Predominantly Erroneous (Exohedron nonsense blog)

On the topic of stirring up shit unnecessarily, the recent discourse on twitter about short people being child-coded and therefore that being attracted to short people is a sign of pedophilia (if you haven't seen this, I'm sorry for bringing it to your attention) makes me want to tell people that being attracted to, say, Richard Armitage is a sign of pedophilia because he played a dwarf in The Hobbit, and dwarves are short.

This will help absolutely nothing regarding the discourse, but I at least find the idea mildly entertaining.

Note: Richard Armitage in real life is 6' 2".

 

Realizing that I don't think I've actually ever heard the verses of Rock the Casbah.

 

Lego Muppet Movie versus Muppet Lego Movie

 

If it's stupid but it works then it's not stupid, but beware: there are plenty of stupid things that don't work.

 

I think the person who upgraded my computer monitor at work also changed the keyboard. Typing is going to feel so weird for a while.
Also the monitor is a lot bigger than I was expecting.

 

Learning once again that I am entirely Correct in my decision not to directly read anything written by Eliezer Yudkowski.

 

I'm very glad that I managed to get through high-school not giving a shit about my GPA. I mean, I got good grades in all of my courses, mostly due to high charisma, a strong bullshitting ability and the willpower to actually Do the Reading sometimes (not all the time). But yeah, I was definitely not a Straight A student and I never tried to be, although rather than out of any wisdom that was simply because I didn't care about anything except for math and occasionally physics, and while the math classes might have had grades associated with them the grades were not themselves math and thus were irrelevant.

Also I have no idea how my GPA would have been calculated considering that all of my math and science was from auditing classes at the local college (and hence the grades were kind of nonsense) and I got to graduate a year early because the administration was sick of the logistical problem I posed (by taking all of those classes at the local college).

Fortunately, I'm pretty sure my transcript was the second-least important part of my college applications, beaten only by whatever bullshit I put in the personal essay.

But yeah, hearing stories about "high-achieving" students who actually cared about grades in high-school is kind of depressing, in the vein of "people hurting themselves over things that end up not mattering".

 

Do skeletons, as in the clackety monsters that crawl out of graveyards and play raucous jazz from August to December, do they have marrow? And if they do, does it produce blood? Could, in theory, a skeleton bleed?
Asking for a friend.

 

if they did have any, it sure would be vulnerable to infection

 

When I was on the science team in high school, a bunch of us were getting quizzed on anatomy. The question was "which organ is the body's first line of defense against disease?" We were guessing things like the liver or the kidneys, and the quizzer just glared at us and flatly intoned "the skin, you idiots".
Good times.

 

I think part of the problem was that a lot of the anime I originally watched was the stupid harem stuff, where the main male character was boring and featureless and all the female characters were more interesting by virtue of having any characterization at all, or bad shonen where the main male character had the power of determination and was indistinguishable from all the other main male characters with the power of determination, and so I just got the impression that male characters were uninteresting as a rule. Which is not true! There are interesting male characters. I just learned about them too late.

This probably has something to do with the proportion of my male OCs dying at the end of their character arcs increasing as I went through my teenage years.

 

Speaking of the Josh fight, at some point there should be a corresponding fight between all of the people named "Victor", with the same rule that the person who wins will be the sole victor, and everyone else will not.

 

The main thing I learned was that my average body temperature is about a degree lower than the standard adult human average. Not entirely sure if that degree is in Fahrenheit or Celsius.

 

Every once in a while I think about my dissertation for some reason, and in particular the eternal question of "how would I explain this to a non-expert?" Where the meaning of "non-expert" varies wildly depending on the impetus for me thinking about my dissertation. There is an aphorism along the lines of "if you can't explain it, you don't understand it", and I like to think that I (at least at the time of writing it) understood my dissertation.

For instance, for a math major at the end of their undergraduate career, I can probably explain the problem to a large extent. To a math major at the beginning of their undergraduate career, I might be able to explain a related problem requiring much less technical background. For a math-inclined high school student, I might be able to explain some of the pieces.
Below that explanations become very difficult, and so the next reasonable question would be whether I can convince the listener that there is something interesting. I think I can do that, again going through the related problem, because then I can draw pretty pictures (for the actual problem there are pictures but most of them are not pretty).

 

At first I thought they were shocked because we went to a nice restaurant and I ordered a hotdog instead of a more "sophisticated" dish. It turns out that they were shocked because the "hotdog" was actually basically a sixteen inch sub sandwich, i.e. quite a bit of food. The sausage was a relatively minor part of the sandwich, compared to the onions, bell peppers, french fries, I think there was an egg in there? and several other things that I never identified.
Anyway, lunch was really good today.

 

I love picking at the bounds of someone's ontology vis-a-vis "Is X a sandwich?"

Currently: a hotdog is not a sandwich because it only has one piece of bread. What if the bun breaks in two? Does it depend on which axis it breaks along?

 

Maybe the issue is that I appear very calm and easy-going, even cheery in demeanor, but the words I actually say can come across as very cynical. So people find it jarring because they're expecting me to say positive things and then I don't.

 

New plan: if I ever make visual art and post it on the internet I'm just going to tag it with "credit to the original artist" instead of signing it.

 

You're going to get at least one person completely missing the joke and accusing you of reposting.

 

That is in fact the point. I'm doing the tumblr problematic% speedrun.