Busy, busy week -- Nian has completed her DS-230 form. After I get my I-864 filled out and sent back there is little left to do but wait for Nian's final visa interview. I've been planning to blog more, but until my GRE test next month and jury duty the week after passes I think I'll be lucky to manage more than a short blurb per week. Maybe I'll go more in depth on Monday with the Labor Day holiday and all. With any luck, maybe next Labor Day Nian will be with me here.

Well I see the ol' webpage odometer has clicked over past 10,000. If this blog were a car it would no longer have that brand-new car feel or smell. My blog's smell has probably not altered much over the last 2 years, but what that smell is I leave for my readers judge.

I'm not sure why we care about round numbers like 10,000. McDonalds use to keep track of the very round number of Billions-Sold. It seems odd, but I actually use to notice whenever the local McDonalds would click over from say 15 Billion Sold to 16 Billion sold. I remember seeing "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" in 1977 and in a blatant case of product placement it showed the exterior of a Macdonald with its sign declaring 24 Billion Sold, which, not too coincidentally I'm sure, coincided with the tally at our own local McDonalds. Somewhere close to 25 years ago, somewhere past the 40 Billion sold mark, McDonalds just went to "Billions Sold."

My Wife and I have eaten more than once at McDonalds in China, the chain is hugely popular there, so these days the Billion ticker would probably go up weekly. I'll take a rough guess that by now McDonalds is at about 500 billion burgers sold. If so, then in maybe 15-30 more years they should hit the Trillion mark. Numbers like a Trillion almost make numbers like 24 Billion seem quaint and understandable, some small multiple of the number of people on the Earth, about 4-5 burgers per person. But When McDonalds gets to the Trillion mark that will mean literally HUNDREDS of burgers sold for every man women and child on the face of the Planet, a stack of burgers that would reach 10 times farther than the moon. At this milestone (or even the current 1/2 trillion one) the number becomes so unimaginably large as to stupefy with its enormity and implied excess. I'm sure this is the main reason McDonalds dropped the Billions-Sold marketing gimmick -- the numbers have become so large as to remind us we eat WAY TOO MANY damn hamburgers.

I've often wondered if anyone from McDonalds ever approached Carl Sagan about saying his trade mark "Biiiilyuhns and Biiiiilyuhns of Stars" (with burgers-sold substituted for stars of course) in a commercial, back when McDonalds still played the billions sold game.

Now to segue from numbers to fame, which are not wholly unrelated, specifically my own fame, which admittedly comes nowhere near McDonalds' or Carl Sagan's of course. In this matter I ponder what would it mean to literally meet Andy Warhol's famous "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes," dictum. With the advent of the internet this is still not literally true, but is probably closer to being true than at any other previous point in time.

Getting back to me and my 10,000 page views, lets assume the average person who clicks on BNL remembers "Bare Naked Larry" or "DumbSwede" for one day. A very small number of regulars may remember longer, but they are most likely offset by those who click through BNL and forget it as soon as they leave. Making these assumptions I have accumulated about 10,000 person/days of fame. With 300 million people in America, 150 million people would have to have been aware of me for true fame. Thus far on the Fame-O-Meter I have acquired 10000/150,000,000 days of fame, which equates to, drum roll please, 5.76 seconds of fame! If you demand my fame only accumulate while my pages are actively being read, and here lets assume a generous 5 minutes of reading per view, then my fame plummets to a mere .0192 seconds of fame, about 1/5 the time it takes to blink your eyes. At this rate (assuming the more stringent fame requirement) it should only take 8 more years for my Fame to last more than the blink of an eye. Ah well, at least until then I get to reuse my Eye-Blink GIF image.

I've been thinking about my dad quite a bit again lately, don't really know why. There were many things I did for him both large and small, and yet there were also a few small little things I didn't do for him that nag at my conscious and until today I hadn't really known why. The small things nag at me not because there weren't good reasons at the time that made them impractical, but because my father was at my mercy for realizing these requests. Perhaps he thought the few things I didn't do were from neglect and not from impracticality. If he were reasonably able bodied he could have taken care of them for himself, or at least discovered they were not easily obtained and decide for himself how much time and energy to invest.

