Predominantly Erroneous (Exohedron nonsense blog)

Every once in a while I contemplate getting an undercut, but that's more work than I want to spend on my hair, where my current regime is "trim the ends once a year if I feel like it"

 

Thinking more about mashups; I think I like ones where it's really clear that more than one song was used, and that it's not just a cover or rearrangement of a single piece. Usually this requires keeping at least some of the lyrics of whatever song was used for the instrumentation. Especially if I don't recognize the song that provided the instrumentation, it's hard to really appreciate that I'm listening to a mashup and not simply a genre change.
This of course doesn't apply to those mega-mashups, like the (long period of time)-of-pop mashups I mentioned a few pages back, where they take snippets of the lyrics from like 30 or 40 different songs; then it doesn't matter if any of the lyrics from the instrumentation track survives, because it's already clear that there's a lot going on, if only because the singer keeps changing.

 

These earbuds really help me hear what's going on inside my own head. By which I mean I can hear the scrape of my eyelids along my eyeballs when I blink.

 

That thing going around tumblr about how if you're weird but your parents are also weird then you're a normie definitely describes me. My parents aren't super weird on their own, but if you take their individual weirdnesses, add them together, and consider the emergent features, you can extrapolate a lot of my weirdness.

 

One of my favorite jokes is someone doing a complex computation in their head while gesturing as if they're counting on their fingers. The joke is enhanced if they mumble a bunch of numbers as if doing simple arithmetic.

"Let me see...1...4...13...carry the 2...and again...pi squared over 6"

 

I've never really liked steak in the "big slab of meat" sense. I like meat, but not in large, somewhat monotonous chunks like that. I get bored after like half a pound. I can definitely eat several times that if it's not all one thing. Plus steaks require the use of a knife, as opposed to it appearing in bite-size pieces ready to shovel into my mouth.

 

It turns out that while chocolate is fine when frozen, chocolates with stuff in them, like Yorks or Reese's cups, tend to be a bit too stiff when frozen for my tastes.

 

Reading through John Baez' old TWF posts about type theory from 2007-8 is kind of wonderful, because you get to see the kinds of things the type-theory/higher-category-theory people were coming up with while groping toward the basics of HoTT. All these analogies and correspondences and them going "there's something going on here but we don't have it quite yet".
I imagine this is what the history of science people feel like when they read about the years leading up to various big breakthroughs, where people had data and hunches but hadn't figured out how to put it all together yet.

 

Gonna make a deck for "divination" except all of the cards are Towers.
"Let's see, looks like you've got ... a Tower. That's a bit worrying. Towers usually mean instability and misfortune. Not great, my dude. Well, maybe the next card will tell us a bit more. It's ... another Tower? That's probably a bad sign. One more shot, then... a four! Of ... Towers? Lol, sucks to be you."

And then when they complain I'll just say that it must have been an accent issue; it only sounds like I said "tarot" because I grew up in Boston.

 

I know it's probably just due to constraints on how many models the devs can make, but every time a video game character gets into bed with their boots visibly still on it gives me the wibblies.

 

Speaking of decks, I still want a deck of twocube's infinite-ordinal cards.

 

I think I understand modern transistors, the ones that use doped silicon. But looking at the original point-contact transistors I'm just like "What?"

 

I wish I still remembered how I felt when I first learn about orbits, the idea that if you throw a rock hard enough it will just fall past the horizon and keep going.

 

You know, I probably would actually like a dish that consisted of eggs, bacon, sausage and spam.

 

You don't have to be an impostor to work here but the guy who's supposed to have your job is one anyway.

 

Another question that I feel like asking but don't necessarily want answered because that would require diving too far into how modeling works, what is the correct units for measuring how badly a place is doing with respect to handling the Coronavirus? The underlying thought for me is that a larger population seems more likely to have a larger number of cases than a smaller population, so maybe it should be per-capita, but also a geographically denser population seems more likely to have a larger number of cases than a sparer population, so maybe it should be per-density.
So it should look something like cases*area/population, so that if you have a lot of people who all live in a small area then you have get a bit of a pass since the higher population density makes it harder to social distance, whereas if you have one person per square mile then above a certain point you'd expect that any transmission would almost have to be deliberate.
Of course, places aren't uniformly dense, so it would have to involve some sort of reflection of the density distribution.
Anyway, this is a rabbit hole that I don't want to twist my ankle by accidentally stepping in, so as mentioned I don't actually want an answer.

 

Yup, I'm definitely skinnier than I was last year, according to these shorts. Unless they were too big for me last year as well and I just didn't notice because I insisted on wearing actual pants to work.

 

The difference between descriptive power, explanatory power, and predictive power. Many things that claim to be "theories" have at most the first, and that's probably why I stop caring about them too early, because I'm expecting either the second or third and leaving unsatisfied. Of course, a good descriptive theory is important for the latter two, but oftentimes I see something where I don't find the descriptions enlightening in themselves, and without explanatory or predictive power I can't really think of a use other than providing labels for things, which, without explanatory or predictive power, could very well mean that the categories implied by those labels are specious, so I find it hard to care even if it supposedly helps communication.

 

Kind of surprised that they didn't just call it "quomputation".

 

A vending machine that sells Skittles by weight. You put in an amount of money, hit "Enter", and out pours a stream of Skittles from what you thought was the coin return slot.