Ch-ch-changes
Candidates Face the Changes - CollegeHumor video
Another amusing CollegeHumor video. Make sure you watch to the end
January 24th, 2008, posted by Joshua
Browser Security
I don’t know if you care, but I’m reasonably paranoid about computer security, and this Firefox plugin is the best approach I’ve found. It defaults to disallowing every form of scripting on any site you visit until you explicitly approve it (via a little toolbar button in the status line that shows you all the sites the page is trying to run scripts from), either temporarily or permanently. It would be hard to get control more fine-grained than that and still be useful, though I do still use Adblock to block certain scripts from running on a site that I otherwise trust, just to block out ads that contain motion.
Note to advertisers if you happen to stumble across this: I will never put up with any ad that contains anything that moves, blinks, or changes color. As soon as I see one of those, I not only block the offending ad, I block the entire provider. If you want me to see your ad, you had better make it just sit there rather than demanding my attention.
January 23rd, 2008, posted by Joshua
I Want Candy!
What I Did Over Christmas Vacation « Miss(ed) Manners
‘This past Christmas Vacation my brothers, sister, myself and my girlfriend built a scale replica of the battle of Helms Deep, from the second book of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, The Two Towers penned by the late, great, J.R.R. Tolkien.’
The above was actually from last year. This year, they’ve done The Battle of Pelennor Fields (the siege of Minas Tirith). It’s truly made of awesome. And candy. Awesome candy.
January 10th, 2008, posted by Joshua
Collaborative Fiction
protagonize: interactive fiction & collaborative story writing community
Welcome to Protagonize: your destiny awaits.
Protagonize is a creative writing community dedicated to the (nearly) lost art of the\naddventure, a type of collaborative\ninteractive fiction. One author writes a story, and others post branches to it in different directions. The result is\nan organic, evolving story where everyone can participate
via EFL Geek
We had something like this on the computer system where I went to college–I think either written by, or just mostly populated by, folks in the Science Fiction Club. The fiction that resulted was god-awful. Some of that may have been the form, some of that may have been the folks (hard to expect much coherence from a club with the motto “Randomness Rules!”), but it was a way to while away time, and sometimes was pretty funny.
January 9th, 2008, posted by Joshua
Does Steve Martin’s Mental Grammar Match Yours?
Wild and Crazy WTF « Literal-Minded
On the very first page, though, I found this strange passage:
…the mouth speaking the line, the body delivering the gesture, while the mind looks back, observing, analyzing, judging, worrying, and then deciding when and what to say next.
How could a sentence that sounds so wrong have survived numerous rounds of revision and editing to end up in the final product?
Neil Whitman goes on to examine a number of possible ways that coordination might be licensed, but finds them wanting. This doesn’t strike me as particularly odd until it’s pointed out. I don’t think I’d produce such a sentence, except by cut-and-paste error, but I don’t notice it when I read it–and there are a lot of things I do notice that bug me when I read, so the fact that it passes muster until I stop to examine it says something to me. I suspect a production rule that merely requires coordination between the last w-word in the list and what follows. If you flipped it around "what and when to say next" it would sound strange, even to me, but could be repaired by fixing the right-hand coordination "deciding what and when to say something next." Maybe. It’s hard to return to the pristine state before the lack of coordination was pointed out and tell if it would have raised a flag.
December 19th, 2007, posted by Joshua
Most Bizarre Spam Ever
Yesterday I got a spam promising “Your dick will be like Jesus when you take this medicine!”
I deleted it without reading the rest, but now I kind of wish I had checked to see whether it was offering to raise it from the dead or if Jesus somehow enjoys a reputation for being well-endowed of which I wasn’t aware.
December 18th, 2007, posted by Joshua
Books that Changed My Life
1. The study game: How to play and win with “Statement-PIE”
The book that taught me how to study and take useful notes. I so wish I ran into it before my Junior year of college.
2. The Selfish Gene
This shook up my thinking about more than just evolution, but how the world operates, and the deep mathematical foundations of growth, competition, and distributed problem-solving.
3. How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method
Another book I wish I had read earlier in my academic career
4. How to Win Friends & Influence People
Not at all what you might think. I read it because a professional magician recommended it in the strongest possible terms as an aid to performance, and darned if he wasn’t right. If I had to boil it down I’d say it makes the case for sincere empathy with the points of view of everyone you interact with, understanding your role as a bit-player in the story of their lives and getting what you want only through helping them get what they want (what ethicists might call treating people as ends and not means).
5. A Student’s Introduction to English Grammar
In which I learned that nearly everything I’d been taught in English class about grammar was either wrong, or worse, nonsense.
6. Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, Freshly Updated
In which I learned the central importance of politeness and etiquette in civilization. The book is highly entertaining, but fairly discursive since large portions consist of letters and answers, for a more concise statement of the central thesis, see her essay The World’s Oldest Virtue.
7. Historian As Detective
The book which changed my college career and convinced me I wanted to be a historian.
8. The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space
The book which rescued me from wanting to be a historian, and probably prevented me from having a miserable existence as a History grad student at UC Berkeley, where I had been accepted into the PhD program, but where there was no funding available for the first year.
9. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain
The book which finally overthrew emotionless ratiocination as the top of my personal totem-pole of valuable mental qualities. It had been wobbling for a while. Hume certainly pushed it close to the edge, and Nietzche set it teetering, but it took Damasio’s to fully demonstrate through case studies how man cannot live by reason alone, and the model of reason being the core self while the visceral emotions and passions are intruding influences is empirically false. (Don’t worry Reason, I still love you, but you have to play nice with the other parts that go into making up my self, k?)
10. Free to Choose: A Personal Statement
The book that opened my eyes to the moral beauty of Capitalism. Given my origins and predilections, this was as big a brain-quake in its own way as The Selfish Gene.
11. The Substance of Style - Virginia Postrel
This helped me get over my reverse-snobbery in regard to style and design, as well as demolishing the place that Maslow’s hierarchy of needs occupied in my mental landscape.
December 18th, 2007, posted by Joshua
TNR vs Kindle
TNR gets taken down a peg by Ann Althouse over the snobbery and sexism that it displays in its anti-Kindle editorial
Althouse: I get pissed off at TNR.
The breathless, Bezos-loving man from Newsweek says that he is reading Boswell’s Life of Johnson on his iPhone. No, he isn’t. All reading is not the same. It takes more than the apparition of words to constitute a book and its inner forms.
No, you’re not a snob. Oh, no, no, no.
There is a kernel of a point in TNR’s rant: there are sensual enjoyments in reading physical books that are not reproduced when you read electronic versions. But to say that reading Life of Johnson on an iPhone isn’t really reading Life of Johnson is the stupidest thing I’ve read all month, possibly all year. And, really, unless you’re the type of person who will sit down and spend hours leafing through a book written in a script you can’t even decipher, I’d suggest that even if you believe strongly in the weaker version of the claim, you’re probably overrating the sensual enjoyment of handling books just because up until now it’s always occurred in conjunction with the extremely pleasurable experience of reading. I’d bet that there are hardly any people, among the vast numbers who find reading a chore, who nonetheless really enjoy handling a book. I’d further bet that if the form-factor of the Kindle lasted long enough that people grew up reading on it and associating the very act of reading with handling it (admittedly doubtful) in the future we could look forward to paeans praising the sensual enjoyments of the lightness of the tablet and the satisfying clicking of the thumb-button.As to TNR’s sexism (which occurs later on in the editorial), I don’t really have anything to add to what Althouse says, except to say she certainly seems to have a point.
December 13th, 2007, posted by Joshua
W00t, there it is!
The origins of w00t:
The Lexicographer’s Rules, the weblog of Grant Barrett
The most likely explanation, as is usually the case, is far simpler. Woot is, with some caveats, probably derived from and most likely popularized by the dance catch phrase of 1993, “whoot, there it is!†In clubs and on dance floors across the country, in half-time shows and in baseball stadiums, “whoot, there it is†and plain old “woot!†were shouted long and loud by millions. It was used by hype men at hip-hop shows, dancers and cheerleaders at ball games, DJs at discos, and probably by ball-callers at bingos.
December 12th, 2007, posted by Joshua
Best Attack Ad Ever
If this doesn’t persuade you, nothing will
December 11th, 2007, posted by Joshua