reading recommendation
I would like to recommend that you read this essay, written in tweets, by Latoya Peterson.
Continue reading →Month: January 2014
online liberalism’s #smackcam problem
I would forgive you if you didn’t remember the brief, bright flame that was the #smackcam Twitter controversy of 2013. The Twitter outrage cycle is now, quite literally, on a daily rotation. It’s amazing that anybody can keep up with it. As far as these things go, the #smackcam storm was minor, in scope though […]
Continue reading →commies for crude associationism
I like Seth Ackerman and his work, but this is a particularly, and peculiarly, poor effort. I’ll expand on this, but I think essentially everything it argues can be rejected with a simple point: it is not required for political actors to be perfectly righteous in their beliefs or associations for them to contribute to […]
Continue reading →what we mean when we talk about regressing to the mean
[Update: I’ve been convinced by readers that, while this is a good example of the power of selection bias, it doesn’t really work as an example of regression to the mean.] I thought that this graph was a good way to talk about regression to the mean. You hear that term thrown a lot online these […]
Continue reading →my The Book of Matt review
I have a review of The Book of Matt, a reported investigation into the murder of Matthew Shepard and the legend that has grown in its aftermath, over at The New Inquiry today. Please check it out. I imagine it’ll provoke a fight, which I look forward to. My basic stance is simple. 1. Stephen Jimenez’s book, […]
Continue reading →thanks, you guys
The weatherman claims, if you can believe it, that tomorrow night will be 55 degrees colder than tonight. So in an effort to spend as little time outdoors tomorrow as possible, I went to the store and to the gym, bracketed by my usual half hour walk to campus. So I was gone for awhile. […]
Continue reading →ain’t too proud to beg
Well gang, depending on your take on me, this is either a worthwhile effort, or some kind of rock-bottom for lack of self-awareness, or something in between. I figured it was worth figuring out by trying. As regular readers know, I live a cash-poor but fulfillment-rich life. Right at the moment, the cash-poor part of […]
Continue reading →quote for the day
Some of the motivations behind this character creation are the same or similar for everyone who blogs: we want our online persona to appear smarter, funnier, wiser, better-read, and more articulate than we are in real life. Some of them are more unique to my own situation and adopted persona: I want to appear richer, […]
Continue reading →what if everybody got health care the way I can?
So yesterday I went to my health clinic here at Purdue. I went to have a followup appointment and get a refill on a prescription I’ve had since last September of so. I went to the Purdue University Student Health (PUSH) center. It’s quite a comprehensive clinic; I’ve had everything up to and including minor […]
Continue reading →there you are
It’s a banal fact that human beings perceive a conflict between their desire to be individual and their desire to fit in comfortably within social groups. This tension is the source of the plots of, like, 75% of the young adult books ever written. Part of the expression of these conflicting desires can be seen […]
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