http://www.sellingwaves.com A graduate student in mathematics and a modern languages major take on politics and culture with the following aspirational motto: ‘Deregulate your mind.’ Tue, 22 Jul 2008 09:59:03 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en The distance between Moscow and St. Petersburg is about the same as between New York and Chicago, but at least for me, as probably for most travelers, the journey between them didn't really give any sense of distance or land in between, as it consisted basically of boarding an overnight ... http://www.sellingwaves.com/2008/07/21/moscow-the-living-brain-in-the-comatose-body/ Giant Steps Amazing animation of John Coltrane's "Giant Steps" (via Big Contrarian) (tags: music animation coltrane fun) http://www.sellingwaves.com/2008/07/07/links-for-2008-07-07/ Though even more minds may be leaking out of Russia than capital or nuclear secrets, St. Petersburg possesses, though only for a few months of the year, what is by definition the ideal of enlightened existence, namely unending daylight. Though with electric lighting the rest of the world has ... http://www.sellingwaves.com/2008/07/02/the-white-nights/ The mantra of the managing classes in the age of globalization is to make your job unable to be outsourced or performed by machines. By electing its presidents with huge majorities in every election Russians have made the results of those elections like those that easily can be and ... http://www.sellingwaves.com/2008/06/17/a-death-foretold/ Purity (tags: math mathematics xkcd humor science) http://www.sellingwaves.com/2008/06/12/links-for-2008-06-12/ Money can buy strange things. When it comes to, for example, the public beach near Brooklyn that a friend and I visited on Saturday which is accessible by subway and free to the public, as compared to the beach a little further away that we visited on Sunday and ... http://www.sellingwaves.com/2008/06/09/new-york-part-ii/ "What a city, right? 18 million people with six degrees or less of separation by coughing." "Maybe that's why the buildings are all so ugly, like they're not ultimately here for our benefit. After all, the fences of a cattle pen don't need to be pretty either." "What makes them ... http://www.sellingwaves.com/2008/06/07/new-york-part-i/ Maybe it's because I've been studying for exams the last few weeks, so that my mind has become like the eyes when they've been staring too hard for too long, and things come into and go out of focus chaotically and lose depth and proportion, but there has been something ... http://www.sellingwaves.com/2008/05/28/success-and-the-military/ Since my auto-link-posting thingy seems to be broken, here's a manual version: Agenbites Nice column about words that "resound with their own verbal truthfulness". Another great example: cherubic. In the Basement of the Ivory Tower “America, ever-idealistic, seems wary of the vocational-education track. We are not comfortable limiting anyone’s options. Telling someone ... http://www.sellingwaves.com/2008/05/25/links-for-2008-05-25/ I tend to think that whether or not you believe there's a God is less important than what kind of God you envision. After all, it's not like searching for Bob, where you have a name and just need to find whether someone answers to it. Here what ... http://www.sellingwaves.com/2008/05/23/god-and-equatorial-guinea-four-degrees-of-separation/