I Know You Know

My middle finger is blistered from playing so much bass.

I Love South Park

Best political show on TV today.

Anapest

Is the rhythm "boom boom BOOM".

As if you were accenting the "pest". ;-)

Laziness

Times like this (i.e. nobody around, beer #2) I most want to read worthless internet crap. But I am persistently holding off.

Sometimes I think about the time long ago when television was first invented. Families would sit down together ready for the socially respectable event of watching TV? It's unclear to me how we got to American Idol.

Maybe nothing has changed except my opinions.

Obviously some entertainment seems like a good idea at the time, but afterwards leaves you feeling like you ate a bucket of Snickers. Change of Heart, political blogs, what's the difference?

Can you believe your own instincts when you have a huge array of choices trying to trick them?

Tooth Imprints On A Corn Dog

I wonder if you can tell much about a book by its title.

If you can, look at this one.

Bayes Schmayes

An intuitive explanation of Bayesian reasoning.

The Funny Side of News Bias

"Let's face it, sports news is the only news most people read," Wilborough said. "That's reason enough to clean it up. Otherwise, the media may start seeing bias and sensationalism as a formula for success. I don't think anyone wants to live in a country where that happens."


Funny 'cause it's true.

Virtue

"The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike or touch the enemy's cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement. It is essential to attain this. If you think only of hitting, springing, striking or touching the enemy, you will not be able actually to cut him. More than anything, you must be thinking of carrying your movement through to cutting him."

Every step of your reasoning must cut through to the correct answer in the same movement. More than anything, you must think of carrying your map through to reflecting the territory.

If you fail to achieve a correct answer, it is futile to protest that you acted with propriety.

We Have Acted Shamefully

The source of my childhood IM name "Ashamnu", for those readers who understand and/or care.

p.s. Any significance to the choice? I will leave that as a literary question.

p.p.s. Any significance to putting the comma outside the quotes? Yes, I know the conventional method is "comma inside," but that's downright barbarous. Offensive to the logical mind! Please join me in this crusade.

Exercise As Placebo

Apparently you get healthier if you think you are exercising more, even holding your real level of exercise constant.

Hmm. How can I trick myself into thinking I exercise more? I could just exercise at a pace tractable for me and refuse to detailedly question the "exercise equals health" meme. I think that would get the placebo on my side.

Fight the myth that calories are the best way of measuring weight!

Read The Funny Ones

So, you're saying that the company that created Betamax, ATRAC encoding, the S-Link protocol, Minidisc players, Super-AudioCDs, Memory Sticks and Universal Media Discs might actually lose a format war?


Preposterous!

Interesting Question

Greg asks:

"Off topic, but have you noticed an increase in traffic coming to chosucks.com since the VT thing?"

(For those of you who don't know - this blog is registered under both lacker.info and chosucks.com, and has been for quite some time. It's a different Cho.)

So I checked Analytics and actually yes!! I've gotten about 20 hits from cities scattered near Virginia in the couple days since this went into the news. That's really unusual for my blog - usually I get about 2 or 3 visitors a day, all from cities where I know I know people there. ;-)

I wonder if I should have a disclaimer?

The Future Of The Past

Predictions from 1900 about the year 2000. Notice how they focus on inventions relating to food.

People will live to the age of 50 instead of 35.

Cars will, like houses, be artificially cooled.

Peas and beans will be as large as beets are today.

There will be no C, X or Q in our everyday alphabet.

Hot or cold air will be turned on from spigots to regulate the temperature of a house as we now turn on hot or cold water from spigots to regulate the temperature of the bath.

Fast-flying refrigerators on land and sea will bring delicious fruits from the tropics and southern temperate zone within a few days.

Rats and mice will have been exterminated.

Fast electric ships, crossing the ocean at more than a mile a minute, will go from New York to Liverpool in two days.

War And Polls

Apparently peoples' opinions of past wars (i.e. Vietnam) rises as a new war (i.e. Iraq) approaches.

Keep Alive

My second post (at least) entitled "Keep Alive." :-(

Sorry for no blogging recently, I've been camping down by Sequoia National Park. Pretty cool - it was snowing up at 7000 feet but sunny down by our campsite.

The Wisdom of Crowds

If you set down a hundred cars at an intersection, they won't invent the stoplight.

Not every crowd has the wisdom of crowds.

Orwell On Politics

"Posters are important in Spain, with its large illiterate population."

To be fair, he's talking about 1936.

This quote answered a question I hadn't realized I had asked myself a couple years ago. In Mexico before elections posters littered every fence and pole - I could have told you the competing candidates for Tijuana comptroller. Didn't understand until just now.

(Comptroledor? Unlikely.)

Sophistry

It's hard to reconcile my new found belief in the value of jazz with my long held conviction that adding sausage to any meal makes it better.

O Anna

Love will fly if held too lightly
Love will die if held too tightly
Lightly, tightly, how do I know
Whether I'm holding or letting love go?

