Sunday, September 28, 2008

attn: jake and little man

Can I make a date to hang out with you guys this week? Wednesday night? Tuesday night at the Tip Top? Saturday party night? I miss you both and have gifts for you.
I miss you.

you're the one who's outta this world...

Wednesday, September 24, 2008


Ohhhhh there's a shit storm coming.... you best be ready!!!

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

just keep on coming


at least
3 new songs
this time

Monday, September 22, 2008

Saturday, September 20, 2008

Friday, September 19, 2008

Thursday, September 18, 2008

Randy!!



Just want to introduce you the newest member of the 2103 Simon Bolivar crew. Randy the dog!!

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

RIP loy bones, we'll miss you

great neighbor
great storyteller
great musician

Monday, September 15, 2008

Sometimes, instead of doing homework, I make charts like this.




The top figure contains raw counts for the number of song titles from my iTunes library that contain the anatomical words listed on the abscissa. The bottom figure is the the same figure, but this time normalized using the sum over all song titles with some piece of anatomy in their title. You can think of this as the conditional probability of a specific body part, given that we already know the title contains some sort of anatomy. So, for example, Probability( head | category of word is anatomy ) ~ 0.19. I didn't bother calculating the joint probability, because I'm lazy. In that case, we would just multiply: Probability of ( anatomy_label & category of word is anatomy ) = P(anatomy_label | category of word is anatomy )*P(category of word is anatomy ).

Fuck. I should really be doing homework.
This is getting me nowhere.

Also, let me know if you can think of any labels I missed.

Sunday, September 14, 2008

self explanatory

Thursday, September 11, 2008

If stars say things it matters more

Buried in the midst of this is a really good idea for a bad Disney movie.

Thursday, September 04, 2008

fun show


I guess that the tribe is "counter-culture"

This is a headline from Yahoo. I find it hard to believe that it's really only 1 or 2 percent that don't have TVs. I'm sure that number will rise with the HD conversion next year.


For many Americans the thought of life without TV is akin to forgoing food, shelter or, God forbid, the Internet. But about 1 to 2 percent of Americans do abstain from the boob tube, and they might seem like strange bedfellows.

A recent study of those who live without found that about two-thirds fall into either the "crunchy granola set" or the "religious right, ultraconservative" camp, said researcher Marina Krcmar, a professor of communication at North Carolina's Wake Forest University. Krcmar interviewed 120 people from 62 different households who do not watch television, as well as 92 people from 35 households with TV, and described her findings in a new book, "Living Without the Screen" (Routledge, 2008).

Aversion to television, it turns out, is a common ground for the very liberal and the very conservative.

"I interviewed one guy who was 31, single, an artist living in Boston, who saw himself as countercultural," Krcmar told LiveScience. "The next day I had an interview with a religious woman with ten children who lived in the Midwest. These people seem like they would disagree about almost everything, but if you ask them about television the things that came out of their mouths were almost identical."

Why do people give it up?

Krcmar herself lives on the dark side, having given up television about 13 years ago.

"It's just something I don't want in the home - it's a perpetual annoyance, like a gnat," she said.

The motivations for most people who abandon TV fall into three categories, Krcmar found.

Some give it up to avoid exposing their families to the excessive sex, violence, and consumerism they feel are promoted onscreen. Others object to the medium itself, claiming television intrudes too much into their lives, interferes with conversation and takes time away from the family. Finally, some people have a beef with the power and values of the television industry and don't want its influence in their homes.

In contrast to the average American adult, who watches three hours of television a day, non-watchers fill their time with a plethora of activities.

"Non-viewers had a greater variety of things that they did with their free time than viewers did," Krcmar said. "It's not just that they were reading instead of watching TV. They were hiking and biking, and going to community meetings and visiting with friends. Overall, they tend to do more of everything."


The article goes on to talk about kids and TV, but to be honest, I don't really care about kids.