Predominantly Erroneous (Exohedron nonsense blog)

I wonder, if I told my dad that I am celebrating Christmas in the Jewish tradition, would he understand that I mean that I am ordering Chinese food.

[Edit] As expected, my mom and brother got the joke immediately, and I don't know if my dad even noticed.

 

Ron Paul's Drag Race

 

It says "volume", but what it probably means is "difficulty".

 

You get back from grocery shopping and think to yourself "you know what I haven't had in a while? Soda and jellybeans", neither of which you bought.

 

A firm that I have a working but friendly relationship with sent me a box of snacks as a holiday present. I would have said Christmas present, except the box of snacks are from a kosher gift company. Not that I am complaining; chocolate is still delicious even without the pig's blood.
But it is interesting that the snack box is explicitly kosher. I am honestly not sure what it means. Maybe the guy I work with is Jewish. That's certainly both a possibility and something I wouldn't pick up on.

 

Kosher chocolate generally just means it doesn't use gelatin and other pork-derived products, it's actually a pretty common thing to see. There were other reasons to not use animal coagulants in chocolate other than respecting Jewish tradition, like, I think most chocolate sold over here is kosher b/c it was more cost-effective to just eliminate all gelatin from the production pipeline.

 

It's more the fact that the box explicitly says that it's kosher. If it were a simple matter of cost effectiveness that would be one thing, but the deliberate use of the word "kosher" sends a signal.
Also there were a few things other than just chocolate, like a bunch of cookies and some popcorn.

 

Happy New Year from EST. Hopefully 2021 will be gentler.

 

Bad (derogatory)

 

I've already talked about strategies for if I ever open up my tumblr, but my new idea is that if I ever become a youtuber, my first video is going to be a long, drawn out, somewhat rambling apology for saying unfortunate things in my last video, complete with declarations that I've learned my lesson and I'm not that person anymore, that it was in the heat of the moment and I don't stand by it at all and I've taken the offending video down because the views aren't worth the damage I've done.

 

And suddenly it's like, of course mammals are born without teeth. Being able to walk does not necessarily imply having teeth.

 

Every time I write fiction it always feels very distant. I mean, I am pretty sure I know why: I have trouble putting myself in my own head, much less someone else's. But although I can sometimes evoke sensations or emotions, I never feel like I am managing personhood; the sadness is a bodiless, bloodless cloud at roughly head height, waiting for a character to wander into it but unconcerned for when or if that will actually happen.
The description I came up with is that my writing, at least to me, reads like "poetry by someone who wasn't there"; fancy words and strong imagery, but all of it secondhand.

 

Like fencing, only the room is pitch black and both fighters are wearing matte black suits and the only light is a single LED on the tip of each sword.
Otherwise the usual rules apply.

 

Somehow, deactivated.tumblr.com seems to be available.

 

My favorite demonstration of relative axiomatic power is a diagram I found once showing the hierarchy of large cardinal axioms, with axioms higher up implying axioms lower down, and thus increasing amounts of proof power as you go up. And then at the top of the pile is just "0 = 1".

[Edit] Found it:

 

At work I've ended up with a role that's currently something along the lines of "here's a thing that we won't be able to do for at least a year, possibly even two, and when we are able to do it you'll be in charge of making sure it gets done, and in the meantime you're in charge of making sure that we don't get impatient and try to do it anyway."
Fortunately the task of "making sure it doesn't happen" is achievable by the simple expedient of failing to send people emails, which I am pretty good at if I do say so myself. Making sure it gets done might be a bit trickier, but if it takes two years before we can even start then maybe by then someone will take the job off my hands.

 

When I say that half the job of a mathematician is naming things, it turns out what I mean is the eternal hunt for more Greek letters to call your variables, because unlike in saner fields like, say, programming, we're not allowed to use variable labels that are more than one character in length.
I like what some of my fellows did when I was in grad school, which was to use Chinese characters; it's a lot harder to run out of those.

 

When the cooking instructions state that you can microwave it for 6 minutes, or you can stick it in the oven for almost an hour (but make sure to wait 2 minutes afterward as it will be hot!)

 

More trolley-problem discourse. Yes, it's not your fault. No, that's the wrong question to be asking here. Blaming people doesn't improve the world on its own.

 

A reminder to myself that I don't like and don't want to support punitive justice. I forget this when I'm angry, and thinking about punishment when I'm angry makes me cruel. I don't want to be that kind of person.