Consider the concept of a minimum page requirement. Commonly, a professor will assign a term paper to a student, and that term paper will have a list of requirements. One of these will be a minimum page requirement. In other words, the term paper must be at least X pages long before the student is allowed to turn it in.

Minimum page requirements are silly. In the real world (the “working” world), the name of the game is getting an idea across clearly and succinctly. Yet students go through elementary, middle, high school, and college being taught that their ideas are not complete unless they happen to fill up at least ten pages of paper, double spaced, 12″, Times New Roman font. Better to fill pages with what we students call “BS” than to turn in a paper two pages shy of the minimum requirement.

Granted, I’m a student, so I haven’t experienced the real world. But from what I hear, in the real world, people are rewarded, not punished, for getting an idea across in one page rather than three. So perhaps more teachers and professors should consider instituting maximum page limits rather than minimum ones. Minimum page limits are fine as guidelines, but creating hard and fast rules for how long a paper must be doesn’t make anyone into a better writer.

Something that really bothers me is when people make racist remarks to me in private because I am white. Over my winter semester break, just a few weeks ago, I was working at my local community center and I was approached by one of the [white] custodians in the kitchen. She began venting about how she hated her job and couldn’t wait to quit. This entire conversation was pretty awkward at this point, and all I could really do was nod and say things like: “uh-huh.”

Well, she was going over a list of things she didn’t like, and she started talking about how much she hated “those certain groups of people that play on the pool tables all day.” This was in reference to the fact that the pool tables are primarily occupied by young hispanic males. At this point in the conversation, I began to feel fairly uncomfortable, so I told her I needed to get back to work.

I should have told her that what she said was wrong. I shouldn’t have just walked away from the conversation. But I don’t want to accuse someone of making a racist comment, especially someone I have never talked to before.

I have never had my own personal hard drive fail.  However, this past year both my roommate and girlfriend had hard drive failures.  In fact, my girlfriend’s hard drive has failed twice in the past year.  In both scenarios, every file was lost.  Pictures, school documents, and more were gone forever.  And because hard drives are not indestructible, this failure could happen to you.  Because of this everyone should prepare for this potential incident with three simple steps.

1. Back up your files regularly

If there are files that you just can’t live without, you should make sure they are backed up.  There are a couple of ways to do this.  You could buy an external hard drive and schedule daily/weekly backups.  You could also burn your files to CDs (or rewriteable CDs). 

My favorite solution, however, is online backups.  Using a program called Mozy (only available for windows currently), my computer backs up my files whenever I am idle.  It’s a free or pay service, depending on how many gigs of files you want backed up.  All you have to do is configure it once, and it becomes automated thereafter.

2. Monitor the status of your hard drive

Anti-gay marriage amendments have been quite successful in various states.  I’ve never understood why… that is, until now.  The Top 10 Reasons Gay Marriage Should be Illegal explains it all.  My favorite reason was:

05) Straight marriage will be less meaningful if gay marriage were allowed; the sanctity of marriages like Britney Spears’ 55-hour just-for-fun marriage would be destroyed.

In all seriousness, I’m still waiting for someone to send a guest article to gimme-five justifying an anti-gay marriage stance.  Please send something to george AT gimme-five DOT COM so we can have some debate about the issue.  Anyone?

Image from tspauld.

There is an increasing movement today to compare America’s fast food companies to the cigarette industry.  Yes, it’s true that they both sell products which have the potential to endanger one’s health if used.  Smoking a pack of cigarettes every day and eating three big macs every day can yield to similar degrees of health problems.

This is much of the logic behind a movement to punish the fast food industry.  Many people are suing McDonalds, Burger King, and other firms, claiming various things, all of which amount to an accusation that these fast food firms are creating an environment in which people are “encouraged” to eat poorly, thus acting as a main cause for obesity.

Let’s stop for one second.  Why does any firm choose to sell a particular product?  The answer is simple: because consumers are demanding it.  It’s not as if McDonald’s spontaneously decided that it would create a large number of unhealthy, affordable foods.  McDonald’s, like any successful firm, responded to market demand for food.  Americans have shown that they want fast, cheap, affordable food, with large portion sizes.  Nutritional information seems to be secondary.  Because of this, McDonald’s has given them fast, cheap, affordable food in large portion sizes.  Is it wrong that they responded to demand?