Experiments in Life

My Personal Dna Report

Nights when I am not in the mood to sleep are the perfect times to take tests like these. They kill a good half hour and can be rather entertaining when you finally get the results. In my case, I find it to be fairly spot-on. In addition to its custom result, the test pegged me as INTJ in its Meyers-Briggs comparison, which is pretty close to what I remember being when I took it back in high school. As an added bonus, the Psych you / psych me! feature lets you evaluate me using the same types of questions that I answered.

Don’t you hate it when songs get stuck in your head for no reason whatsoever? It has been around two weeks since I went to go see the musical Evita and all of a sudden, the main song of the performance has jump straight into my head and refuses to leave. It has not been there for the past two weeks, so I do not know what makes today so special. Sometimes, I wonder if songs get stuck in my head because my mind is not working hard enough. I know that when I am really, really busy, my mind stays focused on the task at hand and the radio station that is my brain is quiet for a while. Lately, though, it seems like my brain is working non-stop to keep me entertained with showtunes. “Don’t Cry for me Argentina” is just the latest song to burst onto the scenes.

I think this, along with the urges to stay up late at night reading, must be signs that I am not being challenged enough. Well, since the books that I have been waiting for have finally come in, I have started trying to rectify (insert obligatory EE joke here) my boredom. I started on Essentials of Programming Languages during lunch today. This, along with the slew of novels I am slowly working my way through, ought to occupy my mind for a while once I get into it. Until then “Don’t cry for me Argentina…”

Although I am almost a week late with this, my 26th birthday came and went last Sunday. It was a good day, laid back, no stress. Every year I go into my birthday wondering whether I will feel any different on the other side and, for the past few years, I have felt the exact same before my birthday as I did afterwards. However, this year, I have been putting some thought into exactly what it is I want to do with my life. What are my goals? What would I like to be doing in five years (the quintessential interview/review question)? I have never really had a solid answer to either question, so I am determined to put some thought into it and see if I can come up with any answers.

Well, the master bedroom is finally finished. I started work on the project right around the end of December and here it is, late January, when I am finishing up. I originally estimated that it would take me four days to finish — it took more like nine, plus a few nights after work. It turns out that I am not so good at estimating the time it will take to complete a project like this. However, I am pleased with the way the room turned out.

As promised, here is a before picture of the room:

Here are a few final shots:

You can see other photos of the renovation here.

With today being the start of the New Year, everyone is making resolutions for he wants to do accomplish in the course of the year. Most of these resolutions fall by the wayside. Typically, I do not make New Year’s Resolutions for just that reason; when I have tried in the past, I generally did not succeed and basically forgot about them by February or March. I believe that most people fail in their resolutions because they tend to make unrealistic claims about what they can actually do. So, I have decided to set a few reasonable goals for myself:

1. I resolve to lose 30 lbs. this year. When I break the goal down, that averages out to 1 pound every 1.7 weeks, or 12 days. Dropping this much weight will bring me back down in to the “healthy” region for my height. To acheive this goal, I have gotten my parent’s old rowing machine and set it up in the home office. Going to the gym never worked out well for me and I do not like being dependent on the weather for running or walking, so have a piece of exercise equipment in the house, staring at me and making me feel guilty, should encourage me to actually use it.
2. I resolve to write on a regular basis. In the spirit of setting reasonable goals, I plan on posting once a week, a whopping 52 times this year, minimum. If I exceed that goal, then yay me.
3. I resolve to actually implement a version of Getting Things Done. I have been talking about it for the past two months and it is high time that I actually got around to doing it. This is a near-term goal, hopefully to be resolved after I finish up remodelling the bedroom.

Here’s hoping that I actually accomplish these over the year.

Seven Things to Do Before I Die (Lord Willing):
1. Have kids
2. Finally learn sign language (and become fluent in it)
3. Visit as many of the 50 states as I can
4. Travel abroad (England, Scotland, Italy, Greece, France, Germany, etc.)
5. Go back to Camp Tik-A-Witha
6. Teach
7. Learn to play the piano

Seven Things I Cannot Do:
1. Reach things on the top shelf.
2. Play basketball.
3. Look out a peephole.
4. Math.
5. Dance.
6. Draw a straight line.
7. The splits.

Seven Things That Attract Me to My Spouse [romantic interest, best friend, whomever]:
These are in no particular order.
1. His eyes.
2. His nerdiness and intelligence
3. His mustache and goatee, I just love a man with facial hair!
4. The way he takes care of me when I am sick or hurt
5. His passion for knowledge and learning
6. His dashing good looks
7. His uniqueness, he is definitely one of a kind

Seven Things I Say Most Often:
1. I’m hungy!
2. I’ve slept since then.
3. I just work here.
4. Dammit Dante!
5. Stop Rosie!
6. I’m sleepy.
7. Oops!

Seven Books (or Series) I Love:
Too many to choose from…but I did my best. Here are my top picks
1. Lord of the Rings series by J. R. R. Tolkien
2. Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling
3. Black Jewel Trilogy by Anne Bishop
4. Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind
5. A Song of Ice and Fire series by George R. R. Martin
6. Meridith Gentry novels by Laurell K. Hamilton
7. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Seven Movies I Would Watch Over and Over Again:
I’m not much for re-watching movies, but here goes…
1. Star Wars (any of them, but especially the original trilogy)
2. Harry Potter (any of them)
3. Pirates of the Caribbean
4. Phantom of the Opera
5. The Saint
6. Lord of the Rings
7. Mulan

Sometimes I wonder why I do not sleep at night. Some nights the reason is blazingly obvious — thoughts like the following take root in my mind and will not let go. Recently, I finished reading Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond. I enjoyed it so such that I plan on reading The Third Chimpanzee : The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal, also by Jared Diamond. Looking at the book on our bookshelf has started me thinking about how humans evolved — specifically, how humans evolved binocular vision with eyes in the front of the head like predators have instead of on the side of the head like most prey animals have. Now, I should state that I accept that chimpanzees are the species that is genetically closest to humans. However, I do not necessarily consider chimpanzees to be predators — although I admit that this subject is not something that I have studied extensively.

Based on these beliefs, I began to wonder where the primate line came from if:

1. primates truely are not predators and
2. primates have eyes in a predatory configuration.

I know that, given a DNA sequence of all mammalian species on Earth and enough calculation time, one could determine how closely related any one species is from any other species by comparing the overlap in the DNA sequences. Now, the following is what kept me up half the night:
would it be possible to approximate, within a million years or so, how long ago the species diverged? I think that a model could be devised that takes into account:

1. the percentage of DNA in common between the species,
2. the average amount of radiation that reaches the Earth’s surface,
3. the average number of mutations to DNA
   that occur per unit of radiation,
4. the average number of mutations that are passed on, and
5. the probability that the mutation will be “beneficial.”

This will probably be something that I will mull over in the back of my mind for several days.

Results of the Nerd? Geek? Dork? test:

Time is relative, but in other ways than the way Einstein necessarily meant. For instance, I met with my Monday night group on Sunday this week, my Tuesday night group on Monday, and now today (Tuesday) has felt like Wednesday all day long. To top it all off, I will probably call my parents tonight and, since I normally talk to them on Sunday, that means tomorrow will feel like Monday all over again.