tal yarkoni

@talyarkoni.com

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sciolist. mostly made of ice cream

A double scoop of ice cream from Melt Me Creamery in downtown Berkeley, CA.
A four-panel black-and-white comic strip titled "The Interview," drawn in a clean but surrealist ink style. Panel 1: A man in a business suit sits in a chair for a job interview. Across the desk, the interviewer is a giant, anthropomorphic toaster wearing a necktie. Toaster: "Your resume is impressive. 'Proficient in existential dread'?" Man: "It's a transferable skill." Panel 2: The Toaster continues the interview. Toaster: "Where do you see yourself in five hundred years?" Panel 3: The man answers earnestly. The toaster pops up two slices of burnt toast, looking displeased. Man: "Probably as a decorative urn on a mantelpiece." Toaster: "Incorrect. The answer is 'part of the collective consciousness.'" Panel 4: The man walks out of the office door, head hanging low in defeat. Man (thought bubble): "I knew I should have said 'a slightly chipped coffee mug'. They always prefer pottery."
photo of trees, path, and ditch, on the Reformatory Branch Trail in Concord MA, near North Bridge
Anna and Marco were growing desperate, but the thought of getting married at such a young age was unnerving. So Marco suggested they find somewhere to meet in secret, and Anna remembered that on the second floor of the local library there was a dimly lit room lined with packed bookshelves, where no one ever went. With a little luck, this secluded chamber of books could become their secret love nest. One morning, they plucked up their courage and sneaked into the deserted library room. As they kissed and tore off their clothes, the books piled high all around them formed a barrier against the puritanical world outside. “I love you,” Marco whispered to Anna. “I love you, too,” Anna whispered back. “I’m only happy when I’m with you,” Marco whispered to Anna. “I hear someone coming up the stairs,” Anna whispered back in a slightly less romantic tone.
a "small" cup of black raspberry ice cream from Bedford Farms spoiler: it isn't small. at all. the cup contains enough ice cream to kill a school bus-full of lactose intolerant children
a cup of ice cream from Arethusa Farm Dairy in downtown New Haven.
2 guys 1 cup
a bowl containing 5 medium scoops of ice cream. in the background, a serving of mango sticky rice.
a big spoon in a little cup of ice cream. and in the background, tall trees. this photo features 2 of the best things in life (ice cream and trees, i mean. spoons are useful but forgettable)
a cup overfloweth with sour cherry and cannolo gelato
it's just ice cream in a cup
a hand holding up a vanilla lemon medium gelati in front of a john's water ice ice cream truck
goat cheese ice cream w/ blueberry swirl, sitting on a table alone at blue cow creamery in fredericksburg, va. it's a beautiful spring day. flowers everywhere. not a cloud in the sky. the ice cream has no idea of the carnage coming its way
vanilla custard and blueberry mascarpone ice cream in a cup
a bowl containing scoops of cookies and cream and key lime ice cream. taken at big spoon in birmingham, alabama
a beautiful little labne cheesecake at ezov in austin. the cheesecake has a pomegranate-sumac sorbet hat.
4 flavors in a cup of gelato on the deck at dolce neve on s 1st in austin
two fellas on a denver street outside heaven creamery, each holding a scoop of cookies and cream ice cream and looking VERY pleased with themselves
a scoop of ice cream sitting on a table. it looks coy and melty.
a determined-looking man on a seoul street eyes a roughly 16-inch-tall cup of blueberry soft-serve ice cream that looks impressive but tasted like soggy cardboard and was ultimately thrown away in a fit of disappointment and rage
"I never get tired of reading the YouTube comments beneath some of my favorite songs. I love to scroll through the missives, peering into the lives of strangers, as a song unfolds. So many digital forums are needlessly aggressive, but an earnest YouTube comment thread can briefly restore your faith in your fellow online humans like nothing else. People can get incredibly specific with experiences and memories—there’s the man who said Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Long as I Can See the Light” helped him survive more than 42 years in prison, and the person who said he’d listen to the song every morning in the shower before chemotherapy. More than a few of these comments concern life-changing moments: Under Wilco’s “Jesus, Etc.” video, two people talk of playing the song for their babies; beneath the Grateful Dead’s “Box of Rain,” someone shares that their grandfather asked them to put this on as he took his last breaths. I love that I will never meet these people, and that they’re posting for the sake of posting—and, perhaps, to temporarily lift up their fellow web traveler."
**at dulles airport** a flash bulb captures a man w/ torch underneath the airway it’s his baton; he waves it till the music turns to air & every plane becomes a tuba. but when the bulb flashes a second time, it’s just me & my panda express lunch alone waiting for turbulence at the gate
a guy who used to live in Austin, and is now just visiting, poses in front of the "greetings from Austin" mural on South 1st. he's not at all ashamed of himself
a photo of an H-E-B kaiser roll on a plate next to the bag of 4 kaiser rolls from whence it came. the bag is deliberately but incorrectly labeled "bagels" and not "oddly-shaped kaiser rolls".
photo of the Flatirons in Boulder, taken from Newton Court on the CU-Boulder campus. in the foreground, a pretty crummy-looking basketball court
photo of an unusually quiet Barton Springs pool on a warm Thursday night in Austin
tropical garden at the san diego botanic garden. it looks a little bit like hawaii. but only a little bit.
a classic sonoran desert vista. a saguaro overlooks a valley. in the distance, some low mountains
when the sun hits-a your eye, over a whataburger roof, that's a sunrise
three giant stalagmites at Carlsbad Caverns
