summer!

Summer has finally... um... sprummered in New York. It's warm enough to wear a t-shirt and the weather is now a pretty constant chance of thunderstorms (rather than constant it's-absolutely-going-to-rain-don't-even-bother-drying-off-after-you-shower-this-morning, like it was for all of June). With this comes... the beach! This may be my most beachy summer yet—between Long Beach LI for the 4th of July, Cape May for Girls' Weekend, and Cape Cod for A's family reunion, I'll have hit the trifecta of weekend getaways in the Northeast. Too bad I'm a wimp about water and it's not yet September, and thus I have yet to get wet past my knees. But I've gotten plenty of sand and sun, so I'd say it's been a success.

Besides the beach, the summer has held a lot of computering. It's been good, especially with the nice window at my desk and the balcony outside the cafeteria so I don't become a pasty shut-in during the week.

Also, some things have happened in the world. I'm not sure what to make of Cheney's secret knowledge yet, and I'm still waiting for whatever dirt made Palin resign to come to light. There had better be some, and at this point it had better be good.

It's that time again...

bsom has once again removed me from his blog links, meaning it's been far too long since I posted. I guess lots of big serious life stuff has been happening, which seems a bit too heavy for a blog. Also I forget a lot.

So here's my shoddy attempt at summarizing, somewhat sarcastically and/or sardonically, these big serious life! things that have distracted me. As per usual, I'll use my acclaimed bullet-point style.

• Getting a Master's Degree!
  I've certainly posted since starting my Master's, but I'm not sure if I've talked about it. Rather than getting really fascinated by the plethora of fascinating but ultimately economically useless subject matter (Politics of Food in Film!), I went to school with a career in mind. It just sort of happened. So I'm learning how to be a computer scientist. It is the family trade, after all.
  
• Getting an internship!
  I'm working at Google for the summer. I have a magnetic ID badge and everthing. It even came with a leash! They feed us and provide infinite snacks (well, they never have the yogurt I like... I know I know, first world problemz). The toilets even flush themselves--and not while I'm still sitting on them! It's pretty much insane. And it's halfway over.
  
• Moving in with my boyfriend!
  In the proud tradition begun by KPd and TtQ, this actually happened somewhat gradually, as I decided that I liked his place better than mine. And then my lease ran out and I failed to find a sublet, and here I am. He's already packing to leave, as this only bought me a month and a half before his lease is up too.
  
• Moving across the country!
  Also with my boyfriend. He's going in August to start a degree; I'm joining him in January after I finish mine. It's big, and exciting, and a little scary. If I'm really lucky, this internship will turn into a job. If it doesn't, I'll still have all of Silicon Valley to look around for one. We hope to have a garden and a garage full of bikes somewhere in the East Bay. After sharing a studio for the past two weeks, I'm also hoping to have at least 1.5 bathrooms, but that somehow still sounds way too grown-up for me.
  

Hoping at least somebody subsrcribes to this on an RSS reader so it isn't doomed to oblivion,
~aerob

Fun with Cloning!

So Slate has an article (as do other newsplaces) about whether we should clone a neanderthal. This idea is most excellent.

Not that I think we should. I like the idea because there's so much to consider! On the one hand, we could really truly find out (to the degree that the scientists are confident they didn't fuck up the clone) whether neanderthals could talk and what they looked like walking around and stuff.

On the other hand, the poor thing would be nothing more than a science experiment and nobody at all would know how to properly parent it. There is no neanderthal Dr. Spock to consult.

On the other other hand, we all remember the hilarity that resulted from a similar experiment in Encino Man. Maybe if we include Pauly Shore in the process it would be ok.

But basically every argument for doing this makes it feel more cruel to the resulting neanderthal. Nobody wants their whole life to be some science fair project.

There's your jumping off point. I wish this could be a Campus Center lunch table discussion, but alas those days are behind me. Please, instead, discuss via comments.

::Looks left::

Woah, my sidebar changed! Now it has a bunch of easy-to-add widgets with things like who follows my blog, whose blogs i follow, and pictures from my it's-been-a-while Flickr page. Basically I like playing with layouts so when Google/Blogger made it easy, I had to try. As soon as they release a "Whose Souls You Own" widget I'll add that one too.

KPd, I'm not sure how I can add myself as a follower of your blog, but if you add the Followers widget (ok there must be a better name for that) I'll try to figure out how to put myself on the list.

