The Sokal Affair

Merry Christmas! The holidays aren't a big deal to me, but time off from work is always nice. The holidays make me miss my sister, though.

But depressing thoughts aside, I stumbled across this interesting incident where a physicist got a joke article published as an experiment to see if the journal would do it. It makes me feel a bit better than those pretentious, convoluted articles really are what they seem to be sometimes.

On top of that, recently, some folks used a computer science paper generator called SCIgen to get a paper into the IEEE database.

Sarah McLachlan + John Lennon

This has been my favorite Christmas song since last Christmas when it was released: Sarah McLachlan - Happy Xmas

I'm a big fan of both Sarah McLachlan and The Beatles, so any time they're combined, I'm kind of a sucker for the result. Also, the similar context of the time when the song was written and the current time of war just makes the song so fitting.

Holiday Blues

The holiday season always gets me down a little bit. This time of year for me is mostly about family and my family still feels broken ever since my sister's death. I don't know if it's possible for anyone to ever recover from something like that, but I know I still haven't.

I'm a relatively boring person. Around the holidays, usually, my sister would be the more interesting person. She'd have ideas for christmasy stuff to do and that sort of thing. She was always kind of the complementary element to my personality, since I typically prefer not doing much at all for the holidays. In her absence, the holidays feel uninspired for me. I'd even go as far as to say they feel hollow. I can't not think about her around this time of year, and that of course drags down my spirits.

I have to keep reminding myself that she would want us to be happy, so if nothing else, we should be happy for her sake. It's hard, sometimes, though.