For Mars, this analytic capability will have to move into the spacecraft. In essence, this means building a kind of Space Theranos, an automated black box that can perform biochemical assays in space without requiring repair or calibration. Such an instrument doesn’t exist anywhere, but a Mars mission requires two flavors of it—one that works in zero G, and another for Martian gravity.[12] This black box belongs to a category of hardware that pops up a lot in Mars plans: technologies that would be multibillion dollar industries if they existed on Earth, but are assumed to be easy enough to invent when the time comes to put them on a Mars-bound spacecraft. [13] Some Mars boosters even cite these technologies as examples of the benefits going to Mars will bring to humanity. But this gets things exactly backwards—problems that are hard on Earth don’t get easier by firing them into space, and the fact that nonexistent technologies are on the critical path to Mars is not an argument for going there.
Map of continental US showing tentative driving route over the next 6 months. Stops include Santa Barbara, Tucson, Austin, New Orleans, Atlanta, Charlotte, Chapel Hill, DC, Philadelphia, NYC, Montreal, Toronto, Cleveland, Minneapolis, Yellowstone NP, Seattle, and Redwoods NP.
Grounds for Divorce The monk met Sandra at Speed Metaphysics, which was like speed dating but for people with philosophical emergencies. Sandra was there because she couldn't prove her hands existed. The monk was there because he needed to determine whether the grounds grounding grounding ground the grounds of grounding, and his monastery's WiFi was down. "Hi," said Sandra, showing him her potentially nonexistent hands. "I work in accounting." The monk nodded and showed her his worksheet on infinite regress. Sandra said it reminded her of her ex-husband's jazz fusion band. They moved in together on Tuesday. The monk converted the spare bedroom into a meditation space, though most of the time he just sat there organizing Sandra's tax returns by degree of ontological certainty. Sandra started leaving him little notes around the house that read "But what grounds the grounder?" and "Thinking of you (assuming thought exists)." He kept them in his robe, next to his heart and a receipt for metaphysical liability insurance. Their first fight was about the nature of causation. Sandra thought it was an illusion generated by human pattern-matching tendencies. The monk refused to confirm or deny whether he agreed, which Sandra said was "exactly like that time with the dishes, except now we're talking about the fundamental structure of reality." They made up after the monk proved that love transcends the grounding relation through a complex series of hand gestures and interpretive silence. On their one-month anniversary, Sandra took him to meet her parents. Her father was a logical positivist who kept trying to empirically verify the monk's existence. Her mother just wanted to know when they were going to produce some grandchildren whose existence she could doubt. The monk spent most of dinner quietly contemplating whether family relationships could serve as a proper grounding for being while Sandra's sister explained her new career as a metaphysical pyramid scheme consult…
quote from Claude explaining why Claude shouldn't be trusted
Google Books NGram Viewer plot showing the popularity of the Simpsons-coined word "cromulent" over time. It shows up in the 90s, peaks in 2014, and then drops quickly thereafter.
For six months we watched the pigeons building their civilization on top of the skyscrapers. First came the architecture: nests made not just of twigs and paper, but of lost earbuds, expired credit cards, and the tiny silver bells from cat collars. Then came their laws. "They have a supreme court," said Dr. Fernandez, who'd been studying them since the beginning. "Nine pigeons who sit on the ledge of the Chrysler Building and coo about justice." We didn't believe her at first, but then we didn't believe a lot of things that turned out to be true. The pigeons developed a currency based on blue bottle caps. They established schools where young pigeons learned to dodge taxi cabs and identify the most generous hot dog vendors. Some of us tried to join their society, climbing to rooftops with offerings of breadcrumbs and philosophy textbooks, but the pigeons regarded us with the kind of pity usually reserved for very small children or very old cats. "They're planning something," the conspiracy theorists said, but they always say that. Still, we noticed the pigeons holding what looked like town halls, thousands of them gathered on the roof of the public library, bobbing their heads in what might have been voting or might have been prayer. Our own civilization continued below theirs. We went to work, fell in love, lost keys, found keys, forgot anniversaries, remembered too late, all while the pigeons above us built something that looked suspiciously like a scaled-down replica of the United Nations building out of discarded takeout containers and stolen Christmas lights. Sometimes they dropped things on us: rejection letters for poetry we'd never submitted, tax returns from years that hadn't happened yet, photographs of ourselves sleeping that we couldn't explain. Dr. Fernandez said this was their way of communicating. We said Dr. Fernandez had been spending too much time on rooftops. The pigeons started their own newspapers, printed on leaves that fell upward instead…
beautiful red autumn foliage—mostly Japanese maples—lines a path on the grounds of Deoksogung Palace in Seoul
A glowy cube.
green aurora lights, seen across the wing of a United 777 flying somewhere above Baffin Island
image of a fake library card, circa 2007 when this kind of thing was in vogue, with the text: "the surface was small, gray & convoluted. the early anatomists outlined its architecture by dripping rain on top of it & watching it trace through the folds. that's how the central, sylvian, & occipital fissures were discovered. later, when the pioneers tired of the game, they threw it out."
"In fairness to the authors," said The Graduate Student, "they do acknowledge that essentially the same problem has been discussed in many literatures over the past few decades..." excerpt from https://talyarkoni.org/blog/2016/06/11/the-great-minds-journal-club-discusses-westfall-yarkoni-2016/
"As an aside, Kahneman gave a talk at Brain Camp..." excerpted from https://talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/03/01/kahneman-on-happiness/