Dinhternet

If a geek is just a per­son who’s really into one spe­cific thing, I don’t think I can really call myself a geek. My inter­ests are pretty damn eclectic.

How­ever, no mat­ter the topic, I have an over­ar­ch­ing desire to under­stand how and why things are the way they are. I sup­pose that’s why I ended up with a degree in psy­chol­ogy with a sta­tis­tics empha­sis. If, as I have said before, psy­chol­ogy is the appli­ca­tion of sci­ence to philo­soph­i­cal under­stand­ing, then sta­tis­tics is the foun­da­tion of the empir­i­cal method of doing same. It is the analy­sis of obser­va­tions of glean mean­ing out of the seem­ingly ran­dom and/or overly com­plex nature of the world.

And to those who would claim that math and sci­ence is soul­less, I would argue there is some­thing amaz­ing about an ele­gant proof to a com­pli­cated prob­lem. Like­wise, graphs, the visual form of sta­tis­tics, can make incred­i­bly com­plex data imme­di­ately under­stand­able and relate-able.

Here are some of my recent favorites:

(from HIMYM, Marshall’s pie chart of his favorite bars and bar graph of his favorite pies.)

(from SFoodie, an actu­ally baked Venn dia­gram of pies.)

(from The Expend­ables, a movie poster with the pre­vi­ous kill counts of all the stars of the movie.)

For more fun graphs like these, check out Graph­Jam. For a more seri­ous dis­cus­sion of stats, try 538.

But that last pic­ture really got me. The orig­i­nal poster with just the action stars of my child­hood is already pretty damn bad-ass, but adding their kill counts just gives it so much more depth. That’s why I can’t wait for aug­mented real­ity tech­nol­ogy to become viable. In the mean­time, I’ll just have to set­tle for Google Goggles.

OK, now to run before the vio­lence geeks find me.

Dong Ha thinks that our fam­ily is some­what food snobbish.

I don’t think that’s quite right… we were cer­tainly raised to appre­ci­ate food. In fact, my whole extended fam­ily is pretty food-centric. We appre­ci­ate good ingre­di­ents. We were taught to be culi­nar­ily adven­tur­ous. (We always go out to try new dishes and then try to fig­ure out how they were made in order to re-create them at home.)

That said, I don’t think we’re snobs. I enjoyed SPAM as much as the next per­son before I turned veg­e­tar­ian. But I mean, taste (as in pref­er­ence, not gus­ta­tion) isn’t a bad thing. And my par­tic­u­lar pref­er­ences can be pretty inex­plic­a­ble anyway.

For instance, take the following:

(from Can­d­wich and Gigizine [in Japanese].)

The are both instant foods of ques­tion­able ori­gin. What makes one seem so appeal­ing and the other so revolt­ing? The world may never know.

Choos­ing to be veg­e­tar­ian can be hard.

You’re often misunderstood -

(Peo­ple don’t real­ize that I don’t hate meat. I do still have crav­ings. I just com­mit to my choice.)

It puts a damper on your social life -

(I always feel bad when hosts have to make spe­cial pro­vi­sions for my choices.)

And there’s a lot of options out there in terms of what kind of veg­e­tar­ian or semi-vegetarian route you want to take.

I’d like to think I’ve done a pretty good job in the roughly two years since I made my choice. I’ve been mostly a lacto-ovo veg­e­tar­ian. Tried to go straight lacto veg­e­tar­ian, but it was too hard for me because eggs are in so many processed foods. Briefly con­sid­ered going full vegan, but that basi­cally elim­i­nates eat­ing any­thing but my own cook­ing, and I don’t have the resources to han­dle that right now. I have made a cou­ple of excep­tions at major hol­i­days with family.

Hon­estly, at this point, I’m just used to it. I don’t have to think about what I can eat, menus are just men­tally fil­tered. But lately, some arti­cles I’ve been read­ing have been chang­ing the way I’ve been think­ing about vegetarianism.

One talks about how oys­ters are “safe” to be eaten, even for veg­ans, because they (and other mol­lusks) can’t feel pain (at least, not as we know it) because they lack a cen­tral ner­vous sys­tem and farm­ing them has little-to-no neg­a­tive impact (or even a pos­i­tive impact, accord­ing to some) on the envi­ron­ment (unique to oysters).

The other arti­cle is one that I posted a while back on Face­book about how respon­sive plants are to attacks.

Sci­ence, why you gotta go chang­ing every­thing up on me? What an odd world it would be if I could eat oys­ters and not plants.

But I just have to look back to my orig­i­nal rea­sons for becom­ing veg­e­tar­ian and I know what I must do. Even if mol­lusks and plants don’t feel pain as we do, they obvi­ously feel some­thing, since they can react to attacks (and even counter-attack). Ide­ally, I want to become fruitar­ian like some Bud­dhist monks. But that’s prob­a­bly not going to happen.