November 29, 2003
The Josh Cooking Show
AFS describes the hypothetical What's Cooking with Josh Zimmerman cooking show. I would like to add:
- Saturday @ High Noon: Bacon flavored sausage.
His particular choice--Swift Premium Brown 'n Serve--gets a bad rap:
Plastic sausage come to life. They are bland, artificial-tasting and spongy. [link]
But as in bad music and B movies, I think there is a certain je ne sais quoi goodness in these things.
UPDATE: fixed the error'd French.
Time passes, amused and slouching
More from Eve's archives:
THINGS YOU CAN LEARN IN CAMBODIA:
1) Maoism sucks, sucks, sucks.
2) You can deep-fry anything. [post]
You'll notice the rotten Yahoo link; my inner Italo Calvino slash Jorges L. Borges fan would absolutely go to town if he weren't grounded. Here's another:
OFF COME THE THONGS FOR THE GAY SAMURAI REVUE. Link via The Rat. [post]
Ok, enough of that.
Lazy Saturday Browsing
The Gators go up against FSU in a few hours. It's a classic rivalry worth joining, even outside the context of a possible three-way SEC tie to be decided by the inhuman BCS polls. I browse away the pre-game hours in front of an aging PIII with a monitor so small I get confused pity from my roomates in my ugly blue hiking fleece because it "Feels Like 39°F."
Women are (in general) divided into those who are encouraged to be vain, and those who (because they can't meet cliched, conformist understandings of beauty) are encouraged to hold themselves in contempt. Meanwhile, guys are divided into those who are encouraged to be lustful, and those who (because they can't or don't "get girls") are similarly encouraged to hold themselves in contempt. [full post]
I've been happily slogging through the archives of Eve Tushnet's blog.
November 24, 2003
From the book
I'm cramming for the Neural Networks exam tomorrow morning, and have run across the following delicious bullet point:
- When performing a nonlinear regression task [...wait for it] is an extension of [...wait for it]. The algorithm is thereby robustified.
From Haykin's Neural Networks: A Comprehensive Foundation (2nd edition).
November 22, 2003
Mary Fights Back
In his vision of 1208, St. Dominic records The Fifteen Promises of Mary to Christians Who Recite the Rosary, including a promise that
"The rosary shall be a powerful armor against hell, it will destroy vice, decrease sin, and defeat heresies."
In case you've forgotten, or never learned: How to Pray the Rosary, if you are so inclined. Joe Convert says it well:
There's no way to talk about the Rosary without making any good Protestant more than a little uncomfortable. The Church's teaching about Mary was one of the hardest things for me to understand, let alone accept or embrace. Even after reaching the point where I was convinced of the Church's historical claims (and therefore of my need to become Catholic), I wrestled with what my Protestant perspective told me were additions to scripture. [permalink]
The permalink is broken; scroll down to his October 16th post. Anyhow, I was delightely amused when I ran across the following captioned image:
[A Saintly Salmagundi]
November 20, 2003
From Russia with love
From the namesake country of a certain, messy game of chance and also communism:
A vodka-drinking competition in a southern Russian town ended in tragedy with the winner dead and several runners-up in intensive care. [Reuters]
It's funny in a you-should-never-ever-laugh-at-it way.
November 14, 2003
Apparently,
It would seem that the WatchMeDance meme hasn't made the rounds around here. I can only hope that I am sadly, sadly mistaken.
Good News!
via little. yellow. different....
And there is nothing wrong with being single, of course. Just make sure you believe the things you tell yourself, that's all.
Lovely.
November 13, 2003
The sound of inevitability
Rome is the new Babylon; her bishop is the antichrist; his flock idolize the mother of the Son of God. They buy their salvation with works and with money. The Roman Catholic Church adds to the word of God the traditions of man, with, for example, a history of anti-semitism. Yet here I am, pining for those Roman fjords.
Overheard at Texas Roadhouse
"That's my favorite duck-hunting joke. I love that duck-hunting joke."
November 7, 2003
Live from the Clone Wars
We just saw the animated Clone Wars on Comedy Central. Oops, I think we are going to do "stuff" now, so I should go be social. Here's the lowdown scoop on that homecoming parade that kept me in Gainesville a few hours longer than I wanted:
- The man with the iguana on his shirt. It blinked at me.
- The Jewish men in black walking alongside an Israel float.
- That girl with better hair than Will from Will & Grace.
Why the blog is?
At some point I'm going to break down and write about stuff that really matters, but not just yet. I'm going to pack for a weekend in Orlando with the gang, and try not to remember that I might be leaving Florida soon. If things go well.
November 3, 2003
ni hao ma
After a two week hiatus, I'm back to my Pimsleur Mandarin Chinese lessons. I'm reviewing the last few lessons to refresh my rusty mind, and looking forward to learning how to generate past-tense statements and questions.
November 1, 2003
Rhode Island Report
On wednesday morning Joel and I left for Rhode Island. We left at 4:30 AM, and were back Thursday at midnight. Betwixt the two we explored downtown Newport, spent too many hours sitting around ATL, and interviewed with the Naval Undersea Warface Center. I was interviewed by Submarine Sonar (Code 21) and Missle, Launcher & Payload Integration Dept. (Code 40). The former went very well; the later.. "not so much."
The Submarine Sonar group does some neat signal processing research--I was shown their class-specific method classifier, and learned that it learns faster and outperforms even support-vector machines. I'm sure you're excited and want to hear more.