Kieran

Huygen's Landing on Titan

Fri, 05 May 2006 06:41:40 GMT

http://www.nasa.gov/mov/148081main_PIA08117_titan_data.mov

Sun, 26 Feb 2006 07:42:38 GMT

Its been almost a year since I updated this.

Today I went to druid hill park with 5 people and we were dressed as the blue angels. we wore blue jump suits with yellow stripes and blue angel patches and hats and we had formations and sparklers and red white and blue smoke fire crackers. We ran around a lot in formation and did tricks.

After that I had band practice and we made our first song and im pretty sure its awesome, seriously.

My lips have been pretty chapped recently all the time.

Pete you still read these things? Where are you? Whats been going on?

I'm making a website with my two friends and its up now but still is real new and needs to be fixed a lot. It is www.wildfirewildfire.com, I just noticed it doesn't really layout correctly in firefox.

Does anyone know any good native american folk songs?

Sun, 18 Sep 2005 08:32:42 GMT

tonight I went to the website www.allmusic.com to look up this new cd I got by the band orange juice and the big featurette spotlight band on the front page was Orange Juice. TWILIGHT ZONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Mon, 21 Feb 2005 05:03:08 GMT

I love eggs.

Thu, 27 Jan 2005 05:30:31 GMT

who at mica wants to go to village thrift with me and buy a ton of green clothes and write EAGLES all over them or maybe even EAGLES 4 EVA or lame shit like that and wear the outfit straight until the superbowl on two sundays from now?

confusing

Thu, 20 Jan 2005 01:11:53 GMT

So today I went to class without a folder or a pen or anything stupid like that because I didnt think I'd need one. So then of course the teacher gave us a bunch of papers and as soon as I picked up the papers I somehow got two paper cuts on my left hand's thumb's knuckle. So I was ok with that. I hadn't gotten any paper cuts in about eight years so I guess it was my time. So then I'm carrying the papers around in my pocket and I go down to take them out for some reason and I sliced open my palm on my left hand on them. I sort of got a little pissed off at that. Then like two hours later I was walking down the street with some people going to Never on Sunday and I somehow swiped my hand against the papers again and once again I got two new paper cuts on my other hand's thumb's knuckle. I didn't even know what to do. I guess it has something to do with my hands being dry and the paper being razor sharp or something.

Now I just got home and I watched some fire works going off in the inner harbor from my window. I guess they are in celebration for Bush's term being over or something. I didnt know what to think.

Mon, 17 Jan 2005 22:46:54 GMT

Why didnt anyone tell me we have class TOMORROW?! Nat you said Wednesday?! Phew, at least I called my roommate about coming tomorrow and he laughed at me when I told him we didn't have classes. Like actually laughed. At least mines at 4.

Tue, 07 Dec 2004 22:10:05 GMT

if anyone plays Go and wants to play vs. the world's greatest me. I'll name the place you name the time. http://kgs.kiseido.com/en_US/applet.jsp

I only play 9 x 9 because I don't have time for anything greater.

Also, I need a rematch with Mr Zucconi.

sometimes you have to clean your fingernails with a nail.

Thu, 02 Dec 2004 03:39:42 GMT

my tears only get their turn while riding my bike down a really steep hill in baltimore in the freezing cold at 1 am.

Sat, 27 Nov 2004 22:12:54 GMT

http://www.molvania.com/video_medium_2.html

Sat, 27 Nov 2004 19:50:27 GMT

last night jeremy, mike satalof, gus, matt and i went to a haunted cemetery at 1 am and screamed like little girls.

mysterious semblance at the strand of nightmares

Wed, 17 Nov 2004 03:12:56 GMT

"it sounds like your standing on the clouds looking at an iceberg, so surreal, so romantic. makes me want to walk down a trail to nowhere."

-alan jen lien

Thu, 11 Nov 2004 23:07:39 GMT

im in the bunting center right now writing a paper in the back row of the computer lab on the second floor. Theres this old guy sitting the very far corner (3 computers down from me) with his monitor turned to the side to face the wall. I can see the reflection of porn on the whiteboard on the wall. Hes breathing really loudly and I still have three more paragraphs to write.

