Jan 2016
- Jan 4
- Reminiscing
Realizing how happy I am these days, and also how my cares and worries have evolved, I can't help but think back to the times when I was single and mired in desolation.
· Read more… - Jan 4
- Income Inequality
"Income inequality" is a neoliberal euphemism for "unjust distribution of wealth".
· Read more… - Jan 5
- El Niño
- Jan 6
- Election Season
The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.
· Read more… - Jan 6
- Panem et Circenses
"…bread and circuses…. I mean, tax cuts and unlimited streaming video…."
· Read more… - Jan 6
- Minerva
OH at the Starbucks counter:
· Read more… - Jan 6
- pro-automation
For some reason, I don't think this is what people who are pro-automation and pro-technology had in mind. #automationFTW
· Read more… - Jan 6
- Leakage
It's probably a bit late to worry about this, but I am hoping that I sufficiently caulked the very large 50+ year old window frame in my living room.
· Read more… - Jan 8
- Accidentally Predicting the Future
Hilariously, I totally foresaw the Apple Watch back in 2006.
· Read more… - Jan 8
- Uber for Doctor House Calls
I remember reading about Jay Parkinson, M.D. back in 2007 and it did seem like a perfect convergence of popular technology and medicine.
· Read more… - Jan 11
- Eyes on Your Own Paper
When your enjoyment of a thing depends significantly on the inability of other people to enjoy that thing, you probably need psychiatric help and shouldn't be allowed to implement policy regarding that thing.
· Read more… - Jan 11
- Bowie's in Space
I can't believe that David Bowie is dead.
· Read more… - Jan 14
- How to Remain Anonymous if You Win the Lottery
In case you need legal/financial advice on how to maintain your anonymity if you happen to have split the $1.5 billion Powerball jackpot with two other people.
· Read more… - Jan 14
- Bad Investment Advice
It would have cost ~$584 million to buy every possible combination of numbers in the Powerball lottery.
· Read more… - Jan 14
- Cry Havoc
So in the course of converting some of my old blog posts to YAML+Markdown (and adding more tags to them) I found myself wondering what the adjectival form of "havoc" would be.
· Read more… - Jan 14
- Polymorphism
It occurs to me that people who disdain nouning verbs and verbing nouns are probably the same people who insist on explicit static typing.
· Read more… - Jan 14
- Requiescas in Pace, Alan Rickman
By Grabthar's hammer, by the suns of Warvan, you shall be avenged!
· Read more… - Jan 14
- Etymology of Element Names
Reading about Poul Anderson's treatise on atomic theory written entirely in Anglo-Saxon-derived words (entitled "Uncleftish Beholding") got me thinking about the etymology of various element names.
· Read more… - Jan 14
- God's Final Message to His Creation
They rounded the foot of the Quentulus Quazgar Mountains, and there was the Message written in blazing letters along the crest of the Mountain. There was a little observation vantage point with a rail built along the top of a large rock facing it, from which you could get a good view. It had a little pay-telescope for looking at the letters in detail, but no one would ever use it because the letters burned with the divine brilliance of the heavens and would, if seen through a telescope, have severely damaged the retina and optic nerve.
· Read more… - Jan 15
- Lightning Modeling for Louis Vuitton
Lightning from Final Fantasy XIII will be modeling for Louis Vuitton in the spring and summer of 2016.
· Read more… - Jan 15
- Sansa Stark as a Sith Lord
Always two there are, a master and an apprentice.
· Read more… - Jan 15
- Ta-Nehisi Coates' favorite poem
I can't remember where the original link is from, but Ta-Nehisi Coates was asked what his favorite poem is, and he answered that it was "Middle Passage" by Robert Hayden.
· Read more… - Jan 15
- Faster Than Light
I always liked the SDF-1's Space Fold Tech because it was such an important plot point in the Robotech Saga and I've always thought it was more plausible than Han Solo's space-contracting hyperdrive that somehow shrank the Kessel Run to 12 parsecs and with a better explicated mechanism than the Enterprise's warp drive with arbitrary warp factor settings.
· Read more… - Jan 16
- Curing Cancer and Shooting for the Moon
The POTUS likens curing cancer to the moonshot. The thing is, cancer isn't a single disease, it's a collection of heterogenous, vaguely-related diseases that have multiple causative effects, widely varying pathophysiology, and widely different prognoses.
· Read more… - Jan 18
- On the Climb from the Bottom of the Blast Crater
If you cannot imagine yourself whole while being alone, then it seems unlikely that you will be whole while being with someone else.
· Read more… - Jan 18
- Infinite Redemption
I would never say that anyone is completely irredeemable, but we are creatures of finite life spans and have to be practical about time scales.
- Jan 18
- MLK, Jr.
MLK, Jr. may have advocated using non-violent methods, but nevertheless his agenda was quite radically progressive, even for today.
· Read more… - Jan 19
- Elvis Presley Ain't Got No Soul
Rock rarely if ever acknowledges its intellectual and artistic debt to black musicians, so I always feel a small sense of justice whenever hip-hop reappropriates it.
· Read more… - Jan 19
- Not Everything That Counts Can Be Counted
Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.
· Read more… - Jan 19
- The Perpetuation of White Supremacy
Despite the well-documented existence of systemic/institutionalized racism that exists as a superset of overt racism, many naive antagonists still retort with "anyone can be racist regardless of skin color" as a way to deflect criticism of inherently racist structures.
· Read more… - Jan 19
- The Illegitimacy of the House of Telcontar
The Toast brings up the fact that Middle Earth is a post-apocalyptic ecocatastrophic feudal dystopia and that Aragorn's ascension to the throne was totally illegitimate.