(Oscar Wilde?)

Does Wikipedia have "intention"?

Dan, responding to this blog post:

"Do you think it's intentional irony that the Wikipedia entry on "pleonasm" is much longer than it has to be?"

No, but I do think that is brilliant commentary.

Godin Theory

Godin logic will make your blog more awesome.

AJ's blog needs more purple cow.

Why not put the most interesting and crazy (remarkable!) picture in the post, and link to the rest?

Naturally I am unable to take advantage of this advice myself, and this blog post will remain banally forgettable.

Money and Politics

A few months back I made a bet with Dan. If Obama wins the Democratic nomination, I get $200. If either the Democratic or Republican nominations go to someone who wasn't in the top 30 at the time the bet was made, Dan gets $200.

Please note, I intended to express no political opinion whatsoever in this bet, except a belief that online betting markets are the best way to predict the future. (At least when they have enough traffic.) At the time, Obama was running around 20%, and "field" was at 1 or 2 percent for both parties' nominations. I felt pretty confident.

But the tide may have halfway turned! Fred Thompson, the DA from Law and Order (!!!) (and actually a former Senator from Tennessee so it's not *that* ridiculous) is now running at 21% likely to win the Republican nomination. For context Tradesports now says he is the second strongest candidate, ahead of John McCain and Mitt Romney.

Following in Schwarzenegger's footsteps? I would literally laugh out loud.

Dan's still holding out hope for a last minute entrance from Bill Gates. No lead time necessary for fund raising. I think he should probably first sneakily buy up the TV networks.

Pleonasm

"Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell."

- Wikipedia

Late Night Conversation

Me: (laughs out loud)

Dan: What are you reading?

Me: This. It's both hilarious and about grammar.

Dan: Oh sure.

Me: "Did you know that probing the seamy underbelly of U.S. lexicography reveals ideological strife and controversy and intrigue and nastiness and fervor on a nearly hanging-chad scale?"

Talent

Talent's just an instrument. It's like having a pen that works instead of one that doesn't.

Stolen Style

Here's my goals for my blogging style.

Incomprehensible, like David Foster Wallace.

Way too much of it, like The Economist.

Annoyingly unusual, like the Venetian Snares.

Arrogantly stubborn, like Paul Graham.

Possibly at some point I will try to work in some positive aspects as well.

In Which I Say "Crap" A Lot

A frequent saying at work is that you can't just get rid of crap. How do you know getting rid of crap isn't just bringing in even worse crap to fill the empty space?

Same thing goes for life habits as goes for search results.

Quit wasting all your time, quit reading your 50th favorite blog, quit various mind wasting activities, is this going to make your life better?

Certainnnnnnly you don't want to fill your time back up with reading your 1000th favorite blog. "No reddit" is an insufficient set of rules to live by.

There's two solutions. Solution #1 is that you can just get rid of the most terrible crap, things you are really definitely convinced are probably pretty much the crappiest things around, and there is really no crap any worse so the downside is limited. Not really helpful for life habits.

Solution #2 is to simultaneously undergo some positive life habits initiatives to go along with the crap removal.

So here I am, blogging almost every day. That's the new goal - new only in the sense that now I fairly plausibly believe it is possible since I've been doing it, mostly, for a little while. I try to have the rule of thumb that if I am in the mood for reading a third blog today, I should just post about something random instead. A little startup woes, not really knowing to write about, but recently I don't feel like this is constraining me.

Acting Smarter Than I Am

One of my favorite habits. Not sure if I should feel bad about it?

"One widely used trick, especially among illustrators, is to intentionally make a painting or drawing look like it was done faster than it was. The average person looks at it and thinks: how amazingly skillful. It's like saying something clever in a conversation as if you'd thought of it on the spur of the moment, when in fact you'd worked it out the day before."

I often read a quote and think, dang I know that's going to be useful in some future conversation, I could bring that up and whether they know it's a quote or not the listener's going to be like, dang good point you win the argument.

Unfortunately I can't usually remember! I have that good-quote-reading-feeling a hell of a lot more than I have that good-quote-whipping-out feeling.

What to do? Blog about them, maybe?

Quote in this post stolen from here.

If You Ignored The Last Post

There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: "Look, it's not like I don't have actual reasons for not believing in God. It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it was fifty below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'" And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. "Well then you must believe now," he says, "After all, here you are, alive." The atheist just rolls his eyes. "No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp."

Now if you've changed your mind about whether you should have ignored my last post check out that David Foster Wallace speech.

Good Quick Read

A speech by David Foster Wallace that you have very possibly not read (and almost certainly not heard) before.

You should probably just ignore this post if the previous sentence leaves you indifferent.

Lots of Free Money

Possibly the best advice you will get this decade.

On Writing

Blogging (even as badly as I'm doing it) has given me a lot of insight into the editing process.

The simplest thing that always makes your writing better is rewriting to say the same damn thing with less words.

a lot of insight into the editing process

turns into

insight into editing

Nobody really cares about tenses, just pick the least wordy one.

