Which Ferdinand?

This Be The Verse, the grad school version (there has to be a name for a technique where you imply that you could say "grants out-churn" but say "churned out grants," thereby making your poem kind of rhyme and at the same time not say ridiculous things like "out-churn." One possible candidate is "laziness"):

wrote the academic version of This Be The Verse (cf. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178055 )

Your supervisors fuck you up
They may not mean to, but they do
They give you problems they screwed up
And add some extra, just for you

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats
Who half the time churned out grants
And half were at each other's throats

Man hands on misery to man
It deepens like a coastal shelf
Get out as early as you can
And don't take advisees yourself

(unfinished, but posted to FB nonetheless)

This one I'm actually kinda proud of:

Science does not always proceed in a linear fashion. One necessarily sometimes pursues research programs that turn out to have been futile, tries to develop ideas that turn out to have been confused, and tests out hypotheses that turn out to be false. It is in this spirit that I report to you that the hypothesis that a _Firefly_ marathon would lead to progress on the paper I'm working on has been empirically tested and rejected.

The paper in question is still, of course, unfinished.

I was walking around thinking unkind thoughts, as I do, about other people's creative output. Also, I'm going through a Paul Simon phase, as I also do.

Anyway, a useful unit in which to rate other people's creative output is hoots in I Know What I Know



The idea here is that the hoots are a decent idea, but not anything earth-shattering.

For calibration purposes, let's say this one is two hoots.

I can't be bothered to wait until I can use it in context: "Pull on all the heartstrings."

Item: the experience of learning to park is (well, should be) a bit weird: you're driving along and picking the car that's going to risk being scratched, just because.

Things that are like that, except not really: driving on the highway, and, I suppose, personal relationships.

Relatedly, isn't it weird how if you give someone the flu you're not supposed to compensate them in any way? I can see how establishing a legal norm would be hairy, but what about just a social norm?

when a graduate student and a thesis committee have an intellectually productive working relationship, a thesis is born. How Google didn't know this until now, I don't know.

* * *

Also, I have this idea with the Three Vices (Belle & Sebastian, I Can Haz Cheezburger, pr0n) and a Venn diagram, but I'm not sure how it could work and not be trite or coarse or both.

* * *

I have this obscure theory about Kodachrome. I think Kodachrome might be a metaphorsynecdoche for photography.


(N.B., Simon isn't even wrong on one point: he sometimes says "everything looks better in black and white," and sometimes "everything looks worse in black and white")

(An example of the unreliability of Wikipedia: a couple of years ago, the entry for Cecilia said that Cecilia was Simon's dog's name. An example of my gullibility: I thought that was a thing I knew, the kind of thing that before cracked.com you could use in conversation without people just assuming you got it from Cracked.)

(By the way, I don't find Cracked amusing anymore, which is awesome. More time for House marathons)

But I have a new project (first post here)

Consider the statement "Eyes that watch the morning star seem a little brighter." As we well know, the morning star is a.k.a. the evening star. And yet, let us suppose, eyes that watch the evening star don't seem brighter at all, or perhaps seem a lot brighter. So yeah.

So in principle, people should be reading, like, Dorothy Parker instead of xkcd and listening to webcast university lectures instead of reading stupid political blogs.

E.g., good stuff, though I guess not easy listening w/out reading the introductory chapter of a macro textbook.

(x-posted)



Googling around, I found this 2007 PNAS paper (ungated version is on google), which at first seems to say that it's because the wires are long and flexible, which is true as far as it goes but not very enlightening.

The actual answer is there as well, though (and it seems obvious in retrospect, so maybe you knew that all along, but still):
headphones don't stay untangled because while the plug isn't moving much, the headphones on the other end of the wire are, and you can form any knot by braiding (by theorem and practically).

In other news, (textually NSFW) Siberian Steve is the funniest meme ever. (Go somewhere disreputable on the internet before you click that link). I've been saying that about dogs for years [1]. Though I suppose Mikhail Bulgakov got there first.

[1] This is why I'm absolutely against getting any more than 4 of them at a time.

Item: saying a feeling is "indescribable" is [what's the phrase that should go here?] the liar's paradox. It could be that it weren't, but it is a contingent fact about the universe that "indescribable" describes a fairly narrow range of feelings, so it is after all. Case in point.

The word of the day is Saudade, an eminently describable feeling.