mahiwaga

I'm not really all that mysterious

2015

Jan 2015 Feb 2015 Mar 2015 Apr 2015 May 2015 Jun 2015 Jul 2015 Aug 2015 Sep 2015 Oct 2015 Nov 2015 Dec 2015

Jan

I've been thinking about forever

I'm not going to say that there weren't a few rough patches or sleepless, existential-angst-fraught nights in 2014, but even then, I have to say, it might have very well been the best year of my life. Hopefully only so far. It's only a little more than a week in, but 2015 has started off well. Here's to hoping the rest of 2015 being just as good or even better! *makes hand gestures to ward away misfortune*

· Read more…

Syncing Twitter with Timehop is the only way for me to reach really old Friendfeed entries now.

· Read more…

So the last (and the first) time I was at Hotel Fig, it was 4½ years ago for a Friendfeed meetup chandelier hallway atrium

· Read more…

ongoing weirdness

So a little more than a year and a half ago, weird things started happening at my house.

· Read more…

Feb

better than a time machine (reprise)

Driving through Old Town Pasadena, my iPod plays the first track of the album "Wish" by The Cure and suddenly it's the summer between my sophomore year and junior year in high school again, and I'm feeling nostalgic about all that existential angst.

· Read more…

better late than never

Everything worth having, everything worth experiencing has a price. When all is said and done, it really isn't much at all, just a small trifle.

· Read more…

when all is said and done, you cannot belong to me because souls cannot own one another
but with our free will, we can choose to walk down this road together
hand in hand and heart to heart
to build the rest of our lives together in whatever time we’re given

· Read more…

rest in peace, Leonard Nimoy

Leonard Nimoy's last tweet: "A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP" https://twitter.com/TheRealNimoy/status/569762773204217857

· Read more…

Mar

great underground empire

The other day Timehop pulled this tweet up:

· Read more…

a long time coming

I learned early on that things fall apart.

· Read more…

Apr

Why Snape's Tragic Back Story Isn't So Tragic • Dorkly • 2015 Mar 31

· Read more…

empathizing with black clouds

Why Some Depressed People Hate Being Told to 'Cheer Up' • PsyBlog • 2015 Apr 21 (via TYWKIWDBI)

· Read more…

penicillin G is a hell of a drug

Beethoven's cause of death diagnosis • OUPblog • 2015 Mar 26 (via TYWKIWDBI)

· Read more…

Thomas Jefferson and originalism

TIL: Thomas Jefferson argued that because no generation has a right to bind subsequent generations, the Constitution should expire every 19 years • /r/todayilearned • 2015 Apr 15 (via TYWKIWDBI)

· Read more…

Oklahoma City bombing

Oklahoma City bombing: 20 years later, key questions remain unanswered • The Guardian • 2015 Apr 13 (via TYWKIWDBI)

· Read more…

the neurophysiology of homophone typos

Stop shaming people on the Internet for grammar mistakes. Its not there fault. • WaPo • 2015 Apr 17

· Read more…

Korean spas don't have this, do they?

· Read more…

the critical importance of adequate sleep

Sleep is productive and an excellent use of your time ;)

· Read more…

I keep Googling the poo emoji to copy-and-paste so much that Google wants me to buy a shirt with poo emoji pattern.

· Read more…

waiting for version 1 of Carrot

OK, maybe I need to get off my computer for a while. I saw a Facebook ad that said Carrot 0.99 and Artichoke 1.29 and my first thought was that they were app names and version numbers instead of prices for produce.

· Read more…

So while converting a really old blog entry to Jekyll, I followed an old link regarding the game Tekken (which my friends in med school and I spent an absurd amount of time playing when we weren't studying or drinking) and discovered that there's a new character in Tekken 7 named Josie Rizal named after Philippine national hero José Rizal. o_O

· Read more…

Random Glimpses of the Future?

A prediction from 2001 that now appears to be a forecast of 2014: “…it’s some fairy-tale of the future—someone to have kids with, to grow old with, to buy a house with, to go on vacations to Hawaii or Puerto Vallarta with.”

· Read more…

I know people in swing states who supported Ralph Nader during the 2000 election get a lot of crap for allowing the Bush administration to happen, but, really, Al Gore ran a crappy campaign and the SCOTUS overruled the popular vote. Obviously, the people who actually voted for Bush deserve the brunt of the blame for that administration.

· Read more…

May

Freddie Gray's death was a homicide

Si vis pacem, opera para iustitia.

· Read more…

Can Orange-Tinted Glasses Help You Sleep?

A workaround for the fact that the blue light from screens (TV, computer monitors, tablets, smartphones) disrupt your circadian rhythm.

· Read more…

An explanation for the alignment of the streets of Los Angeles and the resulting bends and curves of Wilshire Blvd.

· Read more…

Altruistic Punishment

Evolutionary game theory/experimental economics term that I learned today: third-party punishment, also known as altruistic punishment (found in this particular analysis of the Baltimore riots and of riots in general) (crossposted on Facebook)

· Read more…

Boxing Committed Suicide

I would've been really irritated if I had actually shelled out $100 for this sham of a fight.

· Read more…

The Etymology of "Thug"

There was never any clear definition of what a thug was, which is why it was so attractive to the British. It allowed them to criminalize any kind of indigenous activity as being something that was inherently irrational and politically illegitimate, not different from the way it’s used today. You’re effectively describing them as having no legitimate grievances and just being hoodlums.

