The Fox and the Moon

The Fox cries at the moon:

“I want to believe!”

And dead midnight meets his cry,

but I hear it,

and I listen for any answer,

because I too want to believe.



But silence prevails.

Are you there in the silence?

Are you there in the calm after the earthquake and the gale?

Why can’t I see you?

Why can’t I feel you?

Is it simply because my screams shatter the silence

in which you dwell?



But that is wrong,

and I am wrong,

and you are waiting.

Waiting for me.

And I want to believe!

I want that faith the size of a mustard seed

even that I don’t have!

I cannot throw the mulberry tree into the sea

that is not what I want

but I want to know!

But even more than that,

I want to believe!



And when my frenzy is done,

Exhausted I am silent.

Are you there in that silence?



I strive to believe.

by Rand

A little news, well of me

Now my normal plans for Fridays are news run-downs, but since my Wednesday review was news-oriented and because I'm feeling a bit lazy-ish, I thought instead I'd go into a rundown of news about events near to me, which I do favor or plan to attend or wish I could attend, if more weightier matters did not compel me not-wise.

So here's some events:

July 11th - Heading to Cobb's Comedy Club to check out the comedian extraordinary (or at least possessing of weird humors showcased in VH1's Best Week Ever (Perhaps the only VH1 regular show I watch nowadays, although its humor itself is rather hit or miss)) whose name is Christian Finnegan. Cobb's is a nice comedy club (last time I was in San Fran I checked out Joe Roagan there, though his show was also a bit hit and miss), but anyways the main reason I'm going there is that my bro's got free tickets, otherwise I might have to reconsider, but I do like free stuff.

And a great place to find such free stuff in San Francisco is the nice little site Fun, Cheap, SF.com. And it was upon this site I found my target for my Saturday events.

July 12th -

1 pm - The Marcus Shelby Jazz Orchestra (not that I've heard of it before, but there's a nice jazz scene in San Fran, and while I am a rocker at heart, I respect jazz a lot, especially when live (hence I checked out the Fillmore Jazz Fest last weekend, wooo!!!)is playing free in a park. In particular the park is the Yerba Buena Gardens and the whole free concert thing is part of the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival which between May and October is giving lots of free events, which as a cheapskate I'm trying to take advantage of as much as I can.

3 pm - After that I might check out a free concert with an Iron Maiden tribute band, the laid back style of San Fran has been building in me a thirst for some damn hard metal rocking. But then again I might just do the old biking/hiking or something like that and such.

7 pm - More evening-wise though I might check up on some Bluegrass at the Kinda Sorta Bluegrass Hootenanny, perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. Mainly it depends to the degree of which I'm hanging with my bro or sis.

July 13th - However on Sunday, I've got church (with the good folks at St. Patrick's in San Francisco, and then I might mosey on to FREE RAI MUSIC!!! in the good old Stern Grove.

That's a rundown of the cool events of this weekend, but that is not my limit. I shall keep on doing more and more and more, till the world explodes!!! Or until I'm tired, or a mixture of the two. I think you know what I mean...

Or not.

But anywho, take it to your head, take it to your heart, and remember Rand rocks. Goodnight Folks!



July 21st - Heading back to Jersey (currently in San Francisco) - I'll miss San Fran and my brother and all, but I gotta be little-old Jersey-feeling me, well, least till at some point or other when better reasons and circumstances compel me to go elsewhere.

A matter of empire

What is an empire? What is an emperor? In the political and historical lexicon this is thrown around a lot, but does the word 'empire' have any real meaning? Well, no, not really, it just seems to mean nowadays very powerful state, or maybe expanding state, or maybe state with extensive influence.

But let's step back a sec and look at the older meanings. Why? Well, this isn't really a historical definition question, but it's still something fun to think about.

Well, the word 'emperor' comes from the name 'imperator' which just meant commander (although the Roman Emperor took it as his title, emphasizing his military role) and 'empire' probably just comes from 'emperor'. But if we look at emperors in other lands, a common title, used in both the ancient Persian Empire and the Ethiopian Empire in its better days is King of Kings (obviously the local language equivalent like šāhān šāh or Nəgusä Nägäst). And then if we look at the case of say the Holy Roman Emperor, he was more really the case of a king above the princes. Furthermore even the Roman Emperor ruled over semi-autonomous provinces and client kingdoms, (although the extent of his power over much of the territory matches nicely with the title of 'king', the Romans hated the idea of a king, associating it with ancient tyranny and they liked to pretend otherwise).

