Well, I’m still fairly addicted to Facebook, one of the main reasons that I’ve not been blogging all that much. Of course I still show up every once in a while. Indeed, I do see some signs of my addiction waning.

Perhaps one of the reasons is a little bit of disgust that has taken place a couple of times on a trivia game that I frequent called ConQUIZtador. It’s sort of trivia meets Risk in that points come from taking territories, which is done by answering trivia questions. One of two types involves a multiple choice question, simply picking the correct one out of four. The other is a race to enter a number of some kind, such as a year, a ranking, or a quantity of something, where the closest to the correct answer wins with ties broken by shorter time.

Anyway, from a couple of players, they were less then subtle in implying that I am cheating. Their implication appears to be that I have created a new account so that I can have a high winning average and points rating. This would be after playing thousands of games under another account then dropping that in favour of my current account, where I theoretically have seen most of the questions before. One of them cited that my number-race guesses were too accurate otherwise.

Well, I can state categorically that is completely false. I never even heard of this game before I started playing on Facebook. I admit that I’ve played of lot of trivia games before other than this, but that’s no guarantee that there would be any correlation between them and this one. However, I just simply know a lot of semi-useless facts.

When I was a young lad many aeons ago, I gleaned through my parents set of World Book Encyclopaedias on a very regular basis. Mainly I would skim through the pages of a given volume, looking at maps, at charts, at photographs, and occasionally actually reading an article. This was how I spent a lot of time, instead of the so-called “normal” activities of sports or the like. That’s not to say that I didn’t play sports; I simply was not good at them primarily due to lack of practice.

Is it really so hard to believe that someone can be that good at a trivia game with only about sixty games under my belt? I don’t like to admit that I am something of an expert when comes to certain fields of knowledge. Really, I don’t. Childhood was bad enough because of this. I might have let juvenile taunts get the better of me and cause me to see my ability as a detriment, and that has an impact on self-esteem. Even though that particular environment does not exist in adulthood, with admiration being far more common, the patterns of self-abasement still remain. Nevertheless, the baseless infantile accusations that sometimes show up do not help at all.

The problem that I see is that I fear the opposite side of the equation, where I come off as a pompous know-it-all. First of all, I’m not that as I don’t keep up on certain areas such as who’s dating whom in Hollywood or much of popular music. Then there’s the raised-bar expectation, which if I somehow don’t meet then I feel that others could use as a verbal weapon of some kind. Indeed, the last time I truly lost my temper was because of being mocked for not answering a trivia question correctly and even then I argue that the question had two contradictory answers. This was about five years ago when I was at work, and I feel fortunate that I wasn’t sacked, although it did affect my standing in the company. (It did lead to other things which indirectly include getting married. It’s a long story.)

There has to be some kind of balance that allows an ability to exist in any given society. It’s not an obvious thing given how many athletes, actors, and university professors are self-centred jerks. However it must exist for perhaps many more in those fields lead mostly normal lives, something which doesn’t fare well in a tabloid or rant against academia. I suppose that I am still looking to find that middle ground. I think that I know it in my head, just not in my heart.

Today is once again one of those totally esoteric holidays that no one except complete geeks knows about. Being that I may be found among that number, I thought that I’d expound on Pi Approximation Day, or at least one of them as several other days of the year can claim that as well.

Pi (or π) is one of those Greek letters that beer-chugging societies in universities might use as part of their name. In current context, pi is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. It’s probably the most famous constant in mathematics that doesn’t involve units of some kind. It’s simply a number.

Oh, but what a troublesome number it is. The problem is that it cannot be written out precisely using our number writing system. We can write out pi to be approximately equal to 3.14159. This is pretty close to 22/7, which is why today can be associated with the number, if you look at the date as they do in Europe.

To get a more accurate value of pi, you would literally have to keep writing out digits forever, with no patterns of repetition in digits. This is because pi is what mathematicians call an irrational number. It’s not irrational in the sense of the opposite of my Rational temperament, but simply a term meaning that it cannot be written out as a fraction. It’s also what they call a transcendental number, meaning that it is not a root of an algebraic equation and thus transcends algebra.

