Becoming a parent seems to make most people into some sort of weird pseudo-human that causes them to consign to oblivion everything that happened before they decided to grace the earth with their crotchsplosions.

I don’t understand why. Having a kid takes no particular skill. It just takes fucking and then waiting.

When I was a kid — and this wasn’t uncommon at all — kids were not centered in adult life. Not like they are now. At the time it made me unhappy, but then again I was an unusual kid.

This is another relative-large social shift in my lifetime that I don’t really understand the genesis of, nor the dominance of the underlying weltaunshauung. I’m not even going to speculate on how it developed.

This article covers some pretty good annoyances typically heard from those folks, though.

Indicating to these people that having kids is the only way they will reach some higher level of understanding is both inconsiderate and rude. I don’t know what the alternatives to these statements are. Maybe just cut anything that starts with “When you have kids…” out of your repertoire all together. It makes you sound like their mom anyway.

I don’t have any problem with people having kids. I just don’t believe it makes you a saint, a better person than me, or qualified to dispense unwanted advice. That’s all.

It is possible for something to be infinite but not exhaustive — for instance, the set 1, 3, 5….

That is infinite, but does not contain any even numbers. No matter how hard you look  in the sequence it will not contain a 2 or a 2,014 for that matter.

Infinite non-exhaustive sets are a naive mistake people make when they say something like, “If the universe if infinite, there must be another me out there!”

Well, not necessarily.

It is also possible to search an infinite space in finite time. I’m glad he gave a non-topo explanation. I tried to read the topo explanation years ago and couldn’t make heads nor tails of it.

And of course there are countable and uncountable infinities. An easy way of distinguishing between them is to think that if you put the infinities in a room full of an infinite number of chairs (natural numbers) and asked every member present to sit down at once, would everyone always be able to find a chair?

If no, then that infinity is uncountable — such as the real numbers, which are indeed uncountably infinite. For example, the number of elements in the set 0,1 is 2. The number of elements between 0 and 1 is uncountably infinite.

So that is infinity. Or all that I feel like writing about at the moment. If I were an aspiring mystic, though, I’d concentrate on infinity. It’s where reality, rationality and pure insanity all meet up.

I’ve been studying to renew a lot of technical certifications lately.

You really do get better at memorizing things with practice. When I first started several months ago it took me hours to cover material I can now cover in 20 minutes.

Amazing how malleable the mind is and at the same time how inflexible in some ways.

Most browsers already are or will soon be eliminating the ability to easily see/find the URL of the site you’re accessing.

Supposedly to aid the “average user.”

I’ve dealt with “average users” for nearly two decades now. And as much as I hate to admit it, they really do have problems with URLs.

But it does befuddle me why they have so many problems with URLs. It’s just an address, like a home address, at its simplest.

For me the very first time I saw a URL having no clue what it might be, I understood it instantly. I realize I have some advantages that others don’t. Yes, but not knowing how to type a URL into an address bar? That’s a special kind of, well, special.

Not understanding URLs – not knowing how to type them nor how to read them – is these days about the equivalent of not knowing how to tie your shoes.

Another annoyance is just how many people don’t know how to copy and paste despite using a computer for 10+ years.

Yes, it’s an old rant, but incompetence of this sort bothers me as it would not be tolerated in other areas of life. It’s not like we are asking people to do programming or to build a computer from scratch. It’s more like if someone got into a car and had to be told every single time how to use the steering wheel.

Computers are not new. Too bad we have to make them horrible to use for those who actually know how to operate them so that someone with the IQ of a jellyfish polyp can click “Like” on Facebook.

The first company to make a drool-based tablet wins, I guess.

I used to be firmly in the snobby anti-tarot card camp. Then I started researching the effectiveness of psychological counseling – talk therapy – and similar “treatments.”

Realizing that really they weren’t much different, and that talk therapy had as much pseudo-science inherent in it as tarot readings, I lost my disdain.

Mostly people benefit from talk therapy and tarot card readings due to the care effect. And the fact that about 1/3 of people get better on their own no matter what.

(In one of my few actual original thoughts, I was thinking about the care effect and its existence – though not in those words – before I’d ever read about it anywhere.)

Now I’d recommend people go to a tarot card reader than the psychologist as a tarot reader is probably much cheaper and would be just as effective.

“Talk therapy” is basically a very expensive scheme where you pay for a friend. Why not do it more cheaply, and have more fun?

After all, tarot cards have really great iconography and semiotics. I’ll probably mount some on the wall one day.

I can’t understand this – both the misogyny and the “guilty pleasure” concept.

The Shame Cluster artists include Lana Del Rey, Blue Swede, Miley Cyrus, The Bangles, Madonna, Kesha, Blondie, Lorde, Pat Benatar, Robin Thicke, Andrew W.K., The Cure, Soft Cell and Billy Joel. At left are the five genres (as determined by Spotify) in this cluster with the strongest weights.

This means that 44 percent of the artists in the cluster were tagged as “pop,” and so on. In other words, pop accounts for less than half the music within the cluster. It’s a diffuse group of artists. “It’s sort of pop through the ages. A lot of female, a lot of pop, but not exclusively any of those,” Kalia said.

“A lot of female?” What the fuck is that?

The misogyny actually bothers me more than the “guilty pleasure” bullshit. The latter is just hurting yourself; misogyny hurts everyone.

While disagreeing with the entire idea of The Shame Cluster, why those artists? It seems to be mostly that they are women. Lorde’s album was easily the best of last year, no contest there. Nothing was even close. It will stand the test of time, too. When you turn on whatever passes for radio in 2050, I guarantee you’ll hear “Royals” on the “oldie” stream.

And “The Cure?” Even if you do make distinctions between innovative artists and “pop” artists, The Cure changed music immensely in the 80s and have influenced literally thousands of artists. There’s hardly a band outside of the the Big Three who have done more to shape music.

All of this looks like another instance of bro culture, except in music snob form – nearly all of the artists in The Shame Cluster are either women or seen as feminine/soft in some way. Seems pretty obvious when you look at this dumbass’s list that way.