I do much better on closed-universe problems, where outside research is strictly forbidden. If I’m expected to generate an answer based on the information provided in a very limited set of documents, I can do it just fine. That has held, so far, both at work and at school.

I only start to fall apart when the doors are thrown wide and almost anything could be relevant. The hardest part is deciding to stop researching. Ugh.

I really like this approach, especially since I myself would probably have contributed much more to PGDP if it were presented as an unobtrusive word at a time, rather than requiring me to actively complete an entire page. Because I’m lazy like that.

In other news, Linux (specifically, Ubuntu (specifically, Hardy Heron)) is dead to me, and I officially no longer have any interest in running it on my desktop. Not worth the hassle. I’ve had to recover my MBR and reconfigure GRUB far too many times in the past couple of days. GRUB errors 17, 15 and 13 were bad enough, but error 5 (“Partition table invalid or corrupt: This error is returned if the sanity checks on the integrity of the partition table fail. This is a bad sign.“) was the last straw.

That is, I’m questioning the ‘how’ rather than the ‘what’. The Dallas Mavericks were outscored by the Miami Heat in four consecutive games; George W. Bush received more electoral votes than John Kerry. Those are facts, and neither of them is in dispute. But one can question the way those came to be so.

I’m not saying I agree with the conspiracy theorists in either issue, or even necessarily with the more level- headed folks.

I don’t think either contest was stolen, but I can’t be sure at all. It’s just like Scalia going hunting with Cheney and then not recusing himself, or a patent examiner examining an application in whose assignee he owns hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of stock. The appearance of impropriety is what’s important here.

Dirk Nowitzki getting called for a foul when Dwyane Wade shoved him doesn’t, in itself, mean the NBA is rigged; neither does the CEO of a company known for making easily- and untraceably-tampered-with voting machines publicly pledging to deliver the state of Ohio to a particular candidate, in itself, mean the 2004 election was stolen. But, really, how fair can any contest be when the system overseeing and regulating it screws up all the time?