Winter 2020 quotes

These have accumulated for awhile and I might've missed some as there is currently a "scratch notebook" infestation throughout the rooms of my house.

Out-of-context semi-anonymized quotes for your enjoyment!

I: "Evidence is really piling up for us living in a weird simulation. Let's have their teeth fall out, try that!"

M: "What's the official wine pairing for bacon-wrapped chicken?"
L: "Bacon-wrapped wine."

Z: "There's more red flags than potential here."

G: "I'm discovering things about people I never knew."
L: "By looking at their backgrounds?"
G: "By listening to what they say!"

N: "I like that JavaScript is being described as low-level here."

Z: "You accidentally muted yourself."
I: "No, I did it on purpose, but at the wrong time."

M: "I was such a good writer back then. That was before I went to grad school, I can tell."

F: "The problem with legacy code is, they did a lot of stuff in the past, and they keep doing it!"

Z: "Do you have a job, or is this, like, private daycare?"

D: "He died of syphilis because he had all these... incubis... you know?"

Z+D (simultaneously, uncoordinated): "Maybe don't do your taxes today."
M: "I think it'll work out in our favor!"

D: "Julius Caesar was not another Groundhog's Day."

L: "Isn't it being livestreamed on the IRS Facebook page?"
K: "That is a cursed sentence."

I: "I don't trust the government. I don't trust anyone! I don't trust myself! I do trust Paypal."

A: "Tomato grove?"
B: "Tomato thicket."

I, on the topic of grad school: "It was actually quite useful, but not directly."

F: "You know, I'm in a perfect position here to rob the bank."

R: "Can I promise that the results of this won't be used for evil, anywhere, ever? No."

I: "We're all just in a sorry state."

Z: "surveil and digitize" (which I suggested would be a good evil catchphrase)

L: "The problem with buying a fanny pack is..."

Z: "No, I don't want a duck-face filter, I want a duck filter. I want to look like a duck."

D: "When I look at the scores, I think... we shouldn't have explained to her how the points work."

L: "I like to say a long goodbye and get cut off so that my children feel an obligation to talk to me again soon."
D: "Mom, I don't think you should reveal the secrets of how you maintain the social contract!"

This post's theme word is meech (v), "to whine" or "to move in a furtive manner" or "to loiter." Stop meeching about the park, meeching to each other, I see you meeching over there!

How 2020 feels

Basically the only way I can engage with the horribleness of modernity, politics, society, economics, and human-built institutions which degrade everything about the human condition, is through other people's senses of humor.

For example, Tycho of Penny Arcade on the Google monopoly lawsuit:

There's a lot of odd dialogue that surrounds this stuff, like if you hate the naked exertion of monopoly power you're just hating the player or some shit. That you have a problem with people winning or something, issues with the concept of profit fundamentally. What an incredible rhetorical dodge! We're not talking about profit, and even if we were, it matters how the profit was generated. What we're talking about is a Draconic hoarding of wealth, collected in a vessel made from illegal mergers and filled by illegal acts.

... You can't really make the case to younger people that "capitalism," broadly writ, is gonna do shit for them. ... if money is allowed to pool like this, devils grow in it. If you don't fucking govern, if you don't moat these things in a circle of salt, they will invariably become something uncontainable - something too big to fail, part of the walls.  

Or Alice Fraser on reasons that the money-vampires who rule us hate the idea of minimum wage:

In the news today, debates about minimum wage rage on in America despite the entire economy collapsing in all directions. Because if you can't argue about how much money you shouldn't be paying the employees you're itching to replace with robots, how can you even call yourself a bloated blutocrat? 

Isn't it actually more insulting to pay someone a minimum wage that they can afford to feed their children with, than have them work for free while sucking at the milky teat of a rhetorical belief in forward momentum to a Trumpian future? Do you even want a job if you don't want to work for free? Have you ever thought that working for tips is just charity by c**ts who can refuse to give it to you if they don't like your smile, and let's be honest, you've got a shitty smile 'cause you can't afford teeth in your goddamn mess of a country. 

European countries have suggested that if you can't afford to pay your employees then you shouldn't have employees, if you can't run an economy on businesses that can afford to pay their employees, your economy is a lie, and if you're paying your employees in hopes for some sort of amorphous future advancement, you're not a business, you're a religion. (The Last Post 248: Arts in Crisis, 1m59s -- 2m51s, bleeping in original)

... or basically any episode of TRASHFUTURE, although I warn you that listening to educated people describe the state of the world has flung me into intense despair several times. (The hosts do lighten it with comedy but it's very much a sarcastic look at how horrible everything is.)

