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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
the dill pickle to your cheese's LiveJournal:
| Thursday, November 19th, 2009 | |
| 6:01 pm | |
| Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 | |
| 10:42 pm | |
| Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 | |
| 11:56 pm | Someone's slacking off at Amazon: Hard Problems: The Road to the World's Toughest Math Contest is listed as starring two people: "This is documentary" and "so there are no actors". It is a documentary, so there are no actors, but still. |
| 8:45 am | Can your baby get pregnant if you have sex while pregnant? (from Yahoo! Answers) What's surprising is how many people answer yes. My favorite answer: "Yes, however this phenomenon is most common in Russia. See Also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matryoshka If I remember right some aphids are born pregnant, although I'm having trouble finding a source for this. But the question is about people. |
| Friday, November 6th, 2009 | |
| 9:48 am | |
| Sunday, October 11th, 2009 | |
| 10:28 pm | como se dice "inning"? This article en espanol on the Angels win over the Red Sox today (which I found while trying to figure out what the Los Angeles Angels (of Anaheim) call themselves in Spanish, because there's no way it could be "los Angeles de Los Angeles (de Anaheim)") has a couple interesting features: - apparently their web site calls them "los Angelinos". Once or twice I thought they called themselves "los Angeles" but that's actually the city "Los Angeles". - whoever wrote this (or translated it -- but in that case I suspect that it wasn't just straight-up translated, because it specifically seems to focus on Hispanic players) can't decide what the word for "inning" is: "Guerrero bateó un sencillo productor de dos carreras, cuando había dos outs del noveno episodio" "coronando una remontada de tres anotaciones en el noveno inning y permitiendo que los Angelinos propinaran la primera barrida en la historia de la franquicia." "En la novena entrada, cuando Papelbon retiró a sus dos primeros enemigos, los Angelinos perdían por 6-4." "El venezolano Juan Rivera recibió al taponero con un sencillo de dos carreras, cuando había dos outs del octavo capítulo, para acercar a los Angelinos." Now that the Red Sox are out (and the Twins; I like the Twins because I've met a bunch of people from Minnesota and they are mostly likeable), and the AL is down to the Yankees and the Angels, I am rooting for the Angels in the American League for two reasons: - as much as I'd like to see a Phillies-Yankees World Series, the Phillies wouldn't win; - for pure linguistic amusement I kind of want to see the World Series of Redundant Team Names, featuring the Philadelphia Philadelphias (really! that's what it's short for!) and los Angeles de Los Angeles. |
| Friday, October 9th, 2009 | |
| 11:31 pm | This evening's math problem Sunday's major league baseball game times (all Eastern): 12:07 pm: Los Angeles (Angels) at Boston 3:37 pm: Los Angeles (Dodgers) at St. Louis 7:07 pm: New York at Minnesota 10:07 pm: Philadelphia at Colorado So Angels fans get baseball at 9:07 am local time -- on a Sunday! -- which is way too early. And, of course, Phillies fans will have to stay up until 1:30 in the morning or so. Good thing I don't teach Monday mornings... But there's really no way to make this work. The first obvious constraint (that fans of teams shouldn't have to watch the games at utterly ridiculous times) says that neither LA team should be playing at 12:07 ET (9:07 AM PT), and none of the East Coast teams at 10:07 PM ET. There are two solutions, and one is 12:07: New York at Minnesota 3:37: Philadelphia at Colorado 7:07: Angels at Boston 10:07: Dodgers at St. Louis Wow, that almost sort of works. I mean, really, Yankees-Twins starting at 11 AM local time isn't that bad, is it? But I imagine that the people who live near Busch Stadium (in St. Louis) wouldn't like a game starting at 9 PM local time. If the first and last games were Minnesota at New York and St. Louis at LA Dodgers this would actually work. You could switch the middle two games, except Boston-LA is probably a better TV draw than Philly-Colorado, so I'm guessing TBS wants it in prime time. Bored? Try to figure out a better way to do this. Difficulty: you can't just throw up your hands and say "why the fuck do they have a quadrupleheader anyway?" Seriously, with eight randomly chosen teams in four randomly chosen sites, somebody's going to be unhappy when you try to schedule the games so that none of them overlap. It seriously feels like MLB is just trying to piss off the fans of at least one team each year, whose season ends when they weren't even watching because they got a crappy timeslot. |
| Friday, September 25th, 2009 | |
| 9:59 am | I didn't realize that the Nobel Foundation puts out a press release announcing when it's going to announce the Nobel winners for this year. But apparently that's how it works. |
