Nov 2015
- Nov 3
- 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… - Nov 3
- Oral Phenylephrine
Oral phenylephrine is essentially worthless as a decongestant.
· Read more… - Nov 3
- 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… - Nov 3
- The Species Problem
Apparently, I really did kind of pay attention during undergrad bio class.
· Read more… - Nov 3
- 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… - Nov 3
- It Lights the Whole Sky
Aww. Turns out this verse attributed to Hafiz isn't actually written by Hafiz.
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- Nov 4
- Gimp vs. SourceForge
Whoa, since when has SourceForge started using shitty clickbait tactics and bundling malware with open source projects?
· Read more… - Nov 5
- 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… - Nov 5
- 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… - Nov 5
- 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… - Nov 5
- 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… - Nov 5
- Bras Don't Cause Breast Cancer
In case you were worried, bras don't appear to cause breast cancer.
· Read more… - Nov 6
- Not Everything That Can Be Counted Counts
The only black engineer at Twitter quits.
· Read more… - Nov 6
- 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… - Nov 6
- Some Things in Life Cannot Be Fixed
The phrase "everything happens for a reason" used to infuriate me…
· Read more… - Nov 10
- 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… - Nov 10
- Necro'ing an Ancient Bitmap Font in the Bowels of Your Filesystem
Medium accidentally revives the System font from Windows 3.
· Read more… - Nov 11
- Slideshows
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… - Nov 11
- full circle
Still amused by how I've gone full circle from Blosxom to Jekyll
· Read more… - Nov 12
- Panspermia
Panspermia—the idea that the life started off-planet and managed to seed the Earth—is a recurrent trope in science fiction.
· Read more… - Nov 12
- 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… - Nov 13
- Virtual Connections
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- Nov 13
- To Boldly Go
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… - Nov 13
- 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… - Nov 13
- 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… - Nov 14
- 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… - Nov 16
- 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… - Nov 16
- 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… - Nov 18
- DNA isn't really source code
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- Nov 19
- Oblivious to Deprecation
So I ran across an old post about the differences between Cocoa and Carbon12.
· Read more… - Nov 19
- 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… - Nov 19
- 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… - Nov 19
- 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… - Nov 19
- 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… - Nov 20
- Doomed · Read more…
- Nov 23
- 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… - Nov 23
- Grim Cracked Onion Future
Forget the grim meathook future. I think we're looking at a grim cracked onion future.
· Read more… - Nov 24
- Industrialized Agriculture Skepticism ≠ Anti-science
I realize the
· Read more…Internetworld loves polarization, but there's a lot more nuance in questioning industrialized agriculture practices than being anti-science. - Nov 24
- Skepticism
Orac says it best:
· Read more… - Nov 27
- 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… - Nov 27
- Counterterrorism
Seems fairly obvious that ISIL wants us to hate the people they are persecuting.
· Read more… - Nov 30
- Late Entry
On Saturday, I had an anxiety dream that left me feeling exhausted when I woke up.
· Read more… - Nov 30
- I used to blog on my cell phone
Back in the day, I used to blog on a Motorola SLVR
· Read more… - Nov 30
- 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.
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