Hello once again, and season's greetings to all from the scenic and lovely Black Hills of South Dakota. If you are reading this, you are probably someone I know somehow, and I wish you the best of cheer in these peculiar times that my nation is experiencing (even if I've never met you before).
The holiday season in the McMahon house has gone relatively well this year; only two casualties have been reported so far, unless you count a delicious pepper-smoked pot roast and an extraordinary pecan pie. For my part, Christmas shopping was successful, eventually, though I am still posting Christmas cards and making arrangements to spend some time with my oft-maligned friends from times recently past.
I stayed up late last night preparing a long, drawn-out rant about friendship, romance, and how I am a bigger fool than I admit to being, but looking over it today, I observed that it isn't too great of a piece. I could just post the writing out in its present form because nothing else I have posted is that great either, but I really need the practice critiquing and proofing my words, so it will stay in for the time being. Maybe it will turn into a New Year's resolution of sorts, maybe not.

On another topic, doing many things at once with a computer is sometimes a bad idea. Seconds after I typed that last paragraph saved changes to this file, at the exact instant my download of the latest Mozilla milestone build was to reach completion and my grades for this past semester were to come up, Silph spontaneously rebooted. (Again.) The moral here, of course, is to never try to draw to an inside straight after the first round if you're playing for real money.

Melvin Lerner (1980) noted that... disparaging of hapless victims results from the need of each of us to believe, "I am a just person living in a just world, a world where people get what they deserve." From early childhood, he argues, we are taught that good is rewarded and evil punished. Hard work and virtue pay dividends; laziness and immorality do not. From this is but a short leap to assuming that those who flourish must be good and those who suffer must deserve their fate. The classic illustration is the Old Testament story of Job, a good person who suffers a terrible misfortune. Job's friends surmise that, this being a just world, Job must have done something wicked to elicit such terrible suffering.
....Research suggests that people are indifferent to social injustice not because they have no concern for justice but because they see no injustice. Those who assume a just world believe that rape victims must have behaved seductively (Borgida & Brekke, 1985), that battered spouses must have provoked their beatings (Summers & Feldman, 1984), that poor people don't deserve better (Furnham & Gunter, 1984), and that sick people are responsible for their illnesses (Gruman & Sloan, 1983). ....
People loathe a loser even when the loser's misfortune quite obviously stems from mere bad luck. People know that gambling outcomes are just good or bad luck and should not affect their evaluations of the gambler. Still, they can't resist playing Monday-morning quarterback--judging people by their results. Ignoring the fact that reasonable decisions can bring bad results, they judge losers as less competent (Baron & Hershey, 1988). Lawyers and stock market speculators may similarly judge themselves by their outcomes, becoming smug after successes and self-reproachful after failures. Talent and initiative are not unrelated to success. But the just-world assumption discounts the uncontrollable factors that can derail one's best efforts.
--David G. Myers, Social Psychology: 7th Edition, pp. 366-367
References:
Baron, J., & Hershey, J. C. (1988). Outcome bias in decision evaluation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54, 569-579.
Borgida, E., & Brekke, N. (1985). Psycholegal research on rape trials. In A. W. Burgess (Ed.), Rape and sexual assault: A research handbook. New York: Garland.
Furnham, A. & Gunter. B. (1984). Just world beliefs and attitudes towards the poor. British Journal of Social Psychology, 23, 265-269.
Gruman, J. C. & Sloan, R. P. (1983). Disease as justice: Perceptions of the victims of physical illness. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 4, 39-46.
Lerner, M.J. (1980). The belief in a just world: A fundamental delusion. New York: Plenum.
Summers, G., & Feldman, N. S. (1984). Blaming the victim versus blaming the perpetrator: An attributional analysis of spouse abuse. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 2, 339-347.

Yep, it's finals week. My psychology exam is Thursday morning; after that I head home. I really like my social psychology class, because the professors crafted the syllabus with a strong emphasis on the importance of empirical research and the fallibility of truisms and "common sense" in the development of psychology as a legitimate science. The text supports this so well, I think I will keep my copy around after I finish the class. The reader will likely be hearing more from Dr. Myers in the future; I hope the reader does not mind this too very much.

