Look, I get it. Buses get crowded, it’s unpleasant when people have to make brief physical contact with you to get off at their stop. Being of large size (male, 5'9", 280 lbs — but I used to be 300, yay me!), believe me, it happens to me all the time, and I don’t like it either.

But your decision to say to me, “Lose some weight, fatso” was not a proportional reaction to that event. And I’d like to tell you calmly why that is.

I’m fat, sure. I’d love not to be. I could tell you all the…

As an amateur linguist, I am not a prescriptivist, but a descriptivist; I accept (and embrace) the fact that words change meaning. When people rail against “literally” being used to denote “figuratively”, I remember how Benjamin Franklin railed against “colonize” being an invented verb bastardized from “colony”, or Jonathan Swift despairing that young people pronounced “walked” with one syllable instead of two: walk-èd. How quaint those objections seem now! History will treat those who hold to outdated meanings no more kindly. …

These are my thoughts, in only somewhat coherent order:

• That is the most disarmingly intimate depiction of the taking a life of a human being I have ever witnessed
• As a white man, I will never be asked to defend or explain my race’s actions or opinions
• The shooting officer was of Asian descent, which the videographer, Diamond Reynolds or Lavish Reynolds (I’ve seen her referred to both ways) describes as “Chinese”. Perhaps he was of Chinese descent, I’ve made that possible mischaracterization of Asians when under far less stress than Ms. Reynolds.
• I wonder if Facebook foresaw events like…

Bottom line: when you buy insurance, you are fundamentally paying for peace of mind that in the unlikely event something bad happens to you, you will suffer from it as little as possible.

🌸 🌸 🌸 🌸 🌸

When I was growing up, my dad often joked to me that insurance was, essentially, making a bet with a company that something bad will happen to you. If something bad happens to you, you win the bet.

My field is machine learning and predictive modeling, and for the last year I’ve been working in the insurance industry, and I’ve learned a…

I think there’s an interesting parallel to be made between the advent of Uber and the advent of Walmart. Big box stores like Kmart had existed before Walmart; what made them able to cut their prices so much is that they were pioneers in computerized inventory and distribution starting from the late 1980s. Other retailers, especially small businesses, could not compete. …

I wrote some posts about Karla Homolka, Canada’s second-most famous serial killer, last night when I was emotional; I’ve since deleted them as I incorporated the latest news about her (that she’s been discovered in a small Quebec community where her three children attend a local school) into my core values.

Do I think her 12-year sentence was adequate? No. I believe she belongs in jail for the rest of her life. …