Andrew Alexander amalex5

C.S. Lewis on excitement as immaturity

South Lake Tahoe. 13 August 2020

I've been thinking about my dilettantism, which I've struggled with since I was a teenager, and its consequences for my career.

C.S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity, writes about the fallacy of expecting the thrill of new love to persist in long-term marriages. It's not an original point, but it is an important one:

People get from books the idea that if you have married the right person you may expect to go on 'being in love' for ever. As a result, when they find they are not, they think this proves they have made a mistake and are entitled to a change---not realising that, when they have changed, the glamour will presently go out of the new love just as it went out of the old one. In this department of life, as in every other, thrills come at the beginning and do not last.

delhi

6 december 2014

delhi is great!

the SMELL---i smelled it the moment i stepped out of the airport, and i can still smell it outside the YMCA. not the smell of trash or excrement or anything bad---but the same smell i associate with late-summer japan. i've smelled this smell only one other time---driving across northern new mexico in june 2011. there was a huge fire near raton, and the entire northern horizon was black---and i realized that this smell, the smell i associate with late-summer japan, is actually the smell of brush fires. maybe the arid climate has something to do with it. that's the other thing i noticed---how similar (physically and geographically, if not anthropologically) delhi is to japan. the arid climate. the dry warmth. the lack of wet, dark-colored earth---all the exposed dirt is dry and light brown and dusty. (san francisco is like this, too.) the flora. even a lot of the architecture: the poorly-maintained, midcentury white concrete-block-and-stucco buildings. the new d

CANADIAN CITIZENSHIP NOTES

APRIL 2017

PART ONE: AM I A CANADIAN CITIZEN??

canada revised its (already very complex) citizenship laws in 2009. at the time i thought there was a high probability that it might mean i was a canadian citizen, and almost wrote a column for the chicago maroon about it. i ended up spiking the column for other reasons, and, on further investigation, decided that the law didn't actually apply to me.
last year sarah somehow heard about this, and decided that it applied to her, and decided she would apply to "resume" her canadian citizenship. i re-read the citizenship laws, and was still fairly certain that it didn't apply to her (and thus, recursively, to me).

notes on david rockefeller’s memoirs 27 september 2016

i’ve devoured the MEMOIRS (2002) of david rockefeller, john d.’s grandson, over the last two days. to my surprise, it’s really, really good. it’s well-written, it’s honest, and it’s interesting.

david––born in 1915 and still alive––grew up in new york, went to harvard, served in world war two, and worked at chase manhattan for 30 years, ultimately as chairman.

rockefeller writes about his insecurities as a young man, about his wife’s depression, and about his father’s lifelong struggles with insecurity, introversion, and depression. he talks about his own failures as a parent. for a book whose tone is very even, steady, and unemotional, i am impressed at how much of this personal, emotional stuff he reveals.

books, movies poems

the results of an informal facebook poll, taken 7 october 2016:

hey facebook. tell me 1) a book i should read, 2) a movie i should watch, 3) a poem i should memorize.

books

Confederacy of Dunces
Beloved
The Emperor of All Maladies

Three Fun Things About Haskell

###Andrew Alexander

A loose transcription of an impromptu five-minute presentation at the Recurse Center, 5 May 2016

##Pattern-matching

(I don't think "pattern matching" is a great name, but this is what everyone calls it.) Anyway, in normal programming, you define a function exactly ONCE, and if you need it to behave differently depending on what its input is, you have to write if-then branches or switch or case statements, and things can get very ugly very fast.

	$.getJSON( sheetURL, function( data ) {
	data.feed.entry
	.filter(function(e){if (e['gsx$render']['$t'] !== 'n'){return e} }) // labels we don't want to render
	.reduce(function(acc,e,i){
	return (
	acc
	.append(
	(i % 30 == 0) ? $('<div class="half-inch-padding"></div>') : '' // 30 labels per page
	)
	.append(

	the right subtotals and the right tips to make a triply-palindromic bill!

	subtotal: $0.01; tip: $0.00; total: $0.01
	subtotal: $0.02; tip: $0.00; total: $0.02
	subtotal: $0.03; tip: $0.00; total: $0.03
	subtotal: $0.03; tip: $0.01; total: $0.04
	subtotal: $0.04; tip: $0.00; total: $0.04
	subtotal: $0.04; tip: $0.01; total: $0.05
	subtotal: $0.05; tip: $0.00; total: $0.05
	subtotal: $0.05; tip: $0.02; total: $0.07

	-- can we have a triply palindromic bill???
	-- i.e., a bill where the subtotal, the tip, and the total are all numeric palindromes?

	-- (note that we're doing all these calculations in cents)

	isPalindrome :: Eq a => [a] -> Bool
	isPalindrome x = x == reverse x

	numToDigits n = map (\x -> read [x] :: Int) (show n)

	"""
	this is a set of scripts that have evolved over the years to make life easier with my fliphone
	my LG VX8150 lets you download all of your contacts to your computer as vCard (.vcf) files
	and these scripts can parse them and save them into a variety of convenient formats
	"""

	def loadContactsFromPhone():
	"""
	no, just kidding. there doesn't seem to be an easy way to automate the phone-> computer contacts transfer
	here are my manual steps