Back when I was in high school, nobody understood me.  (Like everybody,)  I was alone.

Where could I turn?  Back then, we didn't have manga to cover every conceivable genre.  During this trip to Anaheim, I came across Gothic Sports, and then a Jack Skellington baseball (not "baseball cap") at Disneyland.

I'm not a girl.  And I'm not into Tinkerbell.  Good thing.  Because if I were either (or both), I'd find In the Realm of the Never Fairies irresistible.  What gorgeous art!  What a wonderful book.  It reminds me of the Goblins book I did buy that was a tie-in to the Labyrinth movie.

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

If I were a teacher, I'd forbid the reading of Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman! and IWoz: From Computer Geek to Cult Icon.   I'd explain to the kids that the books are forbidden on the grounds that they could give them ideas about breaking the law, sex, lock-picking, and making contraptions with mischievous intent.

iWoz: From Computer Geek to Cult Icon

The books are too short.  They're written in simple, clear language.  They're written by deviants who forged their own way.  They could only be disruptive.

And with any luck at all, every curious student would have an unyielding desire to learn more, and they'll devour the books on their own accord.

Could such a reverse-psychology ploy work?  I really don't know.  But it's worth a try, even if the kids see though the guise.

I can't wait until the timing is right to forbid these books from my children.

Originally posted on dblume.vox.com

This Middle Eastern potentate called a meeting of the wise men in his kingdom, and he said, "I want you to gather all the world's knowledge together in one place so that my sons can read it and learn."  The wise men went off, and after a year, they came back with twenty-five volumes of knowledge.  The potentate looked at it and he said, "No.  It's too long.  Make it shorter."  So the wise men went off for another year and they came back with one single volume.  The potentate looked at it and said, "No.  Still too long."  So the wise men went off for another year.  When they came back, they gave the potentate a piece of paper with one sentence on it.  A single sentence.  You know what the sentence was?

This too shall pass.

Slaughterhouse-Five

RIP Kurt Vonnegut.  I didn't read Slaughterhouse-Five until I was an adult.  Maybe that was for the better.  The book left a permanent impression, and I better appreciated the choruses and the "plant-connect" analogies while I was reading it.

Kurt raised my awareness of the Dresden bombings the way Isao Takahata did so of the Tokyo fire bombings.

Thanks, Kurt.  Your work was special and continues to affect us.

Originally posted on dlma.vox.com

My sweet wife knows me oh-so-well!  While I gave her mushy Valentine's Day fare, she gave me The C++ Standard Library Extensions: A Tutorial and Reference, and Sculpting A Galaxy: Inside the Star Wars Model Shop.

I'm going to devour these books, and I can't pick which to read first!  Whee!

Sculpting a Galaxy: Inside the Star Wars Model Shop

The C++ Standard Library Extensions: A Tutorial and Reference

Originally posted on dlma.vox.com

First, figure about how many serious relationships you're likely to have, if you never settled on one.  (Are you conservative, or a floozy?)  Then, pass up the first 37% of your suitors.  After that, stop with the best-so-far.  Mathematical proof included.

Assume there is a test for cancer which is 98 percent accurate, and that one out of 200 people (.5%) actually have cancer.  You test positive!  Do you freak?

Imagine that 10,000 tests are administered.  Of these, 50 will have cancer (.5%), but only 49 test positive because the test is only 98% accurate.  Of the 9,950 cancerless people, 2% will erroneously test positive for a total of 199.   Thus, there are 248 positive tests, of which only 49 are true.  So the probability of actually having cancer after testing positive is only 49/248 or about 20%!

Two men bet on a series of coin flips.  The first to win any six flips will win $100.  The game, however, is interrupted after only eight flips, with the score at 5 to 3.  How should the pot be divided?

A.  The man with 5 wins should get the $100.
B.  The man with 5 should get 5/8 of the pot, and the man with 3 should get 3/8 of the pot.

( Read Pascal's decision... )

Alan Dershowitz argues that since fewer than one in a thousand men who batter their wives or girlfriends go on to murder them, the court should not have allowed testimony that Simpson battered his wife.  Paulos writes, "The statement is true but astonishingly irrelevant since it fails to take into account the obvious fact that there was a murder victim.  Using Bayes' theorem and some widely available crime statistics, one can conclude that if a man batters his wife or girlfriend and she later turns up dead, the batterer is the murderer more than 80 percent of the time, and this without any individuating circumstances or further evidence."

“These are the playmate years, and they are demonstrably fraudulent. The scene is reputed to be acrawl with adorably amoral bunnies to whom sex is a pleasant social favor. The new culture. And they are indeed present and available, in exhausting quantity, but there is a curious tastelessness about them. A woman who does not guard and treasure herself cannot be of much value to anyone else. They become a pretty little convenience, like a guest towel. And the cute little things they say, and their dainty little squeals of pleasure and release are as contrived as the embroidered initials on the guest towels. Only a woman of pride, complexity and emotional tension is genuinely worthy of the act of love, and there are only two ways to get yourself one of them. Either you lie, and stain the relationship with your own sense of guile, or you accept the involvement, the emotional responsibility, the permanence she must by nature crave. I love you can be said only two ways.”

“[Credit] cards are handy, but I hate to use them. I always feel like Thoreau armored with a Leica and a bird book. They are the little fingers of reality, reaching for your throat. A man with a credit card is in hock to his own image of himself. But these are the last remaining years of choice. In the stainless nurseries of the future, the feds will work their way through all the squalling pinkness tattooing a combination tax number and credit number on one wrist, followed closely by the I.T. and T. team putting the permanent phone number, visaphone doubtless, on the other wrist. Die and your number goes back in the bank. It will be the first provable immortality the world has ever known.”