Nearly 20 years ago, I got this e-mail from my buddy/mentor gowen, who kind of inspired my decision to pursue a double major of English (which had influenced my choice of University) and Computer Science (which I was actually good at), which was what he was doing.
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 93 19:24:17 EST
From: Gregory Owen
To: kisrael
Subject: Re: !Si Si Si!
Follow this simple flowchart.
1) Go to a party with pretty women.
2) Find a pretty female engineer. Say "I'm a CS/English major." Watch
her laugh, mutter something about leisure arts, and go over to that
dork from your ee128 class.
3) Find a pretty female lib-arts major. Say "I'm a CS/English major."
Watch her laugh, mutter something about "fucking geek," and go over to
that dork from your Shakespeare class.
4) Get drunk off your ass, man. You are a Liberal Arts Outcast. Neither
side wants you. At least you get good head off a beer.
gowen
Still, I think the double major worked out pretty well for me. ("The English to keep me well-rounded, the Comp Sci to keep me well-employed" was my quip at the time and I think I mostly lived up to that... and despite the joke, it was surprising to me to find out how many of my fellow comp sci majors were in it in a trade school kind of way.)
"Be lazy." --Shigeru Mizuki statue in SakaiminatoApple is making money selling older models as lowend product, and dropping the model # w/ product names ("the new X") -- recipe for Future confusion?
Years after it lost me a Trivial Pursuit question "The kilogram is the only SI base unit with an SI prefix as part of its name" still rankles.
Making the rounds on the left-leaning social media is an excerpt from this rant by Steven King:
I guess some of this mad right-wing love comes from the idea that in America, anyone can become a Rich Guy if he just works hard and saves his pennies. Mitt Romney has said, in effect, "I'm rich and I don't apologize for it." Nobody wants you to, Mitt. What some of us want--those who aren't blinded by a lot of bullshit persiflage thrown up to mask the idea that rich folks want to keep their damn money--is for you to acknowledge that you couldn't have made it in America without America. That you were fortunate enough to be born in a country where upward mobility is possible (a subject upon which Barack Obama can speak with the authority of experience), but where the channels making such upward mobility possible are being increasingly clogged. That it's not fair to ask the middle class to assume a disproportionate amount of the tax burden. Not fair? It's un-fucking-American is what it is. I don't want you to apologize for being rich; I want you to acknowledge that in America, we all should have to pay our fair share. That our civics classes never taught us that being American means that--sorry, kiddies--you're on your own. That those who have received much must be obligated to pay--not to give, not to "cut a check and shut up," in Governor Christie's words, but to pay--in the same proportion. That's called stepping up and not whining about it. That's called patriotism, a word the Tea Partiers love to throw around as long as it doesn't cost their beloved rich folks any money.
What's interesting is that they leave out the more right-leaning prelude:
At the risk of repeating myself, here's what rich folks do when they get richer: they invest. A lot of those investments are overseas, thanks to the anti-American business policies of the last four administrations.
I guess I'd like to know more about his view of that.
Scanning photos from my days in Euclid in preparation for our 20th (!) reunion. These were 3 of my favorites.
The first one is Mike at the Science Museum in Boston during a band trip up here... since then they've moved the dinosaur outside. The middle is Marnie at Winterfest, I think-- she wasn't my date that night but man I dug that dress, I think her grandmother did the sewing, with a great fabric that shimmers from green to purple-- I've seen the fabric since, but not for years after that dress.
Finally it's me before the Atlanta Christmas Parade in 1991.
Still bummed that at how much more poorly documented life was back then. And the photos were usually less adventurous.
"Social Conservatives", please all hurry up and die so that the next, more loving and empathetic generations can undo your damage.
"For all the talk about "protecting marriage", it's worth mentioning that Massachusetts has the lowest divorce rate in the United States" --http://twitter.com/Pres_BartletVerbs are stronger than nouns. Nouns may try to be constraints for verbs, but verbs transcend those boundaries all the time.
UPDATE: "Social Conservatives", please all hurry up and die peacefully, in your sleep, surrounded by your loved ones, so that the next, more loving and empathetic generations can undo your damage.
Today I captained team "Barkin' Aura Rainmaker" (an anagram of Amber, Arun, Ariana, and Kirk-- I thought it sounded more clever than my first idea AAAK but it was harder to remember) in the 2012 Hub Crawl, a photo scavenger hunt with puzzles... this year the rally point was near Faneuil Hall and the main areas were from there up to the tip of the North End.
You end up taking a lot of photos like this alleyway of saints, because you get more points the more team members you have in the frame.
Here is a 24-hour bakery in the North End.
In the North End we met 2 people who were on a DIFFERENT scavenger hunt. (I imagine local businesses must get used to a lot of odd requests from these things.) They needed 2 extra people to have a picture with all blowing a bubble. So, I got a piece of gum to blow bubbles with, plus the team got directions to the aforementioned alleyway of saints.
At some point we posed with Team "Jumping Amazing Super Optimistic Noodle Squad". I love the name... surprised it gets a lot of google hits, not sure if it's the same folks or not.
