Heath C. Ice

I can’t take it anymore. I am sick of politicians trying to win over voters by calling legislation “common sense.” I can’t really blame them though since it seems a large section of the American population is far too willing to say “Hmm, I have no idea what they are talking about, but they said it’s ‘common-sense legislation’ and common sense is good, so the legislation must be good!”

What really set me off about this finally is that while I was driving home tonight, I heard a clip of Obama from some recent speech where he said “we’re going to enact ‘common-sense’ regulations on Wall Street.”

Anyways, I am just sick of hearing about “common-sense conservative solutions”, “common-sense gun regulation”, “common-sense bank regulation”, “common-sense Wall Street regulation”, “common-sense healthcare reform”, “common-sense drug regulation” and any other legislation crammed down the throat of America as “common sense.”

Government officials, stop trying to dupe us into thinking that this crap is good for us. Start trying to sell legislation to the American public based on its merits, not on buzzwords. Treat us like we have some fracking common sense of our own.

I absolutely hated eating steaks when I was a kid. My mother has told me that this was because eating them required far too much chewing. I am now 28 and a good steak is one of my favorite foods! I still hate eating food that requires excessive chewing though, so what changed?

My parents had one way, and one way only, to cook steaks, medium-well done. This is the only way I had ever eaten a steak. This was the way steak was supposed to be cooked. This cooking method produced decent, but very chewy meat. When I would see someone eat a steak that was rare or medium-rare, I found it sickening! Honestly, how could you eat meat that was still, basically, uncooked?

Fast-forward to January, 2006. I am on a trip to Las Vegas with a bunch of guys from work. We decide to eat at a nice restaurant on the strip. This is Vegas, so we had been drinking since 10am; it was now 8pm. I ordered a steak and when the waiter asked me how I wanted it cooked, I was feeling ‘a bit adventurous’ (as drinking for 10 hours is wont to make you feel) so I told the waiter “have the chef cook it however he thinks is best.” When my steak arrives, it is medium-rare. Given my state, I gave it a try and it was the best steak I had ever tasted in my life! It basically melted in my mouth and had so much more flavor than any previous steak.

Now, this was a nice restaurant, so I was not fully convinced that being cooked medium-rare was what made the steak amazing. I slowly got myself to regularly eat steaks cooked medium. After a few months of that, I was able to get myself to order medium-rare. So, to conclude, I used to eat steak every now and then. It was good, but not great. Ever since I started eating medium-rare steaks, though, I can’t get enough meat in my mouth.

If you haven’t tried a medium-rare steak, do it! If you currently like the taste of beef, I can almost guarantee you will love steaks more than you ever though possible after trying them this way.

I was compiling an email for a good friend and decided that the list was worthy of a blog post so that all of you could benefit from these YouTube channels.

First, I want to introduce you to cdk007. This YouTuber has created some of the best animations I have seen showing evolutionary ideas and refuting arguments against them.

This video from cdk007 refutes the often-used “blind watchmaker” argument. I have played around with and modified the MATLAB code cdk007 created and it has been the source of entertainment for hours on end. I am in the process of porting the code to C++. I still need to get permission to release the resulting code though.

Now we have another great video from cdk007 refuting, through analogy, the claim that “micro-evolution exists but that can’t possibly be proof of macro-evolution.”

As a final example of cdk007‘s work I give you one of his arguments against “irreducible Complexity.”

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