From this week's NY Times food column in the magazine:

"I've never subscribed to the marketers' description of monkfish as the "poor man's lobster"... If you see a whole monkfish at the market, you'll find its massive mouth scarier than a shark's. Apparently it sits on the bottom of the ocean, opens its Godzilla jaws and waits for poor unsuspecting fishies to swim right into it, not unlike the latest recepients of W's capital-gains cuts. So it has in common with lobster only reprehensibility of character."

[I]t was reported this week that a company called Real Men Outdoor Productions Inc. has begun offering "Bambi Hunts," in which Las Vegas-area men pay $10,000/hour to shoot naked women with paintballs. I suppose this should provoke some sort of feminist rage in me, but in all honesty, this is too weird to be sexist. It's just apocalyptic.

Something I came across today while working: Students for War.

As far as I can tell, they're serious. And personally, I find this very disturbing - the attitude of people who very obviously have never been anywhere close to an actual war. Or if they have, and still have this attitude, then this is even more fscked-up than I thought.

Incidentally, they don't seem to be advocating any particular war. Until fairly recently, their site was advocating war with Iraq; now they're advocating war with North Korea, and on their site are hints that they're interested in Syria and Iran soon afterwards. Now, while I may agree with some (most certainly not all!) of their individual statements, the idea of forming a group for the simple purpose of advocating bloodshed in general seems somewhere between lunatic and demoniac.

Perhaps I'm reacting too much to an (amazingly) ill-conceived name; but these people seem like the exact sort of people I would like to keep the hell away from.

Making the rounds at work. Someone has obviously put a great deal of thought into this - perhaps a bit too much.

An interesting essay on postmodernism

I just read the most amazing/disturbing review of the latest Harry Potter. It's worth reading, with or without the book, just because it's so remarkably over-the-top with its references and giant enumerations. Either the writer (John Leonard) is an enormous fan of Umberto Eco, or he was very, very stoned when he wrote this, or both.

It is moved. All the furniture's in the new place, and modulo some assembly work (fairly light) and some last few things to move (a few lamps, etc.) the new place is ready for commissioning. A few more days and it should be completely liveable.

Blue elf needs coffee badly.

Given that my current main e-mail reading system is flaking: What do you all recommend for a good, stable e-mail solution? I need POP or (preferably) IMAP, and web access would be nice, and (importantly) a trustworthy provider. (And, unlike the past decade or so, I'm not in a position to maintain my own server...)

I don't know what it is, but every time I'm in a game that Monte's GMing, I leave with inordinate food cravings related to some random foodstuff that was mentioned during play. Tonight it was diner food - bacon and eggs, all that.

No diner food for me tonight, but now I'm home and enjoying cheese, crackers and ale. Which is actually even better.

I also formally took posession of my new place tonight at 12:01AM, and came by with Hans and Robert to check it out. (And drop off the first few boxes - the contents of my Stanford office) It's a great place; roomy, lots of light, and with stained glass windows, a fireplace, built-in bookcases, and a washer and dryer. And remarkably cheap. (Ah, what a wonderful thing a renter's market is. Of course, it's been pointed out to me that "remarkably cheap" by Bay Area standards isn't quite the same as by any other standards on this planet, but that's as may be.) Right now I need to decide where to put things, and get minor things set up: DSL, getting the power and the phone in my name, and setting up some curtains for the back door. And perhaps for the front porch as well; I'll need to hunt around and find a good material.

For those of you in the area, a housewarming party will probably occur at some point, although perhaps not in the immediate future.

( weekend notesCollapse )

From an article in the Guardian:

"Canada is subversively sending idiots into the global marketplace with American accents"

Forth, my faithful minions! Wahahahahaha!

(No, I'm not Canadian. I just like having hordes of minions.)

[politics filter]

Report on construction of new intelligence facilities in Iraq. Interesting both for its own utility and for what it implies about America's long-term plans in the region. Compare and contrast with the continuation (with no end in sight) of low-intensity conflict there - what are we getting ourselves into? Can we maintain a long-term committment in the area?

No doubt we have the physical capability to do so, but there are some questions about the costs, how those might rise over time (Vietnamization, even?) and how dependent we may become on being able to hold that position. If costs rise, political will may wane, and then the gods alone know what may come next.

( And, some editorial comment on this...Collapse )

From the NY Times front page, at the moment, the two top headlines:

"Strom Thurmond, foe of integration, dies at 100"

"Gays celebrate, and plan campaign for broader rights"

Contrary to what you may guess, these two stories are not related. The latter is about the Supreme Court ruling in Lawrence v. Texas earlier today. But methinks the front-page net editor is having a bit of fun...

Addendum: Reading over the ruling in Lawrence: this is one worth looking over carefully. The court gave a very strongly worded ruling, especially the majority opinion written by Justice Kennedy. It's clearly meant to serve as a precedent in the future in a very wide variety of cases. In addition to formally stating that homosexuals have legal rights equal to heterosexuals, it makes some broader arguments about the boundaries of privacy and what the government does and does not have a right to regulate. In the long run, this decision may be one of the most significant of the past few decades from the court with regards to a wide variety of social issues.