I once had a vibrating razor I had used once while visiting my dad. I had picked it up at a dollar store in the mid-80s. It used regular razor blades and a single triple-a battery. It worked fairly well. Between visits it broke. Sure enough on that next visit he asked if he could try it, suspecting it might make shaving with his arthritic hands easier, but it just wasn't possible since I no longer had it. I looked in several stores after that visit, but never again found a vibrating razor. This was long before Google.com or Ebay.com so this is one simple thing I was unable to do for my father. Maybe it's fresh in my mind again as Gillette has recently brought its own M3Power vibrating razor to market. Such a simple thing, such and inexpensive thing to bring my father a little joy. I let him down. Strange that this almost brings tears to my eyes today.

Changing the subject to Nian and myself. Our change of agent fee has finally been received by the USICS (formerly INS). It took a full 6 weeks for them to accept and cash the money order. I had made several phone calls inquiring about the hold up. In the end they said they were sending me new forms, but in the delay waiting for the new forms (which were also taking too long) they found my agent fee forms and money order. Now I have to wait for proof of finance forms. That should just about be the last step before Nian's interview in China for her visa, though that is still a year off due to J-1 restrictions.

"Suicide, Suicide, Suicide!" the words come screaming from the TV set in the same voice used to announce Monster Truck Rallies on "Sunday, Sunday, Sunday!" I can't believe in how bad taste this commercial is, advertising a lawyer's service for an upcoming class action suit against some drug. The words "SUICIDE" dominate the screen, to their right is the still image of an obviously distressed and emaciated male along with a list of drugs, assumedly with this side-effect tendency. Some kind of deep gothic chant music pounds in the background. Fox News is running this commercial in high-rotation. I thought after the first day it would certainly get yanked as "insensitive" -- but no. Maybe it is a local cable feed commercial -- I'd have to believe this thing would spark larger condemnation if released on a larger scale. The first time I viewed this I thought it was some kind of poor taste parody, but no -- poor taste reality instead.

The weekend has been spent buried in a GRE study handbook. I will sure be glad once I get it over with.

I wish everybody would shut up about John Karr and the JonBenet Ramsey murder case (damn, and now I'm talking about them). The DNA evidence will be in soon enough. Just SHUT UP already. All this damn speculation won't change one damn thing.

Word of a Chinese AIDS vaccine trial has finally hit Slashdot.org and Western news outlets, Nian informed me about it a couple of days ago. Here is a Chinese news release.

I posted an idea for simplifying liquid explosive detection to a Slashdot.org discussion, but I got to the discussion late and I doubt many have viewed it. Slashdotters seem to be of the opinion that airport security measures are overblown and mainly a cynical political ploy by those in power. I myself don't know. Interestingly Nian feels the security is perhaps NOT good enough in America, as her experience in her native China is of much tougher and thorough security.

One last little nit with Blogger.com, my login and password have defaulted to log me in for years, now it tries to override my default and take me to a blogger account based on my Gmail address name. I'm not sure if this an attempt by the people at Google to be helpful or insultingly intrusive.

Oh, wait, one more last last thing, there is an addendum to my last post (far out as it was).

Some recent thinking about the purpose of the Universe revolves around the possibility that the Universe acts as a huge quantum-computer and that by design or side-effect represent one huge quantum calculation. No one knows what the result of that calculation might represent, though I will head off many at the pass that might suggest the final result is the number 42 (read "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" if you are unfamiliar with this number).

Might I suggest, only partly tongue-in-cheek, that the Universe represents an enormous game of Solitaire by God?

The rules: Start Universe See how long it takes for Universe/Game/Quantum-Calculation to organize into a being of equal intellect Merge with resulting God Entity Start another game

Note: nothing says God can't start as many games in parallel as he/she/it wants (though "wants" may be a misapplied word with respect to an omnipotent being). Not every game ends in a win and some universes may continue forever without creating a God caliber intellect.

