Here's item #1 on the list of topics I've been meaning to post about for a few weeks. Prepare to be outraged.

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Still with me? Now, it's possible that I get a bit more worked up about this issue than most straight people -- the first wedding of a close friend I ever attended was a same sex wedding (in Massachusetts, but before it was legal). So ( Read more... )

For those who haven't been paying attention to all the fun, my previous post, on the Massachusetts state income tax has turned into quite a lively little discussion. (How do I measure liveliness? Well, the Nazis have already been mentioned ( Read more... )

"Math is hard. Let's go to Sweden."

I arrived in Berlin on Monday of this week, and in the evening I went into a bar. Actually I went into a few bars, staying only a few seconds in the first two because they seemed a bit too loud and trendy for my taste. But with such a basis for comparison, a pattern jumped out at me. Something quite unexpected and completely at odds with my ( Read more... )

Yesterday, in the middle of a frustrating afternoon spent sitting at my desk trying to finish a paper, I read the New York Times review of Cloverfield. The level of vitriol with which reviewer Manohla Dargis expressed her hatred for the movie was almost sufficient to lift me out of my mathematical slump for a few hours. Cloverfield, you see, is ( Read more... )

It's become one of those days where I just can't stop myself from saying the following:

Algebraic geometry is immoral.It's a cult, I tell you. They're going to destroy the world if we don't stop them. (What, did you really think the word "scheme" was chosen arbitrarily?) And we'll never see it coming until it's too late. Not just the world ( Read more... )

And in fact it was shaping up to be quite a nice weekend until my laptop hung in the middle of some routine web browsing, and upon restarting and logging in I was confronted with a dialog box that said:

Windows must be reinstalled to activate

Insert the Windows installation DVD or CD into your computer to begin the reinstallation process.And then ( Read more... )

I'll try to keep the vulgarity to a minimum in the following, but I'm not sure I'll succeed.

I've now had two consecutive incidents of ordering a cell phone online and then waiting nearly two weeks as nothing came in the mail. In the first case, Tele2 sent me a confirmation e-mail almost immediately, with order number and everything, but turned ( Read more... )

For anyone who was honestly wondering wtf I was talking about when I posted this, it's a detective series. This detective series:

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The theme music is cheesy as only a series broadcast from 1977 to 1986 can be. But the truly lovable thing about it was the characters: the determined and grounded yet often cheerful Inspector Erwin Köster (sometimes ( Read more... )