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Tuesday, July 7th, 2009
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7:56 pm - My anthem
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| Friday, July 3rd, 2009
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4:58 pm - That explains it!
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| Tuesday, June 30th, 2009
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9:24 pm - In passing...
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....seriously, I have so many channels of communication, I wonder if it's a good thing my Dad didn't live to this point.
It would be insufferable if he commented on a post on my lj, then on a YouTube vid I posted, and then wrote on my wall on Facebook. And then followed me on twitter.
As it is, I'm glad Stu doesn't do this. Because it's superfluous... I tell him all the best stuff I find as it is.
Separately, YouTube has Attenborough's The Life of Birds. Check it out. It's kickass:
http://www.youtube.com/show?p=S3vPSi1o5nM
I highly recommend that.
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Sunday, June 28th, 2009
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12:50 pm - Weird.
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Evidently, Billy Mays of infomercial fame is dead [as an aside, he played a role in the comic strip Secret Asian Man recently, where one of the characters is hawking Lunchkins, a lunchbag made of paper towels.]
This is a bit more surprising than Michael Jackson's death [they were the same age, and - oh - howdy John! Same age as he, and Stu will be there in a couple years]. Still, it could very well be a natural death by heart attack or some such. These things do happen.
Or it could be an "unnatural" death. Who knows. I don't really care either way, but I find this interesting. To be very cold and actuarial for a moment, at a meeting a year or so ago, I was one of the few people who thought that mortality was going to get worse for middle-aged men over the next twenty years. I have my reasons. [On the flipside, I think that mortality at the older ages is going to improve a lot over the next 20 years, in a relative sense.]
Strip from June 12:
[While not the MPC kiss-of-death of getting a letter from me.... [it's a joke between Stu and me - I wrote Asimov right before he died, and he prob. never read my letter]]
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(7 comments | comment on this)
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| Saturday, June 27th, 2009
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3:22 pm - Science and religion
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7:08 am - Hey anne
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I think you might have something to say about this post - relates to gender differences in treatment of actors. I'm vaguely recalling that you did something about female vs. male Oscar winners, so you might have some more knowledge about this phenomenon.
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Sunday, June 21st, 2009
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12:44 pm - Epitaph for my father
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| Tuesday, June 16th, 2009
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6:56 pm - Heresy!
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| Wednesday, June 10th, 2009
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3:30 pm - Not getting it
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Why is it that some people [mainly women, it seems, but that's because I've noticed only women talking about it] feel so self-conscious about eating alone in restaurants?
When I had the disposable cash, I did it all the time. Nothing better than some steak, beer, and Dickens. Mmmm. I definitely have no problem eating alone when it's during business travel. Why would I be expected to eat with others necessarily?
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(6 comments | comment on this)
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| Tuesday, June 9th, 2009
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7:21 pm - Dagnabbit
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Tweetdeck puked all over me about a half hour ago, and I'm barred from Twitter for about 20 more minutes.
Anyway.
What's up?
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(comment on this)
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| Friday, June 5th, 2009
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6:33 pm - A reading family
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| Friday, May 29th, 2009
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6:06 pm - Yay! I'm getting my book!
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Thanks Jake!
Doesn't everyone like to see their name in print? My only other published-in-a-book reference was a thank you list for Web Pages That Suck, and I can't even remember what I sent to Vincent Flanders right now. It's over ten years old. This is still way back when people didn't have CSS to play with, and the blink tag was widespread.
Yes, children, the dark ages of the web.
Which reminds me of one of my fave actuaries (Jeremy Gold) trying to claim online cred longer than mine (granted, he is much older than me... older than Stu, even, to give you an idea... okay, older than my mother, even).... and dude, yes, there were people who were online before me, but I was on Prodigy back in the 80s. I think I used Prodigy more than my Dad did, and that's something.
[I wonder what the wifi is like in Purgatory/Heaven. I'm guessing in Purgatory, they're still stuck on dialup. Heaven gets all Apple's products pre-release. Hey Dad, is there a tablet Mac yet? Ooooh, wait... googling around I see there are mod services.... never mind.]
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(2 comments | comment on this)
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| Thursday, May 28th, 2009
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11:17 am - Blast from the past....
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....from 1993(!)
Well, my free book foray was unsuccessful, but I decided to go back into the google breach and see what new things I could find about myself. And came across these proceedings from a meeting of the National Society of Black Physicists(PDF).
