A life in words

  • So Far, So Good

    Of course, having a good first day as a graduate student is bound to be a poor predictor of the whole graduate experience: everybody knows that nothing but syllabus-reading ever happens on the first day of class. Nevertheless I am glad to have had a good first day in the computer science MS program today.…

  • Медесифра!

    This post is in honor of finally getting my blog to support Unicode characters, including Cyrillic and nearly every other writing system in existence. It used to just replace non-Western-European characters with question marks, but no longer! This is a big deal for someone as fond of writing systems as me. This has caused problems…

  • Forests Real and Imagined

    Forests. Lots of plants, big and small, living together on land. Animals dwell there. Hunters hunt there. Recluses and far-away grandmas live in cabins there. How many fairytales take place in a forest? How many books you’ve read? Is the forest good, evil, or both or neither? When was the last time you sat on…

The common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it. It serves… to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection [and] opens the door to foreign influence and corruption….George Washington, Farewell Address