1. Darn. I'm really not feeling well enough to be sitting here trying to work. I'm going to go lie down for a bit ( Read more... )

I wasn't going to go grocery shopping before I'd done the laundry, because all of my best cloth grocery bags went with me on some travels recently and now really need to be run through the washing machine because they've been serving as laundry bags, shower bags, etc.

But now I can't easily do the laundry before I've gone grocery shopping, since I ( Read more... )

Me: What was that book I keep thinking back to from high school about the young man who goes to read to a blind woman in her 20s? Wasn't it called Blind Sight or something? And wasn't the author's name Peter?

Myself: That's ridiculous. You realise that you have a copy of a sci-fi novel called Blindsight by Peter Watts sitting on your shelf, right ( Read more... )

Minor annoyance: being unable to Google a thing from my childhood due to having called it something completely idiosyncratic.

I just found a paper that addresses a section of my thesis; Google Scholar informed me that I've clicked on it before. The reason why, it turns out, is that this paper cites me. Namely, my undergrad thesis, published obscurely in a volume of proceedings papers from 2011 ( Read more... )

Verena Huber-Dyson and Hilary Putnam died this past weekend?

I'm mostly an outsider to the math community, but at a guess, they're reeling. Ouch.

I recently downloaded the song "Martha (Cincinnati, 1914)" by one of those very many power-pop indie-bands I like, The Corner Laughers. From the title, I expected lyrics about a First World War romance. And the first time I listened to it, I was only kind of listening to the words, but that's what I thought I was hearing ( Read more... )

Washing machine: Look, I never see you wash your blue stuff anymore. What's with that ( Read more... )

Factors making it likely for me to favour a particular brand of olive oil, in descending order of importance:

1. Does not also potentially contain traces of peanut oil.
2. Comes in bottles that fit in my cupboard.
3. Does not have that extra layer of plastic over the bottle head and neck that I can never open without a knife.

Susannah Cahalan's Brain on Fire, which compellingly chronicles a month that the author spent in hospital in a baffling psychotic state until a neurologist correctly deduced that she was suffering from a rare type of autoimmune encephalitis, is set to be adapted for film. And Dakota Fanning is going to be playing Cahalan. Learned this today; ( Read more... )