Beards, Tears, and Other Sundry Topics

So yeah, I got tired of the facial hair and got rid of it. Opinions about it had been mixed, and it didn't really feel like me. Plus, it didn't seem to be getting significantly bushier; it felt anemic and probably looked pathetic. Obviously, I attempted to make it look as bad as possible in the "Before" picture. I was going for the look of those people in weight loss and hair replacement ads; they're completely sullen and disheveled in the first picture and suddenly beaming and perfect in the second picture. I couldn't pull that last part off. :-P Oh well, it was a good change of pace, and my curiosity on the matter has been satisfied.

I mentioned briefly in my last post that my right eye was almost constantly tearing. Unfortunately, that hasn't abated yet. My third trip to Lehigh's health center led to a re-diagnosis of the problem as a blocked tear duct. Who even knew you could get such a thing? And I always thought that tear ducts produced water, not drained it away. Anyway, I went to an eye doctor in town yesterday. He attempted to "irrigate" the duct so that he could see what the problem was. This procedure involves sticking a needle-sized (but not sharp) implement directly into the duct and then putting water through it and seeing where it comes out. Well, that's how it works in theory, but I never found out, because my eye wasn't happy with this foreign invader and blinked each time he got into position (which I felt as an uncomfortable but not exactly painful prick), right before he could irrigate. I was disappointed and frustrated that I was unable to tolerate the procedure, but he reassured me that it happens all the time.

Was he just trying to make me feel better? If so, it didn't work, but I appreciated the effort. After that, he pushed firmly on the edge of my eye (where the tear duct is located) and determined that something is probably blocking the duct, but without being to irrigate it, he couldn't be certain what it is. He wrote me prescriptions for two antibiotics, and that's where I am now. The drugs could take up to a month to work, meaning I may not see any improvement for a while, if at all. Great.

On non-health related fronts, Dr. Blackmore's lecture finally spurred me to read the copy of Sam Harris's "The End of Faith" that I've had lying around since last semester. Harris's argument is predictable but reasonably sophisticated. I take umbrage at his accusation that religious "moderates" are equally to blame for the problems of faith; he claims that moderates legitimize the beliefs of the fundamentalists. I beg to differ; as far as I'm concerned, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and their ilk are about as Christian as Osama Bin Laden is (I'm being a bit facetious for rhetorical effect... but only a bit). The major flaw with his argument is, he makes sweeping generalizations about religious people that demonstrate only a superficial and stereotypical understanding of religion and the role it plays in peoples' lives. I'm about one-third of the way through the book, and later on, he's going to discuss spiritual experiences, with which I have no firsthand experience, so that could be valuable to me.

I'm taking a class on search engines that involves building a search engine from the ground up. We're not looking to make the next Google, but these search engines (one being developed by each group) will be standalone and implement some simplified versions of the real algorithms that go into professional search engines. What this all means is, it's going to be a lot of work. The project is divided into three phases. Fortunately, my current group for the first phase is great, and I already knew two of my group members previously. While we can choose our own group for the third phase, we're getting swapped around for the second phase, so I'm a bit worried by that prospect.

In the first week of the class, we each took an existing search engine API and demonstrated that we could create a search engine with it. I was up almost the whole night before it was due, worked on it until the last minute, and got it working only ten minutes before class, but I had enough time to have some fun with it. If you're interested, you can find it here. See if you can figure out what's "special" about it. :-)