amy g. dala

Future Trends for Same-Sex Marriage Support? - Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 09:35:58 -0600

via stat.columbia.edu

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Rands In Repose: The Foamy Rules for Rabid Tools

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 14:51:42 -0600

My tools appear deceptively simple. TextMate. Terminal. Transmit, LaunchBar, DropBox.

via randsinrepose.com

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What We Talk About When We Talk About Jeff Dunham - Backlashes - Videogum

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 14:16:46 -0600

No one is pushing for “political correctness” as a decontextualized blindly dogmatic philosophy. What people are pushing for is not pretending that racism and homophobia and misogyny and anti-semitism don’t exist, or trying to camouflage these things as “jokes.

via videogum.com

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Light reading: On Trying to Keep Still

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 12:15:00 -0500

Being really alone means being free from anticipation. Even to know that something is going to happen, that I am required to do something is an intrusion on the emptiness I am after. What I love to see is an empty diary, pages and pages of nothing planned. A date, an arrangement, is a point in the future when something is required of me. I begin to worry about it days, sometimes weeks ahead. Just a haircut, a hospital visit, a dinner party. Going out. The weight of the thing-that-is-going-to-happen sits on my heart and crushes the present into non-existence. My ability to live in the here and now depends on not having any plans, on there being no expected interruption. I have no other way to do it. How can you be alone, properly alone, if you know someone is going to knock at the door in five hours, or tomorrow morning, or you have to get ready and go out in three days’ time? I can’t abide the fracturing of the present by the intrusion of a planned future.

Jenny Diski, via jennydavidson.blogspot.com

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Unpublished letters to the Editor: 'Dear Sir, Am I Alone in Thinking?' - Telegraph

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:43:45 -0500

SIR – I find it intensely humiliating to be asked by airport security staff if I have packed my own bag. This forces one to admit, usually within earshot of others, that I no longer have a manservant to do the chore for me. Gentlemen should be able to answer such questions with a disdainful: “Of course not! Do I look like that sort of person?”

Arthur W. J. G. Ord-Hume, Guildford, Surrey

via telegraph.co.uk

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When We’re Equal, We’ll Be Happy - Judith Warner Blog - NYTimes.com

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 14:51:05 -0500

Freedom, opportunity, respect, dignity, self-determination and equality — those universal human rights we somehow judge optional for women — do not make people unhappy. Only roadblocks to those entitlements do. Particularly when those impediments are packaged as what we “really” want.

via warner.blogs.nytimes.com

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on 'information overload'

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 14:18:14 -0500

It is easy to dismiss this cornucopia as information overload. We’ve all seen people scrolling with one hand through a BlackBerry while pecking out instant messages (IMs) on a laptop with the other and eyeing a television (I won’t say “watching”). But even though it is easy to see signs of overload in our busy lives, the reality is that most of us carefully regulate this massive inflow of information to create something uniquely suited to our particular interests and needs—a rich and highly personalized blend of cultural gleanings.

The word for this process is multitasking, but that makes it sound as if we’re all over the place. There is a deep coherence to how each of us pulls out a steady stream of information from disparate sources to feed our long-term interests. No matter how varied your topics of interest may appear to an outside observer, you’ll tailor an information stream related to the continuing “stories” you want in your life—say, Sichuan cooking, health care reform, Michael Jackson, and the stock market. With the help of the Web, you build broader intellectual narratives about the world. The apparent disorder of the information stream reflects not your incoherence but rather your depth and originality as an individual.

via wilsoncenter.org

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I got yer Magic Mouse right here

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 13:22:00 -0500

biorhythmist:

Mac peeps, here’s your magic trick for the day:

Hover over a word with your mouse cursor. Now press command-control-D.

Thank you and good night.

swhy: What Children’s Drawings Would Look Like If Painted...