One of the papers submitted was from a guy who had been on the U.S. Physics Olympiad team in 1992.... and I get mentioned on page 77 while the author describes the various participants:The U.S. Team was quite an interesting group of people. We had a
veteran of the 1991 Olympiad, Eric Miller, who was always looking for links
to things he had done before. There was my extremely inquisitive roommate,
Dean Jens, the very verbose and confident Mikhail Sunitsky, the modest (in
attitude, not ability) Victoria Yung, the insightful if a bit soft-spoken Szymon
Rusinkiewicz, the most sociable Michael Schultz, and the extremely
enthusiastic Mary Pat Campbell. I don't need to point out that all these
people, and the other dozen as well, were very competent in the area of
physics and each brought their own perspective to the problems we faced. Ha. I've not changed in years. [I'll go back to read, because I'll finally get to hear about what the international team did in Finland. I didn't keep up with any of those guys.]
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(comment on this)
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| Wednesday, May 27th, 2009
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11:24 pm - speed reading: why?
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Listening to an ad on the radio for a speed reading [for adults] program....and I've got to say I don't feel like I need to read any faster.
I could read Chesterton at my "normal pace" for books, but what would be the point? I keep setting his books down because I want to think about what I've read. Say you sped-read Shakespeare.... then what?
And it doesn't matter whether it's fiction or non-fiction. If the text has low idea density, sure, ramp up your speed. But then the question is why you're reading that piece of fluff in the first place.
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(5 comments | comment on this)
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8:28 am - No, it's not good as a pure investment
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Residential real estate is not a booming asset class, even before the current bust.
Thing is, it's a consumption asset [to a certain extent...it's not pork bellies, but there is capital depreciation in that one must pay to maintain the asset]. Yeah, you don't make much money on the buy/sell spread generally...but you get to live in the house/condo/whatever.
That's what this is about:Yet for very many people, even over the past 15 or 20 years, the imputed rent may have been all, or nearly all, the real value they actually got from their home.
I don't see anything wrong with that. And as an owner, one has more ability to do stuff to/with your structure than if you were renting. The comments on the piece have good points, such as the mortgage being a form of forced savings, though when all costs [interest, etc.] are factored in, most people are losing money. In short, don't try to make money through the real estate you're actually living in. Somewhat related, buy art because you enjoy it...not because you think you can make money off it.
Yes, there are people who can make money off of residential real estate and the art market, but generally there's a lot more analysis going into it that just buying and assuming things can only go up.
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Tuesday, May 26th, 2009
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2:23 pm - Did someone notify me?
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7:57 am
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Gmail isn't working for me.
MEH: Seems to be a problem with the computer, not gmail. Never mind.
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(comment on this)
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| Monday, May 25th, 2009
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1:17 pm - Memories and mottoes
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I will be posting video from our local Memorial Day observance soon (mainly the parade... I can't remember if I got the speeches. I think I just took pics of that. The reason I can't remember is I mainly kept walking in circles around the venue... I had Mr. D and he wanted to keep moving (he was in kiddie leash, but that was for safety - I was just holding his hand). I grabbed vid & pics as I could.)
I like these small town parades - you recognize pretty much all the players once you've been around long enough. The two guys who are vintage car buffs (one complete with official Ford duster... and it was cool enough to wear it. I can't remember if he had driving goggles on, though he had full windows, so that would be overkill), the oldest veteran, the various band and troop leaders. And of course, there are more people in the parade than standing by, watching.
Many memories come from repetition, where it can be difficult to distinguish year to year - I have lots of memories like this, such as the annual Cook Reunions at Lake Lanier and other locales. For the kids, it's likely these things will likely smear into one whole "Memorial Day thing" with the same groups and people participating, just remembering when it's a new person who's the oldest vet (of course, the "new" guy will have been marching behind the old one for decades).
And wandering down the paths of memory, I recall a middle school assignment - 6th grade, I think, when I was doing a "medieval unit" in the GT class (which was mainly a way to keep us from bugging the other kids in reading period) - we were to create a coat of arms + motto. I don't recall the images on my shield, but I do remember my motto: Enjoy Life.
I think I will.
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(comment on this)
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| Sunday, May 24th, 2009
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7:44 pm - On careers, jobs, and opportunities
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One of my go-to authors is Agatha Christie for just good old-fashioned reading fodder [I need a lot of reading fodder, and I'm not always interested in challenging material. I could barely get through Chesterton's Orthodoxy as I kept putting it down after a page to think about things.]
In "What Mrs. MacGillicuddy Saw!"(spoilers at link) one of the main characters is Lucy Eyelesbarrow, a very clever woman who has made a name for herself as a short-term housekeeper/steward. The piece is set in the 1950s, and the domestic servants that populated Christie's earlier novels are dropping off. Lucy notes that she had done very well academically, scoring very high in maths for example, and people wondered why she got into domestic work.
( Yes, I wrote 'maths'. I like to be pretentious sometimes )
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(4 comments | comment on this)
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| Saturday, May 23rd, 2009
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9:31 pm - Hey kickaha
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meep's journal