March 2009
Rant: Nerd and Anti-Nerd →
Is it time to retire the term “nerd”? It’s had a good run, sure, but does anyone else feel it’s not what it used to be? It’s lost some of its specificity and force, and maybe it needs to retire with honor. What honor it has left.
I love the debate about the true meaning of nerd, geek and dork in the comments. (Also: the battle between Answer 4 and Answer 5 in the...
Time: Different from space →
I missed this the first time around, but it’s interesting and touches on a whole slew of issues. The first is that, unlike what you may have heard but as we always expected, time really isn’t just another dimension like the three in space, not even in the theoretical framework of modern physics. (Apparently the difference comes down to a minus sign.) It then metamorphoses into an...
“I so admire people who don’t need me to love them. I have so much affection for...”
– Merlin Mann. (transcript)
Every Cause Wants To Be A Cult →
Every cause, no matter how noble, tends to degenerate into a cult unless sufficient energy is expended on counteracting this tendency, just like matter tends to slide into higher entropy states unless you put more energy into the system. That’s a basic fact of human psychology, at least if we can take Eliezer Yudkowsky’s word for it. I think he may very well be right:
In the same...
Kafka, the girl and the doll →
Jin Zhu of shooting wide open (read it!) found this little story in Paul Auster’s The Brooklyn Follies:
It’s the last year of Kafka’s life, and he’s fallen in love with Dora Diamant, a young girl of nineteen or twenty who ran away from her Hasidic family in Poland and now lives in Berlin. He gets to Berlin in the fall of 1923 and dies the following spring, but those last months are probably...
You're a Genius all the time
Jack Kerouac’s essentials, in his own words:
Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
Submissive to everything, open, listening
Try never get drunk outside yr own house
Be in love with yr life
Sonething that you feel will find its own form
Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
Blow as deep as you want to blow
Write what you want bottomless from bottom of...
“It is individuals who have rights, not religions.”
– Canada’s representantive to the Human Rights Council, in response to a non-binding resolution condemning “defamation of religion” as a human rights violation.
The Human Rights Council is officially a joke.
Ada Lovelace Day — Bringing women in technology to... →
I suppose if you are going to name a day in someone’s honor, Ada Lovelace isn’t your worst choice. Yesterday was Ada Lovelace Day, “an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology.”
Ada, you may have heard, is “the world’s first programmer” (that claim can be and is widely debated). She is, certainly, a favorite of the...
International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) Chart... →
ɘ jutɪlɪti fɔr taɪpɪŋ fɘnɛtɪklɪ. (Apologies to any actual phoneticians if I’ve mangled something, there.)
What's the Point?
Confession: I used to have an atheist blog. Boy, did I get tired of talking about atheism. I just got really tired of it really quickly. I have since spent most of my blogging days carefully skirting the issue, because I was so bored with it all. At the risk of opening a can of worms, I’ll briefly break the atheism blogging celibacy. Here’s an article about the so-called New Humanism,...
In Bruges (2008) →
Marie: Why don’t you both put your guns down, and go home? Harry: Don’t be stupid. This is the shootout. Ray: Harry, I’ve got an idea. Harry: What? Ray: My room faces out the canal, right? I’m going to go back to me room, jump into the canal, see if I can swim to the other side and escape. Harry: All right. Ray: If you go outside around the corner, you can shoot at me from...
Six-Word Reviews of 1,302 SXSW Mp3s by Paul Ford →
Doing this two years in a row is impressive.
Discuss: Should children have the right to vote? →
Scott Aaronson thinks so.
Your favorite X for the next five minutes
Your least favorite expression for the next five minutes: the above.
I could say that I’m annoyed by the tone of this expression — it’s either an assertion (in which case it’s presumptuous) or it’s an imperative (in which case, OR ELSE WHAT?) — but really I’m just bored of seeing it. Some people (cough) apparently can’t link to anything without...
“When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because...”
– Gordy Thompson, in 1993 (!), on newspapers , quoted in Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable. It successfully draws the line between the invention of the printing press and the internet: “We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace...
1982 Darwin Awards Honorable Mention: Lawn Chair... →
Larry Walters of Los Angeles is one of the few to contend for the Darwin Awards and live to tell the tale. “I have fulfilled my 20-year dream,” said Walters, a former truck driver for a company that makes TV commercials. “I’m staying on the ground. I’ve proved the thing works.”
Larry’s boyhood dream was to fly. But fates conspired to keep him from his...
Uncommon Places, On the Road
Ok, this is a long post, probably the longest I’ve written, but it’s broken up by pictures, and if good blogs reflect focused obsessions (or whatever Merlin Mann said), this is a mirror of what I’ve been thinking about recently.
On the Road is the fictionalized account of a number of road trips Jack Kerouac took across America together with his friend Neal Cassady and an...
Great Moments in Logic →
Exactly as it sounds like: short vignettes of great moments in logic. (via)
Plain, Plainer
1. I couldn’t help it: this and this inspired me, and I had to do a makeover of this site in pursuit of the goal. There may be glitches, since I kind of rushed it, because 2. I’m going skiing for the next few days; expect few (if any) updates the rest of this week. 3. As always, I’m hoping this is something I’ll stick with for some time. If I do say so myself, it...
“My writing tip: after writing anything longer than one page in length, see if...”
– Jeff Porten.
Some Interesting Facts About Memory (and One That...
I’ve decided to let a few things about memory that I’ve encountered and thought about recently converge into a single post, since I can’t make them out to be separate items. One is decidedly personal and un-neat, and I’m saving it for last.
First, there was an interesting article about a young teacher who experienced a rare affliction called dissociative fugue, a condition...
The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped... →
This movie is #80 on imdb’s list of the worst movies of all time, with a rating of 1.9. But come on, look at that title (which includes the two exclamation marks and the question mark). I want to see it just because of that. And look at the plot:
Jerry falls in love with a stripper he meets at a carnival. Little does he know that she is the sister of a gypsy fortune teller whose predictions...
High Tech Misery in China →
A description of the working conditions at the Meitai Plastics & Electronics factory in China:
Two thousand workers, mostly young women, produce computer equipment including keyboards and printer cases for Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Lenovo, Microsoft and IBM.
Workers are prohibited from talking, listening to music, raising their heads, putting their hands in their pockets. Workers are fined...
World Builder on Vimeo →
Now that’s just wonderful. (Even if you’ve seen it around, I’m sure watching it again is worth it.)
Translating "The Economist" Behind China's Great... →
Andy Baio:
While researching Oscar screeners last month, I stumbled on a remarkable example of online collaboration in China that’s completely undiscovered here. In short, a group of dedicated fans of The Economist newsmagazine are translating each weekly issue cover-to-cover, splitting up the work among a team of volunteers, and redistributing the finished translations as complete PDFs for...
“Chicago” →
Israel has a fake Arab town in the middle of the Negev desert that it uses to train its military forces in urban warfare. Called Chicago. Fascinating, to say the least. (via)