Random media of the update: Butasan! If you want proof that the Japanese culture is a little over the edge with its crazy, cute fixation for all things animated, you need only look only to the arcade game featuring a pig in white heart-covered boxers and a Godzilla suit throwing bombs at other pigs. It is fun, admittedly, and relaxing after a hard day on the books... but still very odd.

It snowed last night!
Oh, yes, it snowed. As in any good first snow of the season, the snow that fell on the sidewalks melted almost immediately, but enough fell on the trees and grass to make everything very pretty. I think it is safe to say that special times like the "Holiday Season" or Valentine's Day or the NHL All-Star Game are enhanced by the intangible beauty created by a world covered with snow, surrounded by the odd ambient glow that radiates from big gray snow clouds. It is also why I looked for a university in places like Iowa and New York a year ago. I hear Troy is breathtaking in the winter, though that could just be the college brochure lying to me.
Right now, though, I'm sitting in the KURE studios, chilling to the relaxing sounds of Deep Dish and Dusted, attempting to help studious college students relax this week before finals at Iowa State. Chilling, of course, is the key phrase here, because for some reason it's freezing in the studio, along with most of the rest of the building. Brr. I have my toasty coat, though, and some good wintery trance, so I can't really complain. Hooray for winter!

To ensure that this update is worthy of your time, I present to you Benoit Mandelbrot, holding a chicken.

Postscript: It seems that the above image is also employed in The Utterly Surreal Test. Huh.
I am a minimalist cow sculpture, and you'll never see me fill out one of those again. Ever.

Post-postscript: So much for the snow... it's gone already. The campus is still white, but that's because the crows have come back. (Eww.) On the bright side... err... gas is at $0.99 per gallon. Yeah. But my car is frozen shut, so I can't buy any. Dohh.

Originally, I had planned to write some insightful words on the menace of crows here at ISU, and how most "heavy metal" isn't all that heavy, but I think I'll skip it. Instead, I'll let Jonathan Marvin do the informative deeds and instead just plug a link up to those pictures I was talking about. They turned out better and worse than I expected; better in that they're more interesting than I thought, and worse in that half of them are very, very blurry.
Memo from the closure department: now Steve Skutnik's got the job. Click the link, and join me in a rousing game of Draw Your Own Conclusions!

I got some pictures back tonight. I'll post them sometime, but for now, there (on the right) is a preview.
Yep, it's a door. Except that it's not. In the basement of the Parks Library here on campus, there's an ordinary-looking classroom, with windows, and a wall plaque declaring the room number, and all the usual things you would expect to see on the outside of a classroom. Except a door. Or any other way to get into the classroom, for that matter. I'm guessing it's part of some CIA plot, because sketchy-looking sealed rooms in government buildings are so much more interesting if you imagine agents in black suits crawling through cooling vents to sneak into them.
Yesiree.
The rest of the roll is better, I promise. It even features Joan(s) as the Hand of God!

I'm going to cite the ongoing Steve Skutnik "saga" mentioned in the previous entry as evidence that sometimes it may be best to just shut up and listen. When we left off, Skutnik hadn't been picked for a special GSB spot, and two senators were filing "lawsuits" with the GSB Supreme Sourt (the government of the student body has a judiciary?) in support of the maligned physicist. In a special hearing held Monday night, the Supreme Court quickly tossed the first lawsuit, and probably would have gone after the second if the complainant behind that one hadn't withdrawn it on the spot. Soon afterwards, the Daily's Editorial Board (which Skutnik is a member of at times) issued a bitter statement that, by some fluke, appeared right alongside a letter explaining why Skutnik was turned down in the first place.

Skutnik's case is a rather extreme one, but I hope it makes my point (whatever it is) clearer, and provides an insight into both Iowa college life and the reason why I am going to stop talking now.