News Article both Saddens and Brightens

Published on June 1st, a recent New York Times article discusses President George W. Bush's recent commencement address at Furman University. My personal discussion on the article and event appears below.

I am saddened by the faculty at Furman.

Well, not all of the faculty.

First of all, let me explain what I believe. People have the right to disagree with the President. People have the right to their own opinions. People have the privilege of signing a petition sheet:

More than 200 Furman professors and students signed a statement criticizing Bush administration policies and the Iraq war.

See, that's OK. That is fine. What gets me is when people don't show respect for the office of President of the United States, the highest office attainable in this country. Nobody but those who have sweat and labored, and yes, even lied to get there (not something I'm endorsing - completely the opposite) know how difficult, how challenging, and how pressured the President is. One may or may not agree with the President, but one should still respect the work and the will of the people in force behind him (I'll say that until there actually is a her President, then I'll worry about political correctness). The President is the Cheif Citizen. He is the Chief Executive, the CEO of the United States. He is the Chief Legislator, setting the course for public policy. He is the Chief Diplomat. He is the leader of the country, and regardless of one's views, should be held in a higher esteem and treated better than he is.

Furthermore, look at the message that President Bush is giving the students. That is just the sort of direction the country needs in these troubling times, regardless of his actions in Iraq. Let's get the country headed in the right direction.

This does kind of show though - as a coworker of my mother said:
The Republicans want to control nothing but one's morals; the Democrats want to control everything but one's morals.

When it comes to morals, I wish the country would choose to have good morals to begin with. Then the whole conundrum of whether to force morals on anybody wouldn't have to be dealt with.

For you AP English graduates

Of course, if you've read the several stories, this would make sense to you as well, even if you haven't taken the ol' AP English.

What happened after? (a small excerpt of the upcoming #1 New York Times Bestseller)
By Sean Fisher

The moor was quite possibly the bleakest, drollest, most gray spit of boring land he had ever set eyes on. To top it off, he was cold. The grayish-blue was lightened only by a brighter white road winding through it. The road was white due to the peculiar nature of the rocks on the heath, which had years ago been collected and cobblestoned into a lithe track. The air was dead. No riffle of wind staggered through the surroundings. Even the weeds looked as if they were dying, which is hard for a weed to do. Through the blue, chilly haze of the expansive moor he could see a small cart trundling along perhaps a mile away. Along its side was boldly emblazoned an unrecognizable advertisement in peeling paint.

He turned. There was no joy to be had in meeting one of the inhabitants of this lonely forsaken wasteland. They had no wish to see the return of a native, as it were.

As the old man shambled along the road, his footsteps awkward but his blue eyes lucid and sure, he paid close attention to the flowers lining the roadway. The yellow cut a cold contrast to the stark white of the cobblestones. As a traveler from distant lands he had seen many flowers, but never before had he seen this flower in such proliferation. It positively lined the path, sparked decades before by the thoughtlessness of a passing repairman. The yellow was powerful. It was not necessarily happy. The conditions of its birth were much too heart-rending for that, but the emotion imbued into that simple yellow color immediately caught his eye. He knelt down and touched the fuzzy cluster of small petals. Chrysanthemums.

Do you ever? Thoughts on thoughts

Do you ever finish a sentence with yourself? I seem to always start a sentence in my head, but I never recall ever getting to the final period. I think it's because I already know exactly what I'm going to say. It makes things awfully hard when writing, because when thinking of what to say, I only draft the first half of sentences in higher order brain levels. The rest kind of gets made up on the way from brain to fingers, and usually I don't have much of a say unless I concentrate on the ending of the sentence, which sometimes takes too much energy.

You know, I think that our brains thrive on pure thought. Pure thought is so pure that it cannot be expressed, but only...thought. I think that we each have our own "format" of thought, which might be one reason why we are all unique. However, our brains have a "translator," wherein that pure thought is transcoded into various forms.
One of these forms might be language, or, more specifically, the muscle impulses sent to our lungs, vocal chords, and tongue that will produce language. The translator also receives impulses from our ears and eyes and translates that language back into pure thought. Language is the intermediary pool that human beings contribute to and pull from. I bet it is the sub-perfect level of translation (for we have all seen evidence of misunderstanding one another or not producing lucid sentences) that also gives rise to some creativity. If our translators are different and interperet things differently, a new thought might be introduced into our brains and incorporated into our thought processes even if we don't realize it.
Another form that thought can be transcoded into could be the language that we think in our head. Imagine a chord plugged in directly from the headphone out port on a computer to the line in port on that same computer. It's a loopback. That is kind of like what our thoughts can be. It's a little like saying something outloud so we can here how it sounds. Out the mouth, and straight back to our brain through our ears. Kind of like that, but all within our brain. It may help our thoughts run through the logic machine that makes up a great portion of our brain, because our brain probably evaulates all of the thoughts it gets from the translator in a different way than it evaulates thoughts spawning in our own, local, brains. Running our thoughts through the loopback may help with viewing them in different ways.
It is too bad that all of our pure thought has to be interfaced through translation mechanisms. However, it shows again the wonder and grandeur of the human race and how amazing our minds really are, to enable this sort of communication.
But how awesome would it be to be able to interface with each other so purely we exchange pure thoughts and are able to attain perfect understanding? However, I think all of our hardware is different enough to be incompatible with each other, so we must go through intermediary devices.