Also Bowties were involved.
Our marketing director Gerard LaFond pointed me to an upcoming book by his co-collaborator (and Serious Games superstar) Ian Bogost... the books is called 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 and that happens to be a working program for the Commodore 64 that generates a pattern very much like you see here.
I'm looking forward to the book! Should be a good read.
http://imgur.com/pOXX1 - creepiest patent image ever? (via ranjit)
Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is -- brilliant metaphor... living la vida "straight white male" is the easy mode in the game of life.
"The reason for your complaint, it seems to me, is the constraint which your intellect imposes upon your imagination...you reject too soon and too severely." --Freud quoting Poet Schiller"So the man who falls in love with beauty is quite different than the man who loves a girl and feels she is beautiful and can see what is beautiful about her." --Donald Winnicott"The Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion" --The Treaty of Tripoli, signed by President John Adams and ratified by only the third ever unanimous vote of the US Senate. Man, what you learn reading Lamebook sometimes!
Making the rounds is this awesome series of photographs of people facing very, very strong winds...
Man, I wonder if that hurts? You can see more on
Tadao Cern's Facebook Page.
"Celebrate Diversity" used to seem a bit trite, and unappealing to my pragmatic, engineer-y self... "Why celebrate diversity? Why not enjoy stuff that seems objectively better somehow?" But celebrating diversity-- for its own sake-- is one of the few countermeasures I can think of to the natural human tendency to assume "most common" is also what's "normal" and better, and well on the path to thinking everything else is undesirable.
There were some great eclipse photos this weekend... my favorite has two different clever captions: For normal geeks: I'm sorry to inform you that Earth is about to be been eaten by a fire demon --Ben Brockert, from the original source
For computer geeks:
Guess God really does use Lisp. --Colin Barrett on twitter
(Explanation for non-computer geeks: Lisp is a computer language that is know for using many, many parentheses...)
--via io9 -- Amazing optical illusion... keep your eye on the center point, and the faces to either side are crazily distorted. Look at either face directly, and you see they're fine.
--New England as seen in the Atlas of True Names that displays the etymological roots of places, and makes everything feel a bit more like Tolkien's maps of Middle Earth.
"When life gives you lemons, just say 'Fuck the lemons,' and bail!" --Kunu, "Forgetting Sarah Marshall". Terrific movie!http://london2012.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/21/longing-for-the-return-of-dueling-pistol/ -- Olympic sports they should bring back ASAP!
The toilets at work are delayed autoflush- I love hearing it go while I'm washing my hands at the sinks, makes me feel like an action movie hero not looking back at the fire-y explosion.
"The big trouble with dumb bastards is that they are too dumb to believe there is such a thing as being smart." --Kurt Vonnegut"I don't like your lesbian music." "Ani Difranco isn't a lesbian." "You don't have to be a lesbian to make lesbian music." "..." "Am I right? Am I right? Don't tweet that." --Amber and Me
I scanned in another small batch of photos in preparation for my 20th high school anniversary-- a small selection, me and Mike in the hallway, my favorite teacher Mrs. McLaughlin (looking like she's setting a boozy example for us at '91 Prom), Marnie showing a little leg before prom (so strange how entrenched the garter dance tradition was there, for prom...) and finally Kofi "Reggie" Obeng and Ernalisa...
I remember Tufts' University bookstore having Afri-Cola in the early 1990s... I wondered where it was from, what it was all about...
I'm not sure this commercial from the 1968 would really have explained things.
It kind of reminds me of that old Simpsons bit of faux-agitprop Worker and Parasite...
via
http://www.wrvo.fm/post/world-war-ii-vet-caught-floridas-voter-purge-controversy Florida Election Officials are amoral Machiavellian jerks. (The state that was home of the Butterfly Ballot and the Elderly Jews for Pat Buchanan that gave the national election to Bush in 2000.) Between this and a nationwide trend of voter role purges, I have to say my opinion of Republicans as jerks who value their own agendas over the process of democracy isn't going anywhere.
"I'm a citizen of the republic of empathy." --Sam Lipsytehttp://www.fastcompany.com/1837966/mustafas-space-drive-an-egyptian-students-quantum-physics-invention Quantum Space Drive??? Oh wow...
The whole morning I thought my overshirt lacked a pocket. Nope, it was just on inside out. Gonna be one of those days.
Cap'n Crunch's full name is Horatio Magellan Crunch.
I know my friends have no shortage of reason to hate PayPal, but their incessant shilling of "Bill Me Later" is what gets my goat.
"Aristotle said I am a rational animal; I say I am an angel with an incredible capacity for beer." --Brennan Manninghttp://mobileopportunity.blogspot.com/2011/06/windows-8-beginning-of-end-of-windows.html - looking forward to a cheap laptop w/ Windows 8. Expect I might hate it though. Wish OSX was less app, more task based
"You got keys and money? Good, 'cause I got nothin'. Except you. Which is good, 'cause you got the keys and money." --Amber, before we headed out for dinner
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Guys just aren't wearing enough hats these days.
