Author: mike

Parenting

After reading a bunch of Game Theorist, I’m starting to think that economist parents may be even more scary1 than psychologist parents.

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1 I use “scary” in the affectionate sense, being a sort of amateur-psychologist parent myself, with enough game/mathy obsession to be a potential amateur-economist parent as well.

Entertainment

optic: lol http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vNxjwt2AqY
optic: i am starting to get a vision of my future life that is both weird and comical
cnote: that is pretty adorable
cnote: you should do videos like that too
optic: sure
luna: i wish i could be entertained for 4 hours like that
optic: agreed
cnote: it’s basically teh same thing we do with the internet
luna: i think he looks like he’s having way more fun than us
cnote: agrd

Miss Austen Regrets

Miss Austen Regrets was surprisingly good, especially if you consider the trickle of not-so-good based-on-jane-austen’s-life movies we’ve gotten in the last few years. Olivia Williams (who was also Jane in the Kate Beckinsale Emma) is a great Austen, and the story is very good. It doesn’t take any simple path of making parallels between Jane and her books, but showing her more as the genuine novelist, worried about being able to write and trying to support her family as best she can. The dialogue is witty and austenesque, but not to the point of being unrealistic, and Jane is drawn as an intelligent, wry, sometimes difficult person — as you’d expect and hope she was.

Everything’s Fine!

Slate’s Jacob Weisberg yesterday published an article that basically says “we sure have been wrong about a bunch of big things; here are some other things we might be wrong about!” followed by a list of bad things that, hey, might not be so bad after all. I’ll grant Weisberg the premise that we are often wrong about things that pretty much everyone “knew”, but this list is basically an exercise in wish fulfillment. Nukes are good! Climate change is ok! Detroit is fine! Plenty of gas! Sure, statistically, a couple of these commonly-held beliefs are likely wrong, but good luck figuring out which ones. And good luck betting against them.

Fencing 4/4/09

I went to my first tournament today. My main goal was to not finish last. My that-would-be-awesome goal was to survive the first cut and make it into the elimination rounds (thus earning my Salle Auriol patch). And of course the real goal was to not embarrass myself. On those standards, I did fairly well. The field was 25 fencers, ranging from a C rank to unrated (ranks are A-E and unrated; I’m unrated of course). We had five pools of five, then five more pools of five. You fence everyone in your pool, a 5-point bout, then everyone is ranked based on wins and points, then you go into a single elimination. For this tournament, they cut the field to 16 after the pools. I won one in my first pool, none in my second, and finished 22 out of 25. So I didn’t finish last (yay!), didn’t make the cut (boo!), and didn’t really embarrass myself (yay!).

yes, that’s me in the neon green socks.
Continue reading “Fencing 4/4/09” →

New Chandelier!

When I bought my house, it was equipped with a bunch of those ceiling lights that look like boobs, like this one. We’ve been doing a lot of redecorating of course, and E’s taste has started to influence mine — we’re moving away from dark, modern, and asian to more colors and a little more color and flash. So I started looking for an interesting chandelier on craigslist and found this:

In the pictures, it looked arty and elegant; in reality, it was definitely a little more kitschy 80s than we thought. But we still liked it and figured, for $40, it was worth the risk. Well it turned out looking great in our minimal dining room, and a big improvement over the boob.