I basically agree with the New Yorker review. A big reason the previous film worked so well is that the ever-dour Batman had a fun-loving villain to work against. Here the villain(spoiler alert: s) are if anything even more somber than TGDB himself, not even mentioning all the angst-ridden supporting characters. As Lane and Dana Stevens at Slate ( Read more... )

Hopefully you all listen to Radiolab, and heard their recent show on (a)symmetry. The iPhone/iTouch front camera seems like a natural way to get a "true mirror" (one that properly reverses left and right), but for some reason the default camera app has no option for that. So download True Visage (or some other app that does the same thing; that's ( Read more... )

I have a phone interview on Monday that's going to be on "questions in mental math, probability and problem solving". Any advice/study materials (besides this awesome page)?

(Just to clarify, the interview is not with Google itself, just in that style (I'm assuming).)

Dog: "Guten Tag, Herr Hund!"
Turtle: "Saluton, little buddy!"
Cat: the xkcd or T.S. Eliot methods are acceptable.
Rabbit: "Herr Doktor Professor Bun-bun."

and new today,

Cardinal: "Greetings, your eminence."

No, not this kind. (Or this kind [nsfw].) We know how Roger Ebert feels (or at least felt) about videogames, that they could never even in principle be art in the sense that a painting or song or film can; in this week's Slate Cultural Gabfest, NPR's Mike Pesca argues, while discussing the recent Atlantic article on "foodie-ism", that food is not ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

Books I've read in the past few months:

Lucky Jim, Kingsley AmisMentioned before. Fairly entertaining, but the sexual politics of two generations ago just don't hold up that well as a topic for humor. (Cf. The Age of Innocence, where sexual mores of the past still resonate as a subject of tragedy. Or maybe Wharton's just a better writer than ( Read more... )

Mathemagician. Mathemusician. Sadly I'm not the first to think of mathemortician. Can we come up with some other ones?

ETA1: Okay, I did just invent mathemilitiaman.

From the first printing, 1845:

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before;
But the silence was unbroken, and the darkness gave no token,
And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, "Lenore!"
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the ( Read more... )

( Dr. Clay now returned from the Antipodes )