Friday, August 29, 2014

On voter fraud

Dear Texas,

If you're so damn concerned about someone else showing up and voting under my name, sending voter registration cards as postcards seems awfully...casual, no?

Thursday, August 28, 2014

Artery Metal

Nine Minutes


Nine minutes of local support. Have potential.



Find Balance





Silence The Messenger


Technically proficient screamcore



Allegaeon


Worth the price of a ticket on their own.



Upon This Dawning


Hey, if it gets screaming teenage girls to like death metal, who am I to complain?



Chimaira

Thursday, August 21, 2014

Alice and Bob visit the cardinal, part I

(Part II of this post can be found here.)

Speaking of diagonal arguments: I ran across the blog of one Matt Baker yesterday, who sketched out probably the easiest proof I've ever seen of the uncountability of the real line. He also included a question in his post, one that I have a strong intuition about the answer, but so far haven't been able to prove I'm right.

(NB: when I say easiest proof I've ever seen, I mean that I sat down at lunch with a colleague who hadn't seen math since her freshman year of calc, and we finished lunch with her pretty much all over that shit.)

Anyway, I thought I'd record that argument in case Baker's blog disappears or (as has happened twice today) I can't figure out search terms to find it again. The next post will discuss his question, the version of an answer I can prove, and what makes the full problem more difficult. I'll try to pitch the level of these posts (well, more this one than the next) at the level of my lunch colleague.

Tuesday, August 12, 2014

Today in pissy racism

A quick note for those keeping score at home: Kevin Williamson is still a race-baiting piece of shit:
[National Review] decided to send roving correspondent Kevin Williamson, who has some strong revisionist views on American racial politics, to East St. Louis, Illinois, to take in the local scene, and … oh, no:
East St. Louis, Ill. — "Hey, hey craaaaaacka! Cracka! White devil! F*** you, white devil!" The guy looks remarkably like Snoop Dogg: skinny enough for a Vogue advertisement, lean-faced with a wry expression, long braids. He glances slyly from side to side, making sure his audience is taking all this in, before raising his palms to his clavicles, elbows akimbo, in the universal gesture of primate territorial challenge. Luckily for me, he’s more like a three-fifths-scale Snoop Dogg, a few inches shy of four feet high, probably about nine years old, and his mom — I assume she’s his mom — is looking at me with an expression that is a complex blend of embarrassment, pity, and amusement, as though to say: “Kids say the darnedest things, do they not, white devil?”
The scene ends with an interminable sentence Williamson probably regards as “literary":
... my terminus in East St. Louis, where instead of meeting my Kurtz I get yelled at by a racially aggrieved tyke with more carefully coiffed hair than your average Miss America contestant.
There are a few lines in here that a good editor would cut but could be waved off as unwitting bad judgment — the Heart of Darkness reference, three fifths, making fun of the hair. But when the writer also decides the best comparison for a young black kid’s behavior is a monkey and to gratuitously question his parentage, there’s really not much question, is there?