December 2011
2 tags
jrhyley replied to your post: Hey Jakke, do you have to take precautions against grizzlies where your parents live? I’m so in love with the North American wilderness, I would love to explore it fully one day.
”[…] where bears are not a particular concern.” Do I have to be the one to inquire whether the other sort of bear is much of a concern in the YKA? Well yes, apparently so.
Oh, yeah, outside...
itoldmyfriendsmyurllastnight asked: Hey Jakke, do you have to take precautions against grizzlies where your parents live? I'm so in love with the North American wilderness, I would love to explore it fully one day.
1 tag
ayiman replied to your post: thirty smoked trout
how do you guys smoke ‘em? as a connoisseur of smoked meat, I must know.
It’s kind of a trial-and-error process. All my grandparents grew up in small northern towns and come from cultural backgrounds where smoking fish involves salting them until all other flavour and texture is totally gone so that they’ll keep indefinitely in the...
4 tags
thirty smoked trout
Must resist the urge to eat them all immediately.
just caught myself being turned on by Merry when...
Ugh I need to get laid. Home tomorrow evening.
my entire family ships Eowyn and Aragorn so hard
Capable confident human princesses are so much sexier than morose indecisive elven princesses.
2 tags
attempted night hockey
I have neither skates nor a stick, and I’m not really proficient with either anyway, so I ran around the ice in boots kicking the puck and trying not to run into anyone. All my joints hurt from falling. It is almost t-shirt weather (I was just in t-shirt and jeans), so the ice was really soft and eventually we had to give up.
Had just watched the Fringe episode where the transgenic monster...
3 tags
after twenty years of my grandfather critiquing my...
I’ve finally realized that I can palm half a dozen matches beforehand and he doesn’t really notice. Filial piety achievement unlocked, sort of.
1 tag
garlandgrey replied to your photo: Trout getting ready to go in the smoker. It’s all…
At first glance that looks like a pile of… well, dicks.
I’m going to interpret this statement as an indication that your dick is eleven inches long, silvery pink, and heavily speckled along the top.
“Is that the man that just married the elf? What is Agent Smith wearing?...”
– The urge to liveblog the entirety of my parents’ reaction to Lord of the Rings is almost overwhelming.
“A group of white guys with long hair are talking about ridiculous things in a...”
– Attempting to fill my father in on Lord of the Rings while he’s in the kitchen making latkes. I’m in the kitchen making applesauce but when I went to the living room and asked my mother what was happening she said “we just met the blond lady” and my brother said...
“Why does Jesus need the ring? Why do the peasants fight for the kings like that?...”
– My parents are seeing LotR for the first time. They do not approve.
More Fringe after this, clearly.
3 tags
oh hey if you're living between Chalk River and... →
Then odds are pretty decent that uranium at weapons-grade levels of enrichment is being trucked past your house with neither public consultation nor expert oversight. Enjoy!
hiked up a frozen creek by my parents' cabin
Saw moose, deer, coyote, bear, beaver, and otter(!!!) tracks, and big depressions where the moose put their heads down to eat snow (or twigs or mice or whatever moose eat). Eventually the creek opens up into a big meadow. It’s so beautiful out there.
And then my foot fell through the ice and I got a bootful of supercritical creek water and now I’m back at the cabin with my feet as...
5 tags
71 more hours
2 tags
well this is suboptimal →
Demand for the 17-nation euro was limited as Italy plans to sell 9 billion euros of 179-day bills and as much as 2.5 billion euros of zero 2013 bonds on Dec. 28. It will auction on Dec. 29 bonds due in 2014, 2018, 2021 and 2022.
The nation plans to sell almost 450 billion euros of securities in 2012 to pay for maturing bonds and bills and cover the government’s budget deficit, Il Sole 24-Ore...
3 tags
mildly pathetic father/son bonding time
Making candied trout brine and putting in all the filleted trout, while pretending we’re Peter and Walter and we’re resurrecting the trout somehow.
picking up supplies for candied smoked trout
Oh my goodness so excited. And while my dad and I are doing this my mom and brother are getting cheese fondue supplies and vodka. Life is good.
Okay I need to get back to shouting at my dad’s car’s voice-activated system in a bad American accent so that it understands us.
Also there is a huge unmarked heavily secured facility recently built on the outskirts of town and no one knows...
Britta Perry as a Fringe villain
Surprisingly creepy, even if the episode is not great.
1 tag
love-and-radiation replied to your post: a list of things that Christians do not appreciate when visiting their homes on Christmas
Pretend Jesus tricks are always appreciated around here, even by the Christian boy. I think he’s been desensitized by years of me cracking Jesus/Buddha sexyjokes.
The best kind of sexyjokes!
And I think they were primarily offended when I took the gingerbread man...
a list of things that Christians do not appreciate...
Filling a wine glass with water and a wine glass with Manischewitz and pretending to turn water into wine
The entire concept of Manischewitz
Rearranging the manger to give higher prominence to the Gingerbread Man Christ and stacking the sheep in cheerleader formation
Been an exhausting but excellent day of visiting people.
