March 2012
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thecallus answered your question: help wanted
Visio + Excel
I’m a filthy hippie and run Linux. So this is sort of infeasible.
unfuckwithable answered your question: help wanted
instagram + excel
This I could pursue. Thesis proposals are always enriched by pictures of pale girls standing barefoot in meadows and such.
help wanted
What software do you use to generate elegant flowchart-type graphs? Say, graphs of software dependencies (but I’m not looking at software here)?
[EDIT: all the gratitude to cakesandcourage for suggesting yEd, which seems to be entirely optimal so I’m going with that.]
ran into inlikewiththecity
Despite the fact that I’ve met him before, and I was like three blocks from his school, I had this initial reaction of “oh my goodness how did you get off the Internet” - but I think I concealed it well enough that he didn’t notice. Now he is off being charming to prospective employers and I am scrambling to make sure that research project that was approved earlier today is...
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astationaryjew replied to your quote: Yeah, so this sounds like it could be a good first…
Can we form a Ridiculous Overreactions to All Kinds of Feedback Club? (Don’t tell me if you don’t want to, because I will cry.)
All the positive feedback in the world for this idea!
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“Yeah, so this sounds like it could be a good first chapter of your thesis.”
– Okay so those of you who are well aware of how ridiculously I overreact to any negative feedback may or may not be surprised to know that I overreact just as ridiculously to any positive feedback.
February 2012
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toasterhaus replied to your photo: Just in case we get invaded I made a helpful map…
I would argue that Vancouver is very worth invading. I would love for Vancouver to be in the United States (not Vancouver, WA, it can leave).
Psh if you like Vancouver so much then you can arrange for Kansas City to join Canada.
“I’ll get us that oil from Canada that we deserve.”
– Mitt Romney, during his victory speech Tuesday night. WTF? (via politicalcanuck)
Welp, we’re apparently getting invaded.
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Iran 'to accept payment in gold for oil' →
Oh wow - this is really not a good place for Iran to be. Gold is way more illiquid (difficult to exchange for useful goods) and way more volatile (way more likely to fluctuate in value) than, say, dollars or euro or yen. The fact that they’re accepting gold is unambiguously a sign of desperation.
Why is this happening now? Probably because sanctions on the Iranian government and economy are...
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“Canada committed itself this week to funding reserve schools “on par” with...”
– Welcome to Canada in 2012. Hopefully this declaration of principle leads to reserve schools actually being funded at the same level as off-reserve schools of similar characteristics, because the current state there is pretty atrocious.
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kind of sketches me out when my parents make...
Like, in an email I just got from my father he mentions that actually, I was once in the town he is in right now, because we went through there when we lived nearby when I was four years old.
Problem is, he’s around 11,000 km away. And when I was four years old I’m almost certain I was living in Vancouver! I have clear recollection of going to preschool here. I’ve biked...
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Bloomberg is calling Arizona for Romney
Arizona is winner-take-all so this matters way more for overall delegate count than Michigan. People seem to think Arizona is majority-Mormon and therefore was a lock for Romney, but it’s actually only around 5% Mormon - although I guess they are probably overrepresented in Republican primaries.
jasencomstock asked: re: your exchange with Zaink. Not really. self identifying republicans vote early and often, and they compose about 25% of the electorate, self-identifying conservatives will happily stay home, like in 2006.
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c-newt replied to your post: Romney/Snowe 2012
I think she’s tired of being one of the three (arguably) reasonable Republicans in the Senate.
Were that the case, why wouldn’t she just switch parties? I can’t see how she wouldn’t win re-election. I mean, she won in 2006 with almost 75% of the vote in an election that was quite bad for Republicans in a state where Obama...
Romney/Snowe 2012
Is that what this is all about? Or is she just tired of being generally well-liked and influential?
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maybe if Watson was a Catholic priest who'd...
Then I could see why the CBS Sherlock casting would be super dubious. As it is - yeah, I’m just unfollowing anyone who complains about the fact that CBS is going with Lucy Liu rather than a white dude.
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“You send all the mosquito nets, and then they say “oh that’s great...”
– Just when I thought that okay maybe the activist-y type grad students are interesting and possibly productive to talk to one of them gave me this explanation of why overseas development aid is a bad thing. (The “mosquito nets” in question go over children’s beds to protect them...
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have asked every Jew in this city I'm even...
i-thaphithin:
jakke:
They have what looks like some pretty awesome live cabaret-type music and then a local painfully Jewish DJ and this is exactly the kind of cultural event I feel like I should start going to and I shouldn’t feel so awkward and nervous for wanting to go to such a social event while being Jewish and queer because I know like half the organizers and they’re all really cool...
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the guy who got stabbed for no reason at the...
Feeling a little irrationally teary with relief, because he’s in his seventies and shows up in the evening to listen to music on his mp3 player and drink coffee very slowly and he’s so friendly to the staff and it’s really weird to think that someone can just get killed out of nowhere for no reason like that.
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have asked every Jew in this city I'm even...
They have what looks like some pretty awesome live cabaret-type music and then a local painfully Jewish DJ and this is exactly the kind of cultural event I feel like I should start going to and I shouldn’t feel so awkward and nervous for wanting to go to such a social event while being Jewish and queer because I know like half the organizers and they’re all really cool (and this is...