· Read more…

Why diets don’t actually work, according to a researcher who has studied them for decades • 2015 May 4 • Washington Post

· Read more…

Vietnamese Manicurists

The Fascinating Story Behind Why So Many Nail Technicians Are Vietnamese • 2015 May 5 • takepart

· Read more…

Pacquiao Gets Sued

Manny Pacquiao is sued by two fans who claim they were defrauded • 2015 May 5 • Los Angeles Times

· Read more…

To Boldly Go Where No One Has Gone Before

So in the process of converting old handrolled blog entries to Jekyll I stumbled upon a song from a Rainbow Brite cassette tape that my sister listened to over and over and over again when we were kids and which subsequently embedded itself into my skull.

· Read more…

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on Baltimore

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: Baltimore Is Just the Beginning • 2015 May 6 • Time

· Read more…

Cracked Predicting the Revolution

It’s kind of bizarre that Facebook has juxtaposed posts by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Cracked.com, both of whom are predicting chronic civil unrest in the U.S. #algorithms

· Read more…

SFPD Racist, Homophobic, Corrupt Police Sergeant

‘Cross burning lowers blood pressure!’ San Francisco sergeant’s racist text messages throw 3,000 criminal cases into question • 2015 May 8 • Washington Post

· Read more…

Stand Your Ground

George Zimmerman Shot in the Face in Florida • 2015 May 11 • People

· Read more…

Thabo Sefolosha and the NYPD

An NBA Player Is Missing the Playoffs Because the NYPD Broke His Leg—Why the Sports-Media Silence? • The Nation • 2015 May 22

· Read more…

Uber for Helicopters

Air Bus • The New Yorker • 2015 Jun 1

· Read more…

Before this last trip, the last time I was at the WTC site was in 2004. It was still just literally a hole in the ground and they hadn't started building the Freedom Tower yet. On subsequent trips, I eventually got used to the palpable absence of the Twin Towers, so on this last trip, it almost felt like 1 WTC had been Photoshopped into Lower Manhattan's skyline.

· Read more…

L.A. Street Cars

Los Angeles is Still Governed by Long-Gone Streetcar Routes • 2014 Sep 26 • Curbed L.A.

· Read more…

Jactae Aleae Sunt

Timehop reminds me of the last time I threw the dice and came up with snake eyes #FailedSavingThrow

· Read more…

Jun

Combating Hunger in Developing Countries

I can't remember how I ran into it, but I found a post on Facebook about how the local food movement is actually bad for the environment and that massively industrialized agribusiness is the best model for feeding the world's hungry.

· Read more…

Changing Mind and Fabricating Data

A few weeks ago I was listening to This American Life in the car with ﾐA彡 about how canvassers supposedly changed the minds of people regarding marriage equality.

· Read more…

Scientists dismissed "hot streaks" in sports for decades. They were wrong. • Vox • 2013 Jun 3

· Read more…

Ian Malcolm and GMOs

As background, I'm not one of those anti-science anti-GMO activists who think that GMOs are going to kill us all in some unspecified genetically-engineered bioapocalypse. But neither am I some breathless biotech cheerleader who thinks that GMOs are the only way to prevent a world population crash due to global mass starvation and that anyone who opposes GMOs is de facto anti-science. (For one thing, the simple Malthusian model that predicts unlimited exponential growth until resources run out is unrealistic. Verhulst's sigmoidal curve from the logistic equation is a more realistic way to model population growth, but that never really enters into arguments on Facebook anyway.)

· Read more…

Google vs. Flash

On the road towards the complete obsolescence of Flash? I suppose that's probably too much to ask.

· Read more…

Love in the Time of the Internet

While I did meet ﾐA彡 through a dating app, I didn't really use dating apps for anything more than remote idle amusement. (As Aziz Ansari puts it, "You can stand in line at the grocery store and swipe through 60 people’s faces on Tinder while you wait to buy hamburger buns.") Aside from the MySpace era (i.e., the ancient days of yore), I have never gone on a date with anyone else IRL after meeting them online. But, to be honest, in general, I have never really dated.

· Read more…

I like to think that I know how to build (very specific, mostly useless) things. How to put things together in a playful (and sometimes even artistic) way.

· Read more…

Supersymmetry vs. Empiricism

A Crisis at the Edge of Physics • 2015 Jun 5 • Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser • NYT • The Opinion Pages

· Read more…

The Erosion of the Doctor-Patient Relationship in the U.S. health care system

There are some deep cultural problems that underlie the brokenness of the health care system in the U.S.

· Read more…

I sat on the sand at Playa del Rey yesterday and closed my eyes. For whatever reason, I haven't been feeling well-rested lately. I mean, sure, I've been sleeping 4½ to 5½ hours a night, so that's probably not been helping. So my mind drifted off quickly.

· Read more…

Another Time Loop

Clinton and Bush are running for president, a Jurassic movie is number 1 in theaters, and Terminator comes out next month. What year is it?!

· Read more…

Mass Killings and Mental Illness

It’s not about mental illness: The big lie that always follows mass shootings by white males • 2015 Jun 18 • Arthur Chu • Salon

· Read more…

Local Food Is Still A Niche. Can It Grow Beyond That? • 2015 Jun 22 • Ezra David Romero • The Salt • What's On Your Plate • NPR

· Read more…

The Confederacy was a Bunch of Traitors

· Read more…

Beyond the Wall Where the Shadows Lie

Bran, Hodor, Meera, Jojen, and Coldhands are like the Frodo, Sam, and Gollum of A Song of Ice and Fire. They spend all this time wandering the wilderness for little discernible purpose and I suspect they're the most important part of the plot, but most people probably don't really care what happens to them.

