Akinator is pretty cool (http://en.akinator.com/). You think of a real or fictional character and play the game twenty questions with this genie dude interface. If you don’t know what twenty questions is, you are basically asked questions about the character you’ve decided on, to which you respond yes or no (although with this thing you can also choose “probably/partially,” “probably not/not really,” or “I don’t know”). After twenty questions it tries to guess the character.

For fun, here’s a list of characters it did and didn’t get correctly for some of my friends and me:

Characters it guessed correctly:

• Suzumiya Haruhi (The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya)
• Lelouch Lamperouge (Code Geass)
• Euphemia li Britannia (Code Geass)
• Setsuna F Seiei (Gundam 00)
• Tieria Erde (Gundam 00)
• Osaka (Azumanga Daioh)
• Light (Death Note)
• Arbiter (Halo)
• Hydralisk (StarCraft)
• Captain Falcon
• Captain Planet
• Jolin Tsai
• Richard Stallman
• Pope Benedict XVI
• Anubis
• Condoleezza Rice
• Otto von Bismarck
• Ron Paul
• Armin van Buuren
• Tony the Tiger
• Longcat

Characters it didn’t guess correctly:

• Taeyeon (SNSD) — it guessed BoA
• Younha — it guessed BoA
• Sarah Kerrigan (StarCraft) — it guessed Tanya (Red Alert)
• Marine (StarCraft) — Jim Raynor (StarCraft)
• Archon (StarCraft) — Tassadar (StarCraft)
• Gold Roger (One Piece) — Sir Crocodile (One Piece)
• Ma Ying-jeou — Hu Jintao
• Charles Darwin — Isaac Newton

Hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving! I did. We can’t ignore, though, the bad things that have happened over the course of the holiday break—first, the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, and second, the deaths of a few people the morning of Black Friday.

Mostly everyone condemns terrorism and has a multitude of problems with it by now, so I want to turn the American consumer’s attention to the Black Friday incident at a Long Island Walmart. As he was opening the doors, a man died as he was trampled on by people rushing into the store.

It’s not inherently bad to want to get some better deals on a Friday morning. (I actually really enjoy Black Friday.) But what’s bad is selfishness to the point of totally ignoring everybody around you and even stepping on someone in order to achieve a goal. If you’re a friend of mine reading my blog, you wouldn’t do this, but even so, it’s really sad to hear that something like this happened. I mean, this guy was a temporary worker there that morning just trying to earn some money and get his job done, and terrible, unreasonable things happen to him. Obviously he wasn’t murdered, but he was killed by the ignorance and selfishness of others. Don’t let this happen around you. They should have just done the whole lining up deal like we have around here to prevent such inane tragedies.

Well, it’s inevitable that I write something about what’s going on in the financial world right now. After all—you’ve heard it everywhere—it’s “the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression.”

Is it really? It’s definitely pretty bad, that is, bad enough so that a Republican administration wants to spend $700B to alleviate the economy—alleviate the economy—and not save it, because it’s impossible to totally prevent a recession at this point, but only to make sure it’s not so bad as it could be. It’s also certain that we’re not feeling the full effects of the crisis quite yet and that it’ll last for some time. On the other hand, some people, at least, are probably going too crazy about it, when, really, the good times are going to eventually roll in again. Maybe it’s just my outlook on life, though.

Next, we should think about whether the state doing this and that to simply help alleviate the effects on the economy is going to work. I’m not sure exactly what to think about it. From a purely laissez-faire perspective, one would think it’s crazy. And it very well might be. But, as my parents explained to me, what investors want right now is confidence and assurance, or else the market just goes straight down. The bailout plan may do just that, even if it’s not going to help that much realistically, but it does at least a positive illusion or impression so that investors want to keep their money in the market.

Even so, we have to ask if that’s a wise use of government money, because, hey, that’s seven hundred billion dollars, and it’s not from thin air; it’s our money being spent to alleviate the problems of some huge, once extremely profitable companies who were fiscallly irresponsible. Speaking from a strictly constitutional and free market perspective, it is the wrong thing to do, but with the way people expect the government to do things for them these days, it might be worse to show investors a rough lesson by ignoring their pleas. The government, most believe, has to do something, even if there’s a chance it might not work.

But the government shouldn’t have to do that something. So then what should it do? Something or nothing? Follow constitutional principles or be pragmatic? It’s hard for me to say outright that one of those options is right and one is not, because both have their pros and cons. Maybe the government should do something, but not to that extent and not of that nature. Who knows, anyway? I’m pretty sure the government isn’t so sure of itself, either, and neither is either major presidential candidate, no matter what policy they espouse.