Tag: Commenting on the Commenters
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Someday I will write a post that summarizes all the wisdom I’ve acquired in my life
But not right now. Meanwhile, Theodora Goss has already done it, in this post. The item that struck me the most was: Everything you want to accomplish takes longer than you want it to take. That’s very true. Everything I’ve accomplished in life has taken much more work than I thought it would. Every year I’ve…
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The Best Yahoo Answer Ever
I quit smoking with only minimal side-effects (other than wanting to smoke cigarettes). It’s only after about three or four weeks that I have started to suffer real withdrawal effects, like a pretty durable sore throat or the insomnia that has me posting this at 4:30 AM. The major effect that quitting smoking had on…
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What is it about the lottery that a certain class of intellectuals finds so unfathomably difficult to understand?
In an article yesterday, for the Guardian on “statistical illiteracy”, Cory Doctorow wrote: in the US, its slogan is “Lotto: You’ve Got to Be In It to Win It”. A more numerate slogan would be “Lotto: Your Chance of Finding the Winning Ticket in the Road is Approximately the Same as Your Chance of Buying…
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Disagreement Is An Absolute Defense To Literary Criticism…but criticism is not an attack.
A week ago, I tweeted my bafflement regarding this xkcd. And, in the course of explaining the muddled premise of the strip, an acquaintance turned me onto xkcdsucks, which is a blog devoted to dissecting and skewering xkcd. I found this blog refreshing and highly fascinating. But I was also somewhat repulsed by it, because,…
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Have I ever before linked to something just for being amazing?
From Catherynne M. Valente’s blog: Vampires should be pretty much like mean girls, all the time, only amazing at it. Flawless. They’ve had time. Like when you put a penny in a bank account and a thousand years later you’re rich. Social capital, it is the same. Those high school kids should never know what…
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Reflecting on this absurdly annoying Stan Fish article
Breaking my long posting silence to write about an NYT article that has annoyed me so many reasons that I think I could create an entire blog centered around why I dislike it. Just to start off with, large portions of the comment section to this article is devoted to people bitching about their waiters.…
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Are we in a depression? Who cares?
Here’s Robert J. Samuelson splitting hairs over the state of the economy. He’s talking about whether or not we’re in a “depression” as opposed to a “recession”. And his article is kind of bogus. Because, although recessions are clearly defined (two or more quarters of negative GDP growth), a depression really isn’t. It’s just kind…