their youth, and the solitary, that sit at slot machines for days on end, frowning, smoking, and spending money they won't ever win back. It was just so sad, Jane. Everyone in these casinos just has the most drawn and terrible look on their face. They are either depressed or they are drunk enough to convince themselves that they aren't. Lining both sides of the walkways up and down the strip are Mexican men and women wearing too-big tshirts with phone numbers that advertise instant access to the hottest girls. They're passing out thousands of these little cards with naked girls on them and they all end up on the streets and sidewalks. It's 107 degrees in the sun (which is where they're standing all day and you are walking). Not my idea of a vacation. That being said, we did get to see some good shows: the Crazy Horse at MGM, Blue Man Group at The Venetian, and Cirque du Soleil's "O," which were all varying degrees of awesome. The food was generally overpriced and overrated.

Am I being too uppity about this city? Judgemental? It just made me so sad. And I love drinking too!

Have you written me a mindblowing iPad app yet?

Book of the week! (month? Six months?)

As my mother has so astutely noticed, I seem to be somewhat unemployed at the moment. To remedy her apparent distaste for my lying around and watching food network for the better part of the day, I pretty much spend my time on the Internet (doing really worthwhile things mind you), studying for the GRE, or reading for pleasure. As such, I've got a lot of reading done recently.

Our first book of the week was recommended to me by none other than gangy herself and is called The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery. It's just a really eloquently written/translated book about two characters in very different situations, who see the world in very similar ways. It also gives some really brief and generalized information about certain philosophies that I thought were really interesting and accessible. Anyway, I'm including a little excerpt that i found really striking, because it so accurately described the college experience that I saw in so many of my classmates (including Dan, the Actual secret hot one). It is one of the two main characters describing her reaction after reading the masters thesis of a very wealthy but apparently depthless tenant of the building in which she is the concierge:

"Colombe Josse, who has no ongoing preoccupation with Beauty or the destiny of tables, is relentless in her exploration of Ockham's philosophical thought, but she ventures only where her utterly uninteresting semantic simpering cares to take her. The most remarkable thing is that the intention that presides her undertaking, and that is to make Ockham's philosophical theses into the consequence of his conception of God's action, by reducing his years of philosophical labor to the rank of a secondary excrescence of his theological thought. It is sidereal, as inebriating as bad wine and above all the perfect illustration of the way a university works: if you want to make a career, take a marginal, exotic text (William Ockham's Sum of Logic) that is relatively unexplored, abuse it's literal meaning by ascribing it to an intention that the author himself had not been aware of...distort that meaning to the point where it resembles an original thesis...burn all your icons while you're at it...devote a year of your life to this unworthy little game at the expense of a collectivity whom you drag from their beds at seven in the morning, and send a courier to your research director."

This of course all makes more sense within the context of the story but for some reason I really liked how she collectively described a pretty significant number of Bowdoin College honors projects in just a few lines (those damn honors students just got so self-righteous by the end of the year). Anyway, I really enjoyed the book. It's a really good story and the characters are just as cranky as I've felt at my very crankiest.

How goes your internship? I dig the BTSD makeover...

Also, I just wrote this on my new iPad, which was a very unexpected graduation gift from my uncle and his friend. It's like having a great big iPod touch, only without most of the useful apps that it used to come with. Fun to type on.

Inspiration.

http://www.recombinantrecords.net/docs/2009-12-Challenged.html

If Erik only knew...

Scientific American Mind 21, 7 (2010)
doi:10.1038/scientificamericanmind0510-7c

Neandertal Symbolism

Nicole Branan

Abstract

Abstract thinking may date back further than previously thought

A metal pin adorning a military uniform signifies rank; a ring on the left hand's fourth finger announces matrimony. Most scientists thought that the capability for such symbolic thinking was unique to modern humans, but a new study suggests that it dates back to before the Neandertals.

[EDIT]

Neanderthal Genome Shows Most Humans Are Cavemen

By Brandon Keim May 6, 2010 | 4:35 pm | Categories: Anthropology, Genetics

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/05/neanderthal-genome/#more-21437#ixzz0s9nDOzet