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!
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Things That Are Hard to Quit (Non-exhaustive List)
cigarettes, alcohol, heroin, procrastination of boring-but-genuinely-worth-doing tasks, moral outrage
Advice for a Moment of Emotional Vulnerability
Don't panic; keep it together; silently lower your estimate of your general competence.
I Just Want Outrage Season to Be Over Already
I don't enjoy being provoked into despising my fellow Americans for being alien savages, when it's so much better to just ignore them for the same reason.
On an Image Macro
For the haters are going to hate,
And the ponies are going to pwn,
As for me, I will bear all the burden and weight
And uncertainty of the alone.
Library Fines
Overdue book fines are a terrible sin, not because of the harm done to other library stakeholders, but because of what they say about you as a person: not only did you not get around to finishing the books you (apparently erroneously) thought you wanted to read, but you weren't even responsible enough to bring them back on time.
The So-Called "Euclidean Plane"
I'm skeptical; I think it's actually just a really big torus.
"It's Not That"
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.
Dice
Players of tabletop RPGs are lucky that we live in three-dimensional space; in five-or-higher dimensions, there are only three kinds of dice, but our world has five (d4, d6, d8, d12, and d20).
Speculative Etymology I
In the future (to say nothing of large swathes of the present), creative people work for status and attention rather than money. When X is employed by Y, X is said to be "on Y's blogroll" (coined in analogy to payroll).
Friendship Deficits
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.
The Quieted Scare Convention
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."
My Favorite Mnemonic
(From Leonard Gillman and Robert H. McDowell's calculus text.)
The number e to twelve decimal places is 2.718281828459; it's easy to remember because four plus five equals nine, and 1828 is the year after Beethoven died.
Don't Resent That No One Cares
It's tempting to be resentful that other people don't value your time the way you do. You complain at every opportunity: "Why, why, why do I get socially rewarded for working on this-and-such random chore that doesn't even help anyone, when obviously my great masterpiece (in progress, in potentia, coming soon) on such-and-this is so much more valuable?!"
But I think it's better not to be resentful and not to complain, mostly because it doesn't work. Other people don't care about your great masterpiece on such-and-this. They really don't. Maybe someone, somewhere will care after it's done, but it's not reasonable to expect anyone's support in advance—or, alternatively and isomorphically, it is reasonable, but given that there's nothing you can do to force people to be reasonable, reasonableness is not the correct criterion to be paying attention to.
The Word Melancholy
It sounds like a kind of dog bred to harvest Cucurbitaceae-family fruits.
The Sliding False Dichotomy of Idealism and Cynicism
The Television Tropes & Idioms wiki has a page on the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism. Of course I understand why such a page exists, but part of me can't help but protest that it's not really a sliding scale. One of the most charming things about my native subculture is that we have heaps of both: cynicism in the style of "Humans are selfish, weak-willed hypocrites; the reasons people say they do things aren't always or even usually the real reasons, and even introspection itself is untrustworthy," and idealism in the style of "But knowing what we do now, we shall use the power of Reason to remake the world in accordance with our Values!"
Book Notes I
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.
Idiot or Alien? Incompetence or Evil?
When you encounter someone who expresses a political or social opinion that you find absolutely abhorrent, it is instructive to consider the extent to which this person is making a mistake, and the extent to which they simply have different values from you. Is this opinion something that they would immediately relinquish, if only they knew they knew the true facts of which they are now ignorant?—or is it reflective of some quality essential to their agency, a basic motive far too sacred to be destroyed by the truth?
(Of course, it is also instructive to consider whether you're making a mistake. But that is not the subject of this post.)
Some would say that it is useless to consider such questions, that human cognition doesn't separate cleanly into beliefs and values, and that even if such a thing could be done, it is futile for any present-day human to consider the matter, given our ignorance of our own psychology. And yet, the question still seems to make sense to me. If I can't know, I can guess. And I don't guess the same thing every time.
Facial Hair Is Gross
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.
Character Entity Reference
In addition to — and –, there should also be an &rdash; HTML character entity reference which specifies the Unicode high voltage sign U+26A1 (⚡).