A life in words

  • Real, or Ideal? OR What To Name A Post When No Cohesive Theme Binds It Together

    1. Academia Last night I went to the “Evening for New Graduate Students” at BYU (which was actually secretly or not-so-secretly open to all graduate students—note for next year 🙂 ). President Samuelson spoke first. During that short talk and during his devotional address on Tuesday, I had the feeling that I have really undervalued…

  • 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…

There is nothing I dread so much, as a division of the Republic into two great Parties, each arranged under its leader and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This in my humble apprehension is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.John Adams, Letter to Jonathan Jackson, 2 Oct 1780