Graduation Pictures

The moment you've all been waiting for!

OK, maybe not.

Here's a slideshow of the images - for full-sized pictures and captions, visit my web album at http://picasaweb.google.com/mathgraph/Graduation2008

If you've got any pictures, I have started a group on flickr called hhs2008. Anybody can join, so join and upload your pictures! I'll upload mine and we can start it off. Please!

Recap on Graduation

This is just a text-only recap. Pictures will be dealt with in an upcoming post.

My family left at noon for St. George. We met my mother's parents at the Temple Visitor's Center. My father's parents were already here and traveled with us. We went through the statue display that is completely amazing! Wow. If you haven't been, I highly encourage a trip to the Temple Visitor's center to see the statues.

After that, we traveled over to ye olde Olive Garden and had some most excellent comestibles (I just learned that word). In fact, I'm going to go have a left over breadstick immediately.

OK, I'm back.

So then it was time for graduation. We arrived at the Burns arena at roughly 3:30ish. It was a dreary day, but the weather's disparity with the elation floating in each of the seniors couldn't be greater.

I helped get the percussion ready for the two songs we were playing (A Pirates of the Caribbean medley and the William Tell overture). Then, I went and picked up my gold ropes for good grades and the National Honors Society cape thing. It was then just about time to line up. Jordan, Richard, and I were not allowed to walk in with our class, nor accompany anybody. We were honored, I guess, to walk in at the very beginning with Principal Hoyt, the School Board President, and other dignitaries.

The program proceeded as follows:
A Camber Choir piece called "My Shepherd Will Supply My Need"
The Pledge, led by McKay Butler, Student Body President
A Devotional/Prayer, led by Claire Chamberlain, the Seminary Vice President
The Introduction of the Salutatorian by Tia Beatty, Senior Class Secretary
Richard Wixom's remarks
The Pirates medley by the orchestra
Senior Class Officer Tyson Winder's introduction of Jordan and I
Jordan's and my combined speeches
The slideshow
A Salyce Scarth special presentation
The presentation, acceptation, and presentation of diplomas of and to graduates
The Turn Your Tassels/2008 Cheer and Hat Throw done by all of us Senior Class Officers

Overall it was a good length ceremony. Richard and Jordan both did fabulous jobs. Richard talked about how to be a star to others. Jordan recapped on some experiences and gave some great advice. Afterwords the slew of picture-wanting parents and friends we might not see again drew us into a constantly smiling photograph mode.

My speech went fairly well, I guess. At first I got up and said:

Good afternoon Principal Hoyt, administrators, faculty, families, and guests. To the class of 2008: Congratulations!
Jordan and I have been joking for a long time now that somebody would get up, introduce me, and then I would get up and for my speech introduce Jordan, and then he would take over. So – ladies and gentlemen: Jordan Hall.

I then sat down. You could hear an audible gasp come from the audience. When I sat down, Kirsten Helms leaned over to me and whispered, "are you for real?" in an amazed whisper. It was actually quite entertaining. Jordan got up and said his speech and then went to sit down, paused, returned to the microphone and told the audience he wasn't going to let me get away with that. He gave a few of my more humorous statements and then turned the time over to me. I got up and gave the rest of my speech. We had planned the whole thing from the beginning. After all, I decided, "It's me and Jordan, one of my best buds. Let's have some fun up here!" Besides, it's graduation! It was quite fun to be a part of and shock everybody like that.

Here is my whole Valedictorian speech from where I left off above:

