Xamuel.com

How obscure are your tastes in music? Do you have an obsessive urge to buy CD’s from the 99 cent store? Have you ever sent a check directly to an artist because they’re too small for PayPal? Or maybe you’re the exact opposite. Maybe your radio alarm clock is set to Radiohead and your ringtones [...]

As you know, I’m a big fan of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, especially his epic poems Kubla Khan and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. I was introduced to these poems through, and both play a critical role in, Douglas Adams’ under-appreciated masterpiece, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. That book is the type of [...]

Writers of math books should realize: no matter how many irrelevant pictures you plaster on every page, people are still going to think your math textbook is an arcane tome of black magic. You might as well make it look like a tome of spells, at least that way it’s cool. No, I don’t need [...]

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately playing Katamari Damacy for the Playstation 2. If you aren’t familiar with this game, it’s the most original concept ever. You push around this magical adhesive ball called a katamari (Japanese: “cluster” or “lump”) and roll stuff up with it. Anything smaller than the katamari gets stuck [...]

In the cult classic “Fight Club”, Brad Pitt plays as Tyler Durden, a charismatic anarcho-primitivist who frees lots of men from the lethargic oppression of consumer society. Encouraging men to pick fights with one another, Tyler dismantles deep-held patterns of social interaction, short-circuiting the autopilot mechanisms by which those men used to lead their lives. [...]

With the conclusion of a long year of classes and work, my girlfriend and I decided to go celebrate amid the dazzling lights and sounds of Las Vegas. Our plane took off the very Friday afternoon of finals week, and we were in for a week of fun and excitement. We booked four hotels in [...]

Growing up in a Christian family, I was exposed to a lot of Christian literature. Very little of it really struck a chord with me. But one author really stood out and had a profound influence on me. Merlin R Carothers, the pastor with the most unique philosophy in the world. This is a man [...]

“Infinity!” “Infinity plus 1!” “Infinity plus a hundred!” “Infinity times ten!” “Infinity times infinity!” Remember playing this game as a child? Trying to compete to name the biggest infinity? What happens when pure research mathematicians play this game? A few quarters back, standing outside an auditorium before giving a calculus final exam, some of my [...]

Everyone knows, you should be yourself, let your true core self shine through. And everyone also knows, that sometimes you have to “fake it ’til you make it”. Wait a second, these ideas directly contradict eachother! Many people sincerely preach one, and many people just as sincerely preach the other. You want to develop yourself, [...]

The sexiest, most badass script in the known universe? The Chinese characters. Devised thousands of years ago by ancient Chinese scholars. Revised, studied, worshipped, all while the Roman characters were wrapped in uninvented slumber. I’m going to talk about a book, James Heisig’s “Remembering the Kanji”, which helps English speakers learn the Japanese variation of [...]