Gartner analyst. Good engineer, bad entrepreneur. Once and future academic. But Twitter’s for the important stuff: literature, philosophy, college football.
Boston, MA
Joined June 2014
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"I am trying to be one of those people who write because they have made progress, and who make progress by writing." --St. Augustine
Pro tip: Standardized tests are written by dumb people who believe they’re smart people. Answer accordingly. Ask yourself: “What would a medium-dumb person think the correct answer is?” The answer is B.
I don’t disagree but I am using this as an excuse to recommend everyone read “Father Andrea” by Pearl S. Buck.
This quoted post is unavailable.
Starts on p. 187: archive.org/details/in.ernet…
Doing a bit of performative reading—in an airport lounge, no less—ahead of the reading group with @AnaKrivolapova and @moonandmouth next week.
ALT Cover of Moravagine by Blaise Cendrarz
The weird vocabulary is integral to the vibe. The book is studded with (pseudo-)scientific terms because La Science is trying to interpret everything through the lens of scientific determinism, and Moravagine is trying to be obscure and oracular, which La Science eats up.
OK but she’s right though
Virginia Woolf’s diary entries on James Joyce’s Ulysses:
“An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me; the book of a self taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating. …
I finished ‘Ulysses’ and think it is a misfire. Genius it has, I think; but of the inferior water. The book is diffuse. It is brackish. It is pretentious. It is underbred, not only in the obvious sense, but in the literary sense. A first-rate writer, I mean, respects writing too much to be tricky; startling; doing stunts.”
P.A.C. Delory retweeted
Some of you are suffering because you’ve read a million emails but not a single poem.
People here are doubting that Reagan read Ibn Khaldun, but I used to assign the Muqaddimah to community college Ethics 101 classes. It’s not some obscure lost work. I promise it was widely studied as recently as 20 years ago. Academic standards used to be much higher, kids.
Meanwhile in New England, every 16-year-old with a learner’s permit is out doing this right now with dad in the passenger seat offering tips. Only one way to learn how to handle a car in the snow.
“They claim they never received the fax, so I’m going to the post office to send it registered mail” is a sentence I spoke out loud, today, in the year of our Lord 2026.
Boston College basketball is so bad we’ve even fallen behind other schools in areas we’ve traditionally dominated: point shaving, match fixing, ties to organized crime, etc.
On display at the Mob Museum in Las Vegas. At least we’ll always have @TheMobMuseum
ALT A display at The Mob Museum in Las Vegas explaining the point shaving scandal of 1978-1979, featuring pennants from Boston College, CCNY, and Arizona State.
Pope Paul III banned chattel slavery in 1537, more than 300 years before the US Civil War. Leaving religious issues aside, if you don’t understand this, you don’t understand the history of the US.
P.A.C. Delory retweeted
Always hurts a bit when computer scientists view philosophy as a separate field they can laugh at rather than as a rich source of foundational work on formal languages and logic - a field full of potential collaborators.
