I work with a guy who went to an Ivy League school.

Recently, he had to take some classes at a local community college for a certification.

Now all I hear is him grumbling about (and I quote), “I can’t believe I wasted all that fucking money when I was young and dumb! The community college classes were better-taught, smaller and just all-around higher quality than the classes at my school. And that cost me $45,000 a year. I got ripped off.”

He’s not the first one I’ve heard say that, but he’s the first I’ve heard in person.

Nothing wrong with going to an Ivy, of course — but realize you’re probably buying a name and social networking, and not an education. And that name and social networking can be very expensive.

Why is it the fate of nearly all cities (particularly geography-constrained ones, but not only) to punish residents by having ever-rising housing costs?

Can just NIMBYism explain it? I mean, I am sure it is multi-causal.

But what’s odd is not that geography-constrained cities have high and rising rents. That’s at least somewhat explainable. What doesn’t make sense is that in any city — from very small to very large — housing costs vs. income have doubled and tripled as compared to 1960. (So in 1960 an apartment in 2016 dollars would’ve been, say, $500 a month and now it is $1500 a month.)

My pet theory is that the human tendency to arrange social organizations into hierarchical structures is exacerbated by urbanity, the hierarchical predisposition being greatly reinforced until it is reflected (via zoning laws, NIMBYism, redlining, etc) into housing prices.

With humans, if it can’t be explained by sociological considerations it probably can’t be explained at all. But I’m still thinking.

This is not a weird quantum effect!

Because neutrinos don’t readily react with baryons, this is exactly what is expected. Superposition is present until interaction occurs — in fact, it couldn’t really be any other way.

And of course the writer had to drag out Schrödinger’s damn cat without really understanding it.

The physicist Erwin Schrödinger highlighted some strange consequences of the idea of superposition more than 80 years ago, with a thought experiment that posed that a cat trapped in a box with a radioactive source could be in a superposition state, considered both alive and dead, according to the laws of quantum mechanics.

Actually, that summary is so poor I can’t tell what to make of that or what to conclude other than the writer probably didn’t comprehend the experiment or the point old Schrodie was attempting to make there.

Anyway, I didn’t read the paper because it’d have a lot of math I wouldn’t understand or want to spend the time on. But reading stories like this, one probably understands less than before.

I’m tired of hearing about plagiarism. I don’t give a crap about it and 99% of the time it’s some narrow academic definition of plagiarism that means nothing to anyone not in academia.

OH NOES he plagiarized his own work! She doinked some boring speech that was itself a rehashing of a billion other crappy speeches! It’s the end of the world!

In a hundred years, this era’s obession with originality and plagiarism will seem positively bizarre after culture changes again.

Interesting topic for further research: how and why plagiarism of the minutest variety came be to be such an obsessional topic for so many, when through much of human history the concept as we define it wouldn’t even have made sense to anyone.

“The mind was so rotten with misrepresentation that in some cases it literally had to be damaged before it could make a truly rational decision—and should some brain-lesioned mother abandon her baby in a burning house in order to save two strangers from the same fire, the rest of the world would be more likely to call her a monster than laud the rationality of her lifeboat ethics. Hell, rationality itself—the exalted Human ability to reason—hadn’t evolved in the pursuit of truth but simply to win arguments, to gain control: to bend others, by means logical or sophistic, to your will.”

-Peter Watts, Echopraxia

Rationality — to the extent that we engage in it — is our hoodwinking engine being repurposed from deceiving, manipulating and managing others to an attempt at understanding the mind of the universe. (And no, I don’t mean some wishy-washy conception of “universal mind.” I mean that our minds are engaging in animism about the universe as a cognitive tool.)

If you are biased against Kristen Stewart because of her role in Twilight, I strongly urge you to reconsider. She’s excellent; amazing even. She’s one of the few people (along with Shailene Woodley, Idris Elba, Brit Marling, Laura Dern, Margo Martindale, Elle Fanning, Keira Knightley and a few others) whose films I’ll watch just because they appear in them no matter how bad the work itself is.*

I’ve liked her ever since she was a wild-eyed little squirt in Fincher’s Panic Room and she’s only gotten better over the years (which is pretty impressive when you start from great).

That list leaves out a really good Stewart film and role, though: Speak. Do watch that one, too. You won’t regret it.

*It’s everything I can do to avoid the Twilight series; yes, I want to watch it because Stewart is in it. Someday I will succumb, but today is not that day.

About intelligent life, plants solve some real-world optimization problems far better than most people do because they have no illusions and their biases are highly reality-constrained.

And they have no brains at all. We are biased to cephalization and movement. Sessile and environmentally synesthetic with chromatophoric communication might be where it’s at and we are in fact an anomaly.

Also, my spellcheck needs the dictionary for people who memorized the dictionary when they were twelve. This one isn’t up to the task.

Has anyone watched the Gilmore Girls, and is it worth watching?

