I can’t resist: Now consider again Skinner’s sentence: Justice is not a frivolous thing, Simpson. It has little if anything to do with a disobedient whale. This seems amenable to a quantificational analysis: the set of situations in which justice has anything to do with a disobedient whale is a subset of the set of […]
Monthly Archives: April 2008
The single-purpose gadget that could
I’m not generally a fan of single-purpose gadgets, but when they’re eminently effective and will get a lot of use, I’m down. Garlic press? Oh yeah. Chain scrubber? HELL yeah. One of my Nashbar purchases was the Park Cyclone Chain Scrubber. Chains are just a bitch to keep clean, in my experience. I’ve done okay […]
101: revised
I did end up revising my 101 goals, and I’m feeling much better about them. Many of the biggest changes I made were to change “Do all of this” to “Do N of this”, and that had a bigger psychological effect than I realized it might. Knowing that instead of cooking all the rest of […]
Comcast partially fails
My previous experiences with Comcast customer service haven’t been too bad, but I had an annoying one this weekend. First, I got an online chat representative who wouldn’t really tell me anything useful about my bill changing, and referred me to my local service center. He admitted the bill did not make sense to him […]
15 minutes of fame, but not for me —
My dad is quoted and pictured in The New York Times today! He registers a complaint that his first quotation was incorrectly reproduced by the reporter, because he never would have said that someone “inferred that she believed”; rather he said that he “inferred from her comments that she believed”.
101 in 1001: feeling stalled
I’ve been keeping a list of my 101 with all the completed goals removed on my wall over my desk to remind me of what to try next. Today I put up a picture using the same thumbtack that I wanted to look at for a while, of Candace Wiggins (Stanford star basketball player). It […]
Speechless
Not sure there’s anything to say about this except, what the fucking fuck? This is worse than the Orange County Register article where an SFPD officer described letting other officers (and any other confidential plate holders, some of whom are things like museum staff) run red lights without penalty as a “professional courtesy” — and […]
Nashbar crappity crap
I got my second order from Bike Nashbar today and most of it looks fine, but I must say I’m extremely disappointed with the capri-length bike pants I ordered and will definitely be returning them. They’re Nashbar brand and were cheaper than I’m used to (my experience is that good tights run $70-90 unless on […]
Mine now
The day I would have had to contact Terry to return Meg passed quietly on Saturday without me doing anything of the sort, so I’m now the happy owner of three bikes. And I need to start outfitting Meg appropriately, because today when the trains were late I opted for Maia instead because she has […]
When More is Less
Back at the beginning of this blog’s existence I wrote some about Barry Schwarz’s book The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less. Recently I’ve thought that maybe he should have written a bit more about when more is less. He does devote some space to the subject of how meaningless some of our choices […]