Matthew's Journal

I'm retiring the use of this software to run my journal and I've switched to Wordpress. The transition is still a work in progress, but, for the moment, you should use the URL millercommmatt.com/wordpress. Eventually, you'll just be able to use millercommamatt.com to view my journal, photos, and anything else I put up.

I just found a great Olympics article on Yahoo! about some Olympians competing in the rifle competition who have apparently found love. However, that's not the catching point of the article. This article's gem is its opening paragraph. It's as follows:

Warning: the following item makes no mention of Michael Phelps, men's or women's gymnastics, Michael Phelps, USA Basketball, Michael Phelps, beach volleyball, or international scandals, contrived or otherwise (or Michael Phelps).

I just laughed out loud. Apparently its hard to write an Olympics article without mentioning Michael Phelps winning eleventy billion medals or that fact that the Chinese female gymnasts are all 13.

[Link to full article]

I case anyone was curious, there are 2⁶⁴ (two to the sixty fourth power) ways to fill out an NCAA basket including the play-in game.

One play-in game, 32 first round games, 16 second round games, 8 sweet sixteen games, 4 elite eight game, 2 final four games, and the final gives you:

2¹ x 2³² x 2¹⁶ x 2⁸ x 2⁴ x 2² x 2¹ = 2⁶⁴
(18,446,744,073,709,551,616)

You have better odds of winning the lottery several times than you do filling out a NCAA tournament bracket randomly and correctly picking the winner of all the games.

I’m sure most people reading this have heard or read in the news, at least at some point, that the NSA has been illegally tapping the phones of American in an effort to collect intelligence on potential terrorists. This has caused no small amount of uproar in the press and even in a few everyday Americans. Critics claim that the whole debacle is an abuse of power and a gross invasion of privacy while others support the NSA’s action claiming the need to bend the rules in the name of security.

Observing the press coverage led me to consider how I really felt about this issue. Do I want the government listening in on my calls and invading my privacy? Not really. Do I understand the need to break a few rules if it mean potentially saving hundreds or thousands of lives? Sure. I find myself feeling rather indifferent about the whole thing considering that I haven’t personally been involved as far as I can tell. However, there is one aspect of all of this that leaves me feeling quite upset. The NSA got caught.

The NSA is one of the world’s premier intelligence gathering organizations. Millions, if not billions, of taxpayer dollars go to support this organization that we trust to help secure the safety and wellbeing of this nation and its citizens. We enable the NSA to hire the best and the brightest and they can’t even tap a simple telephone without getting caught. If they can’t even tap a few phones in their own backyard without getting caught, how can we trust the NSA and its sister agencies to protect our interests? I expect a competent NSA to be able to tap everyone’s phone and have no one the wiser. Do I like having my rights violated? No. Do I expect my government’s elite information gathering agencies to do their jobs and do them well? You’re damn right I do. Breaking some rules is one thing, being completely incompetent is something I don’t want to abide in the organization entrusted with my safety.