It is now early in the morning. I have chosen to continue my now four-year-old tradition of staying awake from the list-release until Thursday evening in order to apply twenty-four straight hours of effort to the various items on this year's list. I hold high hopes for our team's impending victory ( Read more... )

"The Master said, 'Do not worry because you have no official position. Worry about your qualifications. Do not worry because no one appreciates your abilities. Seek to be worthy of appreciation.' " (Book IV, Number 14 ( Read more... )

If you want something outside your control, then you are a slave to he who would provide it to you. You'll praise him when he helps but curse his name when he refuses. So happiness comes in learning what is or is not within your control, and giving up your desire for things you cannot provide for yourself.

Anna came to visit me over spring break; we had a good time. This entry is a response to discussions we had over break, but only so far as these discussions were a catalyst: most of the things I will present are things that I have known about for some time but before now have not been sufficiently motivated to think about them in a systematic way ( Read more... )

Stupid twitter. I just started using it yesterday and not only is it monopolizing my time, but half my updates don't appear! I can only apologize to what I'm sure is a rapt audience waiting to hear about how I went to get some coffee, then continued coding. It's really exciting ( Read more... )

You will recall that the first time I met my advisor he was wearing a cool t-shirt. So today I wore the new steampunk goggles that I spent this week making. I got a few weird looks, but nobody really said anything. Except for my advisor, who said, "Cool goggles." And later, "Are you going steampunk now?" I have a good advisor.

I had a quiet Valentine's Day. I had a few beers by myself. But I did not want to wallow publicly in my singleness, so I stayed in. Drinking alone? At home? On Valentine's Day? Surely it can't get any more classically depressing than that -- but it was surprisingly not dramatic. It turns out that alcohol affects me in almost exactly the same way ( Read more... )

"What Was I Scared Of?" tells the tale of a character who repeatedly meets up with an empty pair of pale-green pants. The character, who is the narrator, is initially afraid of the pants, which are able to stand on their own despite the lack of a wearer. However when he screams for help and the pants also start to cry, he realizes that "They were ( Read more... )

Z. Li, C. Callison-Burch, C. Dyer, J. Ganitkevitch, S. Khudanpur, L. Schwartz, W. Thornton, J. Weese, and O. Zaidan. 2009. "Joshua: Open Source Toolkit for Parsing-based Machine Translation." EACL 2009 Fourth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation. Athens, Greece. (Forthcoming ( Read more... )

Read any book by John Green that you can get your hands on. "An Abundance of Katherines" is comic. "Paper Towns" is tragic. I read the latter in one sitting just now.