Greatest Hits of my Previous Blog: Chronologue (12/31/2008)

The day before the day before yesterday Brendan came over. We took a walk and played a game.

The day before yesterday I walked past some cows.

Yesterday I walked over a mountaim toward a beach, and was present for the discovery of a Cthulhoid lemon.

Today I am celebrating the new year.

Tomorrow is unknown.

The day after tomorrow I will take a short flight and eat a fancy dinner with mostly children.

The day after the day after tomorrow I will fly toward home, and be picked up by a nun. The day after that is the day before my bullshit life resumes.

Greatest Hits of My Previous Blog: An Unlikely Scenario By Any Measure (1/8/2009)

[In lieu of writing actual new posts, which I've failed to do for a while, I've decided to occasionally repost old stuff from my previous blog that still kinda makes me laugh.  This series, such as it is, will be called Greatest Hits of My Previous Blog.  Hopefully this will actually be new to some of you.]

Words that don't exist, but should

There should be a word for...

• ... sorrow caused by the good fortune of another.
• ... the feeling of vertigo caused by jumping from a high place... in a video game.

Can you QWOP and chew gum at the same time?

 

One of the information processing tasks that our brains take care of for us automatically every day is how to walk correctly.  It turns out that this is an enormously complicated task, requiring visual, touch, and proprioceptive information to be recieved, analyzed, and reacted to on very short timescales, all of which happens automatically after about the first year of life.

Abberant Blog Neglection

Well.

It has been in excess of a fortnight since I blogged anything at all.  The start of school always hits me hard, even though there's very little work involved, and the way that this semester has shaken out it's been starting for three weeks now.

But rest assured, I have not been idle!  I am even now considering the beginnings of two reviews.  The first is of a comic/comix biography of Niels Bohr, and the second is of none other than Cryptonomicon, which I only just this morning finished, having been reading it since October or so.  Crypto will take some serious digestion, but I will give it my best shot.  I actually found a plot hole, but it concerns something surprising that happens in the last five pages of the book, so I don't think I'll mention it.

The Lesser Vowel Shift

Ten years ago this summer I spent a few days in Italy with a high school group.  One night we, and several related groups, were having a banquet/party at a charming little restaurant out in the country.