If you want something hopeful instead, I suggest following Cory Doctorow's excellent advocacy work, for example  the several articles, books, and links offered here.

This post's theme word is scamander (v. intr.), "to take a winding course." Most dystopias do not reasonably portray the slow scamander preface.

Quotes, summer 2020

I jotted down many quotes in this time interval, because every. single. social. interaction. now feels deeply meaningful and like a carefully conserved resource. Plus they're all happening over video chat, so my notebook is always at-hand. Here is a selection (some quotes were expurgated for being too personal, or too crass when out-of-context); my apologies that my name-randomizing algorithm does only one letter/person, and so has a lot of collisions in the namespace.

M: "I'm super-enjoying not owning things."

Z: "I'm sure there's middle-management goats."

M: "I have the, like, the limping-along ovary."

Z: "Moving online is just an endless stream of apps that stink."

B: "We're DnD role-playing millennial fantasy: we all have stable jobs and healthy relationships with good communication."

B: "Climb the clocktower?"
K: "That's the kind of thing I should wait until AFTER I have tenure to do."

J: "Filibuster #4 has been my favorite"

I: "I am confident our future department chair can be nimble and flexible in the upcoming Battle Royale."

Z: "A lot of this makes no sense."

K: "We learned: everything is bad and nobody is happy."

K: "I can't wait to read your bestselling business novel about How Not to be a Craven Bootlicker." 

Q: "Basically everything the administration does is a giant fuck-you to student culture."

Y: "... not disappointed with the decision, more disappointed with reality."

Y: "You can't compress coding time."

I: "What happens in a COVID year stays in a COVID year."

Z: "I have to look up what is legal or not legal in Pennsylvania."
Q: "Most things are legal if you don't get caught."

N: "[name redacted] stepped on my glasses. I'm trying to fix them."
N': "With a pine cone?"

Z: "All KINDS of things can happen!"
Q: "Meteors?"
Z: "Hurricane season's just getting started."

M: "Oooh, all this talk of working out, I'm sweating."

Z (offhandedly): "high-functioning democracy here"

M: "In theory, anything can be ruined with any move."

N: "If you go by feel you'll know what to do."
Z: "You might be setting your expectations of [name redacted] a bit high."

N: "Winter is coming." (w.r.t. self-haircuts)

Z: "Koi are domesticated carp. They'll eat trash. They're aquatic goats."

Z: "We need to think about how to teach our classes. We can't spend all our time doing other people's jobs."

M: "I don't like shoreline poop."

D: "To Americans right now, euros are fantasy currency."

N: "When I began my homeowning episode..."

Z: "I got the email that Swarthmore ran out of electricity." (i.e., power outage)
Z': "I like that phrasing."

Z: "Postmodern algebra... it's like Bauhaus meets rings and groups."

C: "[name redacted]'s like, this is lovely, I love being so confused."

C: "I tried to write 'an exercise left to the reader' in my homework."
Z: "In physics you can totally just insert a random minus sign to make it work."

C: "I ended up playing with my tmix configuration for a day and a half."
Z: "Quarantine life! ... why do something in 4 keystrokes when you could do it in 3?"

N: "He had it apart several times this week, doing exploratory surgery." (re: the dryer)

N: "You're living the life! Tomorrow you'll be 90 and you found a secret medication that lets you eat salami!"

Z: "I snoozed the email and hoped it would go away in a week. It has not gone away."

K: "We had a really similar form that was much shorter but still as stupid as this one."

N: "The serger so ups the quality of your sewing."
F: "It doesn't if you don't use it."

F: "Bike doula."
K: "I think you mean 'sherpa'."

K: "You're very badly-behaved children." (re: some adults)
F (parent): "They could be worse."

Z: "For upper-level courses I have no problem offering both, and if one of them just dies a natural death, that's fine."

N: "The 38th is conventionally the bandsaw anniversary. ... the 39th is the home security system for birds."

I: "We don't get updates because the policy is changing, we get updates because the slogan is changing."

Z: "Thank god there's a deadly virus around so we don't have to focus on Brexit anymore."

I: "That crisis only affects teenagers, so we don't care."

Z (product pitch): "Each week you get a box of foods that people won't purchase even in an emergency."

Z: "Thank god for climate change and the death of the amphibian."