· Read more…

Corporations Should Subsidize Education

· Read more…

Massacre in Charleston

· Read more…

White American Terrorists

White Americans Are Biggest Terror Threat in U.S.: Study • 2015 Jun 24 • NBC News

· Read more…

Marriage Equality

Justice Anthony Kennedy writing the majority opinion on Obergefell v. Hodges, decided 5-4 that same-sex marriage is a right

· Read more…

The Civil War was Fought over Slavery

The States' Rights explanation is probably the most common deflection from the root cause of the war that killed the most Americans ever, more than all of the other wars the U.S. has fought combined.

· Read more…

KKK Rally at South Carolina Capitol

I'm sure this will help make things better.

· Read more…

Possible Arson at Multiracial Echo Park Church

100-year-old Echo Park church damaged in fire that may have been arson • 2015 Jun 29 • Los Angeles Times

· Read more…

To Refrigerate or Not to Refrigerate

6 Well-Known Health Tips (That Don't Work At All) • 2015 Jun 30 • Cracked

· Read more…

Snape Revisited

I've really been all over the place with how I regard the character of Severus Snape.

· Read more…

Jul

So it took me a while to figure out how to implement tags in Jekyll the way I wanted.

· Read more…

Skynet deferred

I think it's going to be a while before all human manual laborers are going to be replaced by robots.

· Read more…

Today is the 147th anniversary of the ratification of the 14th Amendment.

· Read more…

Jeb Bush sez ur lazy

Jeb Bush thinks American workers are lazy, even though American workers work 47 hours/week on average and get far fewer benefits than workers in other industrialized countries. But I think Jeb Bush is still going to win the nomination. And then we'll all be working 60-80 hour work weeks when he wins the presidency. #GrimMeathookFuture

· Read more…

Alternative Medicine and Conspiracy Theories

I got sucked into following this story about three seemingly unrelated health care providers who incorporated alternative medicine into their practice who were all murdered within a short period of time. I even have Google Alerts for their names.

· Read more…

Neil deGrasse Tyson defends Pope Francis on Climate Change

The Pope employs a dozen full time astrophysicsts as part of the four century old Vatican Observatory. Yes, it's possible to be a supreme holy figure yet still know what you are talking about regarding the climate.

· Read more…

Rediscovered Wisdom (or Madness)

It's been four(!) months since I started migrating my 14+ year old blog to a new domain and to a new blog engine and I am entertained by [some of the things I've forgotten][2]:

· Read more…

Minaj-Swift War

Oliver Willis' chronicle of the Minaj-Swift War (between the Minajadeen and Swift Junta factions) is cracking me up.

· Read more…

Jekyll timestamps and timezones

It just occurred to me that the way Jekyll handles timestamps and generates permalinks to posts is not ideal for me.

· Read more…

Smiling Makes You Happy

So I was reading this old blog post that I wrote after being post-call on my internal medicine rotation during my M3 year in med school and I mention this study where they concluded that forcing yourself to smile can actually make you happy.

· Read more…

Chris Brown vs. Iglesia ni Cristo

So apparently Chris Brown is being held against his will in the Philippines because of the Iglesia ni Cristo. Karma is weird sometimes.

· Read more…

Artificial Sweeteners

The Evidence Supports Artificial Sweeteners Over Sugar • 2015 Jul 27 • Aaron E. Carroll • The New York Times

· Read more…

I have the nerdiest dreams sometimes.

· Read more…

In an effort to become even less prescriptivist and even more descriptivist, I've decided to stop using dictionaries to determine proper spelling and have started relying on Google ngrams usage data instead.

· Read more…

Morbid Thoughts

This time last year, I was certain that the only things I had to look forward to were burying people and being buried.

· Read more…

police officer charged with murder in the death of Samuel DuBose

When I indict a murderer, I don’t pull punches. …

· Read more…

Aug

HOW TO: Get Rid of Flash

So Flash is dead now? (Well, mostly dead, at least, given that Google and Mozilla are dropping support.) Amazing!

· Read more…

Long Term Project

It's been five months give or take since I decided to move my blog to a new domain and to migrate all my entries to Jekyll.

· Read more…

I've always been skeptical of many of the claims that people who are pro-Singularity have made regarding Moore's Law.

· Read more…

Random Welsh Word of the Day

chelyn • Welsh

· Read more…

Chasing "undecided" voters is a lot like chasing unicorns. But even if they do truly exist, they are such a statiscally vanishingly tiny percentage of the electorate that it's berserk to pursue them.

· Read more…

Advancing in a Different Direction

Retreat, hell! We're not retreating, we're just advancing in a different direction.

· Read more…

Trawling through Old Notebooks

I have finally started transcribing journal entries and poems that I have scrawled into random notebooks over the years. Some of these entries have required lots of editing and some of these entries I can't date precisely, but there's something that appeals to the hoarder in me to pile all of these scraps into a single heap.

· Read more…

Eff the Ineffable

Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable, let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.

· Read more…

Tangents of Ice and Fire

So I've been having tooth pain for a couple of weeks now, and I was worried I had a cavity, so I went to see the dentist.

· Read more…

On the Etymology of Fail

So I'm still converting over old blog posts to Jekyll and I've been tagging them, and it occurred to me that using the tag #epic fail is probably anachronistic, at least in older entries.

