For quite some time, my pocket schema has consisted of keys, cell phone and pen in my front left pocket, and wallet in my front right pocket. This arrangement has worked for me, but I'm not dogmatic about it; I would delight in a superior method.

Certain inessential routines manage to escape the light of outside corroboration, which is comforting. These "Opaque Habits" would also incude: toilet paper techniques and eggcorns ("for all intents-and-purposes" vs. "for all intensive purposes").

I would like to believe that they act like vestigial organs or viruses. How would we trace their origins? Who is the "patient zero"? And who wears their wallets in their back pockets, anyway?

Almost everyday, I choose between two pairs of similar-looking shoes.


Both of these shoes are more or less the same. I usually wear the black shoes when it is wet outside, and the green shoes when I am wearing colorful clothing.

The building I live in sits above a bodega (convenience store) called Hermanos Acosta.

Directly across the street from Hermanos Acosta is another bodega, called Super Deli Sajoma Inc.

Both of these stores offer more or less the same products. I usually go to Hermanos Acosta for cans of soda or beans, and to Super Deli Sajoma Inc. for sandwiches.

I enjoy making these arbitrary daily decisions.

Best of 2008

I would like to start writing here again.

Best of 2007

Sometimes I sincerely wish that we could change the year-end reflection system to something more frequent; I would love to devour quarterly summations, and it strikes me that it would prove beneficial on the whole.

Been thinkin' a lot about techniques for extra-subjective representation.

The NASA Voyager "Golden Record" is an elegant example to follow: Dr. Carl Sagan and friends got together in the 70's with the goal of creating a best-approximation record of life on earth (for intelligent beings in space). In the book, Murmurs of Earth, Sagan and the Voyager team describe the epistemological problems that face any aspiring summarizer of society: the balance between over-specification and genericization.
There seem to be two approaches to this encyclopedic middle ground: the diversity of specimen and the universality of a given example. I have previously addressed the question of subject matter diversity, but for reasons relating to a current project, I have been researching universal (extra-subjective) representation. I am looking at gestures and behaviors and assigning metasyntactic variables. Converting from the form "Jeff drank water from a cup" to "X drank Y from a Z" is simple enough, but representing the XYZ form on film has proven difficult. It seems that movies don't quite work like linguistic exercises.