I work at home two days a week and in an office on the other side of the city from home three days a week.  So Wednesday through Friday my life is pretty focused on that whole “commute” thing.  To make things a bit more pleasant than they could be I work 10ish to 6:30ish [...]

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I have to admit that living in California (and working for a university in the UC system) these days leaves me wondering why I’m in this handbasket, and where exactly it is we’re all going. The nice Christians who periodically knock on my door to evangelize seem to be capitalizing on this theme.  Unfortunately, my [...]

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A couple of days ago a web acquaintance pointed out this shirt on thinkgeek. It has a drumset decal on the front that’s hooked up to a battery pack and speaker so that it actually plays when you tap it. Cool idea, right?  Well, yes, but….  My first thought on seeing it was [...]

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So one of the side effects of living with a math/computer geek is that often reading material I would never encounter on my own appears around the house.  For instance, Communications of the ACM, which I found open to the last page, title “Puzzled: Circular Food.”  Skimming this my attention was drawn to the second [...]

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This morning in some web forum I happened upon I saw someone use the expression “reap what you sew.”  I tend to visualize a lot of the language I encounter (yes, this can be problematic; no, you may not take advantage of this knowledge to try to gross me out).  So what popped into my [...]

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What you see here is a screen shot from the online version of the economist. It’s a replication of a story from the print edition about the effects of the recent hurricanes on Cuba. Note the caption on the picture. Is there some Briticism I’m missing here in which woz translates to were? [...]

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I’ve lived away from home long enough that when my mother says something about getting pop in a grocery store with a lot of ambient noise my mental word filters don’t parse that she’s talking about soda.

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I’m in the process of switching this blog over to a self-hosted word press blog. I might even start writing in it regularly.
So you know, under construction, blah, blah, content coming soon, blah, blah. Etc.

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I wish I had something insightful to say about Schwarzenegger’s decision to deny clemency to Stanley Tookie Williams. For me it comes down fundamentally to the fact that I am firmly against the death penalty. Given that, I need not delve any deeper into the questions of guilt vs. innocence or whether Williams has [...]

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So there’s been some discussion in various places of an article in the NY Times about a coffee shop in Chicago that put up a sign saying “children of all ages have to behave and use their indoor voices when coming to A Taste of Heaven.” This dovetails with something else that I’ve been [...]

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