· Read more…

Déjà vu, jamais vu, presque vu

For a few precarious seconds, the chaplain tingled with a weird, occult sensation of having experienced the identical situation before in some prior time or existence. He endeavored to trap and nourish the impression in order to predict, and perhaps even control, what incident would occur next, but the afflatus melted away unproductively, as he had known beforehand it would. Déjā vu. The subtle, recurring confusion between illusion and reality that was characteristic of paramnesia fascinated the chaplain, and he knew a number of things about it. He knew, for example, that it was called paramnesia, and he was interested as well in such corollary optical phenomena as jamais vu, never seen, and presque vu, almost seen. There were terrifying, sudden moments when objects, concepts and even people that the chaplain had lived with almost all his life inexplicably took on an unfamiliar and irregular aspect that he had never seen before and which made them seem totally strange: jamais vu. And there were other moments when he almost saw absolute truth in brilliant flashes of clarity that almost came to him: presque vu.

· Read more…

Fleetwookie Mac

I can't explain this, but autocorrect keeps wanting to change "Fleetwood" to "Fleetwookie".

· Read more…

The petulance of some libertarian arguments makes me wonder how much of the attitude is derived from childhood experience where the child declaimed "You can't make me!" and their parents made them do whatever anyway, resulting in perpetual indignation that only waxed into adulthood.

· Read more…

Code Blue on TV

Watched "Fear the Walking Dead" last night on DVR and was highly entertained. But the one thing that really stuck in my mind was that the doc stopped trying to defib a guy who coded after two shocks and the last shock was only at 250 J instead of 360 J. 😀 #‎nerdalert

· Read more…

Bittersweet Memories before I Met You

That moment lying in the dark except for the light from my iPad, listening to that song.

· Read more…

So I've been slowly going through all my blog posts lately, converting them to YAML+Markdown to use with Jekyll

· Read more…

Sep

I've learned to associate September with endings and beginnings. All these doors all of the sudden start closing, but somehow new ones open.

· Read more…

It's hotter in So Cal than in Baja California Sur right now.

· Read more…

This Only Makes Sense If You Have a Good Sense of Statistics and Probability

People who feel safer with a gun than with guaranteed medical insurance don't yet have a fully adult concept of scary.

· Read more…

My gut just made a sound like a thunderstorm.

Walking in L.A.

Recycling bins on every street corner but no trash cans in sight

· Read more…

Pro-science, but anti-water-carrying for corporations

I am not anti-science by any means, but it seems clear to me that we shouldn't just take multinational corporations at their word that everything they do is perfectly safe and only in our best interests based solely on scientific studies that they funded because "Science!" and "Don't be a anti-science superstitious Luddite!" (And it would also be nice if regulatory bodies caught these kinds of adverse effects prospectively rather than retrospectively.)

· Read more…

…in the American system, the answer to “How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?” is “Go fuck yourself,” because you can’t directly relate any of those quantities.”

· Read more…

Do It to Me One More Time/Locked Away

It's been bothering me all morning, but I think I finally figured out what the new song by R. City featuring Adam Levin sounds like.

· Read more…

Hurricane Remnant

· Read more…

Excessive Build Times

Generating… done in 1095.208 seconds

· Read more…

Feeling Irritable

It would have been nice to have been the obvious choice, not just the least worst option.

· Read more…

A Little Better

done in 426.177 seconds.

· Read more…

No Change in Outcome

I don't understand this tendency to anguish over things that I can't do anything about anymore.

· Read more…

The Opposite of Destiny

Is there a word for the opposite of destiny, to described seomthing where, no matter what you did, or how hard you tried, it was just never going to happen?

· Read more…

Revisiting 8 Minutes

I am still ponderously going through all my old blog posts. I'm currently 7 years back, in the summer of 2008.

· Read more…

Oct

Earthquake Anniversary

Looking through my old posts, I realize that it's been 28 years since my very first earthquake.

· Read more…

Referenced in an old post about DC Comics geography

· Read more…

Tangentially referenced in this old post about depression:

· Read more…

I totally forgot that Vox used to be a blogging platform before it became a news site.

· Read more…

…that which fails to bend will break. That which fails to yield will shatter.

· Read more…

Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want

Still going through my old posts and I remembered this song. It's kind of been my unofficial theme song for the last decade and a half or so. I can never remember how many "please"s are in the title.

· Read more…

Mashups Fo' Life

I am a sucker for any and all mashups no matter how terrible they are and a lot of them aren't terrible.

· Read more…

Typographical Oddities

While wading through all these old blog posts, I keep running into mangled Unicode characters. I've had this problem ever since I started blogging in 2000, but I never knew the source of the error.

· Read more…

I miss reading Barking Up the Wrong Tree. I used to read it a lot more when Google Reader was still alive. Now I'm lucky if a bunch of people share links from it to Facebook.

· Read more…

OS Timeline Updated

A chronology of desktop operating systems from 2001-2015

· Read more…

Know from Whence You Came

Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.

· Read more…

serious geekery revisited

I just ran into this old post about idioms rewritten in computer (pseudo)code. It occurs to me that I've learned a lot more Ruby since then, and I decided to rewrite some of the pseudocode into actual code.

· Read more…

Literal brain-fucking. o_O

· Read more…

Breakfast at Tiffany's reboot

Not sure what prompted this dream, but I dreamt of a totally alternate version of "Breakfast at Tiffany's" where George Peppard's character (and by extension, Truman Capote) was really a CIA assassin (maybe it's just the fact that he was Hannibal in "The A-Team"?)

· Read more…

failure is not a pathology

I'm actually skeptical that the culture of self-esteem and participation trophies and "everyone is a winner" is a significant problem (although it's not constructive). Kids are smart enough to figure out how things really are. I think one of the major problems in our culture is that we don't talk about how to deal with failure enough, because clearly only losers have to deal with failure.

· Read more…

The End of Flash revisited

Remember when everyone thought that Steve Jobs was insane by not allowing Flash on iOS?

