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Reprise
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1–2 minutes·
No comments on RepriseSaw Donnie Darko a second time today, with a friend from Leeds; it survived rewatching quite well. Afterwards, I described my ‘Dance Dance Revolution’ theory of cognitive development to her. It’s a little like Piaget’s controversial theory (although obviously much sillier). Jean Piaget was a psychologist who believed that children when through qualitatively different levels…
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Robert Mundell’s Top Ten Benefits From Winning the Nobel Prize
Robert Mundell’s Top Ten Benefits From Winning the Nobel Prize – starts with ‘Can end almost any argument by asking, “And did you ever win a Nobel Prize?”‘
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Spiritng Neal Stephenson Away
A review of a lecture by award-winning SF author Neal Stephenson, on ‘Newton/Leibniz’, together with a review of Miyazaki’s film ‘Spirited Away’.
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Trek Geektitude
A discussion about chainsaws in Star Trek, elicited by a recent Enterprise episode: “Historically, the most often raised Star Trek technology issue has involved bathrooms. Burning questions such as: “How many bathrooms? And where are they located? What are the fixtures like? Did Starfleet adopt the hideous American ‘low flow’ design? Or like most patriots,…
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Skwerls
During one of our classes today, we talked about the possible causes of Parkinson’s disease. One of the lecturers mentioned that in Kentucky, researchers thought they’d found a possible link between eating squirrel brains and Parkinson’s; 12 out of 42 people they surveyed with Parkinson’s ate squirrel brains, leading them to think that perhaps Parkinson’s…
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Green Card
In an instant message conversation today… [insert moaning about low acceptance rates for international students in the US] Alex: grr.. how does one become a US citizen? Adrian: Easiest way: marry a US girl Adrian: Just like Gerard Depardieu did Alex: can I keep my european nationality? Adrian: Course not Alex: hmm .. not worth…
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Mr. DeLong’s Eight Words
Brad DeLong, a member of the Culture mailing list and professor of economics at UC Berkeley, is much famed for being an advisor to President Clinton. Everyone was suitably impressed by this, until Brad eventually admitted that he’d only said “eight words to the guy in my entire life.” We couldn’t take a challenge like…
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Small World Big Piano Silliness
A conversation with my girlfriend from yesterday, paraphrased: Me: “This is the Jools Holland album I bought the other day. I read an interesting review which was generally positive except about the silly piano flourishes that Jools always seems to squeeze into places where they shouldn’t be.” Her: “Well, maybe people like him for the…
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Pretty girls and hot stoves
Ever heard the famous Einstein quote, “When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it’s longer than any hour. That’s relativity.”? It was an abstract of a paper that’s now online, and if anything, the…
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Proactive Interference
One of the running jokes while I was in San Diego was the that professor who was nominally overseeing all the research in the lab was considerably absentminded. Never mind the times when he would phone up the lab to ask us what the time was because his watch wasn’t working, or when he’d ask…
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