this week i

met at the station after english class.  bought two tickets and some snacks.

arrived in the cool evening.

ate waffles, time for bed.

woke up to a view hidden by the night before.

climbed each of the seven hundred and fifty stairs.

made faces..

..probably not a proposal in the background.

went to town.

rented bikes.

shared an inside joke.

drank cold cinnamon cappuccinos, impersonated dogs who swallow bees.

headed back to the city, thirty fewer hours to live.

9/24

this week i

grew my wings in math class.  djalma has been busy with inequality estimation, i help when i am able.

received a scolding from the security guard for this photo.

ask what if demography were a huge conspiracy and there are maybe 457,200,000 people living on earth and not this many.  we would never know.

consider believability the key to great sex.

only juggle two at a time: travel, exercise, work.  i am as high-maintenance as they come, this was my epiphany.

watched colombian wild magic at the theater near me.  hummingbirds gore each other while competing for nectar and mates.  and now i want an oso perezoso, more than i've wanted a pet since those enchanted moments between learning that sugar-gliders exist and learning that they cannot be housebroken.  saturday morning so if you can't join 'em, be 'em.  bottle says bogota beer company but, really people, it is bogota empresa ceverza.

ate mexican food together, i ordered too much.  we'll go to the lake and celebrate colombian valentine's and then i'll be off for london while she continues her life from a couple months back.  i didn't understand why she was alone when i met her, now even less clear.

9/17

this week i

found our work in the american hospital association's anti-merger recommendation.

landed code within the official documentation at the bureau of labor statistics.

rode one of these for just a donut.  when did this happen?

remember the nepali immigrant at the 7-11 where my father buys coffee and cigarettes each morning.  one day he was gone, and my father inquired: he'd saved $100,000 working as a cashier over five years then returned home to live like a king.  that dude had a plan.

am facebook friends with my aunt, fluent in emoticon.

listened to mitch hedberg for another minute.  sometimes i close my eyes during a show because i have drawn a picture of an audience enjoying the show more on the back of my eyelids. 

find some old music and we dance for a little while.  let us pause in life's pleasures.  my mother preferred the nanci griffith version.

hate traveling.  why can't all of these awesome places come to me?

read..

(1) earth as an organism

in the carboniferous, about three hundred million years ago, oxygen levels seem to have risen to somewhere between 27 per cent and 35 per cent.  this probably aided in the evolution of the disconcertingly huge insects - dragonflies with seventy-centimetre wingspans - that existed at the time and may have also aided the evolution of animal flight.  oxygen levels then plummeted during the triassic (the early period of the dinosaurs), reaching a gasping 15 per cent

(2) religious offense and the press

the argument for "respect" is so uncomfortably intertwined with fear of the assassin's veto

(3) machine learning and the end of uber

a 'flop' is a floating point operation, i.e. a calculation involving numbers which include decimal points (these are computationally much more demanding than calculations involving binary ones and zeroes).  a teraflop is a trillion such calculations per second.  once red was up and running at full speed, by 1997, it really was a specimen..this red equivalent is called the ps3: it was launched by sony in 2005..red was only a little smaller than a tennis court, used as much electricity as eight hundred houses, and cost $55 million.  the ps3 fits underneath a television, runs off a normal power socket, and you can buy one for under two hundred quid

there has never been an invention in human history which has improved at such speed over such a long period

check out my shiny metal ass

we see the computer age everywhere, except in the productivity statistics

it says a lot about the current moment that as we stand facing a future which might resemble either a hyper-capitalist dystopia or a socialist paradise, the second option doesn't get a mention

9/10

this week i

wager that alien civilizations are also too-quickly exploiting the buried carbon fuel sources beneath their martian surfaces, laid there during the eons of evolution it took for that first species to reach sentience.

expect to ride a motorcycle when i'm old.

ate regular breakfast.

(1) costa concordia

on the morning of 2 july 1816, when captain de chaumareys piloted the french frigate medusa into shallow water near the coast of senegal..the waters into which the medusa was sailing were ominously warm.  the captain did not take note.  the sea went green, and crew members worried.  the captain did not.  sand scrolled in the waves.  floating cities of kelp appeared: trouble, crew members knew.  the sea went clear..the medusa ran aground on the treacherous arguin bank..the captain abandoned ship, and worse, cut the rope to the raft of survivors he had pledged to tow.  only 15 of 147 on the raft survived

he was described as ruggedly handsome (nine-tenths of those who come to the aid of survivors in such an emergency, locals who feel the urgent call to heroism as a natural order of life, are later described as ruggedly handsome)

(2) the indispensable candidate

the treariness begins with the real possibility that jeb bush will be her opponent, setting up another contest between two dynasties, one of which 'exploited its vast wealth to obtain political power, while the other exploited its political power to obtain vast wealth'

the blandest understatement in a relentlessly bland book

(3) stupid deaths

most of west africa is in a public health desert, which is why ebola spreads, as well as a supportive care desert, which is why it kills

(4) a volcano in indonesia flaps its wings

starving parents selling their children in the streets of kunming: 'stop crying and go with him..because to buy you he must feed you.'

aerosol particles from tambora, lingering in the stratosphere above the bay of bengal, blocked out enough sunlight to alter the weather pattern, 'inhibiting evaporation from the ocean and deflating the temperature differentiation of land and sea'

the dranse de bagnes river in southwest switzerland was blocked by a natural dam of ice, holding back a vast body of water.  as the ice began to melt in the warming weather, and the amount of water accumulating behind the dam increased, it was only a matter of time before it burst, inundating the valley below.  (the icelandic term for floods of this kind..is jokulhlaups; in french they're known as debacles.)..the engineer in charge of digging the tunnel was called ignace venetz..in 1821, he wrote a paper in which he 'developed the outlines of modern glacial theory and periodic ice ages'

if a three-year climate change event in the early 1800s was capable of such destruction..then the future impacts of multidecadal climate change must be truly off the charts

(5) the franc

'unlimited quantities': when a central bank says that, it is in effect a declaration of currency war

37 per cent of all polish household debt is held in swiss francs

you can't make it illegal for people to punch themselves in the face, and so similarly you can't crack down on retail forex: that seems to be the logic

(6) ersatz college justice

this is rather like having a group of train conductors prosecute the rape of a female commuter, on the basis that the crime violates her equal right to use public transport

(7) flaws of the turing movie


9/3