· Read more…

what didn’t you do to bury me
but then you forgot I was a seed

· Read more…

So Long and Thanks for All the Fish

On the 36th anniversary of the publication of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy the first song my iPod played this morning was "So Long and Thanks for All the Fish".

· Read more…

Bitter Taste Preferences and Everyday Sadism

Bitter Taste Preferences and Everyday Sadism will be the name of my next band.

· Read more…

The Internet of Things at the Mercy of Corporate Black Hats

In the wake of Volkswagen's attempt to evade emissions standards:

· Read more…

Reminiscing about the Days before Shazam

I still remember this specific episode when I finally figured out what song Dario G had sampled for his track "Sunchyme".

· Read more…

Lemmings vs. Zombies

After reformatting this old post about a client-side JavaScript remake of Lemmings, I just realized that Rick Grimes' plan in S6E1 was basically like a game of Lemmings, but instead of funnelling Lemmings to the exit, they were funnelling walkers away from home.

· Read more…

Random Songs from the Weekend

These are the songs that have been stuck in my head all weekend

· Read more…

Walking around the 99¢ Store

I've been walking to the 99¢ Store during lunch lately just for the exercise and to pick up miscellaneous and sundry items, and the music they play at this store makes me feel like I'm in a time warp.

· Read more…

Songs Whose Titles I Never Knew

Honestly, I never thought I'd be the type of person who'd feel OK with singing my heart out in front of a bunch of random people in a public setting, but you really can't beat free karaoke.

· Read more…

This is the Way the World Ends

…

· Read more…

The Protracted Death Throes of Flash

Flash is dead. It just hasn't stopped moving yet.

· Read more…

Fake Grammar Rules

I don't know/remember who to blame for teaching me the bogus rule that you can't use "whose" to refer to nouns that are not people, but I find myself constantly second-guessing myself when I do use it.

· Read more…

I guess I haven't written HTML in a long time. I only just learned about the <details> and <summary> tags.

· Read more…

List Manipulation

I am amused (because I am a weirdo) by how common the paradigm of manipulating lists is in computer programming, specifically, the need to separate the first element in a list from the rest of the list.

· Read more…

Unwrapping Nodes with Nokogiri

I learned a lot about the Nokogiri gem (used to parse and manipulate XML and HTML) when I wrote a script to download all my FriendFeed posts.

· Read more…

The Human Brain and Cooking

This is an old TED talk but I heard it for the first time this past Saturday. The theory is that the reason why human intellectual capacity disproportionately surpasses the intellectual capacity of other species is because we learned how to cook.

· Read more…

Markdown Implementation Lock-In

For a while, I was thinking about fleeing Jekyll for some other static-site generator.

· Read more…

Screwing around with Custom Liquid Tags

I've spent some time screwing around with creating custom Liquid tags.

· Read more…

Warlords of Draenor

I used to play a lot of World of Warcraft, averaging like a couple of hours a night at least. I sort of stopped playing towards the end of Mists of Pandaria because (1) AK took a break to play FFXIV and battlegrounds just weren't the same without him and (2) I met ﾐA彡

· Read more…

The Benghazi Committee is a Fucking Joke

Things might have turned out differently if Fox News hadn't spent the last three years screaming "Benghazi" at the top of their lungs and turning it into a punchline, but this ridiculous committee hearing is just the sad, pathetic denouement that I expected.

· Read more…

Revisiting Logo

I was trawling around the WayBack Machine's archive of Jeff Atwood's Coding Horror because he had changed his permalink style sometime between 2007 and now, and I stumbled upon this old post about Logo (and Processing)¹.

· Read more…

Pyrimethamine and the Treatment of Toxoplasmosis

I will admit, I haven't really been looking too closely at the antics of Martin Shkreli, founder and CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, who is famous for buying the rights to the drug Daraprim (generic: pyrimethamine, used for the treatment of toxoplasmosis in patients with AIDS) and jacking up the price from $13.50/pill to $750/pill.

· Read more…

Old Projects Still on Github

I am kind of amazed that some old blog engines that I used to use still have code up on GitHub.

· Read more…

(I'm going to use tic douloureux either as a band name or my next user name.)

· Read more…

Warning to the Rich

Just remembering the beginning of the second reading from September 27, when ﾐA彡 and I starting going back to church.

· Read more…

Bacon and Cancer

The WHO announced that bacon, sausage, and other processed meats are on par with cigarettes and asbestos.

· Read more…

Rice and Arsenic

Speaking of cancer risk, rice—especially rice from the U.S.—is full of arsenic.

· Read more…

Very Pacific Dreams

I dreamt that ﾐA彡 and I lived in post-apocalyptic Southern California after the sea level had risen 60 meters after catastrophic melting of the ice caps. The U.S. had collapsed, California was (once again) it's own sovereign state, and the center of global power had moved to China and to South America.

· Read more…

That Which Doesn't Kill You Will Eventually Give You Cancer

Everything that doesn't kill you outright will eventually give you cancer. That's just life.

· Read more…

So by now everyone knows what the noun "bling" means.

· Read more…

Perfect Soundtrack for Eternal Longing

It just occurs to me now that Adele would've been the perfect soundtrack for my life from late September 1995 up until very late September 2014.

· Read more…

Everything Causes Cancer

Crazy headlines like these might make you want to throw up your hands and just start smoking cigarettes and inhaling asbestos…

· Read more…

Heart Attacks are Still a More Likely Cause of Death than Cancer

Realistically, if you eat a ton of bacon, sausage, or Spam or eat an entire porterhouse steak every night, you're probably not going to die of cancer. Coronary artery disease is probably going to get to you first. (crossposted on Facebook)

· Read more…

Zombies and Othering

Imagining a grim meathook dystopian science fiction story where some terrible virus causes people to shuffle along like zombies and not be able to talk and generally be out of it, but they aren't actually undead, they're just sick.

