February 2012
1 post
May 2011
1 post
April 2011
3 posts
Neil Gaiman "not actually British" →
“A growing group of writers and readers across England are calling for the novelist Neil Gaiman to explain himself, after rumours began circulating last week that the famed British fantasist was not actually born and raised in the UK as he has claimed since the beginning of his writing career.”
October 2010
3 posts
remember the eyes but not the face
Associating good things with bad things, bad things with good things. It is something that our brains seem to do. That song that you loved might remind you of an ex, whereas you might associate getting humiliated with sexual gratification. Sex is a nice place for depravity.
Some of them want to abuse you. Some of them want to be used by you.
This song reminds me of the 90’s. The...
once more with feeling
Feelings suck. For some reason we feel guilt, anger, sadnesss, etc. Surely some of these have evolutionary adaptations. But you’d think that we would be able to avoid feeling guilt over stupid things we can’t change, or feeling angry over things we can’t change, or getting depressed enough to shoot ourselves in the face. No, if there were an invisible hand guiding evolution, it...
September 2010
3 posts
Last.fm gender/age plots →
Last.fm data used to plot bands and tags by their gender ratio and average listener age. The plots suggest that men go much more heavily into hard rock and metal, as well as progressive rock, jazz fusion and ambient. Women seem to prefer more “emotive” music, going for folk, indie pop and especially j-pop, k-pop and female vocals (Ani DiFranco comes to mind).
There’s also a...
themes, motifs 'n shit: the formula to being...
Telling a story seems to be more than just stringing together plausible events. To some extent, there are rules. Stories should roughly follow the “standard model” of introduction -> rising action -> climax -> falling action -> conclusion, of course, though many stories muddy that a lot by having several different sections. In that respect, it is like the harmonic structure...
fading to sleep
I feel strangely tied to this chair, this wretched red recliner that I have mated to. The rest of my head against the cushion seems to be magnetic, implacably fastening it. I cannot lift the head a single degree. The languor that it induces from me must be Pavlovian in nature; it was certainly not instinctive, but only by the relationship of this chair to so many mystical intercourses of mind and...
August 2010
12 posts
how a rational person might determine that their...
What would it take for you to believe that your best friend, whom you have known for your entire life, is actually an ingenious nearly-perfect robot designed to be your friend? Here I’m assuming that you are a rational agent and not generally paranoid or insane.
The most certain way would be for you to see the inner workings of your friend (so long as you personally trust what you see...
ephemeral pleasures
Sometimes when I lie in bed, trying to sleep, I assume one position, silent and quiet, waiting for sleep to take me, still and breathing slowly. The position is comfortable, the sheets cool against the skin, unruffled, and the air gently circulates. It is a calm feeling, but sleep does not take me, and I lie unmoving for a half an hour, an hour, two hours. And then I shift, for that position that...
writing and stuff
Lots of people write a lot of stuff, every day, a virtual Library of Alexandria of spam, fluff, boring communication, interesting data, insightful discourse, and breaking news of the most important and life-changing varieties. I am imagining right now a cross between Borges’s infinite library and Apple’s Time Machine, with vast quantities of information about the world catalogued by...
High on the power of teaching
After having having taught various people various things over the years, I will attest to the feelings of pride that it invokes. But there is a tinge of darker emotion in it. You feel that you have some power over the people you teach, by giving them information. This is aided when they express their indebtedness to you, even if you try to make light of it. This feeling is a major ego boost: here...
an inkling of portent?
So Inkling (http://www.inkling.com/) seems shiny. The idea of making interactive textbooks is quite sexy, no doubt, and I don’t have to tell you why. However, the details make me highly critical of the whole effort, to the point that I would hope that it fails, for several reasons:
1) From reading the FAQ, it seems to me that the iTunes store restrictions, when applied to textbooks, are...
“Facts are simple and facts are straight
Facts are lazy and facts are late...”
– David Byrne
a fragment on social class and low-income...
In a competitive society, there are not enough jobs for everyone, and disagreeable jobs will only be done by the desperate few that cannot vie for greater. These are the people-centric jobs in retail and food service, and less people-centric jobs like janitorial/maid work, landscaping/farming/outdoor work and waste collection services. This is work that provides low income and has a high turnover...
a window
There is a window here. It’s much taller than you, with a semi-circular cap. Sun motif. No sun shines through it now. A valence divides the cap from the rectangular section, with a bunched lace curtain hanging to one side. Cream blinds, coated with a thin layer of dust, hang behind it. Within the curtain is a bustle of fake flowers, of type you cannot guess. The flowers are pink, with light...
A dream I had last night.
