Nick’s Comments (group member since Nov 23, 2010)

Nick’s comments from the The Extra Cool Group! (of people Michael is experimenting on) group.

yes yes yes of course

Elizabeth wrote: "Nick wrote: "Elizabeth wrote: "Nick wrote: "this is the kind of thing a bookmark folder is for, people. we have the technology lol"

Nick, you're assuming that everyone uses only only one browser o..."

handhelds? my hp48gx can't even use tcp/ip let alone render remote content.

on a serious note, i never expire cached content from goodreads, so i've got a searchable index of every review i've ever read on here (sometimes in multiple incarnations, and including those which have been removed afterwards). caches are good. hard drives are good. mmmm, 12.3TB of RAID5 on the workstation is very good indeed.

Elizabeth wrote: "Nick wrote: "this is the kind of thing a bookmark folder is for, people. we have the technology lol"

Nick, you're assuming that everyone uses only only one browser on only one computer. The app sh..."

bookmark synchronization across one's machines is technology of a 1998ish vintage.

a browser that can't bookmark isn't worthy of the name. bookmarking was a feature of friggin' Mosaic ("hotlists") and is supported in all four of the text-mode browsers on my linux machine.

strawman!

this is the kind of thing a bookmark folder is for, people. we have the technology lol

brian's twilight review and everything that Eric guy posts about american history books will have statues all over berlin in fifty years. conrad's also a regular source of brilliance, especially whenever he can talk about college football or ol' fyodor.

every review of that ghastly "eating animals" suckfest is the worst thing on goodreads, save brian's lies and tricks enticing one to get all excited about blood's a rover. wtf ellroy, that was about as exciting as a transoceanic voyage in a rowboat.

Jimmy wrote: "Nick, your description of your shelves was awesome. Thanks for that. It reminded me of those passages in the old testament about how to build the ark or something."

believe it or not i ghostwrote genesis, judges, and large portions of nehemiah. these days i could stand firm for at least a coauthor credit, but back then i was rollin' round town in a big-booty Benz, which was rented, fronting on a cellular phone which did not work. you took the gigs as they came!

Jason wrote: "funny, i just brought up a different Pi reference in an alternate thread.

jason, i am surprised to see "fnordinc" in the absence of an Illuminatus Trilogy review!

Brainycat wrote: "Didn't win the bonus points for not closing them together, though

i recall thinking when i wrote it, "gotta close all the right parens together so it suggests tail recursion!" i cannot authoritatively claim, however, that this is an accurate recollection rather than just something i made up in the millisecond before realizing that i didn't actually have anything in mind. c'est la vie!

Jasmine wrote: "before I moved i had piles cause I didn't have enough shelves"

oh trust me, i've been there. i finally bought a place this summer, and set immediately to building these. so happy!

my reviewing is in direct relation to how much adderall®-brand dextro and levo amphetamine sulfates i've ingested, and how little i want to work at the moment. i'd thus like to submit a 5th species: the opaque, speedy review i hereby dub Kerouac Toilet Rolls. the following review might be considered a canonical example:

http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/60007882

when combined with graduate-level hard science, i consider this kind of thing almost a new art form. alas, 99% of goodreads consists of liberal arts majors from the northeast who couldn't tell you whether the 2nd law of Thermodynamics is a good thing or a bad thing (answer: NATURAL LAW TRANSCENDS PATHETIC MORALITY, muh wa hahahahah), and think that π is something you stuff with key lime. The overly technical subset of Kerouac Toilet Rolls are hence known as Erdős Furbish (Erdős had a love for amphetamines, and prodigious output; to furbish is to buffer and sheen, much as racemic amphetamines might cause one to furiously cite, cite-check, amend and extend). Pearls before swine, alas.

Brian wrote: "I would like to eventually review every book I've read, but it takes time. I enjoy reviewing books because it forces me to think about what I really got out of the reading experience. It's now gott..."

i'm 100% with brian here, as is typical.

oh goddamnit, i just realized you meant goodreads shelves. well, you can go see my goodreads shelves, or write a script to harvest them, blah. and i don't think i can link directly to my comment, k-crappy :/. goodreads fail!

"It's much easier being an art student."

I don't disagree with this in the least.

Jasmine wrote: "I'm going with joke, cause I can think of better, but you know time moves slower over there and so does the plot of their books."

give me some recommendations! i literally know of no other spanish novelists than mr. cervantes.

Nick wrote: "Jasmine wrote: "hey what is in the spanish from spain section?"

Don Quixote."

Whether or not this is my own private joke regarding personal prejudices about the Kingdom of Spain and its influence on the novel is left as an exercise for the reader.

Jasmine wrote: "hey what is in the spanish from spain section?"

Don Quixote.

i send friend requests to anyone who strikes me as interesting. some of them don't accept, and this bothers me not at all. i remove people if i determine them not, in fact, to have been interesting.

when sent friend requests, i check to see whether they qualify under the above rule. if so, they are accepted; if not, they aren't. a friend request is thus just letting me know you exist; i don't look into possible motives.

i almost always reject anyone listed as an author: if they were a *good* author, they would be researching, or writing, or fucking european handsoap models, but not likely friending me on goodreads. bad authors are uninteresting, and we know how i feel about that.

finally, i can't deny that freakishly unattractive people tend to be freakishly boring, probably due to generally freakish lives and interactions (please note the "tend to be"). this is not a litmus, but it plays into calculations. hurrah for superficiality and prejudice!

i would like to be a vote whore, but it's pretty difficult to do when one primarily reads science and math :/. i've got to have one of the lower reviews-to-votes ratios on this site.