· Read more…

So it's kind of embarrassing that the first time I ever heard of the LAM-ELISA test was because of the unsolved murder of Elisa Lam.

· Read more…

Apparently Approaching the Stationary Phase of Moore's Law

Without some new breakthrough in physics, it seems unlikely that the original formulation of Moore's Law will continue to hold. This is certainly not the first gloomy forecast.

· Read more…

Molecular Version of the Myth of Sisyphus

Christopher S. posted this animated GIF on Facebook and I knew I'd seen it somewhere before….

· Read more…

I never prescribed Auvi-Q because I don't think they were ever covered by Medi-Cal managed care plans, but I thought they were kind of cool. They're kind of like Siri talking you through a scene from "Pulp Fiction".

· Read more…

Nov

The Scourge of Daylight Saving Time

Nat Geo explains that one of the major reasons why Daylight Saving Time still exists is because of businesses—people buy more things when there's more sunlight after work, so we have no one to blame but our own consumerist lifestyles #‎RegulatoryCaptureFTW

· Read more…

Oral Phenylephrine

Oral phenylephrine is essentially worthless as a decongestant.

· Read more…

The Nature of Evil

Bryan Edds essentially argues that the reason why software tends to be crappy and code bases tend towards unmaintainability is because there is an inherent flaw in the nature of capitalism.

· Read more…

The Species Problem

Apparently, I really did kind of pay attention during undergrad bio class.

· Read more…

Google Retrospective

I am exactly eight years back on my quixotic quest to completely migrate my old blog posts from Mephisto to Jekyll.

· Read more…

It Lights the Whole Sky

Aww. Turns out this verse attributed to Hafiz isn't actually written by Hafiz.

· Read more…

Gimp vs. SourceForge

Whoa, since when has SourceForge started using shitty clickbait tactics and bundling malware with open source projects?

· Read more…

Matter Replication

It continues to amuse me that people quote "information wants to be free" without giving appropriate context (namely, that "information wants to be expensive", too.)

· Read more…

Just Because You're a Neurosurgeon Doesn't Automatically Mean You Know Everything

I think it's hilarious that the people who defend Ben Carson also tend to be the same people who don't believe formal education makes you automatically smarter than people without formal education.

· Read more…

Ben Carson and the Dunning-Kruger Effect

…all humans suffer from similar cognitive flaws and biases. We can all be brilliant and stupid at the same time, and apparently have no difficulty compartmentalizing our beliefs in order to minimize cognitive dissonance.

· Read more…

Dunning-Kruger Effect Compilation

I could've sworn I've blogged more about the Dunning-Kruger Effect, but I guess mostly I posted things to FriendFeed.

· Read more…

Bras Don't Cause Breast Cancer

In case you were worried, bras don't appear to cause breast cancer.

· Read more…

Not Everything That Can Be Counted Counts

The only black engineer at Twitter quits.

· Read more…

Ben Carson is Old News

Given the recent headline about Ben Carson fabricating his acceptance to West Point, it seems silly to dwell on his other gaffes, but they amuse me and I have all these browser tabs open, so why not.

· Read more…

Some Things in Life Cannot Be Fixed

The phrase "everything happens for a reason" used to infuriate me…

· Read more…

Missed My Blogiversary Again

November 5th, 2015 was the 15th anniversary of my foray into blogging. (There are blog posts before my first post but those are actually transcripts of various things I've written on paper because I have this obsession with posting as much of my writing online as possible. #ClosetNarcissist)

· Read more…

Necro'ing an Ancient Bitmap Font in the Bowels of Your Filesystem

Medium accidentally revives the System font from Windows 3.

· Read more…

I was certain beyond certainty that if I would never, ever, ever have a wedding slideshow because I was never, ever, ever going to get married because I was never, ever, ever going to find someone who would want to marry me and now I am entertaining the idea.

· Read more…

Still amused by how I've gone full circle from Blosxom to Jekyll

· Read more…

Panspermia—the idea that the life started off-planet and managed to seed the Earth—is a recurrent trope in science fiction.

· Read more…

Parsing HTML with Regexes

Back in the day when running a Perl script that used an XML parser was CPU-intensive and likely to get your shared hosting account suspended, I did spend time trying to parse pseudo-XML with regexes, which did make me feel kind of dirty.

· Read more…

Virtual Connections

· Read more…

The Internet was abuzz earlier this month with the announcement from CBS that they were working on a new Star Trek series as the flagship of their streaming service.

· Read more…

World Building Fails

As someone who has long aspired to write science fiction and fantasy short-stories and novels but who has instead spent hours upon hours on end inventing imaginary landscapes, countries, histories, and languages instead, I am wholly sympathetic with any advice that warns about the pitfalls of world-building.

· Read more…

Precursor to YAML

As I continue to migrate Mephisto posts to Jekyll, I stumbled upon this Perl script I wrote to help me move blog entries from the venerable Movable Type blog engine (see Wikipedia entry) to Mephisto.

· Read more…

The Opposite of Civilization is War

The people who promote the "clash of civilizations" paradigm are predictable and unsurprising. They say that accommodation and multiculturalism don't work at all, and while they may not say it out loud, their only solution seems to be genocide.

· Read more…

Doing Something

Prescribing an intervention when you don't actually understand the scope of the problem nor the possible adverse effects of such intervention is sheer idiocy and likely to cause even more harm.