· Read more… - Jan 19
- Inspirational Quotes
What goes up must come down. Entropy wins in the end and you're gonna die.
· Read more… - Jan 20
- Planet X
The guy who demoted Pluto from major planet status to dwarf planet status believes that there is an actual Planet X with 10x the mass of Earth lurking in the outer reaches of the solar system.
· Read more… - Jan 20
- Pronomial Adverbs
One of the things that going through all my blog posts from the beginning is that I find myself parsing text even more closely than I usually do.
· Read more… - Jan 21
- Invisible Hand
Anthropomorphizing (theomorphizing?) the free market is insane. The Invisible Hand is just a metaphor for the summation of stochastic processes appearing to have intentionality to the apophenia-susceptible human mind, not a metaphysical description of an actual sapient system really having intentionality. #ChurchOfTheAlmightyDollar
- Jan 21
- Super Earth
I was unaware that "super-earth" has a specific (although still informal) definition, roughly, a planet with a mass greater than Earth but less than a gas giant in the Sol system (i.e., less massive than Uranus or Neptune).
· Read more… - Jan 22
- Star Wars vs. Star Trek
In Star Wars, the State is the enemy and the Rebellion is a libertarian/anarchocapitalist-religious fundamentalist utopia that glorifies asymmetric warfare/terrorism while in Star Trek, the State is a (mostly) benevolent democratic socialist utopia that emphasizes diplomacy and peacemaking.
· Read more… - Jan 22
- Old Music
Old music now appears to be more popular than new music, but it relies entirely on how you define old music.
· Read more… - Jan 25
- The Persistence of Ephemerality
I am currently on a quest to rescue all the old comments to old posts on my old blog.
· Read more… - Jan 26
- Model Dependent Realism
As far as our senses and measuring instruments are concerned, the only thing that is real are the shadows. Whatever is casting those shadows is not directly accessible.
· Read more… - Jan 26
- There's More Than One Way to Think about It
I find it funny that the thing the scientific method and quantum physics and biology taught me is that duality, diversity, plurality is reality. There isn't one right answer to anything. Reductionism can be useful, but it's not reality. And anyone who says it is is trying to sell you something.
· Read more… - Jan 26
- Ptolemy and Empiricism
It's funny how people use the example of Copernicus and the heliocentric model as the archetype for scientific progress. The fact of the matter is that, at least initially, Ptolemy's geocentric model actually still made more accurate predictions.
· Read more… - Jan 26
- Wave-Particle Duality
I don't understand the math well enough to actually know, but isn't the reason why we even have a wave-particle duality because not only do we lack the precise language to describe the things that are waves-and-particles, but we also lack the precise equations to describe things as simultaneously waves-and-particles?
· Read more… - Jan 26
- Not All Knowledge is Science
Ethan Siegel points out the obvious that science is not the only form of knowledge and that non-science clearly has value.
· Read more… - Jan 26
- Incompetence or Cronyism?
So switching from getting water from Detroit's water district to the heavily polluted Flint River didn't actually save Flint, MI any money.
· Read more… - Jan 26
- Anticholinergic Drugs and Alzheimer Disease
Apparently there is an association between regular use of anticholinergic drugs and the development of Alzheimer disease.
· Read more… - Jan 27
- Genetic Correlation with Depression
Back in July 2015, a correlation between depression and two genetic loci was discovered. #CorrelationDoesNotImplyCausation
· Read more… - Jan 27
- Challenger Disaster
Tomorrow will be 30 years since the Challenger disaster
· Read more… - Jan 28
- Growth of Capitalist Economies
I honestly don't understand why everyone uses exponential curves for their models when sigmoidal curves seem to better model reality for lots of phenomena: population growth, language change, diffusion of innovation… and perhaps even the growth of capitalist economies.
· Read more… - Jan 28
- Clinton and the Dunning School
There's really no point in pandering to white supremacist neo-Confederates in the 21st century because there's no chance they'll vote for a Democrat anyway
· Read more… - Jan 28
- Fate Map of Stars
When I was a senior in high school, I read Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy by Kip Thorne and gave a presentation on it for my Honors Physics class (incidentally, in the same classroom that Jake Gyllenhaal attempts to have a cosmological discussion with Noah Wyle in "Donnie Darko")
· Read more… - Jan 28
- Challenger Disaster Revisited
I know Elon Musk and others are working on it, but remembering this tragedy also makes me feel especially sad that the U.S. doesn't have independent human space flight capability right now.
· Read more… - Jan 29
- Special Relativity
The faster and faster you go, the more and more energy it takes to continuing accelerating, almost, but never quite reaching the speed of light
· Read more… - Jan 29
- Dermatology
If it's dry, moisten it. If it's moist, dry it. If you're not on steroids, start using them. If you are on steroids, stop taking them. — almost everything I learned about dermatology, taught to me by a general surgeon
· Read more… - Jan 29
- Fear of Starting
Worried that if I start, then I won't finish
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all these loose wayward threads
I am still shuffling, still scavenging
untying knots and burning frayed ends - Jan 29
- Artificial Emotionality
As I grew frustrated with wrestling with Foursquare's bizarre password reset system that either kept asking me for the password that I couldn't remember or asking me to log in first, I got to pondering:
· Read more… - Jan 29
- Eradicating Mosquitoes
Apparently, the only thing mosquitoes are really good at is spreading disease. Anything they do (pollination, serving as food for birds and fish) can be done by other species who don't bite humans and drink human blood.
· Read more…