It was a game show between teams of time travellers, Iron Chef style. One team was myself and my companions, another was Hitler and some nazis, and the third was a group of shape-shifting raccoons. The raccoons learned the secret of time travel by travelling back in time and masquerading as my friends in my 4th grade Christmas pagaent (My Joseph was taken off-stage by the three wise men and...
"You believe what you want, so long as you act in...
We (meaning that good-old progressive movement) love the idea of freedom of belief. It has become important to be able to accept people disagreeing with you, having a different religion than you, having an opposite political orientation than you. And when people try to restrict a minority opinion from even expressing itself in words using the face of the law, the progressives will rise to argue...
twenty four hours of tweets
talents thoughts wasted, brain cells slowly culled by the drink, fear of shadows and words, mortal terror monday madness mornings2 minutes ago via web
Delete
I wish I were in demand.about 1 hour ago via web
@ZachWeiner x = log x => -x = -log(x) => -x = log(1/x) => e^(-x) = 1/x => -x*e^(-x) = -1 => -W(-1)=x ? wolfram alpha says e^(-W(-1))…about 2 hours ago via...
& yet & yet
Hiding in the depths, writing code, reading books, and commenting on The Nature Of Things is my pastime. But why should I be so desolate and self-effacing, so afraid to slink into the public eye? This is something that was never natural for me. My cycle seems to be too long for me to understand, slowly evolving without thinking, more devolving. And yet every move I undertake against this glacier...
July 2010
2 posts
the long-awaited drunk achy truthful post
I can’t bear this anymore. The pain, the physical pain, the emotional pain, the hating, the squeezing myself further and further into nothingness, achieving pure deprecation. I can’t deal with anything. I’m just barely alive. I cannot even talk to anyone. I didn’t even post on here, because I couldn’t get the words out. Now under the gnawing physical ache I could find...
Local vs. Universal
Local is humankind, with failings. Local is closer and more traversable. Local is biased and selfish, but also humble. Hometowns, scientific knowledge, warmth, introspection. Local is near thinking. Local is evolutionary niches.
Universal is past the Kuiper belt, or past the farthest field. Universal is the people who don’t speak our language too. Universal is God’s domain. Universal...
June 2010
1 post
Latin cheatsheet
I’ve misused these myself, so I’m going to put them here:
i.e. means id est, or “that is”, is pretty straightforward. Don’t confuse with e.g. Qualifies what is previously stated with a more precise or expounded form.
e.g. means exempli gratia, or “gratis example”, corresponds well to the English “for example”. Gives examples which exhibit...
May 2010
3 posts
100% new unprocessed entry
I’ll deign to remind the world that I still exist, and have not fallen into a tar pit, to be excavated in a million years by aliens and listed as a stupid extinct hominid with no name inside an archaeological record. As intriguing as it would be to witness, I can’t witness that when I’m dead, and if there were an afterlife it’d probably not be spectator mode.
The motions...
one-offs
Laughter is kin to shudder.
Hate of hate is still hate, right?
Cannot control blood alcohol content with your mind, no matter how hard you try.
When did the average American decide they knew more than the average expert?
If you could die for everyone’s sins, would you?
Another dream with a close friend abandoning me.
If we have a rudder, it must be made of cheap plastic.
I wish I like...
Words again
More stewing in bitterness for me.
I remember reading Infinite Jest back a year or more ago. Besides being a fun read even given its massive size and epic scope, I felt a strange affirmation in reading about addiction in a way that I hadn’t before. In the time that I spent in a psych ward, I felt odd being in a place with people in straits more dire than mine, who seemed outwardly more...
April 2010
6 posts
I don’t have much time to make a decision. But I keep putting the decision off, mincing too much the possibilities. I ask myself what’s the worst that could happen, and the answer is…I don’t know. The worst that can happen if I don’t go is…nothing. And nothing hurts after a while.
How do you tell, for absolute sure, that you are not missing some important aspect of being human which at least many other people seem to have? Sometimes I feel like I’m just faking it, that on some level it doesn’t make sense, and I’m not actually forming real inferences, but just producing results to the level which it seems indistinguishable. And my limit on how well I can...
Book burning
In a world without books, only ebooks, there can be no book burnings,
They take each page, and read the page, and tear the page neatly down the spine, no ragged edges, and lights them individually with a lighter, dropping it lovingly into the urn filled with cinders. And so on. Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, They are brought to bear, They have their words spoken before the convocation of one. They...
Even before
Even before I picked up the glass, I was drunk. Why am I tired? Why do I need sleep? I’m afraid of sleep. The bed is a vat of eels. Eels. It’s all squirming around and slippery and smells like the sea. Like the fucking sea. It’s all briney, except not really. There are waves in and out back and forth like a hammock or a porno. Harmonic fucking oscillators. The cousins to pendula,...
