MIA

I've been busy with so many things lately that I haven't had time to blog. Usually, I try to write an entry with a little bit of substance and that usually requires some time. But something has been driving me crazy and I wanted to post it here and maybe expand on it later when I have time...

I cannot fathom or understand the duplicity and utterly obvious contradictions that our culture blatantly screams out in our faces (the kind of screaming that causes spit to splash on your face--this is the kind of obviousness that I am talking about)! Anyways, why (and I really want to know the WHY of this issue), why does our culture scare the crap out of pregnant women (don't do this, don't eat that)? Why is a pregnant woman told, "Gee, you should hold off on that yummy and otherwise pretty healthy piece of Salmon because it contains mercury," but then, once the baby is born inject them with a bunch of vaccinations that may contain mercury or preservatives that are probably not really all that great for the baby???

I know what my answer to this question is... but I want to know how the medical industry/field or whatever justifies many of these kinds of contradictions. 

Off Topic Rant

I just got home. Traffic was horrible. The proposal for my thesis remains a scattered jumble of ideas that don't seem to come together in the sentence I write.

Anyways, to get out of the monotony of thinking about Lacan this morning I browsed on over to digg.com and saw an entry for Best Colleges of 2008. I had to check where my school ranks and what chances I have of getting into a good PhD program.

Haha. I might as well discard my futile attempts at writing a thesis because there doesn't seem to be much hopes in the way of me getting into a good program and later a good job.

Here's some of the verbiage from the U.S. News & World Report website on how they breakdown their ranking system. See what you think about it.

Student selectivity (15 percent). A school's academic atmosphere is determined in part by the abilities and ambitions of the student body. We therefore factor in test scores of enrollees on the Critical Reading and Math portions of the SAT or Composite ACT score (50 percent of the selectivity score); the proportion of enrolled freshmen (for all national universities and liberal arts colleges) who graduated in the top 10 percent of their high school classes and (for institutions in the universities-master's and baccalaureate colleges) the top 25 percent (40 percent); and the acceptance rate, or the ratio of students admitted to applicants (10 percent). The data are for the fall 2006 entering class. (source)

Can SAT and ACT scores really measure ambition? Wow! I had no idea!

So, any schools or employers who take this crap into consideration when looking at applicants can assume that any prospective students who previously attended a low ranking school will have less ability and less ambition than someone who attends a higher ranking school?