The best part was seeing my maternal grandparents, who were in...
1 tag
arkingarts answered your question: who wants questions?
Is there a society, historical or modern, that economists believe is ideal? Or is there not one ideal just different theoretical situations?
In general economics doesn’t do that sort of normative statement - it’s more that you supply us with objectives (e.g. “We want to minimize child malnutrition” or “We want...
kya asked: How often do you change your bed sheets?
westcoasty asked: What would you ask Elizabeth May? she is having well-publicized public meetings in January.
mikerickson asked: Explain economics in one sentence.
thenoobyorker asked: I've never seen you address or anything but what's your relationship with sports?
1 tag
ubermichael answered your question: who wants questions?
How did your linux project turn out? Mine crashed yesterday and now I’m reinstalling. *sadface*
I’m still using Ubuntu 10.04, and too scared to upgrade. Things have been going pretty well with my computer, though! Currently trying to get multiple Conky panels running smoothly, which is a little tricky.
mapofideas-deactivated20111226 asked: I am really interested in economics, but I had never the time to follow any courses. So do you know a good book with contemporary theories about economics?
who wants questions?
Left at home alone while everyone else does winter type things so that I can get my horrible econometrics project done. Since I’m an infidel, Christmas is basically meaningless to me, so that’s okay.
Anyway, obviously I’m not planning on just sitting down and getting work done - so reply to this if you want questions. Also taking questions myself, and of course I’ll ask...
2 tags
marrinerkeynes asked: Thanks for posting. The loans were not even close to the right thing. We should have nationalized the banks, guaranteed the deposits, broken the banks up and then privatized them again. This is what the european governments did and this is what we did with the smaller banks. This would have spurred more growth by creating more competition, and the government would guarantee lending keeping the...
3 tags
2 tags
all the Federal Reserve lending data from the... →
That link is a 3.0 MB zip file that contains spreadsheets for every bank - 407 in total. Probably don’t click it if you’re reading this on your phone.
The loans totalled around $1.2 trillion. Citigroup, Bank of America, and RBS were relying really heavily on the loans, and Morgan Stanley had particularly low interest rates. Basically every big bank in the world (including all of...
well definitely not sleeping soundly tonight
My brother has always been really erratic and aggressive. Since I’ve gotten here, he’s had loud and incoherent tantrums when my parents declined to fly him out to see his Internet girlfriend again, when they denied him 24/7 access to a car (including when my father has work), and when they told him he couldn’t have any more drinks for the evening. He also goes on rants about how...
“Well, obviously she’s going to end up with the mad scientist’s son....”
– Introducing my family to Fringe has gone surprisingly well. But they are way too good with this sort of show.
3 tags
we're actually pretty insufferable
jakkebro: Here's the plane I worked on. Do you get to do this in economics?
jakke: Do you get to run countries in engineering?
jakkebro: You don't get to run countries.
jakke: Greece, Italy... oh I'm sorry. Did you get a 0.001% efficiency increase? That's an accomplishment, and you should feel really good about that.
jakkebro: And how's that going for Greece and Italy?
jakke: Going pretty effing well for the economists.
jakkemom: Ugh, please shut up.
1 tag
-rosasparks- replied to your photo: GPOY, sleep deprivation madness edition. At my…
Good luck. And that gate looks pretty empty right now. Kindof depressing…
I don’t think the gate behind me is active yet. This wing of the terminal is all regional flights to BC and the Yukon, so not so much happening at 7 am. The rest of the airport is pretty ridiculous, though.
Pretty ashamed to be...
3 tags
LHC reports discovery of its first new particle →
Oh hey this is really cool! It’s not new physics or anything (the new particle is an excited state of an existing meson, which was already predicted by theory) but still awesome to see that the LHC is producing results that couldn’t be observed at lower energy levels. It’s one of those things that mostly just confirms existing theory, but it’s still an important...
2 tags
2 tags
3 tags
full-on panic mode about going to my parents'...
Well this is pathetic.
4 tags
yup definitely teething
Hooray, my ability to chew cellulose just improved drastically! Also it’s coming in at the standard tooth angle, and there is a lot of empty space back there for it to occupy, so that seems all good for now.
1 tag
jasencomstock replied to your photoset: Here are some updated national uniform swing…
Gingrich has fallen off the map- he’s not even winning a majority in Georgia as of Monday.
Oh, definitely. But this is polling data from the last two weeks (weighted so that it decays with a halflife of about three and a half days) so it hasn’t entirely picked up that recent total collapse yet....
3 tags
3 tags
1 tag
British people apparently have such papery-thin...
Seriously I cannot even count the times my head has slammed into something and blood has not welled out. And my skull didn’t really suture properly so you’d think I would be particularly fragile.
I guess this is why no one gets concerned when people suddenly vanish - any time anyone accidentally hits their head on a blunt object their friends or coworkers quietly bury them in the...