Absurd Science

I recently stumbled on this article reporting that the Department of Homeland Security has just ordered 450,000,000 rounds of .40 S&W ammunition.

When I first saw this link, I knee-jerked “what the hell”, then double-knee-jerked, “well, maybe that isn’t that much.” ENTER MATH!

I generally shoot 100 rounds when I go to the range. According to this person who implies that they are a police officer of some type, he (she?) gets an allowance of 100 rounds whenever he goes to practice at the range, so 100 rounds per range visit seems like a pretty good number to do some off-the-cuff calculations.

This person claims that most police officers go to the range twice a year (though he does mention that some go at least once a month). He recommends at least 4 times a year. At 4 times a year, it would take 1.125 million DHS employees to consume all of that ammo.

This site claims that DHS has 230,000 employees. So that means, if every single one of their employees were given a gun, and they all shot 100 rounds every time they went to the range, and they all went to the range 4 times a year, then it would take about 5 years to get through all of that ammo. If they trained enough to get through it all in a single year, they would have to go 20 times a year, or a little less than every other week. Every man and woman at the DHS, including all of the secretaries and janitors and middle managers and what have you.

Are they including their child cabinets in that budget? The only ones that would have any guns at all would be:

• Customs and Border Protection (58,000 employees)
• Transportation Security Administration (another 58,000 employees)
• Coast Guard (about 42,000 active duty members)
• Secret Service (4,400 members)
• Federal Protective Services (2,100 employees)

This is a huge stretch because that is still counting all of the administrative staff in these departments. Even with those additional people getting the count up to 394,500 guns, at 100 rounds a range visit, they could all go to the range about once a month. There we go. If every person in every firearm-wielding sub-cabinet the Department of Homeland Security were training at a very respectable rate of once a month, then they could get through all of that ammo in a year.

Back in 2011, I did the eHarmony thing for 6 months. What a phenomenal waste of money. For about $250 dollars, eHarmony gave me:

A) Matches with about 1400 women. This sounds like a lot, but if you keep in mind that pay-dating sites typically have a 10% conversion rate from the “free” account to “pay” accounts (this is the standard rule of thumb in this industry, though I only learned it after the fact), that means only 140 of those people in a 6 month time span were even capable of replying to any message I ever sent them. Yeah, so much for eHarmony being one of the largest dating sites around. 140 people in 6 months. That’s less than 1 *a day*.

B) Of those 1400, I attempted “communication” with about 800, with an additional 10 attempting conversation with me. Now, like I said, only 10% of those 800 should be paying accounts, so that means only 80 even had a chance of replying. Still, only 10 girls ever messaged me? There were a LOT of people I messaged just because I didn’t really believe that a site profile would give an accurate portrayal of who they were as a person, and wanted to learn more. Between this site and others that I ended up trying for a while, I quickly learned that there is a major disparity between what men and women were expected to do. So much for modern society eschewing gender roles. Maybe it never occurred to anyone that guys like feeling chased sometimes, too.

C) Of those 800, about 40 replied to the first message. That’s not bad at all, I think. That’s roughly 50% of people who were capable of replying that did. Better odds than meeting people at parties, for sure. Of course, the first message was just a multi-choice poll of 5 vapid questions, so it wasn’t that much of a stretch for them to reply, but these were the numbers.

Still, I didn’t know the 10% activation rate issue until after the whole process, and I rather much think eHarmony wants it that way. Why else would they be sending you profile matches to people who can’t possibly reply to you? So you can message them, and then they can send the notification that you messaged them to that user, and then that user is thereby enticed to sign up for a pay account so they can reply to you. But ultimately, I just thought literally 95% of women on the site thought I was a loser from my very brief description of myself.

When you’re a nerd like me, you see patterns in everything, you see opportunities for study, you see things not only for your personal connection to them but also the opportunity for learning as well. For example, self-deprecating humor can be quite easy for me, because I can recognize the purity of the humor disconnected from the embarrassment of my involvement with it. Without knowing the 10% rule of thumb, I started to obsess over optimizing my profile and optimizing my answers to people’s questions.

Through the computer screen, it’s very easy to forget that these profiles are real people and not just XP points on a goddamn video game. I had a bank of eHarmony’s canned questions with notes on how I replied to every single person. I had notes on how they responded and what I had thought of their profiles, like I could magic a spell that would make it all work. By the end, I felt disgusted with myself. I’ve been through darker periods in my life, but I am finding it hard to remember exactly when.

