Normal
So, yeah!
It’s been a little while since I last wrote here. If you don’t like it, well, I blame my irregular update schedule (or well, lack of an update schedule, really). As I’ve stated in my little About Me section: it can be a day between posts, a few months, or anywhere in between. Who knows. (I certainly don’t.)
So, yeah!
Normality.
What the hell is it anyway? When are you normal? When are you not?
For starters, being like me would probably put you in the latter category. But that is entirely beside the point.
Wikipedia (oh, how we love thee!) states that ‘in behavior, normal refers to a lack of significant deviation from the average’. This is pretty much how I would define it myself. However, I find this definition a bit unclear.
In order to determine what normal is, we’d need to first find a way to quantify every aspect of a person. Some of these are easy: a person’s age is already counted in years. We can easily count how many times a person has had sex (well, it kind of hangs on how drunk the person usually is when they have sex, but that’s a separate aspect), or how many different bikes they’ve owned as a kid. When it comes to personality traits, it gets a bit more difficult, but let’s assume that we’re able to measure stuff like how well you respond to humor, at what level you’re interested in science, how socially developed you are, and a gazillion other things, on a simple scale of 1 to 10 each. Of course, there are other factors as well, such as what gender you have and how pretty you look.
Now we have the tricky bit. We’d need to know the values for each of these scales, for every living person on the planet. This may be a liiiiiiitle bit problematic, but in order to accurately figure out what ‘average’ is exactly, it’s pretty important.
So, now we know how an exactly average person would be. We know exactly what he/she would look like. Actually, the matter of whether this average person would be male or female is a bit tricky, but since there are slighly more females than males in the world, our person would have need to have a single breast and both a vagina and a penis, but the vagina would have to be slightly larger than the penis (but still of average size of course – you can see why this is a bit difficult). He/she would probably live somewhere in the molten section of the planet’s core (though leaning more towards China than any other area on the planet), have about a quarter of an internet connection, and own something like three quarters of a mobile phone. We would also know exactly how his/her personality is, how well he/she likes certain subjects, and everything else there is to know.
(Obviously, if we take the world’s internet user’s as an accurate representation of the human population, chances are than our average person is a dumb annoying idiot.)
So, yeah.
Now we have a perfectly average person. Problem is, there is probably not going to be any living human in the world who is a perfect match to this average, and besides, we’re talking about normality, which we’ve established to be having a lack of significant deviation.
‘Significant deviation’ is again a pretty vague term. When exactly is the deviation significant?
I’d say, the deviation is significant when it’s more than the average deviation.
Oh boy, we’re gonna need to pull out the numbers again, and compare everyone’s scores against the perfect average, and write down the difference between everyone’s scores and the average scores, and then find the average of that. In other words, we’re calculating the average deviation that people have from the perfectly average person.
Now we have a pretty good baseline: we know what ‘normal’ is exactly, and we know how much you can deviate from ‘normal’ without reaching an over-average (ie, significant) deviation from being normal.
Since our average person is just about halfway between male and female, and pretty much everyone else is either male or female, we all have a large deviation from the average, so you’re probably safe on that count. In other areas… Well, I can’t tell that for you. Not until zeh maths are done.
So, there we go. Normality.
Have a nice day now!
Slaapliedje
Een variatie op het bekende liedje, nu in heerlijke foute versie speciaal voor kleine meisjes.
Slaap, kindje, slaap
Daar buiten loopt een knaap
Een knaap die laat zijn piemel zien!
Lust jij ook nog wat lekkers misschien?
Slaap, kindje, slaap
Daar buiten loopt een knaap
Thunderfail
It seems that updating my copy of Mozilla Thunderbird on my laptop involved deleting the main program executable, because that is what the updater did.
Sure, it’s guaranteed bug-free now, but the number of new features is pretty disappointing.
Turn-ons
Edited (yes, using Paint, of course) from today’s C&H comic:
I wanted to give the guy on the left a nice little leather suit, but my paint skills just aren’t THAT epic.
