March 2008
33 posts
Would it be bad form to try to convince someone else to write a teaching statement for me?
It’s raining, I just landed in Detroit, and it looks like I’m going to miss my connection. Life is unfair.
My talk went pretty well, I think. Only got one question at the end, though.
You know the plane is small when your aisle seat is also a window seat.
Well that was unpleasant. I had the worst seat on the plane: last row, middle seat.
Man, EDGE sucks balls in Detroit.
Off to Illinois today with an empty stomach and a head full of caffeine.
Just learned that the letter c with a bar over it is medical shorthand for “with” (from the Latin “cum”, obviously).
Cruel and Usual Punishment →
“Overwhelmed with words and imagery, harangued with opinion, beset by twaddle, my brain hungered for simplicity and found it.”
Desperately need a new mouse. This one is driving me crazy.
Quantum Progress →
“What is it about the word ‘quantum’ that sucks the brains out of otherwise reasonable people? There has to be some sort of Heisenberg-Sch[r]ödinger Credulity Principle that makes all the ideons in their brains go spin-up at the same time, and I’m quite sure that the Many Worlds Interpretation of it has the most merit.”
Another totally unproductive weekend: completed.
On the plus side, I can console myself on my worthlessness with good beer.
Highly annoyed that Gus Johnson didn’t get to call any particularly exciting games this weekend.
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Paper finally submitted.
The Theory of Interstellar Trade →
“It should be noted that, while the subject of this paper is silly, the analysis actually does make sense. This paper, then, is a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics.”
A Beringian bombshell →
“Historical linguists have, it seems, opened a new chapter in the human epic by establishing the first-ever verifiable links between the indigenous languages of Siberia and North America. … For the first time, linguistics has set a firm foot on the “land bridge” that lies sunken beneath the Bering Strait.”
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Ricci Flow →
Very nice intuitive explanation of Ricci flow (the key tool in Perelman’s proof of the Poincaré Conjecture) by Terence Tao.
Working until 2 AM Monday night of spring break. There may be something wrong with me.
Finally got a real stand to put my laptop on instead of just using a stack of books.
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Ah, generalizing. So satisfying when it works.
Kosovo: The Brave Tribes Are Doomed →
“And that’s the lesson of Kosovo for the Serbs: we always fight better than our miserable enemies, and yet every time we get screwed.”
The Fear Factory →
“[A] closer inspection of the cases brought by Joint Terrorism Task Forces reveals that most of the prosecutions had one thing in common: The defendants posed little if any demonstrable threat to anyone or anything.”
It’s sort of depressing to think about how much money I’ve spent on coffee infrastructure. Apparently addictions are expensive. Who knew?
Nevermind. ⌥⌘\ toggles anti-aliasing when you zoom.
Can anyone explain to me why OS X anti-aliases the screen when you zoom in? Has this always been the case, or is this new with Leopard?
Stupid infinite sed loops.
“Islamofascism”: More Sloppyspeak →
“In the wide, nasty family of authoritarian political ideologies, Islamism and fascism are not even first cousins, let alone identical twins. To speak as if they were is to blur factors that are morally and politically distinct.”
Why does the CSS font-family property ignore “Computer Modern” if you put anything else after it?
And yes, I know Google Docs/Buzzword/etc. are free, suck less than OpenOffice and are useful for collaboration.
Plus, 40 bucks is cheap enough that I don’t need to use it very much to justify the expense.
On the other hand, OpenOffice/NeoOffice sucks balls and Microsoft Office is way too expensive.
Not entirely sure why I bought iWork 08: I almost never need a word processor, spreadsheet app or presentation app.