September 2008
26 posts
Life Lesson #1: Respond to Demand
When you’re setting up your stuff to study, don’t spend ten minutes taking all your stuff out and setting everything up just how you want it before studying. If something comes up and you have to move, you’ve just wasted those ten minutes and the five minutes it will take you to pack up again. Instead, take out your book and start reading. When you need your computer take it...
Structure can sometimes lead to substance
A Major Promotion at ‘The Office’ →
“As both men recall, it was an early attempt by Mr. Novak to make people laugh that first got Mr. Daniels’s attention.
“Greg happened to see me at the Improv in L.A., and I had a very good night,” Mr. Novak recalled. “I remember he liked a line I had: ‘I spent four years in college. I didn’t learn a thing. It was really my own fault. I had a double major in psychology and reverse...
“I’m always telling stories,” my father says. ”I want somebody to tell me a story for a change. I want Chris to tell me the story of her life.”
“That’s not so easy,” she says.
“It’s easier than you think. There are only tiny parts of it that anyone wants to hear.”
“Where should I begin?”
“Tell what you...
Sometimes I think God screwed up by making us all look different.
Whenever I try to think of solutions to different race problems, like math problems, these days, I generally end up at the same solution; success.
On Opera and Nudity →
“On the other hand, one thing opera buffs have always valued about their beloved art form is that so many excellent opera singers look like everyday people, like us. There is no reason that Rodolfo and Mimi have to look like supermodels. They need only convey that they are beautiful to each other. The music, if sung with tenderness and passion, does the rest.”
No End in Sight: Part 2
sequentialist:
smalter:
sequentialist:
Time to make another movie about the total and headspinning incompetence of the Bush Administration?
I thought yesterday you wrote that no one understands the economy. Now you’re going to blame it on the Bush Administration?
What I said yesterday was that no one at all seems to understand it right now. I don’t know how that is at odds with blaming...
The upside to having to take ice cold showers is that you’re so damn happy once you’re all dried up and warm.
Gut Instinct something something Math →
“64 14-year-olds … were tested at length on the discriminating power of their approximate number sense. The teenagers sat at a computer as a series of slides with varying numbers of yellow and blue dots flashed on a screen for 200 milliseconds each — barely as long as an eye blink. After each slide, the students pressed a button indicating whether they thought there had been more...
sequentialist:
deepalc:
While the liberal project of toleration and the postmodern emphasis on diverse perspective still pervade our national consciousness, perhaps with more urgency than before, we aspire to reclaim a unity of purpose that would fulfill the promises of our national myth … America seeks not only to absorb the authenticity of its constituent communities but also to achieve its...
While the liberal project of toleration and the postmodern emphasis on diverse perspective still pervade our national consciousness, perhaps with more urgency than before, we aspire to reclaim a unity of purpose that would fulfill the promises of our national myth … America seeks not only to absorb the authenticity of its constituent communities but also to achieve its own internal...
Sometimes
judges just throw the kitchen sink in when making arguments.
“I hope the result of that background here will be a deep grounding in specifics...”
What I learned in law school today
If you act negligently, you are not necessarily an unreasonable person. We all make mistakes, it’s just that the reasonable person you’re being compared to is extraordinary in his consistent reasonableness. If I ever meet this person, I will shake his (or her) hand.
“He may have partial paralysis of his left side, but he still has full control of his country.”
NYTimes Article on "An Evolving Harlem" →
Uh… I don’t understand the point of this article. The situation is simple really. People who can afford to pay higher rents are moving into Harlem, gradually remaking it to their own liking, and many of the people who have lived there for a while, who are the connection to the “culture” that made Harlem famous in the first place, are being priced out, and the culture is...
Abramoff Is Sentenced to 4 Years in Prison →
It’s official, a pair of “pants with an elastic waistband” is the symbol for humility.
Apparently
It’s not important for vice presidential candidates to be dignified.
Edmund Burke was a foodie? What?
sequentialist:
1. Unrelated to the article: the term “foodie” is an idiotic one. In fact, the whole idea, as I understand it is totally stupid and bizarrely fetishistic about food.
I think the term “foodie” is like the term “naive”, not in substance, but in that I can imagine someone calling someone else these things derogatorily and that other person being really proud...
Where's Waldo?
So part of arguing is being able to dissect an issue, tease out the true conflicts, and construct an argument from the pieces, but another part of arguing is via analogy, drawing from arguments in analogous subject matter, perhaps matters we have already solved successfully, with special attention to how they are alike and how they differ. Granted, they’re not mutually exclusive, but the...
Vogue India →
I think whichever luxury brands decided to market their goods in these ads are pretty stupid. The way privileged people deal with growing up right next to poverty is that they push it out of their heads. Most people in the US probably don’t realize this because, one, the US is much more segregated geographically (rich people live in the suburbs far from poor people and even cities like New...