This is of course a natural headache for those that like simple numbers. It’s not like we can just avoid circles our whole lives, so pi will at some time rear its ugly head. One place that it sort of shows up at is in the First Book of Kings in Jewish scripture. In describing measurements of Solomon’s Temple, it gives a diameter of a round basin as 10 cubits and a circumference as 30 cubits. The result is pi is 3. My guess is that they were rounding, either that or mathematicians are using some kind of false maths!

A more amusing place that it shows up is in my home state of Indiana. In 1897, some medical doctor out in the boondocks of the state (in a town called Solitude, believe it or not) came up with some “great mathematical discovery” that lead to the result that pi was exactly 3.2. Instead of publishing this in some obscure maths journal, he thought that it should be copyrighted first, taking it to the Indiana legislature for endorsement. Naturally the House passed the bill unanimously. However, thanks to some common sense being introduced by a real maths professional, the Senate let the bill die in committee. (Link to a narrative on this silliness.)

I suppose that today’s commemoration is then a celebration of the irrational, the transcendental, and the nerdy. Probably the level of geekdom that one has achieved is the number of digits that they have memorised. I suppose that I’m up there with fifteen off the top of my head. If you’re under six, you’re safe!

Anyway, happy Pi Approximation Day to everyone, whatever that means to you.

I have a couple of chequing accounts that use paper cheques. Even in a world where it seems that electronic banking in the forms of credit cards, debit cards, and on-line bill pay rule, there are still those rare occasions where one is simply not able to speed negatively-charged particles posing as wealth to another party. Because of that, there is still a utility for this rather archaic means of settling debts.

Recently my wife and I have had a few, euh, financial difficulties, leaving our bank balances on the low side. In other words, it’s life as normal where petrol is over a dollar a litre. Because of a couple of errors on my part, both chequing accounts went into the negative this week. Of course both banks have in place policies that zap a whopping Insufficient Funds (NSF) fee into our accounts, making them even more negative.

Now, I can understand the purpose of NSF fees. Just like speeding tickets keep everyone going the lawful speed limit, NSF fees are the banks way of saying that if you owe them even a cent, they’ll come down on you like you’ll not believe, thus keeping everyone from taxing the bank’s patience. Surely they can’t have customers actually owe them money.

If it where somehow in proportion to the negative balance, then it would be more understandable. My all-electronic chequing account at ING Direct is more or less in this category. If I overdraw my account for whatever, they treat the amount that I own as if it were a credit card balance. I have only a $25 window, but that is usually enough to cover minor emergencies and calculation errors.

With my account at Chase Bank, I had a debit transaction that comes out on a yearly basis (which I had forgotten about) show up out of the blue. That in of itself didn’t push my account into the negative, but a few transactions that took place earlier that day that I could have waited on drove my balance to the negative. It turned out that four transactions which included two sub-dollar transfers to my savings account (moving odd cents there as a way of building up its balance) resulted in a $100 NSF fee!

Fortunately, I was able to work with Chase and explain what happened. They were somewhat understanding and was able to waive that NSF fee. However, I have a couple of other transitions that were clearing while that was in place, and even though we had put $100 into the account, those two extra transactions resulted in a $64 NSF which I’ll have to absorb. I note with interest that if the first NSF hadn’t existed in the first place, I would have had the second one.

Still, at least I was able to at least get a partial solution. Not so much with US Bank. An accidental $5 PayPal transaction (I clicked on a button without thinking) caused my account to go into the red. Even though I immediately sent funds from my ING Direct account to US Bank, it arrived a day late, resulting in a $35 NSF. OK, I was an idiot and likely deserve some kind of penalty, so I could live with that.

However, what follows is rather horrific. I got there obligatory “You are an idiot” notice in today’s post, telling me that I got hit with the NSF (which I already knew). What I didn’t know was that starting on the fourth calendar day, a Continuous Negative Balance fee would be levied at the rate of $8 a day. And not just on business days, but for each calendar day! I checked my balance on-line and saw the first one of those had been levied, all resulting from going $2.85 into the hole.

