For example, I looked up one of the terms I saw in an article by a baseball fan: “Peripheral ERA is the expected earned run average taking into account park-adjusted hits, walks, strikeouts, and home runs allowed. Unlike Voros McCracken’s DIPS, hits allowed are included.” I have no idea what that means.

Long ago, when shepherds wanted to see if two herds of sheep were isomorphic, they would look for a specific isomorphism.

Apart from ignorance of categories, the desire for additive inverses may be the main reason mathematicians indulge in decategorification.

For example, let’s assume that when they joust, the massive, powerful wolf always kills the rabbit, and then eats the rabbit and has one offspring (R=0 and W=2).

In the terminology which you graciously ascribe to me we might say that the atmosphere is a musical instrument on which one can play many tunes. High notes are sound waves, low notes are long inertial [Rossby] waves, and nature is a musician more of the Beethoven than of Chopin type. He much prefers the low notes and only occasionally plays arpeggios in the treble and then only with a light hand. The oceans and the continents are the elephants in Saint-Saens’ animal suite, marching in a slow cumbrous rhythm, one step every day or so. Of course there are overtones: sound waves, billow clouds (gravity waves), inertial oscillations, etc., but these are unimportant and are heard only at N. Y. U. and M. I. T.

(Jule Charney, from a 1947 letter to Philip Thompson, quoted in John P. Boyd’s Chebyshev and Fourier Spectral Methods)

A surfer boy crossed with an angel, his natural good looks appeared unnatural alongside the cadaverous Warhol and his black-clad entourage.

For instance, suppose I have a meeting at 7:15 and I fear the planning fallacy. I just think, “If I believe that (if I believe I believe that the meeting’s at seven, then I believe that the meeting’s at seven) then I believe I believe that the meeting’s at seven.”

Screwtape is, incidentally, very proud of the fact that most women now dislike men with beards. “There is more in this than you might think.”

Let me thank C. K. Stead yet again for reminding me, by reading over the phone the opening lines of Independence Day, how in self-consciously aiming for greatness, Richard Ford, once known for the economy of his Dirty Realism style, achieved the dread ornamentation of the American school of fine writing. Rick Moody is another example of the orotund school. Compared to James or Proust, the aforementioned are producers of perfumed compost.

Look at this.  This is a man trying to diss other the way other people write

“how in self-consciously aiming for greatness, Richard Ford, once known for the economy of his Dirty Realism style, achieved the dread ornamentation of the American school of fine writing”

Overall, despite prior (and pending) criticism, Catton is a considerable talent whose career has scarcely begun. Perhaps we are witnessing the gentle evolution of a giantess as opposed to the devolution of a retro-pastiche.

what the fuck