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lawful... →
wtftory:
Remember when the Conservatives were all about getting rid of the long form census because it was an invasion of privacy? I’ not sure how the fuck you spin this exactly. It’s a one giant bill full of creepy-ass-creep.
Canadians on tumblr, pay attention to this. This is a really massive and unprecedented expansion of police surveillance capabilities. If you’re not the political...
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stayinbedgrowyourhair replied to your post: getting quite a volume of angry hatemail from a tumblr I’ve never heard of
ok FINE it’s me i can’t help it if i get a little miffed sometimes
I KNEW IT! I’m secretly on your side regarding Macedonia and Albania and Cyprus and some chunks of Turkey and Bulgaria why not. All of them should be parts of Greece!
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getting quite a volume of angry hatemail from a...
In German, which is kind of cool!
Not going to publish it, because ‘faschistoides Archloch’ is pretty much the nicest thing it has to say - and then when I clicked through it’s a Greek irredentist tumblr (i.e., a particularly unpleasant and vigourous Greek nationalist) so don’t want to give it traffic. I’m guessing it’s in response to this post, since the...
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currently working through a paper which uses w and...
Took me a very long time to figure out what was going on there.
One of the downsides of economics is that papers stay in prepublication “working paper” form for a very long time (like, up to multiple years) and during that phase they can be widely discussed and even cited but they’re not really particularly polished. The problem is especially bad when dealing with the more dicey...
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achichi-javier replied to your post: Do you think it’s justified to ask Israel to dismantle the Jewish-Zionist nature of its state?…
For some reason I had a feeling we would agree on this. It seems to be an “unpopular opinion” (I guess?) especially among libs and “leftists” but a lot of times I think their conception of democracy is problematic (rooted in western lib values)
...
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achichi-javier asked: Do you think it's justified to ask Israel to dismantle the Jewish-Zionist nature of its state? Or, alternatively, for it to maintain that character? Do you think the labels "Jewish" and "democratic" are contradictory, or that a symbiosis is realistically possible - that the fundamental nature of the state can be maintained while reforms are made to improve the conditions...
oh and in case you're interested in what the US... →
A couple years ago they released these predictions for what the world would look like in 2025. Take this with a huge grain of salt, because they definitely predict the US being way more on top of things than seems reasonable. They’re also really pessimistic about China:
The pace of China’s economic growth almost certainly will slow, or even recede, even with additional reforms to address...
westcoasty asked: physics q;do you feel theoretical physics is close to a ' single unified theory'? do you think a single theory is possible?
mikerickson asked: What's the likelyhood of BRIC nations becoming first-world status in our lifetimes?
achichi-javier asked: What do you make of the parallels being made between the current situation with Israel (& the US) & Iran with the WMD situation between the US and Iraq? A lot of more liberal writers & journalists especially seem to see a direct parallel of exaggerated and evocative statements "beating the war drums". But some academics argue that because of the involvement of the IAEA there...
itoldmyfriendsmyurllastnight asked: If you were to somehow remove all of the energy from matter so that it wasn't moving and then you could stop the inertia (well that would have to come first i suppose) allowing the things to orbit and travel through space so everything was still. Would this be the equivalent of stopping time? Or would time continue to move forwards?
jayoublie asked: What's your opinion on "kink culture?"
who wants questions?
I recognize basically none of the people or movies that are happening this evening and therefore I want to talk about something else. Let me know if you want questions, and specify what you want them to be about. I’m also taking questions if you’re so inclined.
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finally find a paper that tries to link human...
And I’m pretty unfamiliar with the data sources and with the way they do their stats, but it is presenting this really novel result that transportation doesn’t really have much effect on atmospheric chemistry. So that’s cool and novel right?
And then I realize that all the authors have “Research and Advanced Engineering, Ford Motor Company” as their sole...
Reuters | BRICS to look at bid for top World Bank... →
sharquaouia:
The world’s major emerging economies on Saturday rejected the tradition that an American automatically is selected to head the World Bank and they will look at putting forward their own candidate for the open job.
Finance chiefs from the BRICS group of emerging market powerhouses - Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa - met on the sidelines of a G20 meeting in Mexico...
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“The last time Rocky Twyman and friends invoked the power of prayer to pull down...”
– Is it bad that I read this and immediately saw an empirical energy economics paper testing the causal relationship between prayer and gas prices just begging to be published? Because I could totally write that paper and I think it would totally advance our knowledge of economics. (Although I...
“Oh look if I include a duplicate for every country in the dataset then the error...”
– For like ten seconds I thought I’d found a totally revolutionary aspect of statistics that would let me shrink all the error bars to zero (by just including a few thousand copies of every data point) but then I realized that yeah this is probably not legitimate.
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thedisgruntledgradstudent replied to your photo: Just got a Fijian penny in change! Exactly the…
It looks like it has a contact lens printed on it.
That’s just the terrible quality of the photo. It looks more like a communal bowl with perpendicular supports on the actual coin.
I like how tumblr legitimizes having crushes on...
If all those other strangers on the Internet do it, then how grossly inappropriate could it be, right?
okay not even sure what this one means
Dreamed I was at an equal marriage rights rally and someone was explaining how the feeling of being in love requires high levels of oxytocin in the bloodstream and therefore you can only really love someone with whom you have quality orgasms and if you want people to marry then you have to let them marry someone with whom they have quality orgasms. Wait, what?
Also, it looks like the oxytocin...