A few of you have noticed that I'm a little darker skinned than I was previously (see photo to left). Well, the explanation is simple, it's a recent photo and I was at the beach getting my ultra-tan on. I happened to be at the BIL Conference, and was in Monterey where the beaches are. BIL was cool; the proactive social evangelism by the people behind it seemed to work pretty well. Out of the 200 people there was only one super-freak who parasitized everyone's attention (you know who I'm talking about if you were there). I met two bloggers, Lexi Bright and Shannon Clark; we bonded over our interests in small-world networks. Speaking of blogs, about 20 people there seemed to know me from the blog. My face is pretty distinctive I guess.
The nerd-quotient was out of control. There was always someone somewhere deriving a proof on a napkin (sometimes you'd see two people extemporaneously deriving a proof simultaneously). Later down at the bar I had a conversation where I made an analogy to the third moment about a distribution; no one blinked. There was also this Irish guy who looked kind of like an elf who wanted to discuss the deontological implications of transhumanism over a beer (no, not guinness!).1 Finally, to the chagrin of some of my friends who were temporarily associated with me I attempted to make the term "tranny" an appropriate shorthand for transhumanist by regularly asking people if they were trannies upon first meeting them (the Singularity Institute was a sponsor). In my defense, gay used to have a very different connotation at one point, and I'd estimate that 20% of attendees were sympathetic to transhumanism.
I also met Craig of Deep Sea News. If you were to guess who had the curried dish for dinner, would you have thought it was the guy from Arkansas instead of the brown dude? Life is full of surprises (I much recommend the calamari at The Crown & Anchor, I ordered it three times).
Finally, the Trader Joe's in Monterey had only one hot sauce. And it was of the jalapeno variety. Weak!
1 - Piece of advice to Irish guys with big eyes, slim build and who are not particularly lanky: don't wear a hat that makes you look like a leprechaun! It ruins the conversational flow when your interlocutor keeps wanting to psych you out by suggesting there's a pot of gold at the other end of the bar....
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Could you provide a 'full body shot'? We can't tell if you are wearing sneakers with your khaki pants!
You are not only darker-skinned than previous, but you seem to have removed a cat off your face (and grew out the hair on the top of your head).
Hopefully this will not change the frequency of how often you put up 'Katz' entries.
The nerd-quotient was out of control. There was always someone somewhere deriving a proof on a napkin
Meaning a proof of a little problem someone suggested, or demonstrating something they more or less already knew?
assman, both. on one occasion someone was talking about an equation and there was a question where it was derivable from from axioms and the internet connection was down so 3 people started trying to prove it.
Here's a story you'll want to follow: Bone-breaking fight pulls kitten from python's jaws
It's much easier to take a neutral word and attach a derogatory or negative meaning to it than it is to take a negative word and attach a neutral meaning to it.
The use of 'gay' for homosexual was euphemistic and derogatory, although with a great deal of work by the homosexual community the word is greatly rehabilitated. I don't think one person is enough to redefine and rehabilitate 'tranny', razib.
At first I thought this article was some kind of comment on Clinton supposedly darkening Obama's skin in one of her political commercials. The camera does not lie, it just doesn't always tell the whole truth.
WTF is transhuman? That is not a word my Firefox American dictionary knows. Trans=across as in the Trans-Siberian railway. So, transhuman means across-human? WTF does that mean?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhumanism