Today I bought a headband

Today I bought a headband. Today was an interesting day.

My desktop

This is currently what I see when I open my laptop.

Spinning fans make me happy

I get an inordinate amount of enjoyment out of writing a computationally expensive program, making my computer execute it, and then hearing the computer’s fans start spinning frantically as heat build up in the processor, RAM, etc.

Dry clean only!? Noooo!

Just realized my new sweater is dry clean only. Worst feeling in the world.

Someone’s coming towards you head-on!

Panic!

It seems like two people walking directly toward each other should either collide or do the awkward shuffle approximately 100% of the time. I am astounded that this doesn’t happen more often.

Since one of my classes was talking about the (iterated) prisoner’s dilemma, I thought of this payoff matrix:

(update: I realize now that the wording of the choices is ambiguous. Think of “left” and “right” as from your own perspective only, for both you and your opponent.)

(update: as per RD’s post below, perhaps the payoffs might be slightly heavier, e.g. (3,3), for player 1 choosing right and player 2 choosing left, in America for example.)

	player 2 chooses left	player 2 chooses right
player 1 chooses left	-1, -1	1, 1
player 1 chooses right	1, 1	-1, -1

This seems to apply in the same way for two people coming up to a doorway from opposite sides:

	player 2 proceeds	player 2 waits
player 1 proceeds	-1, -1	1, 1
player 1 waits	1, 1	-1, -1

I think about this fairly frequently when I walk toward someone, or when I come to a doorway.

Predictive text: “going”

The most satisfying word to type using a phone with a standard 0-9 keypad and predictive text input (like T9) is “going”. And it comes up so frequently.

4-6-4-6-4; left thumb, right thumb, left thumb, right thumb, left thumb.

Yes.

An ambiguity in the English language

The English language is an enigmatic beast, full of beauty and splendor and rife with confusing ambiguities. I think my favorite construction is an adjective followed by two nouns. The tricky part here is that sometimes we use a noun as an adjective in order to describe another noun. For example, this weekend I passed a laundromat with the name “Giant Laundry Center“. The noun “Laundry” is used adjectivally to describe “Center”. This leaves “Giant” open to describe either of the two nouns. Humorous, to say the least. Let me know if you find others, I will rejoice.

Are you really surprised that I posted this?

I found a brief video featuring the adorable Jenny Lewis from this sort of fashion/cinematography experimental series from a few months ago.