· Read more…

Aside from the Fact of Colonization…

Ignoring the fact that France colonized Syria in the first place, it's almost like France refused to help us break the Middle East, we called them cowards for refusing to sanction an unjust war, and now they're the ones suffering the consequences and have to clean up our mess.

· Read more…

DNA isn't really source code

· Read more…

Oblivious to Deprecation

So I ran across an old post about the differences between Cocoa and Carbon¹².

· Read more…

Reverse Engineering Life

This XKCD post (mentioned [previously]) really got me thinking too much about the analogy between genetic code and computer code.

· Read more…

Ruby-like Languages

I don't code professionally, but I've been a programming dilettante since I was like eight years old #nerdalert

· Read more…

OK Cupid and Silly Quizzes

So I think I found the post where I signed up for OK Cupid for the sole purpose of taking a Harry Potter quiz.

· Read more…

Blowback Part 75

The things about ISIS is that it really wasn't unforeseeable. People knew that invading Iraq was a terrible idea. People knew that torturing and murdering Iraqis was going to create new enemies. People knew that creating a power vacuum meant worse people coming into power.

· Read more…

Donald Trump truly and seriously suggested that we should force all Muslims in the U.S. to register with the government.

· Read more…

Calling Out Bullshit

Let's face it, most people who post on the Internet believe they are righteous and correct. This is not surprising.

· Read more…

Grim Cracked Onion Future

Forget the grim meathook future. I think we're looking at a grim cracked onion future.

· Read more…

Industrialized Agriculture Skepticism ≠ Anti-science

I realize the ~~Internet~~ world loves polarization, but there's a lot more nuance in questioning industrialized agriculture practices than being anti-science.

· Read more…

Orac says it best:

· Read more…

Complexity of Nutrition

People want simple answers to complex questions, so you end up with bad advice like "fat bad, carbs good". Then when the experts point out this isn't actually what the research suggests, the people who want simple answers moan and wail about how science always ends up contradicting itself and no one really knows anything, even though the research has always suggested the same complex answer. (crossposted on Facebook)

· Read more…

Counterterrorism

Seems fairly obvious that ISIL wants us to hate the people they are persecuting.

· Read more…

On Saturday, I had an anxiety dream that left me feeling exhausted when I woke up.

· Read more…

I used to blog on my cell phone

Back in the day, I used to blog on a Motorola SLVR

· Read more…

Belief, Heresy, Islamophobia, and New Atheism

I have flirted with the idea of non-belief for a while now ever since the beginning of my ongoing crisis of faith. It may seem wishy-washy, but I will go as far as agnosticism at most.

· Read more…

Dec

Adobe Deprecates Flash

I've hated Flash for a long time.

· Read more…

Enterprise vs. The Millenium Falcon

NdGT's reasoning for why he prefers the Enterprise over the Millenium Falcon is different than I expected, but I would've said it's because the warp drive (AKA the Alcubierre Drive) is actually being worked on, whereas we really have no idea whether hyperspace actually exists (although String Theory necessitates its existence) and opening controllable wormholes permanently linked to places in the Universe that we can specify seems even more unlikely than generating a warp field.

· Read more…

I did get my flu shot more than a month ago, but obvioiusly that doesn't make you immune to any of the other respiratory viruses circulating around this time of year.

· Read more…

Up to three dudes have decided to shoot up a facility that helps the developmentally disability.

· Read more…

It's been almost three years since Sandy Hook and here we are at square one again after 14 people have been murdered and 21 people wounded in San Bernardino.

· Read more…

Terrorism or Not, We Still Need Sensible Gun Laws

Tashfeen Malik, one of the shooters in the San Bernardino tragedy two days ago and wife of the other shooter, Syed Farook, apparently expressed admiration of an ISIS leader before carrying out the attack.

· Read more…

The Solution to Dangerous People with Guns is More Dangerous People with Guns

I was just joking about it when I said it, but I never really thought that Congress would seriously protect the rights of people on terrorist watch lists to purchase guns without difficulty.

· Read more…

Probably because of my exposure to postcolonial, anti-imperialist, and neo-Marxist literature, the theory that economic inequality in the Middle East is making terrorism popular seems thoroughly plausible. Add to that the fact that the West typically supports autocratic totalitarian regimes in the region often against the will of the people these regimes rule, and it's no wonder that radicals are having an easy time recruiting the disenfranchised. #‎blowback

· Read more…

Political Correctness, Mass Shootings, Terrorist Attacks

So some people are blaming "political correctness" for the San Bernardino attacks because people weren't reporting suspicious activity for fear of "appearing racist". So does that mean we should be reporting "pro-lifers" like Robert Lewis Dear or neo-Confederates like Dylann Roof, or does this just apply to Muslim Americans?

· Read more…

Freedom of Movement

It is not uncommon to see people argue that the right to bear arms is actually more guaranteed than the basic human right of freedom of movement, as there is an amendment protecting the right to bear arms but no specific text protecting the freedom of movement.

· Read more…

No Right to Bear an Assault Rifle

Even this SCOTUS does not think the Second Amendment is totally unlimited. You do not have a constitutionally-protected right to bear assault rifles.

· Read more…

Legislating Morality

One of the more disingenuous arguments against gun regulation is that laws don't prevent crime, therefore they are useless.

· Read more…

The Second Amendment is a Control Mechanism

What better way for a tyrannical government and its autocratic oligarchs to keep its citizens under control, by allowing some of its citizens to keep the rest of the populace under constant fear of extrajudicial arbitrary killing, and letting citizens slaughter each other without due process, all the while as these citizens believe that they are upholding freedom.

