December 2010
Decades
So it’s 2011 and the pedants are saying that since there is no year zero the decade didn’t actually last 2000-09 but 2001-2010. And I’m making the same point I did last year, which is that there’s nothing special about our calendar and it’s kind of accidental that our year one is our year one, given that it’s supposed to commemorate the birth of a religious...
"The Best Debugging Story I've Ever Heard." →
(see also)
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5 tags
I wrote a letter.... by Donald Barthelme →
I wrote a letter to the President of the moon, asked him if they had towaway zones up there. The cops had towed away my Honda and I didn’t like it. Cost me seventy-five dollars to get it back, plus the mental health. You ever notice how the tow trucks pick on little tiny cars? You ever seen them hauling off a Chrysler Imperial? No, you haven’t.
The President of the moon replied most...
Something that might not be entirely true
Jeremy sought refuge among the numbers. The integers, specifically. He found the reals too dense, like he couldn’t quite squeeze in between them no matter how hard he tried. Wide-eyed, he stared down the line, numbers stretching in both directions as far as he could see. He sat wedged between fifty-three and fifty-four, and if you’d been there you could’ve seen his head as he...
Something that might not be entirely true
Jeremy sought refuge among the numbers. The integers, specifically. He found the reals too dense, like he couldn’t quite squeeze in between them no matter how hard he tried. Wide-eyed, he stared down the line, numbers stretching in both directions as far as he could see. He sat wedged between fifty-three and fifty-four, and if you’d been there you could’ve seen his head as he...
Ideas
I wonder if the tyranny of primary texts can withstand rational appraisal. I’ve read some 21st century technical philosophy, and it’s hard work — even if you’ve been working your way into the heart of the web of technical terms and theories and countertheories from the periphery, following and following up threads as you go — to even get to the point where you...
Ideas
I wonder if the tyranny of primary texts can withstand rational appraisal. I’ve read some 21st century technical philosophy, and it’s hard work — even if you’ve been working your way into the heart of the web of technical terms and theories and countertheories from the periphery, following and following up threads as you go — to even get to the point where you...
“The metaphysicians of Tlön do not seek for the truth or even for verisimilitude,...”
– I’m perhaps a little too fond of Borges. His brand of philosophical fiction is delightful and sadly unmatched by anyone else. This is from Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, describing the philosophers of Tlön, a fictional planet invented by a secret society, a planet on which everyone is a...
We control the algorithms for all emotions. We... →
Sold as a gentler alarm clock, the ocean clock was marketed as a curiosity, a gift for the dad who has everything, an embellishment to replace the default in the common stock of household electronics. Like other white noise alarm clocks, it could be set to slowly wake its sleeping owner with progressively louder sounds of waves. The clever addition that set it apart was the built-in atomizer,...
Top 10 Animals That Don’t Have Asses →
Tao Lin:It has been said that when God created the Ugly Fish he momentarily forgot he was creating things to exist in concrete reality, rather than in abstraction, or in “art,” and therefore would be subject to cause-and-effect/time/[other physical laws] that allow crippling loneliness and severe depression to manifest in specific consciousnesses. To solve this, it has been said, God idly inserted...
Certain words are like mood in a can. Unscrew the lid and a very specific image will spread into the air and form in the minds of anyone who hears or reads the word. Certain words, you’ll see people advocating their extinction because they’re meaningless, they’ve come to mean too little, so we no longer have any idea what it’s supposed to mean in any given context....
I’ve been waiting for several years for the perfect opportunity to brag about being a technical writer whose contribution to the world of open source has been translated into French, Chinese, German, Polish, Spanish, Portuguese, Bulgarian, Indonesian and Italian. I think it’s safe to say this opportunity will never present itself.
My motives for bringing up this highly laudable act...
I’ve been waiting for several years for the perfect opportunity to brag about being a technical writer whose contribution to the world of open source has been translated into French, Chinese, German, Polish, Spanish, Portuguese, Bulgarian, Indonesian and Italian. I think it’s safe to say this opportunity will never present itself.
My motives for bringing up this highly laudable act...
Coyote V. Acme →
Mr. Coyote states that on December 13th he received of Defendant via parcel post one Acme Rocket Sled. The intention of Mr. Coyote was to use the Rocket Sled to aid him in pursuit of his prey. Upon receipt of the Rocket Sled Mr. Coyote removed it from its wooden shipping crate and, sighting his prey in the distance, activated the ignition. As Mr. Coyote gripped the handlebars, the Rocket Sled...