Nirvana's Supersymmetric Pair
Is nirvana (the state of enlightenment) something which is an isolate, a fixed-point of the cycle of rebirths, a singular eye in the storm of forms? Or maybe it has a dual, which is a lower energy state, so low that we cannot probe it easily? Perhaps there is a nirvana in the Lyman spectrum, some sort of condensate of negativity that produces a fixed-point. It could be theorized that it has been...
pivot
Looking for the ZEN, the pivot, the crank, a cog central, upon which the whole system turns, the essense, the metanoia, the generator function of the cascade sequence. I’m fucking mario, invincible, star cascade, breaking down barriers like the Kool-Aid man, I’m going to fuck up the numbers, going to fire the books and lose the game.
This pivot is our own, it is everyone’s,...
not kill, pkill
Another headache from thinking too much.
I cannot countenance society much. Sure, there are the obvious bad things about the society, the “people are dying while no one seems to notice” aspects of society, the Lindsey Lohan effect of meaningless fluff, that are well-documented in all your angsty blogposts, dystopian novels, etc. But it’s also the shallowness, the hypocrisy and...
March 2010
24 posts
ape
Let’s write on the dry-erase board, little ape. Write Euler’s formula, little ape. More funny jokes, you should remember them ape. Repartee, rinse, repeat.
Did they tell you the name of the game? It’s called the tenure track.
Here’s how to write an academic paper. Powerpoint. Ad-lib thesis. Here’s how to solve Laplace’s equation using Green functions. Here is...
Made in
Don’t fault me my Fisher Price reality. My plastic persons live idyllic lives in the ivory towers I made of flawless lego bricks. Just because you can’t live there, doesn’t make it worse. It might even be better that nothing truly happens there. If nothing ever happened, you’d not have to worry about the future, and you wouldn’t have baggage from the past.
I want to...
We're all there
I have to confess, I’m mostly just trying to say things so that I don’t go crazy. It doesn’t have to be anything more significant than that.
t’s not that we want perfection so much as better than before, it’s not that we demand creativity, just pastiche. We need the novel without the different, we need the expectably unexpected instead of the unexpected mundane. We...
Post about posting
I write a lot of posts that end up never coming to fruition, I just don’t have the concentration for this gig. It’s pretty lame, I know. I have good ideas that can be farmed out to real blog posts rarely enough, and I usually forget the gist in the meantime.
Don’t go to Michigan, it’s kinda lame.
Drowning in the unborn
Think about fungus. It’s one of the more simple lifeforms, even though something like a mushroom is hardly simple compared to, say, a member of Archaea, it is much less extrinsically complicated than a homo sapiens or a hummingbird. But anyway, a mold, say, that produces a prodigious quantity of spores in every direction, pushing its possibly progeny to the four winds (literally). The...
möbius poem
the same as the first day, but flipped out turned upside down like that time I became Flemish prince of Belgium, western Poland born and raised, raised to be lowered to the pit, but we are sinners in the hands of an angry frog, except the frog is Balfrog, and the gum base is in another castle, and the castle is a razzle dazzle shake it baby texas toast machine, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, nuclear war,...
If
If I’m writing to be meaningful, why are my words without meaning?
If I’m writing to let people know I exist, why don’t I write things that actually matter?
If I’m writing just for myself, why am I letting other people see it?
If I’m writing and it’s not helping, why am I writing?
dive into mark - The pursuit of happiness →
I deleted that entry I was writing. Maybe I’ll delete all of this.
Masturbation guilt
If you have it regularly, is it a sign that there is something wrong with you, or your self image? I mean, minus the usual bullshit and everything. It’s probably more reasonable when you’re depressed. I guess?
Self-conscious
Collect millions of pictures of beautiful people. They’ll pile up on your hard drive. You can look at these people forever. Maybe they appear in your Tumblr feed. But why? How do you separate the reasons?
1) Artistic: you like beautiful pictures on an artistic level; you appreciate their beauty and originality and could pontificate to someone about what makes this one better than that one...
There’s blood in me too. There is life in these bones, the kind that can lift small stones and walk moderate distances and briefly sprint. But in so many ways, I am dead.
nuage
It starts in the head, the wisps coalesce, when you just can’t countenance this train of thought, and pretty soon the sun is hemmed in by clouds and the barometer starts spinning and you can’t control and that terrible sigh releases. That sigh has measurable weight and you recoil at its loss, shivering as if you just tied off the stump of a failed relationship with surgical gauze...
Virtuous vagrancy
Has there ever been a society which promoted vagrancy as a virtue? Surely there are enough examples of religions and social arrangements that made it seem more romantic than it is. Jesus and the Buddha are two examples of mostly homeless mystics that emphasized the virtues of freeing yourself from earthly desires in the pursuit of enlightenment / complete love of Christ. But there is dignity in...