February 2012
7 posts
Where I'm At
secondbalcony:
I was so ashamed at my subculture’s elective affinity to Continental Philosophy that I cut most of my ties to my subculture and now I am part of nothing.
“The most poignant part of Monday’s testimony came when a handwriting...”
– um
“You better have a “lady friend” or something fucking dignified...”
– the wife, planning for life after death
“One fancifully imagines a Chinese restaurant with an infinite number of circular...”
– Wikipedia on “the Chinese restaurant process”: “In probability theory, a discrete-time stochastic process” of some sort. There is also an “Indian buffet process,” but apparently it’s not as famous.
Well, we’re stuck with it now. For all of future... →
January 2012
35 posts
surely you jest
Just encountered a recipe that calls for blanching lemon zest. ?!?! Am I missing something here?
“Tom Gayner, chief investment officer of Markel Corp. and a sizable holder of...”
– Grant’s Interest Rate Observer
“All girls[’ blogs] are the same. It’s like, picture of Liz Lemon,...”
– The Wife
“What do you think about Newt and then Romney?”
– my four-year-old nephew. “I heard about them on the radio.”
I knew there was something missing
Over the course of the past several years, it is likely that there are 5-8 million babies not born as a result of this prolonged recession. (#)
everything you already think is true
We surveyed an entire class of high-functioning young adults at an elite university for prospective major, familial incidence of neuropsychiatric disorders, and demographic and attitudinal questions. Students aspiring to technical majors (science/mathematics/engineering) were more likely than other students to report a sibling with an autism spectrum disorder (p = 0.037). Conversely, students...
the curse of dimensionality
The curse of dimensionality refers to various phenomena that arise when analyzing and organizing high-dimensional spaces (often with hundreds or thousands of dimensions) that do not occur in low-dimensional settings such as the physical space commonly modeled with just three dimensions.
There are multiple phenomena referred to by this name in domains such as sampling, combinatorics, machine...
salt in the wound, Wall Street Journal
From a piece on the shutdown of Ticonderoga Securities:
A call to [the CEO] Mr. McLoughlin, who was in meetings with employees and clients during the afternoon, wasn’t immediately returned. An employee who answered the phone, and sounded choked-up, declined to comment.
“He was allying himself to science, for what was science but the absence of...”
– Henry James, The Golden Bowl.
Someone I know has at times insisted on calling Facebook “Thefacebook” because of history. I now feel the same way about SeamlessWeb. It was a stupid name to begin with, but I’m never going to call it just “Seamless.” Fuck you.
non-great moments in judging human character,...
He told me that I should try to be more misanthropic and more contrarian. A first!
He believes I am “happy” and “not dejected” and “energized.”
insights from Top Chef
CHARLIZE THERON HAS AN AMAZING PERSONALITY. WHO KNEW??
video-game idea
Mortal Wombat.
mortgagez: yeah, the whole "bucket list" thing kind of demonstrates a lame european hedonist perspective on life
mortgagez: the world is not for seeing, it is for either creating or destroying
guilty as charged
mortgagez: it is possible that you put too much of a premium on fonts and their moral equivalents
lessons learned from my first trip to the Brooklyn...
All the world’s cultures have always loved depicting lions.
“In a non-smoking carriage Miss Emily Brent sat very upright as was her custom....”
– Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None. Later: “I think there is really an opening for a place where there is good plain cooking and a nice old-fashioned type of person. None of this nudity and gramophones half the night.”
the wife and I are going to read Henry James's The...
Me: Let's take a quick look at Wikipedia first. It was published in 1904...
The Wife: Okay...
Me: It's "complex" and "intense"...
The Wife: Uggghhhhhhh.
Surely one of the single most potent arguments against unbridled capitalism is the existence and success of “BluePrintCleanse” (six days for $390). Relatedly, one of the single most potent arguments against our particular form of semi-bridled capitalism is that, of all the billions of pages of federal, state, and local regulations, none seem to prohibit this.
the anxiety of influence
I just finished reading the book Supergods by beloved comics writer Grant Morrison. Unfortunately, it was a bit of a letdown. For one thing, no one seems to have edited it; Morrison repeats himself all over the place. For another thing, he spends a weird amount of time badmouthing Alan Moore. But methinks he protests too much…
Supergods: “A fist-shaking Moore disowned [the Watchmen...
“For the first time in almost half a century, homicide has fallen off the list of...”
– Obviously suicide needs to be higher on this list. (via nodicesoldier)
“In recent weeks, the government has stripped two-thirds of entertainment...”
– USA Today. Who among us can really say they’re wrong?
For literally years, I’ve been jokingly using the anti-expression “At the end of the day, it is what it is,” because it combines my two least favorite pseudo-wise tautologies (both of which are particularly popular with businessfolk).
On this week’s episode of Top Chef, the irritating contestant Sara(h) actually used that exact string of words, in a very serious way, to...
fun with numbers
mortgagez: you know that rule "80% of contributions are made by 20% of people at arbitrary organization"?
mortgagez: if that was fractal (ie "20% of the 20% do 80% of the 80%")
mortgagez: then 0.8% of people do 50% of the work
mortgagez: and the #1 person in the us does ~7%
“I love you, even though no one else could.”
– my boo, speaking truth to power.
“I think I have good, complicated ideas!”
– Lola. No, Lola, you don’t. Also, I’m pretty sure that complicatedness is not in itself a virtue when it comes to ideas. But she really thinks that it is.
more notes on Work of Art (I'm catching up)
Lola is exactly the same person as Jaclyn from the first season, down to the fact that they both interpret criticisms about not opening up enough creatively as demands to take naked photographs of themselves because they think they’re so irresistible.
Obviously I hate Lola.
Michelle was kind of the same as Peregrine from the first season.
I loved Peregrine. I also started to fall...
“I’m just not sure there’s any inner Sucklord there to find.”
– Jerry Saltz, Work of Art. Kind of impressive that he was able to say this with a straight face.
December 2011
40 posts
“The tautological emptiness of a Master’s Wisdom is exemplified in the...”
– weird to see Zizek quoted on Less Wrong!
not a typo
losel (n.): a worthless person
“A Florida animal sanctuary said Cheetah, the chimpanzee sidekick in the Tarzan...”
– ?!?!?!?
everyone is a groupuscule: Ineffectively Corrupt →
I see this in lobbying all the time. Because, I am a soulless technician who will faithfully advise anyone and everyone who asks I see the back rooms of opposing lobbyists all the time.
Here at the state level I can safely say that virtually no one has any idea what they are doing. That is, for…
Goddammit, I was going to post this. Fucking Christmas. I’m off my game.
it's a talent
me: it sucks to be able to experience stress and boredom at the same time
me: you'd think they'd kind of be mutually exclusive
cashflowz: god you are so right
cashflowz: can you write a book?
cashflowz: I feel like you are very good at expressing all these negative things
Wife: Let's get some tea.
Me: But I want to stop having caffeine. And stop eating sugar and wheat again. And not have alcohol anymore. I'll just be my real self all the time!
Wife: Uggghhhhhhhh.
so bored
cashflowz: I am literally looking up amazon SKUs and comparing them to lowe's SKUs and seeing which products are cheaper
cashflowz: I AM SO BORED I WANT TO DIE
me: that's kind of cool, though!
me: "granular"
me: think of how bored i must be
cashflowz: robots should do this
me: if that sounds cool to me
cashflowz: you must be SO bored
“Instead of housing precocious well-to-do children with names like Finnegan and...”
– Curbed