I am currently using this as MSN picture, waiting how long it takes until people are going to give me weird responses… We’ll see 
File of Holding
After recovering some data from a damaged USB stick, I found a very curious file…
I want more of those! 
“Unconventional”
In my life, I have seen many bad websites. I have seen many terrible websites. I have even seen websites that, were they publicly known, could likely become the cause of WW3.
But rarely I have seen pages that are so fucking terrible that there are not even words for it (except perhaps ‘oh my god, fifteen minutes and the page still isn’t done loading’, which actually sums up many of the shortcomings of this particular website).
Comic
Occassionally, there is a comic that just stands out above the rest of the comics I read every week. Occassionally, they are just extreme awesomeness. Todays xkcd comic is stunningly simple, yet true, and awesome. It’s been open in my browser all day (and that is something a comic can be proud of here).
It arrived
Well, I’ve finally got the parcel I mentioned in my previous post.
The box:
The actual content of the box (it was nearly impossible to get the picture sharper, the thing is very small):
For reference, I’ve added a pencil in this picture:
And then, I’m not even going to use it. I made a little mistake with the part number, giving me these instead of a slightly different one (which is the only one I can use).
Shipping madness
Admittedly, two posts within 24 hours is kind of a lot for me. As you may have noticed I have no schedule regarding posts on this site whatsoever, and I just post something whenever I feel like doing so and have a subject to post about. It turns out that that just happened twice in a relatively short time.
Anyway, here’s the deal. Recently, I ordered a load of small parts. As my order was large enough (>€20) shipping is free, which I think is a great policy; now if I forget to order something at one point, I’ll just place a second order, maybe add some extra stuff so it’s at least €20 (spend €10 on stuff and pay a final of €20 with shipping, or just spend €20 on stuff and get shipping free is an easy choice) and be done with it; instead of making sure I added all the correct items. Just because making sure everything is 100% OK is kind of a big deal with >400 small items.
It turns out that they only had 1 piece in stock of an item, however I ordered two. Out of >400, it was the only item that they didn’t have right away, so they shipped out everything else and the last item would be delivered later when they have it. Note that we’re talking about a very very small item here, priced at about € 0,70, and the ‘you might loose it between the coins in your wallet’-kind of small. You’d expect the second one to arrive by regular mail in a bubble-wrap envelope or something. As the first parcel came in, I found the first piece and discovered that I accidently ordered the wrong part number, so that first part goes on the shelf and I don’t really care about whether or not I still get the second one.
I placed a second order with the correct part number, and a couple of other things where I accidently ordered too few, and that follow-up order came in last Tuesday.
Just after I came back upstairs I noticed I have an e-mail. Apparantly they still shipped that one, € 0,70 part to me.
In a ~€ 8 parcel.
Since the shipping cost’s on them, I do sometimes wonder how companies like these ever make profit. I might even make a picture of it when it comes in.
This kind of reminds me of this TDWTF article (however while searching that one again I also came across this forum thread which is infinitely more brilliant, especially the post from a guy named ‘Cyrz’).
Bandwith
As this article (Dutch) says, the American internet provider Cox Communications is planning to loose a lot of customers. If the network is busy, they want to give a lower priority to p2p-traffic. The FCC will probably deal with it quickly, so this company is acting stupid in at least four different ways:
- First, they are giving themselves a bad name and a bad reputation. Existing customers who are faced with this policy will leave, and new customers are scared off at the idea that they pay for an x amount of bandwith but won’t actually get it if they use too much of it.
- They know, from the example of Comcast, that the FCC will deal with it quickly enough and that this new policy of theirs won’t last long. That makes the previous point, and the next one, even worse.
- Therefore, all they are really saying is ‘Hey look guys, our network sucks. It can’t handle it if everyone actually uses what we are promising they can use.’ Of course, that will be equally bad for their customer base as #1.
- Cox Communications? Seriously guys, what the fuck is that name supposed to mean? That name even implies that they support p2p use, for downloading pr0nz0rs.
Americans, sometimes… 