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 12:37:46 -0500

swhy:

What Children’s Drawings Would Look Like If Painted Realistically

mariaschneider (mariaschneider) on Twitter

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 21:25:31 -0500

I’m going as a semicolon for Halloween. It’s a well-known fact people fear them more than vampires.

via twitter.com

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Timewarp: How your brain creates the fourth dimension

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 12:45:42 -0500

Sounds tend to be processed faster than images, so without some sort of grouping system we might, say, hear a vase smashing before we see it happen.

via newscientist.com

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simplified and lucid image of the world

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 13:57:32 -0500

“One of the strongest motives that lead persons to art or science
is a flight from the everyday life. With this negative motive
goes a positive one. Man seeks to form for himself, in whatever
manner is suitable for him, a simplified and lucid image of the
world, and so to overcome the world of experience by striving to
replace it to some extent by this image. This is what the
painter does, and the poet, the speculative philosopher, the
natural scientist, each in his own way. Into this image and its
formation, he places the center of gravity of his emotional life,
in order to attain the peace and serenity that he cannot find
within the narrow confines of swirling personal experience.” - Albert Einstein

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on Dad Lit...

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 18:02:20 -0500

Yet Dad Lit is a tricky business, fraught with traps: the putatively self-deprecating vignette that actually demonstrates how pleased the author is with himself; the inordinately delineated neuroses of the overexamined life; the T.M.I. disclosures of sexual proclivities and other familial weirdness; the tone-deaf presentation of some mundane, schleppy aspect of parenthood (e.g., the absence of “me” time, the utility of swim diapers) as some sort of epiphanic discovery.

via nytimes.com

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the Skyscraper Index

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 09:39:43 -0500

In 1999 the research director at investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein invented something called the “Skyscraper index”, arguing that the construction of super-tall buildings is often a sign that an economic downturn is on the way.

via guardian.co.uk

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Rich People Things, with Chris Lehmann: Free Fall in Crimson | The Awl

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 16:11:54 -0500

…Or that the school’s endowment is in freefall largely thanks to the ruinous—dare one say girlish?–miscalculations of a former Harvard president best known for deriding the math abilities of the fairer sex.

via theawl.com

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The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:03:44 -0500

A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

via nytimes.com

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"Now that the economy is suffering, there is talk of reforming the prisons, of reviving the..."

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 10:56:42 -0500

“Now that the economy is suffering, there is talk of reforming the prisons, of reviving the discredited concept of rehabilitation, of letting some prisoners out early. Some people have even mentioned doing away with the death penalty because of the exorbitant cost to the state of guaranteed appeals. For those of us who have endured a generation of policies intended explicitly to inflict pain, this has a surreal quality to it. After all, it was only a year ago that the state authorities were planning the next phase of prison expansion. Obviously, all the passionate arguments that have been made about the moral wrongs of mass incarceration, of disproportionately affected communities, of abysmal treatment and civil rights violations were just so much hot air. Only when society ran out of ready cash did prison reform become worthy of serious consideration. What this says about the free world is unclear to me, but it doesn’t feel like a good thing.”

- Op-Ed Contributor - The Recession Behind Bars - NYTimes.com

"The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good."

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 14:05:18 -0500

“The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.”

- Samuel Johnson (via theimpossiblecool)

Untitled

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 08:44:29 -0500

“Managers may truly believe that, without their unremitting
efforts, all work would quickly grind to a halt. That is not my
impression. While I encountered some cynics and plenty of people
who had learned to budget their energy, I never met an actual
slacker or, for that matter, a drug addict or thief. On the
contrary, I was amazed and sometimes saddened by the pride people
took in jobs that rewarded them so meagerly, either in wages or
in recognition. Often, in fact, these people experienced
management as an obstacle to getting the job done as it should be
done. Waitresses chafed at managers’ stinginess toward the
customers; housecleaners resented the time constraints that
sometimes made them cut corners; retail workers wanted the floor
to be beautiful, not cluttered with excess stock as management
required. Left to themselves, they devised systems of
cooperation and work sharing; when there was a crisis, they rose
to it. In fact, it was often hard to see what the function of
management was, other than to exact obeisance.” - Barbara Ehrenreich, in Nickel and Dimed.

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now it all clicks

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 09:21:00 -0500

Cheney makes better sense if you add, “— , Clarice” to the end of his sentences. “Torture worked, Clarice” (via @pourmecoffee)

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