Take 4 at a stable blog
My general rants and speeches
In a dream last night, a person I knew collapsed on the ground. I gathered around them, and attempted to call 911. However, no matter how many times I try, I just couldn’t type the simple digits. 922, 812, 914, and so on. Every time hindered by my touchscreen keyboard.
Dreams are wild.
The grasshopper laid on the small open air passageway between the stairs and the front door of my apartment. A streak of ardent green juxtaposed against the gray, brutalist pockmarks of the concrete walkway. And yet, I almost stepped on it. Not, on purpose mind you, but because of the very subtle pull from peripheral vision; a beckoning of sorts when one’s mind is on autopilot.
It looked like it was dead. A grasshopper is not considered an elegant insect, with its many sharp angles and rectilinear tagma. Nothing like the gentle curves of a butterfly. But with this, comes a natural orientation that I could clearly see even while erect. It was lying on its side, throwing off the alignment to the ground attained by millions of years of evolution.
But occasional twitches showed specks of life remained. Unfortunately, my hands were full carrying trash to the bin, and saving this tiny green mote involved several steps. I would had to lean my trash bag against the wall, find and gently use a piece of card stock or paper to scoop the little fellow. Finally, take this little specimen down the flights of stairs and deposit it among the shrubs.
Maybe “several steps” is overselling it, but I ultimately did nothing and continued with my chores after returning from the bins. Was it really that hard to do something for a helpless creature stuck in a foreign land? The activation energy required so large that I chose inactivity? (To be fair, it was three flights of stairs…)
Or was my laissez faire attitude the correct choice for it was too weak to survive anyways? The wind was strong that day, and I suspected that it was blown from the nearby tree onto the balcony. Perhaps the traveler was just catching its breath and would straighten up by itself after several minutes
Twenty minutes later, when I was throwing away the recycling, it was gone.
I’m a fan of well-designed objects. One where its clear that an engineer spent some late nights thinking about the utility. They consciously insert themselves into the consumer who just want an intuitive experience paired alongside the promised functionality.
Things like the OXO measuring jug, where the lines are placed so that the baker doesn’t have to bend over. Or maybe just a door whose design clearly proclaims whether it should be pulled or pushed. A paperclip even passes this criteria.
The inverse is also true. Sometimes the pursuit for trends or profits causes a product to be utterly disgusting to use, causing pain (well, more so emotional damage). Even worse is when these products are procured by other businesses or the government, and just squirts soap or blows hot air when you want water….
In other words, I hate those stupid new faucets with soap dispenser/dryer that look alike. Shitty things like
or this…
or this…
especially this…
like who thought this was good… a three in one?
KISS.
You are standing next to a lever that controls a runaway trolley. The trolley is headed straight for five people who are tied to the track. You can pull the lever to divert the trolley onto a different track, but there is one person tied to that track. Do you pull the lever?
You decide to pull the lever. Unfortunately, due to lack of infrastructure upkeep, the lever malfunctions and snaps off and you witness the brutal massacre of five innocent workers. It’s a good thing they were unionized and their widows are now receiving proper indemnity benefits.
A runaway trolley is headed towards five people who are tied to the track. There is no lever that you can pull to divert the trolley, but there is a large person standing next to you. The only way to stop the trolley and save the five people is to push the large person off the bridge and onto the track.
You try to push the person off the track. But you, a scrawny philosophy student who subsists on a diet of ramen and Cheetos, lack the power to push the large person off. As retaliation, the large person shoves you instead, and your last thought before you are crushed is about Camus.
You are a surgeon performing an operation on a patient. Suddenly, five other patients rush into the operating room. They have all been involved in a car accident and are in critical condition. You can only operate on one patient, and you know that the other five patients will die if you don’t operate on them.
After asking the RN to find insurance cards in their wallets and realizing that the five new patients are most likely on high deductible plans, you decide to simply operate on the original patient. After all, he has that new BCBS plan that will finally help you make a dent in that ridiculous $100,000 student loan. So much for the Hippocratic oath.
You are a self-driving car engineer. You are working on a new algorithm that will prevent self-driving cars from hitting people. However, you know that the algorithm is not perfect, and there is a small chance that it will cause the car to swerve into oncoming traffic and kill the people in the car. Do you release the algorithm?
Your boss is Elon Musk. Of course you do/did and was/will be the cause of a major pile up on I-75 one of these days.
The clue read
3 letters, 39 Across: Tamagotchis are digital ones
celerius: wait you don't know this noah?
noahsfart: uhhhh no I don't
celerius: did you not have one like in early 2000s? everyone had one
noahsfart: dude, I just never did. guess I faintly
remember classmates having one???
noahsfart: idk I was just playing too much maplestory lol
Noah started doing the crossword on Discord with his friends during lock down as a way to feel connected. However, he didn’t expect a game, out of all things, to cause a moment of self-reflection.