| Saturday, September 19th, 2009 | |
| 7:38 pm | |
| Thursday, September 10th, 2009 | |
| 5:23 pm | Free Library of Philadelphia to be closed October 2nd if the budget doesn't pass. Yes, you read that right. WTF, Philadelphia? |
| Tuesday, September 8th, 2009 | |
| 12:57 pm | Is anybody else getting false positives on gmail spam filtering (i. e. legitimate messages that get put in the Spam folder)? I think I've been getting one every week or two. This is kind of annoying because the only way to find them is to at least scan the subjects in my spam folder, which is seriously depressing. |
| 11:32 am | I'm pretty sure that my first day of kindergarten ever was September 9, 1988. (I was exactly four and three quarters, in a time when fractions of a year actually meant something.) Tomorrow is the first day of my last year of grad school. I will be twenty-five and three-quarters. My formal education will be twenty-one. That's right, my formal education will be old enough to legally drink. |
| Tuesday, August 25th, 2009 | |
| 8:47 pm | Because I don't have a current e-mail address for JGH JGH asked "My zip code is Zone 1. I want to ship 3 packages to Zone 6. When I calculate postage, are the rates for shipping FROM zone 1, or shipping TO Zone 6" The zone actually represents the distance between the two zip codes; see page 4 here (yes, I'm bored, so I poked around the postal service web site until I figured this out). So the zones 1, 2, 3, ... are a bunch of circles, like an archery target, with your current location, wherever it is, at the center. Zone 6 is all locations from 1000 to 1400 miles from where you are. In short, you need to pay zone 6 prices. |
| Saturday, August 22nd, 2009 | |
| 9:22 am | There really needs to be a convention for what "previous" and "next" mean on blogs. Sometimes "previous" means "older" and "next" means "newer" (that is, "previous" and "next" are relative to the order in which things were written) but sometimes it's reversed, presumably assuming the reader is reading in reverse chronological order. Often I end up clicking on the wrong links. I seem to have the first convention in my head, but a lot of people use the second one. Some pages just use "older" and "newer", which is a lot less confusing. |
| Friday, August 21st, 2009 | |
| 8:52 pm | The article on American and British English differences in Wikipedia is interesting. But it includes the example "She majored in biology at MIT." for American (contrasted with British "She read biology at Cambridge.") which is clearly wrong. Proper American English here is "She was Course VII." (Note to idiots: that's pronounced "seven". But for some reason the Institvte uses Roman numerals in this context.) |
| Friday, August 14th, 2009 | |
| 7:01 pm | New York Times obviousness of the day: eating gluten-free is expensive. |
| Wednesday, August 12th, 2009 | |
| 8:45 pm | |
| Wednesday, August 5th, 2009 | |
| 8:36 pm | I find the heat in August much less bearable than the heat in July, even though the temperatures are the same, because by August I'm tired of it being hot. I suspect that I could even prove this with actual data; I bet that I run the air conditioner more on days later in the summer than on days with the same temperature earlier in the summer. But I don't have that data. (I don't even have good month-level data, because I was gone for a couple weeks in July.) |
| Saturday, August 1st, 2009 | |
| 1:11 pm | Problems with the farmer's market: 1. Since I end up buying things from many different people, I never know how much money I spent while I was there until I count my money afterwards. 2. I'm not sure what's more annoying: (a) the kids running around (who wouldn't be annoying except that I'm constantly afraid I'm going to hit one of them in the head with a bag of food while I can't see them); (b) the parents yelling at their kids to stay put; (c) the parents not yelling at their kids who obviously want to. but on the other hand, I now have what you'd think would be more peaches, blueberries, tomatoes, etc. than one person could eat in a week. you'd be wrong. |
| 11:34 am | I googled "mathology" to see what would come up. Someone wants to know: In greek mathology did the god live on mount Sinai or mount alipise? I think the correct answer to this question is "mount alipise", but this person's spelling is bad enough that "greek" could be a misspelling of "Judeo-Christian" so I'm not sure. (Although the Judeo-Christian God doesn't live on Mount Sinai, right? Also, Tom Cruise converted to mathology. Somewhat more seriously, The power of alpha refers to "mathology" in a way that seems to mean something like coming up with attractive-looking formulas without regard for actual physics, although it's hard to tell from the sample at hand. And there's this article "Towards mathology" that turned up on JSTOR but I'm too lazy to log in, and a few other references that seem to use it in the same way, to refer to pure mathematics as opposed to applied. This is apparently originally due to Halmos. |