I’ve just discovered a beautiful new set theory called pocket set theory. See http://stanford.library.usyd.edu.au/entries/settheory-alternative/#PocSetThe

30/11/2012

There is a correlation between the alignments of heavenly bodies and events in my life. The latter cause the former. Astrologers, weirdly, get this the wrong way round.

22/11/2012

Some famous violinist (it was either Pinchas Zuckerman or Itzhak Perlman) was once asked what they’d practice if they had just an hour before a performance. They said they’d spend 55 minutes doing scales and then 5 minutes on the hardest parts of the piece they had to play. It’s like that with sleep. You should spend most of your work time sleeping, to get your brain operating smoothly. Then you can do your work well, even if you have to rush.

Which reminds me of another work anecdote.

I was sitting behind two students on a bus once. One was explaining how this semester, for the first time, they’d been good and put aside a bit of time every day to work on their big assignment. And they’d actually stuck to it. “How did you do?” asked the other student. “Hm. I got the worst mark I’ve ever got.”

21/11/2012

About behaviourism. True story. A friend of a friend saw a friend of a friend of a friend off at the airport. He noticed he was on the verge of tears, trembling and overwhelmed. He thought, “I must be in love.”

Later he got back home, saw himself in a mirror, and realised he was sunburned. Not love, heatstroke.

5/11/2012

Lisa: So I was just wondering if there was one general thing that you’ve found over the years to be generally true in a general way that would help anyone in any situation?

Psychiatrist: That’s a great question, yes, I would say figure out what you want and learn how to ask for it.

- James L. Brooks, "How Do You Know?" (film script), [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1341188](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1341188)

Alison says, “I’ve done the experiments, and you can’t finish a cheese sandwich and clean your teeth at the same time.”

17/9/2012

I really enjoyed the harmonies on Allan Holdsworth’s Metal Fatigue album for the first time today. It’s taken 20 years!

30/8/2012

A statistician is a device which takes in data and hypotheses and produces … what?

11/8/2012

RIP Gore Vidal. :-(

Go and read his novel Kalki, and then maybe his historical novels.

7/8/2012

Another hobbyhorse of the same day!

According to Putnam, apparently water is H2O and not XYZ, and anyone who says water is anything other than H20 is wrong. Unfortunately, water is not H20. Under normal conditions, water is a very impure mixture of all sorts of things including lots of oxygen and carbon dioxide, and even PURE water is a mixture of H20, H3O+ and OH-. Of course this doesn’t affect the structure of Putnam’s argument, and he can run a parallel argument for whatever we currently think water is … but only if it’s static. The fact that people keep getting this example wrong reminds me that scientific facts keep changing.

I know this is not an original point. I just needed to get it off my chest.

Hobbyhorse of the day: The idea that the natural system of numbers, or “the number line”, is the Real numbers is (a) definitely very recent, (b) probably not very well motivated and (c) possibly actually a bad idea.

9/7/2012

Why is there suddenly a proliferation of programs (e.g. Latexian) which will typeset LaTeX but not TeX? Has everyone gone mad?

American police brutality: http://www.criminology.com/know-your-rights

If Bayesianism is like Utilitarianism, then the likelihood principle is like Consequentialism.

13/4/2012

“There is no ‘Cloud’: There are only Other People’s Hard Drives.”

—- http://www.loper-os.org/?paged=6, 2009

“At a number of places in this book I have resorted to the use of mathematical formulae, unabashed and unheeding of warnings that are frequently given: that each such formula will cut down the general readership by half. If you are a reader who finds any formula intimidating (and most people do), then I recommend a procedure that I normally adopt myself when such an offending line presents itself. The procedure is, more or less, to ignore that line completely and to skip over to the next actual line of text! Well, not exactly this; one should spare the poor formula a perusing, rather than a comprehending glance, and then press onwards. After a little, if armed with new confidence, one may return to that neglected formula and try to pick out some salient features. The text itself may be helpful in leting one know what is important and what can be safely ignored about it. If not, then do not be afraid to leave a formula behind altogether.”

—- Roger Penrose, Note to the Reader, “The Emperor’s New Mind”, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, p.vii

I’ve had a lot of lower back pain recently, almost certainly caused by driving too much in my buckety-seated car.

Saw a great massage therapist today. Asked him about car ergonomics. He said “fix your body not your car”. Specifically, don’t swap the car for another one because “the Eunos 30X … it’s such a lovely car”. !

http://non-human.people.xeny.net/small/Consumerism%20-%20Cars/2011-09-27-642%20Sparky.jpg

sin(x) goes into a restaurant and orders a meal. The waiter says, “Sorry, we don’t cater for functions”.

LiveJournal friend kylecassidy mentioned William Wegman recently. I looked him up, and discovered this, possibly the best video ever:

http://www.wegmanworld.com/splash.html

13/1/2012

The other day, Alison drove to the chemist to spend a $5 voucher that had been burning a hole in her bag. She accidentally parked in a clearway zone and got a $206 fine. That’s kind of a net loss.

10/1/2012

Jason

Tumblelog - 2012