But in summary, what empire really seems to historically mean is a ruler who ruled over many semi-independent kingdoms and prince-ships. Which actually means that emperors, while traditionally ruling over more extensive territories than kings, were often far less powerful over the full extent of their territories.

Now using this as a political science concept might be useful, but there are so many other examples of historic kingdoms which don't match that concept of empire, so it's kind of iffy to use it for history, but... well...

YOU'RE STINKY!!!

And I've got the history to prove it!

We're all quadratics too

So let's do it as they do it in the quadratic formula.

Behold:

x = (-b ⁺/_- √b² - 4ac)/(2a)

Now Mathimoto's Complaint aims to cover a wide range of fans of math and today I'd like to reach out to the younger crowd. That precious younger crowd undoubtedly have seen the beauty of the quadric equation. But they and probably some older folks as well have never given an effort at deriving it. Well, I thought I'd give it a shot and show you the awesomeness of figuring out these formulas. Because Math rocks, it really does.

First start out with the generalized form of a basic quadratic equation (ie any equation with 1 variable (let's say x) and some instance of that variable raised to power 2 and possibly some instance of that variable raised to power 1. Okay, so it was harder to describe things rather than write it out, so let's do that)

Let a, b, and c be constants and x be a variable.

A basic general quadratic equation is:

ax² + bx + c = 0

Now it helps then to know one particular quadratic equation, that is what happens when you have

(x + b)² = 0

this can be expanded to

x² + 2bx + b² = 0

(Don't believe me, just use the distributive property of multiplication, ie,

(x+b)² = (x + b)(x + b) =

x (x + b) + b (x + b) = x² + bx + bx + b² =

x² + 2bx + b²

Ta-da)

Okay, now if you got a quadratic equation of the form

x² + 2bx + b² = 0

And you know

(x + b)² = x² + 2bx + b²

You can then say

(x + b)² = 0

and with an equation like that, the only time you have a number that can match the value of x (and still give you 0, ie, the solution of the equation) is

x = -b

Back to the general basic quadratic equation:

ax² + bx + c = 0

At this point we don't know how to find the solution value of x here, but since we know the solution for

(x + b)²

we can reconfigure our general equation to fit our particular equation. Just follow along.

If

ax² + bx + c = 0

then we can play around with this, our goal equation doesn't have a c, so let's just subtract it from both sides.

ax² + bx = -c

Well, our target equation doesn't have an &lsquot;a&rsquot; so let's get rid of the a by dividing it from both sides.

x² + ^bx/_a = ^-c/_a

Okay let's remember our target equation (or the essentials of it)

(x + b)² = x² + 2bx + b²

now let's make a little pretending. Let's say instead that the b in our target equation is really say some other letter, say d. Then:

(x + d)² = x² + 2dx + d²

And if the current state of our manipulation of the general equation is:

x² + ^bx/_a = ^-c/_a

we can get to our target a little easier if we say that

d = ^b/_2a

alright now let's take it up a notch by throwing in the new d, then we get

x² + 2dx = ^-c/_a

well now all we need is the d² and we can just add that to both sides, so:

x² + 2dx + d²= ^-c/_a + d²

Well, we can use our old target equation:

(x + d)² = x² + 2dx + d²

to simplify this:

(x + d)²= ^-c/_a + d²

Now remember, with a situation like this, the name of the game is find the x, and currently our x is trapped in a term that's raised to a power, so let's get rid of that with a little friend called the square root (but remember that with real square roots you have a positive root and a negative root, since the negative goes away from the squaring).

x + d = ⁺/_- √d² - ^c/_a

Now, now, now, we can FIND THE X (by subtracting d from each side)

x = -d ⁺/_- √d² - ^c/_a

now just one more step to define the x in the a, b, c constants we started out with, just reverse the d insertion with our

d = ^b/_2a

and we can get...

x = ^-b/_2a ⁺/_- √(^b/_2a)² - ^c/_a

so there we go, we've found the x, but it's kind of ugly so let's simplify things a little by doing some expansion and some common denominator and essentially simple algebra which I'm going to skim over a little:

x = (-b ⁺/_- √b² - 4ac)/(2a)

And there we go, we've got the quadratic formula! Yaaaah!!!! Behold it and be amazed!!!

x = (-b ⁺/_- √b² - 4ac)/(2a)

MATH RULES!!!! WOOOOO!!!!