Z: "Could the Ottomans competently administer a test to teens? I say, welcome to our new Ottoman overlords."

Z: "Someone pored over the outline of the eagle thing. Gotta get paid somehow."

Z: "Everybody universally hates the robot, which is the appropriate response."

Q: "Static! I only hear it when you're talking."
Z: "That's just my midwestern accent."

Z: "I was uncomfortable because I'm an idealist."

N: "It's a circular saw at the end of a string trimmer."
M: "Wait, like... Mad Max?"

[D joins the video chat]
All others: "Good morning! Welcome to Vasectomy Talk."

Z: "I have walked less than 20 steps today & all of them were on this camera."

D: "Whoever is playing the video of my voice, can you mute it?"

Firstborn: "Everyone knows I'm the one who inherits the titles and lands."
Secondborn: "And I have the right to marry a divorcée."
Thirdborn: "And I'm supposed to go into the clergy?"
[laughter]
Parent: "I love my children! That was the best possible answer! Perfect!

Q: "They'll only hear your yowls of pain when you're shocked for typing on the keyboard wrong."

This post's theme word is lithophone (n), "a musical instrument which is sounded by striking pieces of stone." It's easy to fall down a quarantine video rabbit-hole and watch many modern and ancient lithophones played.

April Fool's?

These posters mysteriously appeared on April 1 across campus.

They are expressing ... something ... stridently.

It's just not entirely clear what.
And there's no call to action, or url, or reference to a student group... The posters are handwritten in marker, mostly all-caps, on scrap paper. (At least, the pages I read were unrelated middle pages of math or biology articles.)

Is this an April Fool's joke? If so, ... what is the joke?

[Update April 2: posters still up, so reduce the probability estimation of "this is an April fool's joke".]

[Update April 3: found a poster with slightly more context.

Updated my weight for "this is a protest or other political movement" with some connection to climate activism.]


This post's theme word is ekistics (n), "the study of human settlements, drawing on such disciplines as city planning, architecture, sociology, etc." Climate scientists of the future will focus on ekistics as a subdiscipline.

Merry non-Christmas!

In the spirit of un-birthdays, merry non-Christmas to you!

Today's a pretty unexceptional day, so it's a great time to contemplate the infinite possibilities happening in parallel universes not our own.

Cartoon by Tom Gauld

This post's theme word is pernoctate (v intr), "to stay up all night", or "to pass the night somewhere." I passed the time with phantasms of present, past, and parallel realities, pernoctating while pondering possible payoffs.

The tiniest steamroller

It doesn't run on steam, of course, but this tiny steamroller is just the width of a single sidewalk square, and fits through the adorable under-train-tracks tunnel on campus.

Itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny yellow double-wheeled steamroller

Now in temperate zones, this may be the closest I get to seeing a sidewalk snowplow.


This post's theme word is rill (n), "a small stream; a narrow groove carved by erosion." The bottom of the rill was paved smooth and level.

Moderately romantic gesture by a yeti rumormonger

This sign was publicly posted, and I pass it almost every day. Now I put it on the internet, for the enjoyment of ages to come:

Last line reads: "P.S. I dropped the class and my back is now unscathed, thank you for caring."

I want to know more circumstances.

Who is moderatelyromanticgesture@gmail.com? 

How does the sign writer know Anne's last initial but not some other way to find her (facebook, twitter, university directory)?

Why 68%? Is this some reference to the circumstances of their meeting?

Why is 68% in blue? The author really splurged on color printing there.

Why not take the brush-off? There's a story hinted at here, where some people meet (possibly in a setting with nametags, so everyone has firstname-lastinitial identifiers), the author is charmed by Anne R., and she is not reciprocally charmed, so she manages to sneak off without giving out her number. The author, undaunted, initiates a passive but hopeful campaign to get her number.

Is the postscript sarcastic?

How did the author's back get scathed? What class-related activity is physically scathing?

Is the entire thing a honeypot for some psychology researchers who want to know how many people would respond to a moderately romantic gesture targeting someone else?

Please write your hypotheses in the comments below. Bonus points for creativity, using citations, identifying the location of the sign (have you seen one like it?), or emailing moderatelyromanticgesture@gmail.com and reporting what you find.

This post's theme word is onomancy, "divination by the letters of a name." An anagram of "moderately romantic gesture" is "yeti rumormongers acted late," one possible explanation of both why Anne refused to give her number, and why the author didn't manage to ask for it.

