Amalgam

"There's so much more to a relationship than sex," she said.

"Like what?" I asked.

"There's just so much," she repeated, "you either get it, or you don't."

"If you can't describe it, it can't be that important to me. My life's work is about describing things."

"Is that why you're always studying?" she asked.

"Yup."

"Tell me, when will you ever take a break?"

"I don't know - I don't plan my vacations."

"Well, that's all I need to know," she said, nonchalantly, "you don't get it."

I generally didn't appreciate how divorced she was from reality - constantly living in an imaginary place that would let her feel alive. I hadn't read fiction in years. In my life, ever footstep contained a structure, and a mystery. Only fools took fiction seriously. Fiction always made me feel lonely - glorified caricatures designed for public consumption, reminding me that most people live in a world that they feel they will never understand - which leaves the rest of us, alone.

"Math? But why?" she said.

"For fun," I said.

"Fun?" she said.

I pointed to the coffee shop, and said, "money," then I pointed to the notebook on my lap and said, "fun."

"Then I was right," she said, "it's a planetary difference."

"What's a 'planetary difference'?" I asked.

She replied, "it means we're from different planets; you know, metaphorically. At first I wasn't sure if I didn't get you because it was an age thing, but no, it's a planetary difference."

"So where do we go from here?"

"Home, I guess."

"Separate homes?"

"Maybe."

- A fruit salad of conversations I have had with women, and then some.

MBTI Barista Rage

ST Barista: this coffee sucks; someone screwed up.

SF Barista: this coffee tastes terrible; I'm so angry/sad.

NF Barista: this coffee hasn't received the respect that it deserves; I'm going into a righteous funk now.

NT Barista: where's the bloody documentation?! Nevermind. The coffee is fucked.

Grinders. Hmm.

Brain fart while traffic jamming.

A lot has been said about the importance of grinders. But I do have my doubts about the relative importance of grinders in the espresso stack. (I borrow the term "stack," from software engineering, where it refers to the supply-chain of machines which are critical to the delivery of a particular result.)

Why do grinders matter? Consistency of grindsize distribution and temperature for sure; consistency of dosage, probably not so much, except when orders are piling up - if you find it hard to modify a dose, you simply need a better scale or a smaller spoon. (Some of my colleagues and I weigh every dose - we find it not too hard to get within 0.1g of a target dose with a teaspoon.)

This is my first job calibrating espresso, but those with prior experience tell me that it is hard to know where variance creeps into a stack - I believe them. I am just wondering if a Robur is worth the retention waste, for a very small shop. A scale and an espresso machine for consistent water temperature, dose mass, and brew pressure readings are probably of greater importance until business is very heavy. Over to the definition of "heavy." :)

Math & Linguistics

I swear, the hardest thing about studying textbooks is to focus on semantics... and to ignore typography, etymology, syntax, morphology... actually no, we need morphological and syntactical context from which to derive semantics. Screw linguistics, I'm supposed to be studying math. But that, is how I ended up studying linguistics. :p

History of my thoughts... heh.

Morning Shift

Awake, an hour before first alarm. Snoozing. First alarm. Second alarm. It's 0615. A few minutes of sitting in the dark, calibrating my nervous system, against the relative silence, the streetlamps, and other items here and thereabouts. It's interesting to note that six minutes of this is sufficient to reduce the amount of ambient noise in autonomous conscious imagination. On with the rest of the day. Need to beat the traffic. Checking web stuff. Second alarm. Rolling out.

Linguistics

I still find it strange how far apart treatments are, of the fields of study which are called "information systems or informatics," and "linguistics." I look at people and see only memory systems where the data-structures are defined by modes of sensation. I wish more people attacked these field as "the same problem."

Meanwhile, updating my readings of what are pidgin languages, creole languages, decreolisation, hypercorrection, [diglossia, digraphia, prestige dialects, Indo-European language family relations, Brahmic scripts, diacritics], etc.

Pay Day

Got my 50bucks/day for December!

Injection, surjection, bijection... revised FWIW, time for enforced sleep.

Make some money. No pity for fools, happy and sad alike. Roll out!

NYD:

Looks around. Sees a quiet night.

Stays calm and deletes more distractions.

Back to the office to study tomorrow, presuming a decent waking hour.

Information systems: too much math? No problem... intersperse with the history of human writing systems.

NYD: "deploy deploy deploy!"

Late. For studies. At least not too late.

Tired. But I guess it was a late night last night, a normal waking today, and a very early waking tomorrow.

Shutting down. Shutting down. Shutting down.

Wine Market

Some reading on the wine market (roughly sorted by date FWIW):

2013, and a great survey of price vs. perception issues:

http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/46618070248/the-price-of-wine

Older, random data:

http://giannini.ucop.edu/media/are-update/files/issues/v13n6.pdf

http://www.adelaide.edu.au/wine-econ/papers/GWM_SC_charts_043011.pdf

Stampede

So there I was, washing dishes.

"All units: is that a girl crying in the corner?"

[STAMPEDE OF PEEPING TOMS]

Colleague said, "was it you?"

I said, "it's always me."

Uninformation

D-Wave: Had to watch it just to keep abreast of fads. But...

...that was one vomit inducing promotional video omg. Reminds me of those job ads for programmers that look like someone scraped the front-page of Tiobe for "top ten fads in technology" - but this was physics.

Sunday: Late. Off the the pleblands. Where we turn our meat to the business of feeding itself. :)