A bit of a look: CNN and BBC

It is often said that American news sources are biased and lack depth. The latter I dispute to a degree, there's often a lot more depth of coverage that people simply ignore, and when you go to some of the more respected newspapers (say The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal or go to some of our essayish magazines like Atlantic Monthly or The New Yorker, you can find a lot of depth in those sources. But overall I must admit most American news stories, especially on TV are more oriented toward a quick rundown of events along with a debate on popular issues (this is true of even CNN, my perhaps main go-to news source). I actually don't mind that often, since it is really nice to have a wide-ranging skimming of world news, so you can have general idea of what's going on without needing to search and run around. I also believe that even more deeper sources are mainly there to point you into the direction of some news subjects you want to investigate more.

But sometimes a brief summaries of events just leaves you without a full understanding of what the events actually mean, or an understanding of how trustworthy the reports are or the moral standing of the players or the impact of incidents and such (moreover, with a limited number of "breaking" news events or popular issues to debate, things get repetitive fast). Take for example, CNN's coverage of the recent shooting of Uygurs in Xinjiang, which concentrated on the Chinese police reports and attributed the whole thing to an anti-Han holy war as per that report. Thus unlike BBC News, they did not take the rather obvious step of connecting the shooting to the long low-level separatist campaign in Chinese Turkestan, which BBC News on the other hand did so easily. Moreover, while BBC just said the Uygurs were shot dead, CNN said Chinese police killed them in a shootout (which is a questionable way of phrasing things since even the Chinese police say that the Uygurs were armed with knives though they were shot by police, which is justifiable if the case, but not exactly a shootout).

Yet the second usual claim that American news is extra biased is something that I'm going to object to a little more. I'm not saying there aren't biases in American news, or that perfect objectivity is possible (I don't think perfect objectivity is possible and I think that news readers should be aware of that, but I think that reporters should aim toward objectivity), but barring FOX News and personality-centric news shows (like Nancy Grace, Keith Oberman, etc.), I'd say overall American news is a lot less biased than a lot of other countries, especially my old friend CNN. Take again for example BBC, whose coverage of Uygur-shooting was more in depth (hence giving more room and potential for opinion and shaped depiction), had a stronger bias to its article (not that its opinion on the matter was necessarily wrong), and it more pushed an idea of the Chinese gov. being the real bad guy in the picture. CNN's brief coverage was perhaps a little more biased against the Uygur militants, but its lack of depth gave no claim to making an assessment of the whole of the matter, while BBC in its attempt for analysis does.

But if I was to recommend things, well, if it's an update on a news topic I already know about, I'd rather have the more objective, briefer story, but if it's a matter I've heard less about, well the less objective, more-in-depth might be good.

Still, when it comes to news, I always take the point that news sites and shows and papers are just the starting point. The world can't be summarized even in a whole magazine, even if people tried, but the resources are out there, and so I go out investigating and trying to learn and grasp things. After all, I at least have a vote to tilt things around, I can still send letters and complaints, I can still write, and maybe someday I'll be able to have a greater power of things.

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

Anywho, take it to your head, take it to your heart and remember Rand rocks. Goodnight Folks!

And God Bless.

Mathimoto's Revamp

As things have suggested Mathimoto is still doing changes of many types. First I have added good old Robo-Bobo as my partner, and now I'm doing some redesign of the layout and such. So prepare yourself, for awesomeness, brought forth through the power of MATH!!!

Check it out now: The History's Your Brother

I've been adding some more features and a new layout. I added some links for my history professors and some history resources, as well as some random stuff and such. Hopefully it's all pumped up in coolness, but there's still extra coolness it can get, because History's just soooo awesome.