Icy ice ice

While walking through the downtown, I noticed this strangely organic pillar of white. Protected by a fence and barbed wire and a "no smoking" sign.
It looked at first like plastic, its uneven surface polished smooth. There seemed no ready explanation for a plastic blob protecting these pipes, and gradually my brain -- loosened from reality by the inhumane 80F+ temperatures -- wrapped itself around the idea that this might be ice.

It looks like ice. But what sort of reverse-heat sink ("heat source"?) is conducted on this scale, outdoors? And accompanied by the slow but steady dripping of water? I suppose it could be condensation, but in that case, the heat source is very poorly designed, because it is gradually reducing its radiative capacity with a giant, thermally-insulating icicle. If icicles were built by trowel, not by fairies.

Also, what good is an outdoors heat source in Canada? For a significant part of the year, outside will be below freezing and these pipes will only serve as a traditional heat sink.
Lastly, "no smoking"? The thought that a discarded cigarette butt could have some deleterious effect on this ice hunk is charming.


This post's theme word is esker, "a long, narrow ridge of gravel and sand deposited by a stream flowing in or under a retreating glacier." A bizarre esker of ice loomed above the city's summer streets.

The axiom of choice is provably mentioned in this post.

I have filled a research notebook full of notes and conjectures and half-thunk thoughts, and I am moving on to a new and vestal-white notebook, into which I shall spew the next few months' outpourings of my mind as it haplessly thrashes across the Fields of Higher Learning.* Before I discard this old, ratty notebook, I am flipping through it to glean any actual knowledge that I obtained and put down therein. (The conjectures are far more plentiful and thus less valuable, in accordance with the principles of economics as well as the judgment of learned mathematicians.)

Thus I present you with various quotes, as overheard by me in seminars and research meetings, from January through April 2011.

"You can picture the lizard crawling up onto the beach, fighting the forces of physics every step of the way." SM 1/19

"The thing about water is... it does tend to drip off your roof more than liquid methane. We're not on Titan." SM 1/19

"Does everyone know what an interactive proof is?" W.
"Do you want me to convince you?" J. 2/8

"What can a superenvelope do that n regular envelopes can't do?" M.
"You're about to find out!" W. 2/8

"As anyone who's ever had a child or been a child knows, ..." JT 2/15

"Unfortunately, that's how science works, too!" GT 2/15 on diminishing returns (of abstracted knowledge learning)

"The most beautiful thing I have found in studying mathematics is Truth. With a capital 't'." PO 2/17

"I'm not really sure what kind of audience you are... but if you were a mathematician, which I think some of you are, ..." PO 2/17

"There's a process in mathematics, it's called 'diagonalization,' and it looks almost magical." PO 2/17

"Small numbers are discovered, and big numbers are invented." PO 2/17

"The world of math is more real than the natural world b/c it has an objectivity. ... What color is an electron?" PO 2/17

"This VINDICATES mathematical institutions and departments." PO 2/17

(apologetically) "This is classical quantum physicist humor." P. 3/22

"And if we can cover it with that many balls, what happens?" S. 4/4

"What I learned from you: you have to always look at bit complexity, because algebraic complexity lies!" EK 4/8

"Yes, I know the general problem is hard, but I solve these everyday! -- and you ask, 'why can't you factor integers with this?' -- there are too many variables." EK 4/8

"We actually had to discuss -- to be scholarly -- to cite the 1649 paper!" EK
"To be scholarly, you're supposed to have actually read the paper." C. 4/8

"We thought we had the most complicated determinant algorithm, but they beat us by 20 pages!" EK 4/8

"In computer science, the level of hot air has to be zero. In other subjects, you don't have to be correct. Including mathematics." HF 3/15 (in pleasing contrast to PO 2/17)

"I don't know if counting from 1 bans me from giving a talk here." HF 3/15

"The axiom of choice is provably irrelevant to this talk." HF 3/15

"It's the most contrived thing ever done. 45 years of complete contriving, every day. And when it's done, it should seem completely natural." HF 3/15


This post's theme word is coprolalia, "an uncontrollable or excessive use of obscene language." I have never witnessed coprolalia in an academic seminar... yet.

*Pardon my sentence, which is to blame on a profusion of caffeine in my blood and Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle in my brain.

International Women's Day

Today is International Women's Day, a "major day of global celebration of women." Today, if you are so inclined, you can "inspire women and celebrate achievements," "make a difference , think globally and act locally !!", and "ensure that the future for girls is bright, equal, safe and rewarding." See the official site for more enthusiastic words.

