another sunny sunday 29 March, 2009

hooray! The productive highlight of my day was walking to the library, and on the way back:
I’m walking down Mass Ave; walking the other way is a guy kind of draped over his girlfriend. Guy: “Excuse me! Sir!”, as his girlfriend is kind of making apologetic noises, you know, excuse him, sorry about this, uh [...]

things that should be cooler than they actually are 26 March, 2009

George W. Bush once said, “Is our children learning?”
Using “GraphJam“, a website affiliated with the lolcatz group and failblog, I can scientific verify that the answer to W’s question is a resounding, “No, they doesn’t.”
Basically, the premise behind GraphJam is similar to that of Indexed, a blog by a former Freakonomics intern that features a [...]

springtime 23 March, 2009

First, the bad news: since it stays light out later, it’s way easier to lose track of time and go home from work later than planned.
Then, the good news: with now completely free weekends, I can spend days like how I spent last sunday: sitting on a bench in Dupont Circle, pretending to read but [...]

what i just finished reading 19 March, 2009

Don DeLillo’s “Mao II”
I gotta say, for a PEN/Faulkner award winner, I thought it was pretty “meh”. A lot of novels depend on the era in which they’re set, but I think a reasonable standard should be that they make that era more accessible to the reader. Much was lost from my reading of this [...]

where are you from? 18 March, 2009

A new one: a guy on the street last night greeted me “Salaam alekum!”
And when I kind of awkwardly turned to him and didn’t immediately respond because I didn’t process what he’d said, he offered, “Oh, where are you from? I thought you were Moroccan.” He subsequently asked me for a subway fare, but I [...]

just so you don’t get the wrong idea 16 March, 2009

That I’m one of those government-is-the-problem people, just because I happen to have asserted that all branches and instruments of government operate somewhat inefficiently, I pose the following rhetorical point:
Why is it that Hong Kong, consistently ranked one of the world’s most capital-friendly countries, feels it necessary to have parallel state-run and private health care [...]