It’s interesting how wishing sometimes makes it so on the Internet. Or at least how enough people are thinking along the same lines that ideas pop up in multiple places last month. A few months ago, I went to a Social Media Club meeting, and came back musing about feedback karma, where it “would be […]
The Duke Ellington Nutcracker
Last night I opened up my copy of Time Out New York for the first time in a couple months. I have a subscription, but I’ve been so busy with classes, that I was basically tossing it in the recycling as soon as I got it. But I’m done with classes (yay!), so I flipped […]
Idea functionalism
This isn’t quite coming together yet, but I’m so happy to be done writing for class that I want to write a blog post this evening, so bear with me. One bit of preamble – for the sake of this discussion, when I talk about truth, I am not talking about logical consistency, e.g. proving […]
Patterns and truth
But in Ender’s mind, madness. Thousands of competing contradictory impossible visions that make no sense at all because they can’t all fit together but they do fit together, he makes them fit together, this way today, that way tomorrow, as they’re needed. As if he can make a new idea-machine inside his head for every […]
Socialed out
So that plan of mine to post every day during November? Somehow that stopped. Class is almost done. I had a big presentation due this week in one class, and next week I have to turn in a take-home final, and the final version of master’s project proposal, and then I’ll be done with my […]
Bobos and Biology
A couple weeks ago I broke down and actually did some non-class, non-Economist reading. Crazy, eh? It was a weekend where I didn’t feel up to socializing, but didn’t feel up to homework either. So I looked for something light in my book pile, and this is what I read. Bobos in Paradise, by David […]
Group flow
I was telling a friend about the Buffy singalong today and mentioned that one of the reasons it was so enjoyable was because everybody in the theater was a Buffy fanatic, or at least Buffy-fanatic-friendly. Because the show had sold out earlier in the week, only the fanatics had tickets. And that created a really […]
Competition
I went for a bike ride last Saturday. I rode on up to Central Park, and started cruising around the 6 mile loop there, which is closed to cars on the weekends so all I had to watch out for was slow-moving families. I’m cranking along, pedalling away so that I get a good workout. […]
Buffy Singalong
In September, I was walking through Greenwich Village with a friend. We were chatting away as we passed by the IFC movie theater. Suddenly he noticed that I was no longer talking, and that, in fact, I had stopped several paces behind him. I had been dumbstruck by the theater marquee which said “Buffy singalong”. […]
Optimization Multiplicity
Religion fascinates me. I am not religious myself, but I sometimes yearn to be. It’s fashionable among the intellectual set to disparage religion, especially when the discussion is political, but having grown up in a religious town, I try to stay away from that (not always successfully). I knew lots of good people whose faith […]