D) But honestly, from those 40 people, about 10 were women I considered somewhat to rather unattractive. I’m not afraid to admit that I would like to be dating an attractive woman. I’m not Brad Pitt myself, so I certainly don’t expect to be dating a supermodel, but I’m not a tub of lard either. There was a serious lack of balance.

Regardless, I was actually pretty cognizant of my issues and pushed myself to message anyone who seemed to have activities listed on their profile that were interesting me. That was my real minimum criteria; you had to be doing things that I thought were interesting. There were a lot of very attractive women that I completely passed over just because their profile seemed to be one of a person living a consumerist lifestyle of just going out all the time and never creating things of importance. So much for the “29 Dimensions of Compatibility”! Out of 1400 people, eHarmony might have paired me with 3 who seemed like the kind of person I’d just like even being friends with, say nothing about dating.

E) Of the 40 people who ever replied to that first set of questions, 10 followed through to back-and-forth email communication. I always followed up on communication to whatever degree the other person reciprocated, presuming that it’s not possible to get to know someone properly through a silly website, and at least I could have a nice night out with someone if we went on a date. eHarmony has a process that they tout, and since I was paying for it, I wanted to use it completely and to the best of its ability.

In the end, it just felt so interminably shallow. Every day, click through 5 to 10 profiles, decide if you want to message any of them, then send them a list of 5 multiple choice questions, of which you select from a list. Wow, really fucking brilliant system. What the hell is this, grade school? Why not just send them a note with big check-boxes, “DO YOU LIKE ME? YES [ ] NO [ ]. RETURN TO BLAH BLAH BLAH”.

I eventually got so bored with the process that I just messaged everyone that came in to the contact list. It didn’t much matter, 90% of them couldn’t reply and 100% of the remaining 10% wouldn’t be able to tell from the list of questions I sent them whether or not I had actually read their profiles. So I gamed it: if they replied to the first step in eHarmony’s vaunted process, then I would pay attention to their profile. 1400 people is a lot to sift through to get to 10 conversations in 6 months.

F) And those 10 conversations lead to a grand total of four (4) dates! Out of those four, only 1 of them were from women who initiated contact with *me*. Here’s how it broke down:

2 were insufferably boring (one of them being the girl who contacted me first), more interested in what was on TeeVee than what was going on around them that very moment. I really can’t stand most passive activities. I’m a very active person (I run my own business, for crying out loud!), so for me, sitting down on a couch had better involve more *making out* than watching American Idol. There are a very small handful of shows that I find enjoyable, but for the most part I avoid the thing in general just to keep from getting sucked in for 5 hours a night and not getting anything done.

1 I don’t really want to talk about that much. She wasn’t a very generous person and the month we spent together was a mistake. I was tired with the eHarmony process and I just wanted to feel some human contact. That’s not wrong. I just didn’t realize at the time that the person wasn’t really human.

And 1 inexplicably fizzled out. Even though I really liked her, I can’t hold it against her. I was unemployed at the time, and 75% of the girls I went on dates with from eHarmony weren’t my type, so I guess I just wasn’t her type either.

Summary:
So, that’s a 57% chance that I would message someone, a 5% chance that it would lead to any level of interaction, and a 0.3% chance that an eHarmony “match” would lead to a date. I like my odds in person a lot better. I can do better than that just talking to random strangers in the grocery store. Hell, I *have done* better than that just chatting up the girls who come to my door, asking for donations for some charity!

This whole online dating thing is a complete boondoggle. If you think you don’t have time to do the traditional dating thing, then you *definitely* don’t have time for online dating. Or at least, that is, if you’re a man. I don’t know what it’s like for women, seeing as I’m not one. I’ve always been under the impression that women must be under a barrage of messages from men. I mean, I know for me, near the end, I was messaging everyone that came through my inbox.

But whatever. Waste of time, waste of money. I’m going to give cooking classes a shot now.

“Embrace Chaos”: Make choices. Make choices in support of maximizing opportunity. Extend action. Open stories. Do not retreat. Do not end conversation. There is nothing won from nothing risked.