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* Addendum 2006-08-20
Not to be too compulsive on this subject, but I am not so perplexed as to why the universe exists, but rather why logic or math seems to exist. If the universe failed to exist it seems that logic and math would still hold. The fact that the universe is habitable by beings able to think and reason logically and mathematically seems bound to its existence in some profound, but ultimately unknowable way. Perhaps math and logic make possible the existence of an ultimately intelligent, though shy of omniscient, entity at the end of time. An entity which, by a complete understanding of space and time, is able to signal back in time in such a way as to nucleate the universe thus leading to its own exogenisis -- we humans, or some other evolving alien race, being mere stepping stones to its emergence. A sort of "God isn't dead, he just isn't awake yet" universe.

I've just finished a new DumbSwede Slashdot Journal entry: Any Religion That...

I hope I touch a nerve with this editorial. I will wear any hate or condemnation as a badge of pride. I leave it as an exercise to the reader as to which religion or religions I am referring.

I took another practice test for the GRE over my lunch hour, a quantitative section one. I'm sure my speed is increasing, but my overall score stayed about the same. I'm not sure why, but I felt drained after I scored the test, I also felt edgy, almost shaky. I find with practice, instead of becoming more confident and less stressed, just the opposite is happening. I know how to do the problems, but racing against the clock pressures me to a degree I wouldn't have imagined. Hopeful things will get better; I still have over a month to get ready for my first GRE exam, the general exam.

I'm not sure how this happens, but I find I brag quite a bit about my intelligence to my wife. I'm sure I'm smarter than average, but now I'm in a situation where I must prove my assumed intellectual mettle. And then what? Graduate school? More pressure on trying to get in and pay for it.

My friend Apollo (a Java programming expert) did very well (really, really well) on the general GRE, though not so well on the subject test GRE. My fiend Tom has two PHDs and just recently became a professor. My friend Bryan is very successful in business. I think in some way I see doing well on the GRE as an attempt to keep up with my closest friends, who for one reason or the other have all far exceeded average expectations, and until now perhaps I have been bring up the rear.

I've been back from Singapore for more than a couple of weeks now. It took over a week to get back to a regular sleep schedule. I haven't been blogging as much as I would have liked and now I have new distractions. I have registered for a general GRE test and a subject matter GRE test in computer science -- the first in mid September, the latter in early November. It's all part of a plan to get back to school and get a Masters. I have also promised my wife Nian that I would find us a house by the end of my apartment lease. Nian isn't with me yet here in America, and there is another trip back to China in late November to celebrate our one-year anniversary. Nian is studying for the MCAT test to apply for an MBA once she moves here to America. All in all we're one busy family.

I was happy at first to notice a comment to my last post, but it turned out to be SPAM. Now I have to wonder if someone took the time to post the SPAM, or whether some SpamBot is now smart enough to the read the "Captua" (distorted picture of password) that should prevent SPAM. Time will tell -- if it is automated there will SOON be a lot more.

God I wish the war/wars would end. Despite the patriotic drum beating for support of Israel, I don't think many of the "accidents" that have left UN personnel and Lebanese civilians dead are true accidents and now today comes news of a shelling of a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon. I don't doubt Hezballah started this latest round of violence, but Israel's reaction has all the finesse of a bull in a china shop. To some degree I think Israel is not-actively avoiding civilians, not targeting directly exactly, but using any Hezballah presence to extract a revenge toll in civilian casualties. To hell with American media's "how could you think that of Israel." One doesn't have to be anti-Semitic to disapprove the way this war is being waged. The spill over of course is more hatred of America by side effect. Everyone in that region of the world seems to be crazy, but Israel found a way to make the bat-shit crazy Islamic extremist ones to seem sympathetic and noble.

Time to study for the GRE. In future I'll try to blog a little more often, but with a little less obsession on "the look."