I will spend today acting very locally, marking midterms in the endless effort to educate people (of both genders). I may take some time to work on ensuring my own future: research.

I hope you do something today that could be described in inspirational phrases.


This post's theme word is prosopography, "a study of the individuals in a group of people." I wish we focused on prosopography rather than generalizations. (Note: the OED agrees with my definition, above, but Wikipedia offers both this definition and its apparent opposite -- the word's meaning is subtle.)

Sword Swallowers Awareness Day

Sword Swallowers Awareness Day was February 26 (in conjunction with National Swallow Disorders Month -- I had no idea, and it's nearly over!). I know I missed it, but I thought it was worth mentioning anyway. Take some time out of your day today and thank the sword-swallower in your life. Give them a hug, unless there is a sword currently in play...


This post's theme word is acicular, "needle-shaped." He swallowed three acicular swords of increasing size!

Black and white

A woman, clad only in black and white, was redecorating the front window of this interior design store entirely with black-and-white wallpaper and fabric. I wonder if the yellow ladder felt out-of-place.

This post's theme word is vellicate, "to twitch or to cause to twitch," "to pluck, nip, irritate, etc." The ladder's appearance in an otherwise homogeneously-colored scene caused onlookers to violently vellicate.

Data management recommendation?

I have a bunch of data.
I made it out of clay.
And when it's dry and labelled,
I'll put it in a dossier.

I have some thousand or so data points, and I am looking for a program to organize them so that:

• it is easy to cut and slice them and get nice graphs
• it is easy to sort them on many dimensions
• it is easy to enter more data points

This project started quite small, and so I felt ok simply using an openoffice spreadsheet. There is now enough data that openoffice (and Excel) has trouble with the size of the file.

Do you have a recommended/preferred method for managing data?


This post's theme word is scienter, "deliberately" or "knowingly." It's an adverb: he waggled his eyebrows scienter.
This post written like Isaac Asimov.

Ice curtain

A curtain of icicles has slowly descended over the window across the alley from mine.
Cars drive through the alley below, with no regard to the massive property damage that may fall onto them from the sky anytime.
Look at that texture! I attended a seminar with some physicists who study icicle formation, and it's cool in every sense.


This post's theme word is guyot, "underwater mountain." Is the underside of an iceeberg an upside-down ice guyot?

Repetition

It's 10:10, 10/10/10. That is all.


This post's theme word: ploce, "the repetition of a word or phrase for rhetorical emphasis or for extended meaning." Really 10.

5 6 7 8 9 10.. ah ah ah!

It's 05:06:07pm on 08/09/10. I like to think that somewhere, a felt puppet of a vampire is croaking his laugh into the skies! (HT: danteshepherd.)


This post's theme word: campanile, "bell tower." Ask not for whom the campanile tolls...
This post written like Stephen King.

Pink cement truck

Walking home from school, I spied with my little eye:
... a pink cement truck!

Of course, like all other pink atrocities visited upon the public, this truck raises awareness of breast cancer. It performs this admirable task mostly by being pink, and secondarily by displaying a pink ribbon. (Thirdly, perhaps, by that website.)

The color really struck me, with its (1) unexpectedness, (2) purity of purpose (all pink! even the truck details!), (3) cleanliness (I expect cement trucks, like all construction machines, to be covered in dirt), and (4) contrast of a very stereotypically feminine color with a very stereotypically male job.


This post's theme word: campanulate, "bell-shaped."
This post is written like Vladimir Nabokov.

Spam spam spam!

I just got my first spam in maybe 6 months. How interesting! I couldn't find anything particularly strange about it to indicate how it had snuck through my several filters.


This post's theme word: wildcatter, "one who drills for oil speculatively," or "one who promotes an unsafe or fraudulent enterprise," or "a worker who takes part in a wildcat strike: a sudden strike not authorized by the labor union. "

Bureaucracy sucks

Bureaucracy sucks, and yet we give it much power over us. That is all. I got jerked around this week by some terrible bureaucracy.


This post's theme word: barratry, "The practice of stirring up of groundless lawsuits," or "an unlawful act by a ship's master or crew that harms the owner of the ship," or "the buying or selling of positions in church or state."

Stacked penguins

If you shake them long enough, this will eventually happen once.
This post's theme word: oleophobic, "lacking affinity for oils."