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Akutagawa Ryūnosuke
My first contact with Ryūnosuke Akutagawa came from this essay on Fantastic Metropolis, a great site that now seems to be defunct, on the short story Hell Screen. Hell Screen is an intense tale of creative obsession, and it’s built up in the same way I build my stories when I try my hand at fiction: around a central image. In Hell Screen, that image is of a young woman writhing in pain in a...
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Akutagawa Ryonosuke
My first contact with Ryonosuke Akutagawa came from this essay on Fantastic Metropolis, a great site that now seems to be defunct, on the short story Hell Screen. Hell Screen is an intense tale of creative obsession, and it’s built up in the same way I build my stories when I try my hand at fiction: around a central image. In Hell Screen, that image is of a young woman writhing in pain in a...
3 tags
So, I was lying in bed trying to get to sleep, thinking about how I should do a post about my ambivalent feelings re aestheticizing violence in the form of sports, where I was going to mention how I train Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (but suck at it) and compare that sport to chess and go all intellectual and defend the intelligence and tactics that go into something like MMA and thereby attempt to...
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-undermined replied to this: “NASA discovered a life form with the core element being arsenic. About two weeks ago. Check it out!”
Actually, they didn’t. Also, nobody discovered conclusive evidence that the universe was “bruised” by parallel universes. One of the reasons I like speaking of hypotheticals and science fiction is that real science almost always comes...
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Agenda item of the day: D or L isomers?
— Joe won the lottery. It’s L. Moving on…
— So in this jar we’ve got Luca, and his spawn is about to diverge forever. Anything else you’d like to add before we unfreeze?
— How about… Like, a signature?
— A signature?
— Stamp his genome, like, hiya, we were here.
— That’ll fuck with some heads some billion years down the road,...
Agenda item of the day: D or L isomers?
— Joe won the lottery. It’s L. Moving on…
— So in this jar we’ve got Luca, and his spawn is about to diverge forever. Anything else you’d like to add before we unfreeze?
— How about… Like, a signature?
— A signature?
— Stamp his genome, like, hiya, we were here.
— That’ll fuck with some heads some billion years down the road,...
2 tags
I wish I was satisfied by how or the instrumental why. Humanity is stuck on the metaphysical why? The how of the way we got here is so extraordinary that you’d think it’d be enough. If humanity were content with how, we’d be dumber but, perhaps, also happier. The philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe, a nihilist if there ever was one, in his essay The Last Messiah calls the human mind...
I like it when the year draws to a close and all the media outlets and blogs start doing their year-end summaries of whatever it is they’re all about, be it geopolitics or legos. It’s so nice to have someone sit you down, figuratively speaking, and tell you, “This is the shit that’s been happening over the last twelve months. Here’s what happened, and why, and how it...
We Are All Stupid Narcissists and I Got the Fancy...
Dunning-Kruger effect: incompetent people tend to overestimate their own skills and fail to recognize genuine skill.
Forer effect: we tend to estimate that statements about ourselves are highly accurate if we believe they were specifically tailored to us, even if the statements are completely generic.
Pollyanna principle: our perceptions and memories are biased towards the positive.
Loss...
The Woman
At the end of the internet is a woman. You can reach her by following any of her silvery hair strands, which are tangled into other hairs at their tips. She used to be young and pretty, probably, but now she’s old and wrinkled. She doesn’t age in earthly years.
There are probably questions you want to ask of the woman at the end of the internet. Maybe you were laboring under the...
“I am coming to see that the sensation of the worst nightmares, a sensation that...”
– David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest. Yeah, I’ve had some of those. Managed to read 60 pages in before quoting anything from this book; do you think I can avoid becoming that guy that a disproportionate amount of people who read IJ tend to become, the one with an overwhelming urge to quote and...
“Using the “born-that-way” argument in a defense of homosexuality has...”
– Dia Nomou Nomo Apethanon on metafilter. I’m in favor of getting to the bottom of things: I think it’s dangerous to use arguments that may appear rhetorically effective, yet have implications we don’t endorse. E.g., that we should accept something because of some contingent fact...