Sun, 12 Sep 2004 01:44:43 GMT

my grandpa got married today. he's 87 and he married a woman he met at his retirement home that is 84. hes pretty much blind but my dad said she cuts his pizza.

Mon, 23 Aug 2004 18:00:02 GMT

These are excerpts from an article I recently read in The New Yorker. The article can be found here: http://www.ahc.umn.edu/ahc_news/080304/The%20Gift.htm.

*********************************************************************************************************

Last summer, not long after Zell Kravinsky had given almost his entire forty-five-million-dollar real-estate fortune to charity, he called Barry Katz, an old friend in Connecticut, and asked for help with an alibi. Would Katz call Kravinsky's wife, Emily, in Philadelphia, and say that the two men were about to take a weeklong trip to Katz's ski condominium in Vermont? This untruth would help Kravinsky do something that did not have his wife's approval: he would be able to leave home, check into the Albert Einstein Medical Center, in Philadelphia, for a few days, and donate a kidney to a woman whose name he had only just learned.

Katz refused, and Kravinsky became agitated. He said that the intended recipient of his gift would die without the kidney, and that his wife's reluctance to support this "nondirected" donation-it would be only the hundred and thirty-fourth of its kind in the United States-would make her culpable in that death. "I can't allow her to take this person's life!" Kravinsky said. He was, at forty-eight, a former owner of shopping malls and distribution centers, and a man with a single thrift-store suit that had cost him twenty dollars.

"You think she'd be taking a life?" Katz asked.

"Absolutely," Kravinsky replied.

Katz then asked, warily, "Do you mean that anybody who is not donating a kidney is taking someone's life?"

"Yes," Kravinsky said.

"So, by your terms, I'm a murderer?"

"Yes," Kravinsky said, in as friendly a way as possible.

After a pause, Katz said, "I have to get off the phone-I can't talk about this anymore," and he hung up. A few weeks later, Kravinsky crept out of his house at six o'clock in the morning while his wife and children were still asleep. Emily Kravinsky learned that her husband had donated a kidney when she read about it in a local newspaper.

...

"The reasons for giving a little are the reasons for giving a lot, and the reasons for giving a lot are the reasons for giving more," [Kravinsky] recently said.

...

The risks are in the operation. "I had a one-in-four-thousand chance of dying," Kravinsky told me. "But my recipient had a certain death facing her." To Kravinsky, this was straightforward: "I'd be valuing my life at four thousand times hers if I let consideration of mortality sway me."

He made one other calculation: there was a chance that one of his four children-then aged between three and eleven-might need a kidney that only he could supply. Kravinsky took into account the rarity of childhood kidney disease, the fact that he had only ten or so years left as a viable donor, and the fact that siblings tend to be the best kidney matches-his children were well provided with siblings. He decided that the risk was no greater than one in two hundred and fifty thousand, and that it was a risk he could accept. In fact, Kravinsky began to think of a donation as "a treat to myself. I really thought of it as something pleasurable."

In a now famous 1972 essay, "Famine, Affluence and Morality," the Australian philosopher Peter Singer set up the ethical puzzle that has become known as the Shallow Pond and the Envelope. In the first case, a child has fallen into a shallow pond and is drowning; Singer considers saving the child, and reflects on the inconvenience of muddy clothes. In the second, he is asked by the Bengal Relief Fund to send a donation to save the lives of children overseas.

To ignore the child in the pond would be despicable, most people would agree; to ignore an envelope from a charity would not be. (And the law supports that view.) But Singer's contention was that the two derelictions are ethically alike. "If we can prevent something bad without sacrificing anything of comparable significance, we ought to do it," he has written. To allow harm is to do harm; it is wrong not to give money that you do not need for the most basic necessities.

Many philosophers disagree-and would argue, in one way or another, that we can have greater faith in our intuitive moral judgments. Colin McGinn, a philosopher at Rutgers, has called Singer's principle "positively bad, morally speaking," for "it encourages a way of life in which many important values are sacrificed to generalized altruism" and devalues "spending one's energies on things other than helping suffering people in distant lands. . . . Just think of how much the human race would have lost if Newton and Darwin and Leonardo and Socrates had spent their time on charitable acts!" Singer has his adherents: in 1996, Peter Unger, a philosopher at New York University, published "Living High and Letting Die," an extension of Singer's analysis whose aim was to show how we let ourselves off the ethical hook too easily. According to Unger, we placate our consciences with an "illusion of innocence."