“Why didn’t I know what Tamagotchis are? Oh god, what are other toys that I didn’t play with? … did I have a bad childhood? Oh my god, think of all the cultural phenomenon that I never will know! My friends already think I’m weird because I never watched Teen Titans…”
He didn’t have a terrible childhood. After all, it’s just a matter of circumstances that he couldn’t control that he never got to take care of a digital pet. The fleeting panic passed by the second the group moved to the next clue:
4 letters, 44 Down: Cubs slugger
snickerpunch: isn't slugger a baseball term? is must be AROD
noahsfart: it's not AROD, it's definitely SOSA. AROD never
played for the cubs.
celerius: how do you know this baseball stuff???
noahsfart: ... how do you know about Tamaguccis
noahsfart: I mean i did play little league for 5 years.
snickerpunch: lmao guccis
Pressure is trying to pass for four when you just turned seven, at the “Miss Toddler Panama city” pageant.
You’re crammed into the same five-inch heels you wore the year before, blood pooling in your toes.
But you know if you don’t win, mom can’t fix the hole in the gator fence, so you’ll be up all night, s*ab gators.
Pressure is performing on a party boat that catches on fire, your throat burning from the smoke.
You still sing so beautifully that it calms the passengers, so that you and the crew can escape.
Pressure is singing the Yemeni national anthem while a handsome but ruthless general pushes a scimitar into your neck, Kristin Chenoweth’s corpse at your feet.
That’s pressure. – Jenna Maroney
Pressure is trying to finish the New Yorker magazine before the next issue arrives.
STRFKR concert was dope.
I guess I’m a poet now:
There was a mattress store near my apartment in Providence which never had people in it. Since it lies between where I lived and a popular local taquería, the storefront was actually quite familiar to me. There would always be a sign reminiscent of Word’s Pop Art announcing a sale, and several mattresses lied in the darkness through the dusty panes of glass.
Not once did I notice the lights turned on. All this convinced me that this was in fact a front for the notorious mafia in Providence. After all, Providence was renounced for their intimate ties with organized crime, College Hill was not the cheapest real estate, and, most importantly, there were no, nil, nada, zip customers.
For four years of my time in PVD, it just sat there. Seemingly abandoned. I don’t know if I preferred it to be a barren storefront, or just one with no character. But eventually an electric bike company peddling (get it?) their wares took over the lease.
But perhaps, I misunderstand the economics of a quality mattress. Maybe selling one a week was enough to go even, with its high prices justified by the substantial mass of a mattress.
After all, a mattress should be hefty in weight, able to withstand the tossing and turning of the, sadly, probably overweight sleeper for years on end. The mattress might even increase in weight as the various dandruff, hair and dust mites bury themselves into the seams and folds of the mattress.
This means that a mattress flying through the air would be surprising…
… which is exactly what happened today when a mattress nearly landed on the hood of my car tonight while commuting back home.
Moral of the story: don’t buy mattresses which can fly when blown by gusts of air, but if you do, please dispose of it properly.
Given a set of positive integers $\{q_i\}_{i=1}^n$, describe the set $s_t \in S$ of positive integers such that there exists only one linear combination of $\sum_{i=1}^n a_i q_i = s_t$.
In the comic above, it’s pretty obvious with the amount of money given, that Calvin was hoping to get four “D”s. In fact, all integers from 1 to 9 can only be expressed in one permutation.
A satisfying answer to all sets of integers might be less trivial.
Laziness prompted me to buy a mandolin. It did expedite the slicing of my potatoes, but at a cost of some dermis from the knuckle of my middle finger. Hubris lost me that piece of skin.
Wow, this is so easy to slice by using my hand. Why use the protector. Only dumb peo….
Worse of all, since I wasn’t done with the dish, I had to painstakingly finish the recipe with only one hand. Arranging the sliced potatoes vertically in the casserole dish can be a real spud in the butt as one might say.
For the Black Friends-day dinner the next day, I made the same potato gratin dish again. This time using the protector the entire time. I stayed whole. The dish stayed delicious (because how can it not be? It had two cups of heavy cream and another half pound of premium cheese. It’ll be difficult to make it not delicious), and life was joyous.
I guess the lesson here is that I should’ve bought a mandolin awhile ago, back when I was young, limber and heal from scrapes in half an hour rather than the six hours it took for the wound to congeal. Pride will never change.
On an tangent, I really cannot find the connection of the word mandolin the instrument versus mandolin the slicer. There is a website which claims that the tool was named because the action resembled the strumming movement of mandolin the instrument but that sounds bonkers to me.
This past Sunday was the only day when a broken clock could be potentially correct for more than two times a day.
But you know what’s annoying? Changing the clocks on ovens and cars by pressing the “H” button eleven times.