Square Galaxy

Twice a year a list of the top 500 supercomputers is released.  BYU’s supercomputer, named Marylou4, was once ranked as high as 45 on the list.  As of last June, Marylou4 fell in rank to 274.

The most recent listing doesn’t even include a BYU supercomputer.  Marylou4 is too slow to make the list. 

So there you have it: BYU no longer has a top-500 supercomputer.

I found this recent BYU police beat amusing:

Nov. 10: Students in Foreign Language Student Residence called in a fire in their apartment. One student ran the automatic cleaning cycle on the oven without realizing that another had left a rag in the oven. The apartment received only minor smoke damage.

Do you know how to say, “Don’t turn on the oven clean cycle, I left a rag in the oven!” in Chinese?  I doubt that these foreign language learners did either.

I had a roommate once who wasn’t currently in school, and he was working a low paying food service job.  And get got married and I am really happy for him and his wife.

But at the same time, I thought his wife was kind of crazy for marrying him when he didn’t even have a decent enough job to provide for himself.

I’m not saying that only rich people should get married.  But I do think that everyone should look at the job potential of their future spouse, and that is where it gets tricky, because it is easy to get over optimistic about the potential of the person you love.  But a commitment like marriage requires some realistic outlook.

What I think is realistic, is looking at the career momentum of the person.  If the person is progressing through school, or successfully climbing a corporate ladder, then that person has good career momentum.  But if they aren’t in school, then you kind of have to expect them to maintain the same career path that they are currently in.  You cannot expect someone to make a dramatic change to their job potential at some latter point after marriage.

I guess all of the above was an elaborate way of saying, don’t marry someone with a dead-end job.

Today I looked at some visitor statistics for this blog over the last month.  Specifically, I looked at the average number of views in a category normalized on the number of posts in that category.  I found that my top 5 categories are, based on number of views per article:

• Insights: 6.6 views per article
• Reviews: 4.5 views per article
• Religion: 3.7 views per article
• Technical: 3.6 views per article
• Politics: 3.1 views per article

The category in which this article is posted, Blogging, is the worst category, with about 0.2 views per article.

A couple of days ago, I discussed the definition of human rights.  I argued that a human right is something that applies to all humans, regardless of age, gender, race, or nationality.  It a right shouldn’t be given to a particular set of humans, then it probably isn’t a human right.

It is with that definition that I wish to argue that marriage is not a human right.  Many people claim that it is a basic human right to marry the person they love, but they are wrong.  

Consider a child, to whom the human rights of food, shelter, education are given.  If a child is in love with someone, should they be able to marry?  Of course not.

Marriage is not a human right.  Human rights don’t need licenses or certificates.  There isn’t such thing as a license to eat.  But marriage licenses and marriage certificates do exist.  

Marriage is instead a priviledge afforded by governments and/or religions.