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In college, I made a computer program that would tell me the room number and class schedule of every person at the university.

You will never know how easy it was… or still is!

I've noticed something about myself lately: I'm much more concerned with the way things are than the way things should be. It's not that I don't appreciate thinking about how things should be with some sort of goal of achieving that end. It's just that it bugs the crap out of me that people who think in only those terms think of nothing else: they have no appreciation for how the world does in fact work. Without that appreciation, no realistic goal will ever be achieved.

Why do the vast majority of humans somehow believe that they're all above average? Pretty much, if you think you're below average, you are.

Again, of all those faculties with which nature endows us we first acquire the potentialities, and only later effect their actualization. (This is evident in the case of the senses. It was not from repeated acts of seeing or hearing that we acquired the senses but the other way round: we had these senses before we used them; we did not acquire them as the result of using them.) But the virtues we do acquire by first exercising them, just as happens in the arts. Anything that we have to learn to do we learn by the actual doing of it: people become builders by building and instrumentalists by playing instruments. Similarly we become just by performing just acts, temperate by performing temperate ones, brave by performing brave ones. This view is supported by what happens in city-states. Legislators make their citizens good by habituation; this is the intention of every legislator, and those who do not carry it out fail of their object. This is what makes the difference between a good constitution and a bad one.¹

1. Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. J. A. K. Thomson (London: Penguin, 1953) 31-32.

As this year is the fiftieth year of the AFL's existence, fans are invited to go to the Denver Broncos' website and vote for the all-time Denver Broncos team. Here are my picks (only to show how little I know about Broncos history, but so what).