When I was young, I sometimes used to say “I don’t have an accent.” Now I realize that such a statement is tantamount to saying that “I haven’t observed/experienced/fully internalized the breadth and extent of language x.” I somewhat internalized my gringo accent when learning to speak Spanish, but I think it was really took moving to New York City to learn the degree to which I will probably never speak Spanish like someone who grew up in Mexico or Cuba or Colombia. When I was first learning Hindi and went to India with my family, I became painfully aware of my Americanized Hindi especially when a security guard picked me out immediately as a foreigner to make me pay more for visiting a museum, as was the policy (I was relying on my mom to do all talking so that he wouldn’t even be suspicious enough to check 🤣. I hadn’t gotten my OCI yet.) But it really took leaving the US (or atleast the midwest) to understand the degree to which accent is used to identify an “in-group” and an “out-group.” But when an American says “I don’t have an accent,” I hear “I have never left my home town/state/region.” And most Americans have the financial means to do so at some point for some amount of time (not frequently and not with any regularity, but likely 10% of Americans simply do not have the means to never visit another side of the country). I hear “I have no interest in seeing the rest of the world on its own terms.” My excuse for saying ‘I don’t have an accent’ is that I was a child, but what is the excuse of grown people saying that? ...

At the end of the day, there are no rules. The “law” and “justice” in this country are all in support of empire and capital. Buck v. Bell (1927) The court ruled that the state has the “right” to control the “genetic stock”, roughly speaking of a place/people. More accurately, “we will do it; shut up about it or we will kill you too.” We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. […] Three generations of imbeciles are enough. – Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927)12 ...

My first course in complex analysis involved almost no pictures. This is the first post in a series dedicated to distilling a few neat properties of analytic and meromorphic functions by letting pictures and videos do as much heavy lifting as possible. A survey of complex functions We begin with the identity function $f(z) = z$. This form of domain coloring is essentially a kind of polar coordinates where the “base color/shade” is an angular coordinate and the “darkness” is the distance from the origin. This is why when we zoom out, most of the picture is white (large magnitude). ...

Imperialism Who Is That You All Are Going to Whip, Mr. Legree by Robert Minor This one always makes me laugh. Even when I know it is coming and I try to not laugh. As far as I can tell (and it is somewhat difficult), it was drawn by Robert Minor for the Daily Worker . I don’t know why the main place I can find it is the Marxist library . ...

TLDR: The way I determine whether a “text editing tool”/“thing I use to write software” is a text editor or an IDE is as follows: If it requires more than one second to open/fully start, it is an IDE; if it opens in less than one second, it is a text editor. Examples GNU Nano , and out of the box/vanilla (neo )vim are absolutely text editors because they completely start/open in less than one second. Visual Studio is absolutely an IDE because it never opens in less than one second. Corollaries Some of these are spicy takes, but follow immediately from my definitions. ...

A review of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States TLDR: This book was an absolute banger that I don’t think 98% of Americans have the heart to read. To be clear, any literate and educated adult who wants to seriously engage with the history and trajectory of the United States in the scheme of the past 5000 years of history must understand and internalize these lenses. In atleast one lens “Everything in US history is about the land – who oversaw and cultivated it, fished its waters, maintained its wildlife; who invaded and stole it; how it became a commodity broken into peices to be bought and sold on the market”1. ...

Today I was walking through some of the deserts roughly 1 hour south of Dubai. This was my first time in a desert and I wanted to know what it feels like to walk for a while with no water in sight. As I got to the top of a sand hill and felt how powerful the sun really is in a desert, the following hit me: Drinking alcohol frequently leads to dehydration, which can be a death sentence in the desert, or atleast divert limited water from more important uses. Since Islam developed in the Arabian Peninsula, much of which is a desert, it might make sense to discourage drinking alcohol so that the group makes the best use of the relatively little water it has. ...

Hikikomari Kyuuketsuki no Monmon is my favorite anime of Fall 2023. The Jujutsu Kaisen Shibuya arc had some good scenes this season, but is kinda settling into not having much of a plot, pushing it further into just some teenage power fantasy. The Tokyo Revengers Tenjiku arc is…fine but I am just getting a bit sick of Takemishi’s main redeeming quality being limited to having unlimited HP. ...

This is the first of many posts that react to/discuss the History of the Indian People and Culture series. I plan to write roughly one every hundred pages or so, mainly to make sure I understand the claims in the series. The first few chapters of Volume One were rather dull, insofar as we mainly focussed on the scope of the series, dicussed which sources were most valuable and worth considering, and described the geography, flora, and fauna of India. We have a ways to go before we get to my main research questions. I will write a bit later about some of the ideas brought up here, such as the dearth of recorded/rigorous political history prior to, say, 800, that contrasts with what may be the most complete intellectual/philosophical/spiritual records of any place in the world. I might write later about the spicy claim that Sanskrit was a form of linguistic unity despite the fact that maybe only 5% of people in India have ever spoken Sanskrit and many were literally prevented from learning it. ...