March 2008
33 posts
Learning to Lie →
“Although we think of truthfulness as a young child’s paramount virtue, it turns out that lying is the more advanced skill.”
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Are our brains wired for math? →
“Over the decades, evidence concerning cognitive deficits in brain-damaged patients has accumulated, and researchers have concluded that we have a sense of number that is independent of language, memory, and reasoning in general.”
The Campus Rape Myth →
“In a delicious historical irony, the baby boomers who dismantled the university’s intellectual architecture in favor of unbridled sex and protest have now bureaucratized both.”
Liars Without Borders →
“Does anybody really believe that in every other country around the world except the former Soviet Union, journalists never die from car crashes or suspicious suicides, never have untimely heart attacks or other fatal illnesses that can be connected to their work?”
February 2008
33 posts
Another Leopard gripe: the single pixel of forced space between the bottom of the menu bar and the top of any window…
…aesthetically I like it, but I keep trying to move my windows up without thinking and getting frustrated that they won’t budge.
Politics →
“Democracy is at a huge advantage over dictatorship or monarchy when it comes to handling the organized succession problem, because the entire system is predicated on the possibility of non-violent succession and an amnesty (or at least amnesia) for the former rulers.”
Playing around with Fluid a bit. Seems cool, but I don’t know how much I’ll actually use it.
Most annoying thing I haven’t managed to fix yet is how stupid the toolbars in Mail and Preview are (I know, Mail was like that before).
In fact, the stupid up/down buttons in Preview’s toolbar have already annoyed me enough to make me switch to Skim as my default PDF reader.
Finally upgraded to Leopard.
Fuck. Sounds like my hard drive is dying.
I was going to say that this was the first time in years that I’d seen the movie that won Best Picture…
…but then I realized that The Departed won last year.
Making fiddly changes to the links on a blog I never update is, in addition to wasted effort, probably an expression of deep denial.
Interesting that the second half of Kevin Kelly’s famous article about the universal library isn’t nearly as whacked-out as the first half.
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Re: principal angles/eigenvalues tweet from Feb. 18, it turns out the cosines of the principal angles are singular values, not eigenvalues.
Seriously considering buying a “Knuth is my homeboy” shirt.
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Slightly depressing to spend a week on a problem, then realize that the right initial approach would have led to a solution in five minutes.
I’m for Obama in the sense that I’m against Hillary and McCain, but I have no idea what he stands for, other than platitudes and slogans.
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“If you can figure out what’s going on when k=3, you can figure it out for all k.” Violates Feller’s principle, but probably true here.
…across sums.
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Turns out the cosines of the principal angles are not eigenvalues; it’s just that, when multiplying, you can pretend square roots distribute
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Turns out the terror was fully justified. Much respect to anybody who actually accomplishes things with elliptic functions.
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Terrified by the prospect of having to learn about theta functions.
Going to try using Subversion for next project. No reason it shouldn’t work just as well for LaTeX as for code.
I spoke too soon.
Whatever Twitter did this afternoon, it seems to fix the problem with tweets not showing up, at least for me.
Also not looking forward to the inevitable story about the ’72 Dolphins popping champagne tonight.
I’m not looking forward to the forthcoming outrage about Belichick leaving the field before the final snap.
As it turns out, Burress actually gave the Patriots’ offense 3 more points of credit than they deserved.
Holy shit.
Faking transparency to get an EPS file that doesn’t look like shit is a big pain in the ass.