Nick wrote: "Two bays, each 12' x 10' and formed of 3 pods. The middle pod is wider than the other two, which are equal. In Bay A, the middle pod has one fewer shelf than the others, and also the only extended-..."

Awww fuck I forgot the shelf of Translated Literature (1x shelf, middle pod Bay A, following Unamerican-Literature-in-English). This is broken up into Russian, Spanish-from-Spain, Spanish-from-Mexico-and-Central-America, Spanish-from-South-America, African-nonEnglish, Indian-nonEnglish, French, Italian, German-Germany and German-not-Germany. whew!

Two bays, each 12' x 10' and formed of 3 pods. The middle pod is wider than the other two, which are equal. In Bay A, the middle pod has one fewer shelf than the others, and also the only extended-height shelf. In Bay B, all pods have the same number of shelves.

Height restrictions mean that the topmost shelves in both bays are used to hold mass-market papaerbacks, the only things that will fit. Mass-markets are not allowed on other shelves, because they are ugly, break up a shelf's aesthetics too much, tend to get beat up, tend to be my oldest (in terms of acquisition date) books, and are otherwise generally unloved. Likewise, oversized books can only go on the oversized shelf. I have only two of these currently -- the Oxford English Dictionary (Condensed), 2nd Edition, and a gigantic book of Hubble pictures called "Cosmos".

Subjects are grouped within pods, rather than crossing pods to be grouped along shelves. An attempt has been made to have subjects "flow" into each other; together with pod-grouping, this prefers my own sorting rather than, say, DDS or LLC indexing. I feel this to be the weakest aspect of my system, since it's a large non-standard, controversial wad of information in what's otherwise a fairly streamlined axiom scheme.

In a divergence from standard indexing practices, I sort biographies, memoirs and autobiographies directly into their appropriate subjects. I find this vastly preferable to a distinct biography section.

All subjects are sorted by author, subsorted (if necessary and appropriate) by translator, and finally subsorted by date of *that edition's* or *that translation's* publication.

Subject breakdown, proceeding top to bottom in all bays, mass-market topshelf ignored in all cases:

Bay A, Left Pod: 3x shelves American Literature. 1x shelf American History. 1.5x shelves Military History, including the Holocaust, with .5 shelves of Sociology and History-of-Events-In-My-Lifetime. Grabbag shelf of large bargain hardbacks of the "Art of the World" and "World Religions" sort, Encyclopedia of Animal Life (9 volumes), Jacques Cousteau's Marine Encyclopedia (20 volumes), Life Science, Financial/Investing. .5x shelves of Sports History. 1.5x shelves of General History.

Bay A, Middle Pod: 1x shelf broken into Religious-Texts-of-the-World-No-Matter-How-Ludicrous (thus the Satanic Bible and something calling itself the Necronomicon find their home alongside the
القرآن‎ and the New International Version; I figure they'll fight it out amongst themselves, and I'll worship whichever wins), Philosophy-Including-Philosophy-of-Science, and Books-About-Drugs-Which,-If-Not-Placed-So-High,-Will-(history-shows)-Regrettably-Be-Stolen-or-at-Least-Loaned-Out-While-I'm-Too-High-To-Remember-To-Whom-I-Lent-Them. 2x shelves of Unamerican-Literature-Written-in-English, broken down into Canada, Ireland (but see JAMES JOYCE FETISH, below), Great Britain, South Africa, India, Trans-Tasman, Exiled, Beckett-Writing-in-English and Nabokov-Writing-in-English (ya bastards). 1x shelf pop science (but see NUCLEAR WEAPONS FETISH, below). The next shelf is the aforementioned oversized; next to the OED sit my nuclear weapons fetish, a collection of books related to nuclear weapons and those scientists primarily known for weaponeering (this means: Oppenheimer, Teller, Ted Taylor, Sakharov, and Szilard. This excludes: Einstein, Fermi, Bethe, Feynman, and -- by default -- everyone else not listed previously). .5x shelf James Joyce fetish, including 4 different copies of Ulysses. .5x shelf Literary Criticism. 1x shelf Collected-Works-and-Combined-Novels-Usually-Listed-as-Bargain-Editions.

Bay A, Right Pod aka THE POD OF ETERNAL RIGOR (everything must be an authentic textbook, ie contain either equations or code set off by their own fonts): 1x shelf useless/embarrassing computer science and manuals -- most of these I've had since I was a teenager. 1x shelf of Language- or Technology-Specific Programming, partially-subsorted by abstraction of the language and thus Assembly Languages (subsorted by architecture), C, C++, shell, ML, Lisp, Haskell, SmallTalk, Java, Prolog, Pthreads, RPC and finally OpenMP (there's also a lone Perl book, but I don't much like to talk about that). .75x shelves of grabbag science: Electrical Engineering, Nuclear Engineering, Nuclear Physics, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, dominated by Nuc-E, followed by .25x shelves of Cryptography (applied and theoretical). 1x shelf of Theoretical Computer Science and the King's College Texts in Computer Science series. 1x shelf of Mathematics, sorted into Logic (all the way up to Category Theory etc), Combinatorics, Prob/Stats, Algebra, Analysis, Number Theory, and Numerical Analysis. 3x shelves of the hardest of hardcore computer science.

that's enough for now. i can cover bay b some other time if you'd like.