Overheard:
1: "I'm going on vacation to the Basque region of Spain."
2: "Will you eat the bass you catch?"
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12:03:58 PM, Friday 7 September 2007
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Drat. Bought a little sago palm, but the cat seems to really enjoy chewing it, and it's on the poisonous houseplant list, so I guess it goes in the trash. Pity.
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06:50:22 PM,
Thursday 6 September 2007
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Hmm. I am not at all sure about desktop tower defense. I just got 1,943 on medium. I think I could do much better next time, but that is of course How They Win. What is clever about it is that it doesn't require your full attention. It's rather like building sandcastles. I'm not convinced it's hard in interesting ways. There's the problem of maze optimization, which is sort of interesting. Then there's the problem of weapon balance. (I didn't have enough air defenses, it turned out) That aspect seems rather dull, a matter of experience. It also just takes so much time to play out. Upgrading is busywork, as near as I can tell. Which is all to say, anyone have a group out there?
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(6)
05:15:59 PM,
Thursday 6 September 2007
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Xenocide could be a really good book if he hadn't got himself entangled in the philosophical grocery bag that is free will vs nihilistic genetic determinism. It isn't even like it's that hard to get out. But mystics, they like it in there. It lets them pretend those rustling noises are immortal souls.
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11:04:17 AM, Thursday 6 September 2007
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A brief history of cold fusion
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03:28:07 PM,
Wednesday 5 September 2007
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A good day for the post office. We have shiny brochures from HR, a delivery from Timeless teas, the new cooks country, with a roasted banana bread recipe, and a early woody allen box set. They gave us a free sample of caramel crunch tea! It almost makes up for charging us $5.40 in handling. But it isn't like I was planning to go into the city anytime soon, and I'm addicted to their Uva tea, and I like their lady gray as well. The real problem is that the box set came with the movies in alphabetical order. I don't like to think that I'm the sort of person who goes around putting things in chronological order, but that was just too much for me.
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03:08:04 PM,
Wednesday 5 September 2007
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A libertarian explains, slowly, why everybody rolls their eyes when Ron Paul mentions the gold standard. Helpful. There's a tendency for the sniggering and eyerolling to outlast the actual substance of old political debates. Prohibition is another one. People seem to have just remembered that banning alcohol is silly, without remembering why. This causes problems when people just sort of assume that somewhere along the lines, the rules changed, or the problems were specific to that case. The tech/housing bubbles and the guantanemo/abu ghraib atrocities fit the same model. Of course, the other problem happens, as well. Something fails, and people learn the wrong lesson from the failure. The Bourbon Restoration comes to mind, but there must be better examples.
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11:41:15 AM,
Wednesday 5 September 2007
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Seniority rules discriminate against short-lived species.
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(1)
06:59:40 PM,
Sunday 2 September 2007
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Manouri Cheese is good cheese.
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(1)
06:05:28 PM,
Saturday 1 September 2007
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10:53:51 AM, Saturday 1 September 2007
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Reread Ender's Game last night. It's a book I've read meany times, but I've never put it down in the middle. First time I finished it at dawn and went off to school without sleeping, thinking about it all day. Reading it now, more distant from childhood, I can sort of see why it grabs me, from the outside, a bit. It isn't just that I'm the third child in a bright family, with a brilliant older brother. There's one aspect of the fantasy appeal of the school, that I'd never really thought about. As a gifted kid, you feel you're being wasted. You're worried that society doesn't seem to want you, to need you for anything. It isn't just competition, it's the notion of public service. It isn't just Harry Potter, being wisked off to a world where you fit. It isn't really that at all. It's being whisked off where you're useful. It's the fantasy of purpose. I gave up on it, in a way, after seeing what university did to my siblings. Part of that surrender was deciding to go to St. Johns. That was my way of refusing to play the adults game.
Excuse me if this doesn't make sense. I didn't get much sleep. Apparently he's written a screenplay for it. Not sure how I feel about that.
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(2)
12:40:15 PM,
Friday 31 August 2007
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04:26:14 PM, Thursday 30 August 2007
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