Finding a Girlfriend, Drake Equation Style
So let’s say that I was in the market for finding a significant other. The total candidate pool (C) would then be:
C = Pdc * F * G * A10 * S * Dn * Ra * A
Where:
C = total number of candidates
Pdc = total population of DC metro area
F = ratio of females
G = ratio of college graduates
A10 = ratio of those within a ten-year age range of myself
S = ratio of single
Dn = ratio of nondating
Ra = ratio of atheists/agnostics/nonreligious
A = ratio of those I find attractive
Pledge to End Hunger
Too lazy to volunteer and too cheap to donate? Fine. Click here and sign your name and Tyson Foods will donate 35 lbs. of food on your behalf. You ingrate.
A few years back, I tried an experiment where I went without food of any kind for as long as I possibly could. I wanted to test myself, to see if I could stand with greats like Gandhi, who went for three weeks without food at age 70. (I wasn’t even counting those IRA guys who went for twice as long—that’s just insane.) In the end, I lasted for fifteen days, consuming only water and Dr Pepper the entire time. Ironically, I broke down shortly after volunteering in a soup kitchen, eating a small bag of McDonald’s fries.
Thankfully, starvation of this kind is rare in the developed countries of the world. In the United States of America, for example, very extremely few people actually suffer from malnutrition so extreme that it endangers their life. It does still happen, of course—just ask Dr. Mariana Chilton, one of the friends I made at Share Our Strength’s Conference of Leaders last year. She works with extremely underdeveloped children every single day.
But of far greater concern for a country like the United States is the fact that hunger is still so prevalent. No one is surprised when I say that few Americans die from starvation, but almost everyone I speak with is genuinely surprised to find out that 1 out of 6 children in the United States are at risk of hunger. 12.4 million children (just in the States) are at risk of going 24 hours or longer without food. And they’re not doing it for kicks, like I did.
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Christmas ‘08 With My Family
The Best People to Follow on Twitter
Twitter doesn’t quite rival email for me, but it’s rather close.
Twitter is one of my favorite web apps, right up there with IM and e-mail. I use Twitter for everything from work to news to trivia to play and beyond. But if you’re new to Twitter, you might need a little direction on which people are good to follow. Hence this list.
(Please keep in mind that Twitter is best consumed only when all the content you subscribe to is interesting to you. Don’t just follow everybody. Limit who you follow to under 100 at maximum; I recommend under ten for those who are getting started. A good number to follow is forty or so, once you’re into it.)
The following list is of people that I personally follow, simply due to their interestingness. As I’m not a big fan of celebrities nor up-to-the-minute weather updates, neither of those are listed here. Your tastes may differ quite drastically from mine, so take these suggestions with an appropriate grain of salt. Also note that my very favorite twitterers are bolded as appropriate.
Should I feel bad about things?
When something feels this good, w/o causing harm to others, why not just enjoy it?
Through talking to others over the years, I’ve learned that what I think of as my “conscience” is very different from the ordinary person’s conscience. While it is true that I do feel badly about certain things from time to time, they are almost never the same things that others continue to maintain that I should feel badly about.
The Horrors of Installing Facebook Connect
Although it’s been a number of weeks since I integrated Google’s Friend Connect on EricHerboso.com, I never bothered to write about it because it was by far the easiest install EVER. Installing it literally consisted of going to Google’s web site, hitting a few buttons, typing in a few characters, and then it was over. Google made things super easy.
Installing Facebook Connect, on the other hand, has been an immense pain. Every step I took in getting it to work has been a step lined in tears of sweat. Everything that could possibly go wrong has in fact gone wrong, and it was the most irritating install ever. Horrifyingly, on my second attempt, I even followed an inane video entitled “Add Facebook Connect to your blog in 8 minutes!“. And while following their directions were not hard, it took more like 45 minutes, and at the end of it, it didn’t work at all. Which is severely fucked up, since the video was literally posted only three days earlier. (The sticking point was their usage of uid=’loggedinuser’ — it turns out that ‘loggedinuser’ cannot be called by uid through xfbml. Which makes the entire video pointless.)
Noam Chomsky on Pres.-Elect Obama
End Child Hunger in America
As most of you know, I work as the webmaster of Share Our Strength, a national organization dedicated to ending child hunger. When I first joined, I did not know nearly as much about the issue as I do now. What I’ve learned has astonished me.
Poverty is complex; solving hunger is easy. We already know what works, and we already have the tools in place to ensure no child in America has to go hungry again. The only thing we lack is money.
Let me repeat that for emphasis. The ONLY thing we lack is money.
Change.org is accepting submissions of ideas on how we can change America and will be submitting ten of them to then President Barack Obama on inauguration day. I want the #1 issue that he sees to be ending child hunger in America.
To do this, all I need is for you to go to change.org and vote on this issue. With enough votes, we can ensue that first thing President Obama sees is a plan to end child hunger in America in less than a decade.
A Feminist Viewpoint
Feminism is a tough subject for me to discuss, if only because I generally hang out with a lot of feminist friends who hold distinctly different ideals than I on the topic.
This is not to say that I am anti-feminist, nor is it to imply that my friends are anti-feminist. On the contrary, both my friends and I are staunch believers in the equality of the sexes, and we would both call ourselves true adherents to the cause of feminism.
But there is one issue in which we differ, and that is the topic of my entry today.
The Start of a New Blog
Ah, the crisply fresh feeling of starting a new blog. It is like the coming of a new year—somehow, everything before that first entry is set firmly in a past that hardly seems to count, while everything from the first entry on becomes important. Extremely important, even.
