There is a common confusion among humans between doing something that is fun and doing something that it useful. Put as directly as that, it seems silly – “I can tell the difference between fixing my flat tire and putting plastic wrap across the toilet seat” – but it’s a bit more subtle than all that. As my example, I’m going to use a current internet “fad”
Author: Al Denelsbeck
The proper way
Sorry, this will be brief, and pointless. Courtesy of a post by Sean Carroll, I herewith present the proper way to order your favorite drink:
1. Ask for what you want.
2. Drink it.
You will note that I have excluded everything having to do with learning how anyone else does it, receiving instruction, and most especially long discussions about what effect some method produces. It’s your
What’s not in a word?
Not too long ago, I picked up a book that I’d had, not exactly in my childhood, but in my earlier adulthood (which may yet be my childhood, at least if you ask some people, including me.) Tortured sentences aside, I’m finding it quite interesting to note how differently I react to the content now, two decades after my first read-through.
The book is called Mysteries of the Unexplained,
Anonymity and the web
Over at Why Evolution Is True, Jerry Coyne has posted a new rule regarding anonymity and pseudonyms – specifically, that he no longer allows someone to link to his site from another when critiquing his posts, unless they’re using their real name. I will stress that as a policy,
Grecian troublemakers
This is a revisit of a subject that I first broached in this post, which I felt needed more examination. So let’s return to that radical concept of Phi.
Phi is a mathematical ratio that, curiously enough, has more than a few close representations in nature. It is an irrational number, one of those decimals that go on forever, but usually shortened to 1.618. If you create a rectangle
But how uncertain do you feel?
I have very mixed feelings about emotions [now, there’s a sentence of remarkable profundity.] As manifestations of internal functions to provoke behavior that benefits our species, they are distinctly important, but too often, they’re not specific enough, or they’re too easy to fool, producing behaviors that don’t really benefit us and are sometimes quite detrimental. I hate
Nicely done!
[UPDATE: The video has been taken down now, since apparently the copyright holders of the ABBA music felt that a non-profit organization using it was “too commercial” and was unlikely to boost the sales of a thirty-five-year-old song. Did you need more proof that attorneys are not bright?]
It’s been a while since I mentioned having worked in an animal shelter, a portion of my life
Not the right kind of composition
Just a quick image from tonight, as Jupiter passed close to the moon. Or at least, from the given perspective of one position in the universe presently occupied by Earth. Jupiter has often been much closer to the moon, distance-wise, even when not visible in the sky at all.
This is admittedly both not very good, and a digital composite. The reason for the composite is the wide disparity in light
Chasing megapixels
Some time back, I’d started a post on this subject, partially in response to a thread somewhere, but when I took too long to finish it I realized it was, in webby terms, no longer current, and simply let it go. But after another prompting, this time from The Straight Dope, I decided it’s worth pursuing anyway, and may provide a little insight into the whole digital photography thing.
Dead of winter
Well, okay, it’s really hard to refer to the dead of winter in the mid-latitude US in normal circumstances, and it seems it’s going to keep getting harder to do that with warming trends. The temperatures yesterday and today exceeded 21°c (70°f,) spurring some activity not just from me, but from other critters as well.
Above, a red-tailed hawk (Buteo jamaicensis) rides