It’s an absolute honor to be up here with Jordan and Richard, two of the greatest guys I know. They are a lot better than me. I can’t think of anyone better deserving of their numerous awards, including this one. I thank them for their example and friendship. I also thank the faculty and staff. Moreover – – – – you know you’ve been in English class for too many years when that slips out without even thinking about it – I thank my parents and my religion. Together they have at the same time both anchored and lifted me.
To begin I would like to share some memories that we have had together. Let’s begin with the faculty. They are the greatest, aren’t they? Learning mathematics from teachers like Mr. Esplin and Mrs. Kidd-Thomas allows us to plot the number of people that got Mr. Moore’s chemistry jokes on a nice graph and laugh at how it goes zero – zero – one – two – two – and then, all of sudden - twenty. Especially memorable is the librarians’ eagerness to open the doors of the library early on everyday but checkout day, when they look through the little windows at the massive crowd around the door and smile and wave, but make no move for the door. We have a great faculty and staff. I know that I particularly enjoyed the janitor’s clever announcement on free cleaning lessons during the summer to those interested in littering in the school.
Remember the good times and what our class has accomplished. Remember when Jared Behunin broke the school discus record and went on to take first in state. Remember when the girls attacked the high school with sidewalk chalk at Spirit week and the boys had an almost instant rebuttal. Remember when we buried Tyson in the sand at Senior Sunrise and Jake got stuck on the H at H day. Remember the procrastinators, those that would get up at four AM the day a five-page paper was due and have it done in time for school. I guess most of us are procrastinators – almost all of us have waited until the very last day of high school to graduate. I would tell you to stop procrastinating from experience, but…I won’t even mention when I wrote this speech. I’m doing well, though – I mentioned procrastination in the middle of the speech, not at the end.
At commencement our thoughts naturally turn to the future. Incidentally, it is these memories of the past, anecdotal and humorous though they may be, which link us to the future. The future is built upon the past. It is these past experiences that provide the framework for our current and future actions. Each experience tempers character like metal in a forge. Or like the construction of a golf ball. I learned this from my neighbor. Golf balls used to be smooth until it was discovered that the chinks or marks made in the ball made from hitting it would allow the ball to fly farther. So it is with us. Each experience molds our character and when applied appropriately helps us to fly farther and achieve greater heights. Let our experiences, and those of people gone before us, refresh our mind and help guide decisions for the future.
Stay loose. Don’t get so caught up in the system that you think you can’t do something you really want to do. Go for it anyway. We’ve seen in high school that the times we remember the most are those when something…unorthodox occurs. Unorthodoxy happens when we do not succumb to the unifying pressure placed upon us by fear. I am not advocating breaking rules or anything like that. Rather, take courage in pursuing your own dreams. Each of us has our own utopia. Define it and work for it. Seriously. Why shouldn’t that be our ultimate goal? Miraculous things can and will happen when you bend your will to accomplish something.
And remember that with the privilege of contentment, accomplishment and success comes an equally important obligation to perpetuate privilege for others. Success without service is like drawing interest on somebody else’s bank account. As part of that charge, may we always remember our alma mater, Hurricane High School, and give back to the school and community that sustained us.
We have an amazing class. I moved here a few years ago from Bountiful and so I could really see people’s character stand in sharp relief because I didn’t know anybody. You are great. I have seen deep compassion and kindness, acceptance, tolerance, a little mischievousness – especially when it comes to spirit week – and unity. These last few weeks have really shown how as a senior class we are all – well, most of us – friends. Despite our differences, we are one. We respect each other, know each other well, and have a bond. Look around. Smile at each other. 12 long years. We did it. Together. Once again, congratulations class of 2008!

Well...done!

Last night was grad-nite. We got done at about 5:30 A.M. I went home, went to sleep, and when I woke up, it was 3:30 P.M.! Wow! It totally felt like it was 10 in the morning. I have NEVER slept that long into the day before! It kind of wasted my whole day. But hey - I'm not sleepy!

Posting During Graduation!

Here I am, posting while we're all at graduation! Figure that one out, eh?

I'm so nervous right now, because I'm sitting up here having to speak in a few minutes and I don't like speaking. Well, here goes.

Hopefully Grad Nite will be fun tonight!

Yes! Graduated!

Biased Randomness?

You know, I've been thinking.

It is so typical to choose randomly at fun, casual sporting events. For example, everybody lines up and are numbered off, or names are randomly drawn from a list or something. This is supposed to be the most unbiased way to make teams, right? Wrong. Here's an important fact about "randomly" drawing teams:

The drawing is always biased toward the winning team, especially in a tournament structure.

The teams are already biased! The best team is going to win, regardless of the method of choosing! The teams will always be biased in a tournament structure, because one team will end up as the winner. They're already better than everybody else, they just haven't proved it yet. A tournament always has unfair teams. Nobody starts on a footing commensurate with anybody else. The only thing a tournament is for is to tell everybody where they are in relation to everybody else. Then the question becomes: what is the motivation for joining a tournament? If one team is already better than everybody else, why does everybody think they have a chance?

I tell you, we all see things wrong when it comes to selecting teams.

Whew!

Graduation!

Not just graduation, but the End of Year Video Yearbook, the Senior DVD, and the Senior Slideshow are all finished now! Each took a great deal of work! Now they're done! Free at last!

Epitaph on a Dentist

Stranger, approach this spot with gravity;
John Brown is filling his last cavity.

-Anonymous