Part of the problem here is that there are no US Bank branches in town. I have that chequing account as at one time I had a credit card through the bank, plus it was a decent way of shuffle funds off to the side. (I direct deposit FSA funds there.) I rang their main number to find out how I might be able to add funds into my account to cover the negative balance ASAP. What I got was pretty much no help. They couldn’t do an electronic transfer into their bank, nor could I send any fund to them that would arrive before Monday at the earliest. Gee, so much for the power of electrons! Meanwhile, a Sunday debt would be an $8 indulgence.

The only resort that I can see is making my way to a bank branch somewhere. Fortunately, we’ll be going to my mother-in-law’s tomorrow and a branch is about a 60-kilometre detour along our route. My plan is to give them the funds to bring my balance to zero and then close the account. Good riddance!

One would think that with the advent of flying cars and cybernetic implants, 21st century banking would be a lot more user-friendly to mere mortals. Instead, we see something of a system that resulted in things like feudalism and other things we’d like to forget about. Along with the usury of credit cards, perhaps these marvels of modern economics will be able to build debtor’s prisons. I know, I’m probably grousing from my own stupidity, but still isn’t this how populations are divided economically? Just a thought.

The other day, I was browsing some Facebook profiles and saw a question that intrigued me. It was a question about whether or not one can truly “know” someone else. I wrote a somewhat lengthy response that got cut off for the most part due to an unannounced character limit, but as it piqued my interest, I thought I’d explore that notion in some depth, or at least on a level past a simple yes or no.

Looking at perhaps the first criterion, I would have to say “no” to that answer simply on the grounds that two people virtually cannot be together their entire lives. Thus there are pieces of history that we cannot attest to apart from hearsay evidence. To truly know others on that level, a full and complete record of their life histories are in order.

OK, so perhaps it need not go that far. After all, most of us have lots of repetitive patterns from which we rarely deviate. We usually call this a routine, where a semi-conscious order of events takes place such as when we prepare for going to work or school, prepare meals, watch television, or are getting ready for bed. This would be some kind of shortcut to the whole history paradigm. I suppose that over an extended period of time, most or all of these routines will manifest themselves.

However, I suspect that is not what is really being asked. Probably what the question seeks to know is can we understand another person’s inner being, a soul if you will. That is, can intimacy reach a point that what constitutes another person’s soul be fully realised? As to how others see it, I don’t know what point is sufficient to them, but I’ll analyse it in my own rational way.

There is really only one way that on the whole yields information about another person, and that is language. I do not limit my definition to spoken or written language, but also to more subtle forms such as body language and even the routines that someone exhibits. This is how I communicate with the world, and I suspect that holds true for everyone else.

However, language is a limited concept. If we take for example the spoken languages of the world, the concepts that one language permits expression of do not equate to those of another. Spanish is simply not English with different words, so thoughts in Spanish are different than those in English. A very good example of this can be seen in the history of the Roman Empire, where the Greek-speaking eastern half would be engaged in subtle fine points over philosophy and theology that would literally baffle the Latin-speaking western half. To a large extent, this is why there are separate churches in Europe, Catholic (plus Protestant) and Eastern Orthodox.

I postulate that within each and every one of us, we have our own unique system of internal communication. As we are not born knowing any of the world’s languages, this internal system pre-dates whatever spoken system learnt later on. True, we tend to exhibit similar body responses to external stimuli just after birth, but the body and the mind are not equal. Certainly our brains all differ simply by genetics and information constantly being imprinted upon them. It’s as if the words we speak and write and also the more complicated body signals that we take for granted are actually an auxiliary language. We use learnt languages for interpersonal communication, but our true selves retain a native, innate language of its own, unable to be understood by anyone else.

I know within myself there are many thoughts that I cannot easily put into “words”, and I probably have a larger-than-average vocabulary. I feel that anything that I say outside of the radically simple is not truly communicated, with some meaning lost in translation even before I speak it, let alone when someone else hears it. Intimacy cannot be boiled down to simple terms and concepts. We are indeed quite unknowable outside of ourselves.

Still, we somehow manage to live with one another. Perhaps not being able to fully open ourselves up to someone else actually keeps the peace. Then again, wars often start because of a failure to communicate. However, I believe that is more about a failure to listen instead of a failure to speak. Perhaps it is the relative equality of communication that is what allows for civilisation to exist and families to be formed. That’s good enough for me.