It’s an extension of the adage, “Luck is the intersection of opportunity and preparedness”. Life presents opportunities to us on a daily, even hourly basis, and we refuse to take most of them. There are so many ways to do anything that lack of preparedness is a false notion. Feeling unprepared is really just fear, masquerading as rationality. Miyamoto Musashi said of Bushido: “the way of the samurai is resolute acceptance of death.” Not a life of morbid depression and reckless self-destruction, but one without regrets, lived fully, without inhibitions. Eliminate the greatest fear—that of death—and there are none that can replace it.

Such it is with Chaos. Fear nothing and find the capacity to do anything.

Lately, I’ve felt like an apostate in the way of chaos. “I just need to hold off on my projects until I can [get my sleep schedule back to normal/pay off my credit cards/save up some money/lose some weight/find Shangri-La]”. Excuses to mask fear, fear of the unknown, fear of failure.

Bullshit. Say it with me now. BULLSHIT!

I’ve bandied about a personal challenge for a while now: do the weirdest thing I possibly can every night for two weeks. I won’t be looking for things I *want* to do—there is so much in life that I haven’t experienced, how can I know if I want to do them or not—I must do the most absurd things. Absurd. Unfamiliar. Unknown. Fearful.

And all y’all honkeys are coming with me.

Instead of making a resolution to change something in my life, I want to make one to keep something the same:

For 2012, I want to stay curious about the world. I want to continue to be so enamored with the things going on around me that I still barely find time to sleep. I want to keep learning, finding, doing, and winning. It’s what makes me who I am.

So, here’s the setup. I was really curious about chemistry as a kid (well, I still am, so “as a kid” doesn’t really add anything to that statement, but whatever). I had read this book that was explaining how electroplating works and thought it was all very interesting. The description also mentioned that a lot of hydrogen gas was generated and I got the idea in my head that I was going to try to make a hydrogen-powered gas lantern. I say “lantern”, but what I really had was a mayonnaise jar with a hole punched in the lid with a nail. I setup the “experiment”: a sand pail full of salt water (you need an electrolyte of some kind in the water or else it won’t conduct enough electricity), and a couple of paper clips as electrodes hooked up to a model train power supply, with an upside-down mayonnaise jar to catch the resultant gasses. Wait 12 hours and I had nearly a full jar hydrogen and oxygen (and actually a little chlorine… I’ll get to that later).

Now, I have this jar, and I have my pail of very disgusting water full of iron oxides and sodium hydroxides. Because I had used common table salt as my electrolyte (i.e. sodium chloride), I also had a small amount of hydrochloric acid (very, very weak solution, but it still gave me a rash from submersing my hands in it too long). And technically my jar also contained a small amount of chlorine gas, which is a very poisonous gas, though thankfully I hadn’t made enough to hurt anyone. I put some tape over the whole I punched in the mayonnaise jar lid, screwed it on tight, then tried to melt the tape with a cigarette lighter with the intention that a small trickle of gas would leak out and make a candle flame. Instead, the thing exploded and blew the lid off the jar. I’m lucky it didn’t break the jar and throw shards of glass everywhere.

Where was I [sips beer]? Oh yeah, so now I’m sitting on my bed in a daze. I’m staring at my hands for no reason I can come up with, and all of a sudden my mother kicks my bedroom door in. I’m serious, she literally kicked the door and busted it open (I never understood why the kids used to teased me that, “your mamma wore combat boots.” A) how did they know? and B) well yeah, the Army doesn’t give you a choice of footwear). Apparently a small explosion in the house is cause for concern! I looked up at her and she asked me one thing: “WHA WHA WHHAAA WHAH WHA?!” (imagine one of the adults in a Peanuts cartoon) I said, “huh?” I read her lips this time, “WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?” I was almost completely deaf for the next two hours. I just kind of muttered at her, “I dunno” and then fell over on my bed. She started slapping me, “DON’T YOU FALL ASLEEP ON ME!” We both realized later that I had actually just passed out from adrenaline shock.

Anywah, point of the story, I’m an incredibly curious guy by nature. I tend to see things that interest me and want to replicate them. I learn best by doing, and I LOVE learning. My best friends are all people who live by the old saying, “it’s better to ask forgiveness than to ask permission.” If this sounds like you, give me a message, I’d love to hear a story about an experience where your own curiosity should have killed you but you came out unscathed, or project that had some kind of unexpected serendipitous outcome.