I do like parenthetical asides. Sometimes I have more ideas to say and no natural place to put them. Plus it's like a little shout-out to David Foster Wallace. Also it feels like breakcore, tossing off phrase fragments. I'm in a very breakcore mood nowadays.

This blog would be better if I edited more. But I'm afraid anything unfun will break the positive feedback loop that makes me blog. Or maybe just lazy.

I want a perfect body

Since my birthday I've reopened the losing-weight quest. Since January I've been serious about it. I'm hitting the gym three times a week almost every week, I'm mostly following an informal set of diet rules, and I'm neurotically keeping track of everything I eat.

The tracking is interesting, if you find the organization of information interesting. In past Atkins-style attempts at dieting I found it much easier to stick to a rule if it was hard and fast. "No bread" is a fairly easy rule to follow. "Eat less bread than usual" is a really hard rule to follow. Why? You don't know what "usual" means, not really in your gut, and in moments of weakness you will always tell yourself everything is fine, eat something unhealthy, then tell yourself it's okay not to think about this moment ever again, and then later your self-analysis gets confused. How did you end up so unhealthy? You've been trying the whole time.

The subconscious betrays you by maliciously misinterpreting any fuzzy rules. But at the same time living your life according to an absolutely strict diet can get annoying. E.g. a big group going to an Italian restaurant. So there needs to be a fix.

My solution so far (which is really mine in no way - like most of my good ideas all the idea-parts are stolen, no epiphanies were involved in any way) is to maintain strict rules, but keep them from directly restricting what I do all the time. The point of the strict rule is to maintain a subconscious bother when I eat unhealthy food without letting myself slip.

Specifically, I'm just keeping track of everything I eat. Really standard, and hard to convince yourself you shouldn't do it too, if you are remotely concerned about diet. It takes 2 seconds per meal to jot down what you ate, and you don't have to do anything more. Track your weight too. If you're frustrated later because you don't understand what's happening, you have a sea of data. Most likely there's a couple outlier days where you just ate insanely unhealthy food.

The upside is the tracking makes it a lot easier to roughly adhere to a plan without strictly adhering to it. There's no way you can possibly come to a conclusion like "I'll aim for eating a hot dog no more than twice a month" and actually implement that otherwise.

Many faint analogies are possible. If you don't know what to do, collect a lot of data. Probably you will get some instincts going even before you start analysis.

Now on to the perfect soul.

I am never satisfied... it's a curse.

I think the only way to get the creative juices flowing is just to blog really badly rather than not blog at all.

Apologies in advance for how mindbottlingly terrible this post is going to be.

Eh, I'll just cut the terriblest few paragraphs. They stank like aftershave and taco meat. Better leave it like this.

Rat Race

I was just checking out the competition in what seems like today's target niche. This guy seems pretty impressive.

Timesaver

This blog reads like an industrial machine tools catalog. I don't know what's wrong with me. When I talk, I don't sound stilted and produced by NBC - which I mean in the worst. I feel like I should drop words out at random and that would make it better. Better better. (I *am* taking my own advice - that was going to be three extraneous "better"s.)

Stunningly worthless? Are you easily stunned?

Brilliant

Best response so far to the previous puzzle posed on this blog:

"I googled the phrase '1# Vegas' and all I found was this crappy blog."

Awesome! Thanks Greg. I like how you misspell #1. Or is that really called "misspelling"?

You win one really cool T-shirt. I have a fantastic plan in mind. Send me your shirt size and address.

Antipode

What is absolutely the most boring blog post possible?

Please, please, PLEASE answer this question with a brief two second stab at an answer.

(Here's mine.)

Breakcore

Apologies in advance.

Some new musical investigation recently.

It requires a certain amount of willingness to constantly argue. Fortunately that can suit me.

Music can be something friendly and comprehensible. Why not something you don't understand? And then as a response, more and more of it.

Yes all right yes.

I keep coming back to "under" as an unusual word. I don't believe in parts of speech. They were made up by grammarians with their insistent humanities-major way of insisting they understand. I myself nag about grammar a lot, at least in my head. I like comma splices though. Somehow it fits.

I think everyone should pick and choose which grammatical rules to use, with the caveat that they are ready to pick a fight, about them. In practice that's how it is, anyways. Would you ever say the phrase "comma splice"?

Can I even read, when there's commas, basically every plausible place, as if commaful was my speaking style, probably not too far from the truth? I, suspect it, would annoy you, a lot, more if, I just comma'd willy.

Nilly.

Delay

If I listed ten random words would you laugh?

If they were really random, really mathematically provably equally likely to be any word you've ever spoken, would it matter?

Maybe if they kept getting longer, one letter at a time? If they all started with letters that spelled out each other?

If they happened to all be the same word, I would have to redo the post, and it would be one of the most surprising things, but I could never really share that.

Free Form

dark

alone

wind

gray video game skies

empty

absent

concave

rain

end