@rands To err is human; to check is engineering.
— @astandy
Smith Rock at Night
I’m just going to leave these here for you to enjoy[1]: P.S. I’m not dead. Promise. click to embiggen [↩]
The printer was hole-punching my printouts at work (on the wrong side of the page, to boot). I was mystified by why it was doing this. I tried changing the print settings. I tried restarting my computer. I tried restarting the printer. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the printer driver. I tried that rain dance…
Rachel’s grandmother passed away last week, so we’re making the trek to Montana for the funeral service. We were going to visit Portland this weekend, but that trip has been preempted by this. Since the funeral isn’t until Monday, we decided to inject some fun and take the train to Montana and then fly back.…
Emailing and IMing with people while I cross the country in an airplane gives me an odd sense of omnipotence. So does posting on the blog.
Sorting through “My Documents” sometimes feels like opening an unexpected time capsule.
Simpson’s paradox →
“A common example of Simpson’s Paradox involves the batting averages of players in professional baseball. It is possible for one player to hit for a higher batting average than another player during a given year, and to do so again during the next year, but to have a lower batting average when the two years are combined.”
I shared this video[1] with Peter, who then asked: I saw that a couple days ago. Awesome! And has some cool practical applications. I [couldn't] quite tell if the pitch of the robot was adjustable by the user, or of it always jumped in the same direction. Did you get a sense for that? It…
Generally, I try to be content with how things are. This has been a challenging mix of rejecting the status quo when I believe it is required but also not getting sucked in by Shinny Object Syndrome (rushing off to the next latest and greatest thing, what I think George Leonard would call “The Dabbler”[1]).…
The Biology [and Physics] of B-Movie Monsters →
An immensely humorous and (as far as I can tell) technically accurate analysis of what happens when biology goes awry in the movies.
I feel like this quote does a good job of capturing my feelings behind why I have no kill switch on awesome: From www.nybooks.com:Widespread ignorance bordering on idiocy is our new national goal. It’s no use pretending otherwise and telling us, as Thomas Friedman did in the Times a few days ago, that educated people…