Oh also, bsom, you now owe me a link, by your I-link-your-blog-you-link-mine rule =D

So anyway, who's giddy about this election? It's like the night before a first date. I'm mostly excited but a little bit nervous (currently 1.9% nervous¹). Tomorrow I'll prepare (vote!), put on a special outfit (i'm hoping to find an Obama t-shirt for sale on the street somewhere) and then get increasingly giddy as the day wears on until at last, following office hours with Professor Google, I'll meet my next president. If I'm lucky, he'll be the man of my dreams—or at least good enough for the next four to eight years. And then, after what I now hope is a perfect evening, I'll finally drop this metaphor.

So Vote! Vote Obama! And if you're a New York State voter, vote Obama via the Working Families Party and the rest of the Working Families Party-endorsed candidates in Row E. Happy lever-pulling!


_{1. Nate Silver, you owe me a link now too!}

Things that are ridiculous

I don't like Sarah Palin. She stands for many, many things I disagree with. She calls me, and everybody at all like me in any way (live in the same city; have the same education level; share any of the same opinions) elitist and anti-American. She doesn't trust me to make my own decisions about what to do with my body.

That said, she doesn't deserve a lot of the criticism that she receives. The latest in this series of undeserved panning has been this business about her clothing. It's one thing for Cindy McCain to have paid over a quarter of a million dollars on one outfit. But I'm not surprised at all that a woman so much in the public eye would have paid $150,000 in a month on clothing. It's been, say 45 days. That's $3,000 per day, or probably about $2,500 per appearance. That's about what a fancy suit costs.

Men can get away with wearing the same two or three $2,500 suits for months on end. As long as they have enough ties to switch in, they're good to go. Women's clothing—even women's suits—come in all kids of fancy colors and styles. And somebody is going to notice at some point along the way if she's wearing the same few suits over and over, or if she's wearing sub-par clothing. Sarah Palin did not create the world that expects women to be pretty and perfect all the time, but she must live in it, and she must do so under severe media scrutiny—more than any other vice presidential candidate, I dare say.

This election cycle brings a set of issues more important than many that have faced this country in a long time. There's a financial crisis; we're stuck in a quagmire¹ in Iraq and are losing ground in Afghanistan; we're about to see a sea change in the United States' position in the world. Governor Palin is not ready to face any of these challenges. Her wardrobe has nothing to do with this.

Yes. Please. Criticize Sarah Palin. But do it for the right reasons. She's wrong about choice. She's wrong about international relations. She's wrong about health care. She's wrong about offshore drilling. Name an issue, she's probably wrong about it. Fashion is the last thing that matters in this election. The anti-elitism, while proven hypocritical by this whole designer clothing thing, is still only tangential to the core problem with the rabid anti-elitism in the Republican party. So please, leave Sarah Palin alone when it comes to her latest outfit and dig into her politics.

_{1. Yes. I said it. Quagmire.}

What the hell, Wall Street?

Hokay. Here's how I understand this financial crisis:

A bunch of people wanted to buy houses. They couldn't afford mortgages. But they really wanted those houses! So they applied for loans anyway.

A bunch of fly-by-night lenders approved the loans, either knowing full-well that the borrowers didn't have the income to pay them off, or not even bothering to look into the matter.

A bunch of real banks/lenders bought these loans, not bothering to look into where they came from, who owed the money... Essentially they had to clue what they were buying, and didn't bother to look closely at who was doing the selling.

Lots of these home "owners" couldn't pay off their mortgages. So instead of loans, the banks owned a bunch of houses. Easy enough--just sell them again! There's a housing boom!

... No, there isn't. Not when this many houses are being foreclosed all around. It's pretty much a housing bust. Good luck getting even half of what that loan was worth.

So now all these major banks and lenders are SOL because they didn't bother looking at what they were spending oodles of money on.

But not to worry! The government will bail you out! We love welfare! Especially when it's going to a bunch of rich bankers who should have been smarter than to buy things they had no knowledge of.

So now $5,000 of every American's money is about to go toward these idiots who got themselves into this mess in the first place.

This is essentially what would happen if you took how things ought to work and flipped it upside-down. The free market doesn't work if it gets bailed out every time it makes huge mistakes. This should be a never-work-in-this-town-again situation, not a poor-fannie-mae-we-got-your-back situation. Things are gonna suck for a few years because of this debacle, no matter what, but taxpayers already in up to their ears in military spending shouldn't have to bail out a bunch of huge corporations on top of it.

like the "new" cars in Maine...

The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks

i'm glad somebody else is noticing this.