Maya and I speculate Uruguayan professor, in his free time, operates a contraption similar to that of a one-man-band (what with all of the gadgets strapped to him foolishly), the sole functionality of which is to make paella and play soccer (or, as they say, fooot-ball ( Read more... )

"To see how some of the most basic results of classical analysis lack computational meaning, take the assertion that every bounded non-void set A of real numbers has a leas upper bound. (The real number b is the least upper bound of A if a <= b for all a in A and if there exist elements of A that are arbitrarily close to b)... If this assertion ( Read more... )

The latest homographic, homophonic antonym I've encountered:
cached: (1) to use up. (2) to store up.

``The Peanut Butter Crunch is cached''
``Is enough of that South Park episode cached so we can start watching it yet?''

A culinary history lessonAC: "It is funny how cultures get attached to the idea of certain foodstuffs always having been around ( Read more... )

I haven't posted in a while. Things have been either too awesome, or too lame ( Read more... )

I'm at my Grandmother's house on the south side. Last night, my mom, Gram, and fairy Godmother (as well as favorite aunt) Ann looked through shoeboxes full of old photos spanning maybe seven generations. I set us on this mission in hopes of finding a photo of my namesake Mame. We found only one picture, of Mame nearly on her deathbed, once-elegant ( Read more... )

Igor and I went to the aquarium yesterday and saw Faust (!) the Komodo Dragon. As most of you know, Komodos are seriously big; apparently, this is a result of island gigantism (qwantz conveniently discusses island dwarfism). I didn't learn much about komodos at the aquarium, however; the most prominant "Fun Fact!" written on Faust's cage was that ( Read more... )

Clara links to this mac-hating article from her blog. One of the arguments in the article is against "apple the monopolist." Steven Levitt has some better-reasoned commentary about Apple's financial decisions, but points out that consumers are enraged when they think a company is making profit-maximizing decisions. It's true---people get into their ( Read more... )

Connecticut: said good-bye for at least a long while.

Philadelphia: spent a weekend with the fantastic Michael biking around and drinking. These are the things we like to do. Did NOT eat a cheese steak; sorry, Alan, couldn't bring myself to that. Experienced what Michael assures me is beautifully archetypical of South Philly: listened to the ( Read more... )

For most of this weekend, I had no human interaction except to confirm that, yes, my lamer rommate was moving out. Now I have a gigantic bedroom, fro real queen bed, red walls, wireless reception, soft lighting, and---most importantly---other roommate no longer has to walk through my room to get to hers. Finally, this terrible apartment (which, ( Read more... )

I just finished Emmanuel Carrere's I Am Alive And You Are Dead, a biography of Philip K. Dick, which reads like a Phil Dick novel (almost). The key difference is the ending: in Carrere's book, the clouds lift at the end (unambiguously), whereas Dick never stands for that sort of thing. I recommend that you read it if you have ever read anything by ( Read more... )