By the spring of 2003, Zell Kravinsky had become a man with no such illusion. "It seems to me crystal clear that I should be giving all my money away and donating all of my time and energy," Kravinsky said, and he speculated that failure to be this generous was corrosive, in a way that most people don't recognize. "Maybe that's why we're fatigued all the time," he mused-from "the effort" of disregarding the greater need of others. "Maybe that's why we break down and suffer depressions: we have a sense that there's something we should be remembering and we're not. Maybe that's what we should be remembering-that other people are suffering."

...

Several times, Kravinsky talked of giving away his other kidney and living on dialysis, and then he would upbraid himself for hesitating. "If I didn't have kids, and I saw a child who was dying for want of a kidney, I would offer mine," he said. He sometimes imagined a full-body donation. "My organs could save several people if I gave my whole body away," he told me. "But I don't think I can do that to my family. Or, at least, I can't endure the humiliation. I've thought about it: my kids would be under a cloud, everybody would pillory me as a showboat or a suicide. I know it's a thing I ought to do; other lives are equal to my own, and I could save at least three or four. I have fantasized about it. I've dreamed about it. But I don't have the nerve." He said that "before it happened I'd have to endure the screams and yells from my family. Then I would be committed." He laughed. "My wife and my sister are psychiatrists."

...

"Oh, Barry," Kravinsky said. "It isn't that I think people are evil. But it's a fact that our actions, in some sense our thoughts, let some people live and some people die."

Susan, sitting at the other end of the table, looked at Kravinsky with fond exasperation and asked, "This is how you think every day, really? That's got to be tough. It seems so sad. You seem so sad."

"Well, I am sad." Kravinsky had arranged everything within arm's reach-orange juice, mug, salt, sugar, cereal box-into a tight cluster on his placemat. His adventure in donation had been a rhetorical opportunity-a showcase for his underappreciated talent for argument. But for a moment the debate had slowed, and Kravinsky spoke less forcefully, in apparent recognition of the unequal ratio of sacrifice to sustenance, of good done to moral certainty felt.

"But shouldn't there be more joy in this?" Barry said.

"I don't think of it as something that's joyful. Why should I feel joy?"

"I just feel that if you really were on this path to enlightenment, whatever it is, you would feel joy."

"It's not enlightenment," Kravinsky said quietly. "It's the start of a moral life."

it lasts longer if you take a picture

Sun, 15 Aug 2004 03:35:40 GMT

Fri, 13 Aug 2004 16:04:09 GMT

today is friday the 13 and we made plans to sleep in a graveyard.

Fri, 13 Aug 2004 06:19:11 GMT

i got a free trombone from mike satalof, it even comes with a case.

Thu, 12 Aug 2004 18:59:27 GMT

looks like mica finally realized i was still using my emac web space and decided to delete it. sort of knew that was going to happen.

Sat, 17 Jul 2004 21:20:05 GMT

nest under the table

Thu, 15 Jul 2004 23:35:22 GMT

today at work i was POWER WASHING these picnic tables. i got up ontop of one of them and two seconds later i felt like someone stuck a hot poker in my arm and so i looked down and there were four bees on my arm. it still hurts to move my arm.

they are so assertive; they dont beat around the bush. and they dont take crap from anyone, they'll hurt you without thinking if you mess with them. so cool. too bad i have to kill them all tomorrow morning.

Tue, 13 Jul 2004 04:10:40 GMT

they can also be seen

here

and here

Thu, 08 Jul 2004 22:43:36 GMT

i bought myself a cake today.

fawn

Thu, 24 Jun 2004 03:04:40 GMT

im sorry you got hurt

choo choo! all aboard!? woo woo!

Sat, 19 Jun 2004 21:57:33 GMT

"hello?"

"hey steve, its kieran. im finished spreading those wood chips and i just finished lunch. im also stuck in the employees bathroom. I can't get the door open, its stuck, has this ever happened before?"

"uhhh, no."

today i also drove a miniature train around for little kids and had to be the conductor and make train noises.

yesterday i watched two people as they had heat strokes.