· Read more…

Japanese American Internment and Muslim Immigrant Bans

If not for the gravity of his xenophobic policies and the fact that so many people in the U.S. take him seriously, it's absurd and hilarious that Donald Trump is citing the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII as justification for banning Muslim immigrants.

· Read more…

Fewer Gun Deaths, Same Number of GSWs

Despite the constant media spotlight on mass shootings, it's true that gun deaths have decreased in the U.S., tracking the decrease in violent crime.

· Read more…

Benedict Anderson

I just learned from L. that Benedict Anderson, the author of Imagined Communities died two days ago.

· Read more…

Strive to Make Things Better for Others

I'm not a huge believer in the idea that if I endured some kind of hardship, then it should be OK for others to endure the same kind of hardship.

· Read more…

San Bernardino and the Media

So I'm keeping my #ConspiracyTheories in abeyance, but at the very least, the #MSM fucked this up.

· Read more…

Antibiotic Arms Race against S. aureus

A and I were listening to the Radiolab episode from November 2nd last night about S. aureus' evolution against antibiotics and how a microbiologist and a historian re-created an anti-bacterial remedy from the 10th century.

· Read more…

Researchers used mtDNA and nuclear DNA analysis to pinpoint the origin of dogs to south East Asia (the northern part of Southeast Asia? It's confusing.)

· Read more…

Shkreli at It Again

Shkreli, the CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals who jacked up the price of Daraprim (pyrimethamine), wants to do the same thing to benznidazole, one of two medications known to be effective in treating Chagas disease.

· Read more…

Driverless Cars

I was listening to a brief snippet of a radio talk show and the topic was driverless cars. As far as the guest was concerned, driverless cars are inevitable (one of the things they touched upon is that since they're safer, insurance companies are probably going start charging higher prices for cars that require a driver.)

· Read more…

Star Wars and Dune

I never noticed until people started posting about "Star Wars" non-stop that Owen Lars claimed that Anakin Skywalker was a "spice freighter navigator".

· Read more…

Martin Shkreli Charged with Federal Crimes

Martin Shkreli, CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, best known for trying to gouge patients with toxoplasmosis and Chagas disease as well as buying a Wu-Tang Clan album for $2 million, has been charged with securities fraud.

· Read more…

Influenza and AGE

Hmm. While it's true that most cases of viral acute gastroenteritis are caused by rotavirus, norovirus, enteric adenovirus, and astrovirus, influenza can totally cause GI symptoms.

· Read more…

Medical Grade Wearables and Skepticism of the Quantified Self

Everything in my medical training has taught me that trying to min-max your vital signs and lab values is absurd and insane if you don't have any medical problems, but people are going to do it anyway, so I guess I might as well get used to it.

· Read more…

Franz von Suppé

Hermione Granger as a person of color

Given the postmodernist/postcolonial filter through which I was exposed to English literature, I've always been wary of taking authorial intent as the end-all/be-all of textual interpretation and deconstruction, but it's also true that Hermione Granger's skin color was never mentioned in the text, as pointed out by the author herself.

· Read more…

How to Stop Hiccups

In case you don't happen to have Thorazine or Haldol lying around, you can always use a finger up the butt to stop intractable hiccups.

· Read more…

The Jedi and Tchaikovsky

I was certain that I had blogged about this before or at least posted on Friendfeed but given all the "Star Wars" hoopla, I have the Jedi leitmotif/Force theme stuck in my head.

· Read more…

So I had this weird dream that I was at work. But instead of my usual office, it looked like the Whitefeather law firm from "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" and it was a combination internal medicine-pediatrics clinic and dental office.

· Read more…

health care in the U.S. is expensive

According to this meme going around Facebook, the average hip replacement in the U.S. costs $40,364 while in Spain it costs $7,371

· Read more…

The Myth of Pharmaceutical Innovation

Despite the passage of the ACA and despite reams and reams of analysis papers, the task of containing costs still seems wildly out of reach.

· Read more…

This picture of a wolf pack walking single file through the snow has been making the rounds on Facebook lately.

· Read more…

The iPod is Dead! Long live the iPod!

I am still on my retrospective crawl through my blog. I've finally gotten back to Oct 2006

· Read more…

No Shit, Sherlock

The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.

· Read more…

Driving on Snot and Ice

This is essentially how the Jatravartids on Viltvodle VI celebrate their Winter Solstice #GloryToTheGreatGreenArkleseizure #BlessYou #TheGreatWhiteHandkerchiefWillComeAgainInGloryToJudgeTheLivingAndTheDead #HHGttG

· Read more…

Negative Reviews for Star Wars

There are spoilers ahead. You have been warned.

· Read more…

Given the fact that the Dark Side of the Force (as the Sith, the Empire, or the First Order) always build a planet-destroying weapon that has a single point of failure and the Light Side of the Force (as the Jedi Council, the Rebel Alliance, or the Resistance) always manages to destroy it, I've started to see "Star Wars" as a version of the myth of Sisyphus.

· Read more…

Jodorowsky's Star Wars

The Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics implies that in some alternate timeline, Jodorowsky managed to release "Dune" before "Star Wars", making subsequent science fiction movies look nothing at all like the ones we have in our own timeline.

· Read more…

LotR's Expanded Universe

(Inspired by a post comparing the mythology of Middle Earth with the Star Wars Expanded Universe)

· Read more…

The Pursuit of Meaning

On one hand, telling people to just "suck it up" and to simply endure unrelenting injustice while doing absolutely nothing to ameliorate conditions merely telegraphs your privilege.

· Read more…