Writers and mathematicians and programmers (&c.) can work on whatever they want with equipment that's easy for individuals to purchase. Architects and particle physicists and psychologists (&c.) need to hustle for clients or fill out a dozen grant applications just to be allowed to breathe—how do they bear it?

I will not be rich; I will not be famous; who can say but that in a year's time, my desiccated corpse will be found abandoned in the most desolate of wastelands?—but! By the stars which may one day yet still be ours, I will understand!

Don't panic; keep it together; silently lower your estimate of your general competence.

I'm skeptical; I think it's actually just a really big torus.

Oftentimes I initially want to write "It's not that X, but rather Y" to mean "You might think I'm implying that X is true, so I want to emphasize that X is false; Y is true, and that's what explains my position," but I worry that this idiom is ambiguous; someone is likely to interpret it as meaning, "X might be true, but it's not the relevant consideration; my position is actually explained by Y (which does not necessarily contradict X)", which doesn't mean the same thing.

I'm not sure, but I suspect that I'm running a friendship deficit—that I need my friends more than they need me.

In a naively romanticized world of "pure" and unconditional love, you would never have occasion to think of such things: friends are always there for each other, no matter what, and no one would dream of anything so monstrous as consciously evaluating whether it's worth maintaining a friendship given the costs and benefits of doing so (including the opportunity cost of forgoing something else that could be done with the same amount of time and attention).

And in a world of Bayesian expected-utility-maximizing decision agents, there would be no loyalty and no concept of friendship.

Part of the beauty of our world is that it lies somewhere between the two extremes, but that we don't know exactly where.

Everyone knows ("everyone knows") about "scare quotes," where you enclose a phrase in quotation marks to indicate that the literal interpretation of the words should be regarded with skepticism, but sometimes I do this thing where I'll use a phrase normally and then repeat it in scare quotes and parentheses, as if to say, "I do partially intend this sincerely, but also with some irony or skepticism, although not so much as to justify outright scare quotes."

Of course, this practice immediately suggests the "dual" (dual) practice of using a phrase with scare quotes and then repeating it unquoted in parentheses, as if to say, "I do partially intend this ironically or in a way that should be regarded with skepticism, but also with a some sincerity, although not so much as to justify not using any scare quotes at all."

It sounds like a kind of dog bred to harvest Cucurbitaceae-family fruits.

Did you know that putting adorable foxes on the cover of your book will make it sell more copies??

Speaking of books with animals on the cover, is it wrong to mentally associate specific programming languages with specific colors based on the O'Reilly books?

Toni Morrison has a book titled What Moves at the Margin, and based on the title I keep hoping that it's a treatise on microeconomic theory, but that's probably not actually true.

I often go a couple days without bothering to shave, but never much longer, because the stubble quickly becomes intolerable: I end up compulsively touching my face out of what I want to describe as a mildly horrified perverse fascination, perhaps of the same kind that would motivate picking at a scab, or poking a tumor.