croissants

The past few months have, among other things, illustrated to me how many people feel hurt by past experiences with mathematicians, and how this, not always unreasonably, colors their opinions of the field and its future today.

There are much easier and more prestigious ways of fulfilling university service requirements than reviewing and editing for TMLR, so I think it is correct in spirit to label it as volunteering.

I took a course on Freud in college, and what struck me at the time was that the framework of psychoanalysis seemed basically cruel, in that the analyst was free to say that either acceptance or rejection of their claims was evidence for them, and that it would be maddening to deal with that for any extended period of time.

The paper does more than that. It measures wet bulb temperatures at different stops with different combinations and varieties of trees and bus stops, provides decent evidence of variation among these combinations, and attempts to explain the variations. For example, the roles played by evaporation from leaves and shelter material weren't obvious to me before reading.

More generally, this method of interacting with the most simplified interpretation of science and then criticizing its simplicity isn't useful to the criticizer or the criticized.

+1 for Consumer Reports. They're not expensive either, something like $5 per month. If they keep you from buying a bad fridge, it pays for itself!

Their recentish coverage of lead in foods is a bit embarrassing though, since they used a California standard for dosage limits that even the EU would blush at.

I chalk that up as lame but kind of inevitable mild corruption that doesn't really go anywhere -- Hunter seems more like an embarrassing addict child that a caring parent has no choice but to put up with than somebody who can truly peddle influence over his father -- and feel that this administration is a vast difference in degree of corruption. Degrees matter!

Yeah, The Economist regularly writes these articles that spend half the time praising the intense competition in certain sectors of the economy and half the time bemoaning the influence of state-owned enterprises (or other CCP instruments) in others. It seems to vary a lot by specific industry.

At least in moderately urban parks in the USA, one complicating factor is that a lot of the dirt has dog poop scattered on top.

I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned Blindsight. I don't think it's a spoiler to say that it is a book about the place of human intelligence in a universe with other options, both biological and artificial.

Please elaborate?

I'm not sure what word to apply to facing three familial tragedies, any one of which might seem like more than a life's fair share of misfortune, with that kind of perseverance. Inspiring is too glib, inhuman is too alienating. Whatever kind of mettle that is, I hope to never have to prove it.

Yeah, I think this is one of those domains where frictions (or lack thereof) matter. It is much faster, cheaper, and easier to send out a significant volume of material on the Internet than through the mail. In theory, somebody could send a bunch of obscene trolling letters, but having to lick all those envelopes seems to deter most of the people who'd be otherwise tempted.

> they can be applied to many different situations, even business management and interpersonal relationships

Disclaimer: most people do not think "Machiavellian" is a flattering descriptor