That show has 154 episodes. Really didn’t watch any TV shows during that period of my life so missed almost anything that came on during that era (1995-2004 or so).

Jet lag?

Never had it. No strong circadian rhythm or really any.

To someone who has never experienced it, seems just bizarre. Can’t you, just, like go to sleep when you want to? You mean regular people can’t just do that?

Huh. Weird.

I marvel nearly every day (as my partner can probably wearily tell you) at just how very quickly people forget the past. Sometimes even people who have lived through it, oddly.

For instance, how making college free or nearly free again is supposedly “impossible” and “completely crazy” when that’s just the way it used to be nearly everywhere.

 Other state universities had ludicrously low rates: University of Texas in 1970 had fees, in 2016 dollars, of $335 and annual in-state tuition of $310. So “free” or nearly free tuition isn’t a radical new idea, it’s an old one, one that was prevalent even in conservative states.

Clinton’s new take on college isn’t horrendous. It’s merely barely civilized. But my mind boggles at how things we’ve done in the past when we were collectively much poorer are now deemed completely ridiculous and risible.

Can not understand.

I was thinking about this article again, and the problem boils down to this:

Even feminists use the epistemic and hermeneutical framework of the society in which they are embedded and share still 99%+ of its values.

Nerds have little power and are thus easy to shame. Because feminists (as well as all women and men) are so similar to everyone else just by nature of participating in a society, the objects of most of their attractions and those who can inflict the most real harm on them are the societally-approved powerful jock types.

Therefore attacking them would be dangerous. Very, very dangerous. Much easier and safer to attack those who can’t and won’t really fight back much, and whom they are extremely repulsed by in principle and practice. So when a nerd approaches someone like Amanda Marcotte, she’s absolutely revolted and interprets it as an affront to feminism. However, if a physically-fit jock type exhibits the very same behavior (or worse) even if she turned him down, she’d be flattered (secretly or openly).

This isn’t some feminist flaw, though it is hypocritical. It’s just a human reaction to the powerful that nearly everyone has.

(And no GamerGaters aren’t mostly nerds, but rather part of the FPS gaming subculture, many of whom are actual jocks or jock wannabes and who share far more in common with them in all ways.)

While I agree that treating Elon Musk as some sort of flawless messiah is a mistake, I fail to understand why people pretend that Tesla and SpaceX have done nothing at all interesting or innovative. In both areas, they’ve accelerated some areas of human progress by perhaps two decades.

But this sentence from here is just great.

We now live in an era where raising a billion dollars of other suckers’ money and developing a new “app” to take selfies or find imaginary creatures in a porta-potty is considered the apex of human civilization but investing your entire fortune in a quest to build a self-driving electric car is treated like dangerous, egomaniacal adventurism.

Anyone who builds anything that interfaces with the real world does seem to take on withering criticism these days. Perhaps it’s because we live so much of our lives behind screens that anything with moving parts is seen as disreputable and too disorderly to dignify with any concession to its usefulness.

I don’t know.

But would the world be better of if Tesla and SpaceX didn’t exist? I can’t find even a scrap of a good argument for that. Because it’s goddamn stupid, mainly.

55°: sweat begins
65°: clothes soaked
75°: passing birds bathe on skin
85°: locomote on belly by becoming 1-man slip’n’slide
95°: Full Slime

— gregory erskine (@cat_beltane) July 13, 2016

For me:

55°: Need parka, attempting to set fire to random objects, animals for warmth.
65°: Still need parka, no longer setting fire to animals.
75°: A light jacket is okay if the air is perfectly still.
85°: Comfortable, not warm enough yet to swim. Not sweating yet. AC is not needed.
95°: Pretty good. Warm enough to swim.
100°: It’s getting a little warm; still not sweating.
105°: Remember to turn on AC.
110°: A little sweat appears. Everyone else is dead.

“Systematic design excluding intuition yields pedestrian follow-ons and knock-offs; intuitive design without system yields flawed fancies.”

–The Design of Design: Essays From a Computer Scientist by Frederick P. Brooks

This explains Firefox and Windows 8 and 10, I think — they lack and lacked both intuition and systematicity, combining the worst of both worlds.

In striving for some false simplicity, they achieved neither simplicity nor increased capabilities, instead landing squarely at the left failing edge of the bell curve of incoherence and lack of discoverability.

Anyway, the book is good. Most designers “designing” today should read it.

Design is another field like economics that should just be blown up (metaphorically) and started from scratch. There’s nothing there to save.

Tried to read 3 well regarded recent books only to find them all too MFA-y

“The gulls wheeled around the spires, keening themselves hoarse”

— Chris Arnade (@Chris_arnade) July 10, 2016

Hear, hear. Had nearly the same experience.

I just can’t read or write books like that. It’s just trying too hard to do something that sounds impressive to the educated morons but that sounds like a shithead shindig to the truly educated.

Marge Piercy is another prose writer like Coetzee, if anyone is interested, though far less well-known.

She ain’t no slouch at poetry, either.