Wow, some good news in the paper for once. :)

First day at Google today. Wow. It's really as cool as it's rumored to be.

And I am now really tired. So details later.

While searching for Aramaic dictionaries on Amazon, this came up. Note what it suggests readers may also be interested in.

Also, for your amusement, a bit of news from Germany...

(or, The Gods Must Be Crazy)

Last night, aided by a great deal of coffee and a strange mood, hansandersen, jrpseudonym and I had a discussion about Pascal's Wager and the mathematics of belief. The results were... well, somewhat strange, but some of you may find them amusing or interesting, so here's a brief summary. It's incomplete - guys, you want to add in some comments with your own notes and thoughts from last night? I know there's plenty.

So, without further ado: ( Magic 8 ball, what should I believe?Collapse )

I have now been officially indoctrinated. And now, I'm going to... bed.

Update: And now I'm much more awake, feeling strangely at peace. And realizing that it is a far, far better thing to be indoctrinated than inculcated. (I believe that's what they do to proctologists)

No, really. Story here. The crops have been decimated and the roads turned blood red.

This has been your random fact for the evening.

Things achieved today so far: Parents and sister got in town, showed them around some, got the apartment I was trying to get, and handed in my signed & sealed offer letter to Google.

Pretty good start for a day... (knock on wood) more amusements to follow, most likely.

Well, here it goes again... I just found another good place, I should hear back tomorrow by noon about it. Once again, there's competition for it, but I may be able to achieve something with negotiation on it.

*sigh* Ah, the joys of apartment-hunting...

For those of you who (like me) have no television, or otherwise haven't seen this - a new Honda ad that's somewhere between beautiful and frightening.

No, that's not CG. Yes, it took a lot of takes to get that right.

This has been your work avoidance for the night.

I just went and saw the perfect apartment. It's got absolutely every feature I wanted, it's pleasant, in the right location, the price is right. And I'm currently the third applicant in line for it.

Bugger.

(From a problem set my students just handed in...)

The amount of energy it takes to bring water from room temperature to a boil is enough to launch it 34km straight up. The amount of energy it would take to boil it down all the way - until it all evaporated - would launch it 270km.

Compare this to a typical altitude for a 747, about 11km, or for a space shuttle, about 150km.

Damn. Water has a very high heat capacity.

And the idea of launching a liter of water 34km into the air is pretty cool.

( Other related ramblingsCollapse )
This has been your random thought for the day.

Apparently last week wasn't my last class. In fact, I have to teach a class in 1.5 hours.

I should probably put this up every so often: I've got a "politics" filter where I tend to put things like interesting news items, political analysis-type stuff, and occasional "incoming trouble" warnings. It's filtered since many people prefer not to have to get this in their LJ.

So if you'd like to be on this filter and aren't already (if you are, you've seen several "politics" posts from me, marked as such, in the past few days), comment or e-mail me and I'll add you to that filter.

Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were gunned down in Texas. News story courtesy of the New York Times.

This bit of work avoidance has been brought to you by the letters 't,' 'h,' 'e,' 's,' 'i,' and 's.'

( Roleplaying purity testCollapse )

On Edge, Martin Rees - a noted cosmologist, someone who definitely knows what he's doing - has an article about multiverse cosmology. (This is a general-public article, BTW, not a technical one)

Now, I've got one primary objection to this article, which is that it makes multiverse cosmology sound like something much more agreed upon in the scientific community than it actually is; its current status is more on the lines of "a definite possibility, one whose details haven't been worked out yet, but has some really good features as a prospective model."

But that aside, he has some interesting things to say on the subject. One intriguing possibility he brought up, which I hadn't heard before, was that in an infinite universe, someone has very likely developed extraordinarily powerful computers, ones powerful enough to simulate not just individual life forms but even large sectors of the universe itself, and that for all we know, we may be living in such a simulation.

The philosophical implications of this sort of thought are rather intriguing. On the one hand, we couldn't necessarily intrinsically tell whether we're in such a simulation or not, since we don't have any outside reference points to work by; but it may be possible under such circumstances to communicate with the simulators, by some means or another, and indicate that yes, there's life inside here.

The good/bad thing with this line of thought is that it seems that one could use it as a basis for virtually any argument; it's like theology, but even less constricting. Can't explain some property of the universe? Maybe the simulators programmed it to be that way. (Like the "well, that's just how God planned it" excuse - a great way to avoid answering any inconvenient questions)

What's interesting, here, is that this seems to arise naturally as a consequence of certain kinds of cosmology: If the universe really is large enough to contain all things, one must expect such simulations to exist therein. But this gives us no information whatsoever about whether we're elements of such a simulation.

Anyway, this is just sleep dep and a great deal of physics (from the past few days) talking at this point. There are some interesting issues brought up here, but they're about on a par with solipsism as far as really arguable points. Perhaps it's time for bed.