Conspicuously absent from here are the things I tend to think about during business hours. I’m lucky enough to have some difficult problems to solve every now and then, especially when we have client with a scientific turn of mind. Right now, for example, I’m trying to figure out how to display very complex tree-like relationships between things. You know your family tree? Something like that, except on an enormous scale. Like, a family tree for an entire country. Potentially. Something like that.
So I say “I need something that automatically draws graphs of data,” and start looking around. Turns out that’s a whole discipline within computer science and math. Very complicated. They even hold international symposia in Vienna on this.
On the one hand I hate it when I get a problem like this. Deadlines and all, you know? But on the other … man, I think I could get into graph theory. I wonder if I would have dropped out of CS all those years ago if someone had introduced me to graph theory first. “Wait, don’t go! This is what you eventually get to study!”
We have to decide on our majors too young. We should get to wait until we’re really quite old.
I’ve been writing at Thudfactor for almost nine years now. Is that right? Yeah, just six months shy of that. When I started the weblog I wasn’t married yet, Elf and I were living in a small apartment in Prince William County, Virginia, and I still considered myself a “designer” more than a programmer. In fact, the first version of the weblog was my own blogging software written with brand-new knowledge of PHP and MySQL.
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NPR wrote an article about salmonella and eggs and the Facebook entry is entertaining. Quite a few people have suggested going vegan as a way to protect yourself.
Yah, that’s right. I’ll go vegan. I’ll sacrifice my general health and well-being by eating a diet completely unsuited to me, but at least I won’t get salmonella. At least until I eat some tainted spinach or something.
I wonder why so many liberal bloggers think it’s acceptable to harp on the weight of conservatives. Here’s an example, and I didn’t have to look hard for one:
Now that the hordes of Sansabelt-clad teabaggers who waddled to descended upon Washington, D.C. for a group primal scream therapy session have taken their honor, along with their fannypacks, back issues of Parade magazine, and Medicare cards, back to their gated retirement communities, we can cogitate on what really happened in our nation’s capital. Take Back the White 2010
You know what? Just shut the hell up. When you start flapping your jaw about “doughy” this and “couch potato” that, I am sure you get a big laugh from all your skinny, fat-fearing friends. But to everyone else you sound like a jerk. Especially to all the obese liberals in earshot. Find another insult.
Thanks.
Immediately after posting about the inevitability of government and why weakening government just gives other people the opportunity to exercise their strength, I read this:
The American people, in the vast majority, are a profoundly religious people. We must never allow the noisy liberal minority and radical groups like the ACLU to impose their secular vision on the majority. We must resist the oppression of religious liberty.
We must never allow the Liberal, anti-God, anti-religious freedom minority to remove the words Under God from the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag. We must never allow them to abolish our National Motto: In God We Trust. John Fleming for US Congress
That’s from a sitting U.S. Congressman.
It is true that we, in this country, oppress theocrats. We tell them they are not allowed to use the weight of the State to impose their religious beliefs on us. For people like John Fleming, this means our government is too big and too powerful; he would much rather do the oppressing himself.
People like John Fleming require the rest of us to have a strong government in self-defense.
I once saw a guy described by the newspaper as “the head of the local anarchist group,” which should tell you everything you need to know about the anarchy’s feasibility as a theory of government. At some point even the anarchists seem to look for leadership.
Anyway, here’s Tom McNaughton explaining that the misbehavior of corporations is aided and abetted by a strong central government:
A few years ago, I watched a stupid left-wing documentary that compared corporations to sociopaths. As an example, the filmmakers showed how a company that builds water systems moved into a small country and then (according to their narrative) made it illegal for people to collect their own water. This prompted me to scream at the TV, “How the @#$% can a corporation make anything illegal?! Corporations can’t pass laws! The @#$%ing government passed the law! The @#$%ing government enforced the law!” Raw Milk gets Another Raw Deal
McNaughton’s solution is less government: “If [government officials] have the power to outlaw products you don’t like, they also have the power to outlaw products you do like,” he says. So, you know, knock them down a peg.
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This is a Sufi dancer. There's probably a better phrase for that, but I don't know it.
There’s a lot of difference between “Sufi-run Islamic community center in Manhattan” and “Ground Zero Victory Mosque.” I’ve been thinking about that, and a lot of other words, since listening to
this Radiolab episode. Radiolab argues that language doesn’t just give us the ability to communicate complex ideas — it gives us the ability to formulate them in the first place.
In other words, if you couldn’t say to yourself “over the river and through the woods,” you might never make it to Grandmother’s house.
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This is the kind of thing parents who are not dietitians and biochemists are up against:
So here’s a registered dietitian telling parents to serve their children chocolate milk as snacks, actually suggesting that kids need a post-game sports drink (they certainly don’t) and that it ought to be chocolate milk, that kids who are lactose intolerant get calcium and vitamin D from fortified juices (despite calls to limit juice consumption in children to 1/2 – 1 cup daily) and that basically any dish that can be spiked with milk should be. Dietitians — a question for you
The dietitian is concerned kids aren’t getting enough calcium, so he or she is recommending that we get calcium into kids even if it’s in the form of sugared drinks — which, just about everyone agrees, puts the child at greater risk for obesity. So the blog item I’m linking to is deeply concerned that if we give kids too much milk that we’ll make them fat.
This is not an unusual occurrence; diet advice is not only conflicting and confusing, but often delivered with histrionics and dire threats of crippling disease if the advice is not followed to the letter. Elf’s Ideal Pregnancy Diet is compiled from all the dietary advice she got from her doctors while pregnant; it’s clearly impossible to follow.
The state of dietary research is miserable. Either we know next to nothing or what we know gets so drowned out by people who have marketing or political agendas that it’s no longer recognizable as fact.
The basic problem with the two party system is that when one party goes massively, rat-chokingly insane, you’re pretty much forced to go with the sane candidate. “Sane” is a low bar for public office. It includes the subsets of the sane-but-stupid, sane-but-criminal, and the sane-but-disagrees-for-everything-you-stand-for. For example, here in the ninth district I get to choose between Rick Boucher, a Democrat who voted against health care reform and thinks Arizona’s immigration laws are a peachy idea, and Morgan Griffith, a friend of the Roanoke Tea Party.
I can’t say I’m happy about my options.
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When I tell people I’m eating a low-carbohydrate diet a lot of them think I’ve eliminated carbohydrate altogether. I guess they imagine me frying three pounds of bacon for myself every morning, eating massive porterhouse steaks every night, and avoiding broccoli as though it were a rabid badger. That’s not really what being low-carbohydrate is like.
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