May 17, 2008

The Past Will Tear Us Apart

The ability of the human mind to conjure potent and extraordinarily vivid memories from tangential sights and sounds never ceases to amaze me. Perhaps it should: at some level, it is these very mental non sequitors that form the basis of our collective experience in this (necessarily futile) existence. And yet, when the memory evoked is of particular poignancy or significance, the almost narcotic effect that follows is one for which I am never fully prepared.

May 14, 2008

The Day the Irony Died

When you lead your life adrift in a turbulent sea of mediocrity, loneliness, and despair, as I do, really all that there is to keep you waking up in the mornings and setting aside the metaphorical (if not actual) gun to your head is the bitter irony that accompanies a life devoid of meaning, purpose, or happiness. The day the irony disappears is the day the abyss consumes you, the day you hit absolute rock bottom. Today was such a day for me.

May 05, 2008

Stable Marriage and Information Failure in the Social Marketplace

Standing around at a bar last Friday night, sipping a dirty martini and semi-engaged in a lackluster conversation with some random woman I had met approximately ninety seconds earlier, I felt my thoughts drift almost involuntarily from trying to figure out whether she was attractive or I was hallucinating, to the Stable Marriage Algorithm and pervasive information failures in day-to-day existence. This is only one of the many reasons why I do not have a girlfriend.

April 26, 2008

Much Ado About Chicago Law's Classroom Internet Ban: A Faux-Empirical Study

It has been a month since Spring Quarter classes commenced at The Law School, and more importantly, since the policies outlined in the now infamous e-mail read 'round the world went into effect. Of course, here I refer to the e-mail from the Dean which informed us, much to our chagrin, that the beloved Internet which had once been provided in its full edu-network glory—for educational purposes only, of course—would no longer be available to us in the classroom.

Worse still, this was not a result of the so-called democratic process, where poor and starving law students, induced by promises of free food from sub-par establishments in the greater Hyde Park area arrive to do whatever it is they need to do to get said food, but instead, an onerous mandate from the administration. People had complained, they said. Learning would be enhanced, they told us. In the end, our experience will be better without classroom Internet, they assured us. Somewhere, a University of Chicago Nobel Laureate rolled over in his grave. Paternalism, the bane of libertarians, conservatives, and Federalist Society members near and far, had supposedly arrived at the once stalwart home of the free market economy. Oh, the irony.

April 11, 2008

Escape from Hyde Park

What with all the tired introspection, trite whining, and tepid acts of kindness in recent weeks, it may be hard to imagine that at one point this site was known far and wide (or near and narrow, as the case may be) for its irrational rants of decidedly mediocre quality. Where is the unintelligible vitriol the About page so proudly touts? Where is the illogical, unreasoned spewing of venom against irrelevant and incidental targets of only minor significance? Where indeed! Today, in a grandiose (and necessarily ill-fated) gesture of returning to the roots, I will embark upon a rant of little consequence that is guaranteed to embody the same mediocrity of thought and irrelevance of topic which comprised this site for nearly four years of its (worthless) existence. Enough useless chatter. Let us begin: I hate Hyde Park.

April 02, 2008

The Spring Break That Was Neither

Spring Break. The phrase conjures up images of warm, tropical beaches, scantily-clad women, and tequila—lots and lots of tequila—in your mind, does it not? Unfortunately for me, I sort of hate the beach (despite having spent a little less than half my life in (the) O.C.), have already been to such destinations as Cancún and Miami, and in any case, stand no chance with scantily-clad women of any sort, no matter how much tequila they may have consumed. Instead, I chose to spend my break on a bicoastal whirlwind tour that left me perhaps more tired than before. And considering that today was probably the first day where it was both sunny and above 45° F here in Chicago, one might say that my so-called Spring Break was neither spring nor a break. [...]

March 20, 2008

La Persistencia de la Memoria

Salvador Dalí
La Persistencia de la Memoria
MoMA.org

With the first week of Spring Break nearly over, and my (triumphant) return to California, in particular the Bay Area, drawing to an unavoidable close, I cannot help but succumb to the memories of a bygone era that this trip has evoked with such puissance as to shock the senses—good ones and bad, those that stir laughter, and those that conjure tears (insofar as I am capable of such emotions). The memories that hardly seemed indelible even a month ago have demonstrated themselves to be just that in the course of less than a week. To say that the past few days have been surreal would be grossly unjust; a waking dream is perhaps the closest I can come to describing it.

March 11, 2008

Deleveraging the Personal Brand

Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torments of man.
—Friedrich Nietzsche

Perhaps it is because I am within a day of finals again (damn quarter system!), but for that, or some other reasons not worth indulging in as public a forum as this, I have been thinking a lot about expectations lately—our own, those of others, and those of society—especially, the relationship of such expectations vis-à-vis the (patent) meaninglessness of life. In particular, how do we (in the royal sense) reconcile the lofty—and very likely, unattainable—expectations that we and others set with the certain and blinding futility of life? In a dense and meandering article last year, I suggested that the way to resolve this paradox was essentially to ignore it, letting hope and (daily) contemplations of suicide coexist uneasily, mentally disquieting though that approach may be. Today, I propose an alternative solution: deleveraging one's personal brand (as we say in contemporary parlance).

March 03, 2008

Four Reasons Why Google Reader Shared Items Suck

As many of you who know me in real life could attest to, I am a fairly hardcore user of Google Reader for all my syndication needs. Until quite recently, I would venture that I was a very satisfied user. The introduction of the Shared Items and Friends, however may just change my mind.

February 16, 2008

Barack on Sorting Algorithms

I am normally not a huge fan of posting videos (other than those produced over at 1524, of course), but for all the incorrigible (computer) nerds out there, the follow clip from Barack Obama's interview with Google CEO Dr. Eric Schmidt is awesome: