May 2013
5 posts
Yes, Pope Francis said: All are ‘redeemed!’ Is... →
Terry Mattingly at Get Religion on how the Pope is reported to be cool with atheists:
The pope said all are redeemed through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Check.
The pope said that it is important to recognize that all can do good and, thus, to move closer to God — even if they are not believers. Check.
Did the pope, to be blunt, say that hell is empty, that all have chosen to...
generally confused and awkward.: Arrested... →
whisker-biscuits:
No Touching!
Pour a shot of any alcohol of your choosing. Place it on the table in front of you. Grab your hands behind you back, place your mouth over the shot glass and lift, drinking it without using your hands.
The Franklin
Pour 1/2 shot of Kahlua into a shot glass. Using the back…
Why isn't New Orleans Mother's Day parade shooting... →
David Dennis, regarding the our collective capacity to notice some tragedies and ignore others:
So I shouldn’t be surprised that the Mother’s Day Parade shooting has largely been forgotten. On Sunday, shots were fired into a crowd during a parade in the New Orleans 7th ward. Police said they saw three suspects running from the scene.
This is the largest mass shooting in the...
Hilarious versus Hysterical
From Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary:
Hilarious: marked by or causing hilarity : extremely funny
Hysterical:
a psychoneurosis marked by emotional excitability and disturbances of the psychic, sensory, vasomotor, and visceral functions
behavior exhibiting overwhelming or unmanageable fear or emotional excess
— hys·ter·ic noun
— hys·ter·i·cal also...
Date snippets for TextExpander
Dr Drang recently wrote about date snippets for TextExpander in Bash. I put together a group of these snippets, plus snippets for calculating the first and last days of this month, last month, and next month.
You can download it here.
April 2013
13 posts
Some Thoughts on the Real World by One Who... →
Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it...
I, Pencil | Leonard E. Read →
I, Pencil, simple though I appear to be, merit your wonder and awe, a claim I shall attempt to prove. In fact, if you can understand me—no, that’s too much to ask of anyone—if you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing. I have a profound lesson to teach. And I can teach this lesson better than can an automobile or...
I Came Here to Do Two Things: _______ and Kick... →
In Boston and suburbs, shutdown is surreal - The... →
John Fox, the official historian of the FBI, said that the shutdown of such a major city was virtually unprecedented in recent U.S. history. He said the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, attacks was far bigger, knocking New York and Washington on their heels and clearing the airspace over the entire United States.
But beyond that, Fox said, a city shutdown has “only happened on a smaller...
Statement of the Ambassador of the Czech Republic... →
Petr Gandalovič, Ambassador of the Czech Republic,
As more information on the origin of the alleged perpetrators is coming to light, I am concerned to note in the social media a most unfortunate misunderstanding in this respect. The Czech Republic and Chechnya are two very different entities - the Czech Republic is a Central European country; Chechnya is a part of the Russian Federation.
Weekly Address: America Stands with the City of... →
Barack Obama, today, in his weekly address,
On Monday, an act of terror wounded dozens and killed three innocent people at the Boston Marathon. But in the days since, the world has witnessed one sure and steadfast truth: Americans refuse to be terrorized.
What would Boston have done differently yesterday if they had been terrorized?
This Is A Tragedy—Does It Really Matter Exactly... →
And yet, there are still people—literally millions of them—who actually have to ask why we didn’t simply slow down and wait until the whole story came in so that we could run an accurate, fact-checked article that didn’t exaggerate the number of dead by 9 or 10 people. To that, I say: How could you even think about accurately reporting a tragedy at a time like this? When those pipe bombs or...
Group of Men Have Played Game of Tag for 23 Years... →
It started in high school when they spent their morning break darting around the campus of Gonzaga Preparatory School in Spokane, Wash. Then they moved on—to college, careers, families and new cities. But because of a reunion, a contract and someone’s unusual idea to stay in touch, tag keeps pulling them closer. Much closer.
The game they play is fundamentally the same as the...
The Trials of Princess Jasmine, Classroom Pet and... →
She was dying of thirst, but never cried once. It was only later that I realized why: her body was too dehydrated to produce tears.
Pocahontas was her name.
My name is Princess Jasmine. I am a male, so this name is humiliating, but I’m aware that my situation could be worse. The other homeroom, 2R, has a guinea pig named Homer Simpson and an elderly turtle named New Kids on the...
Vampire Finch - Wikipedia →
The Vampire Finch (Geospiza difficilis septentrionalis) is a small bird native to the Galápagos Islands. It is a very distinct subspecies of the Sharp-beaked Ground Finch (Geospiza difficilis) endemic to Wolf and Darwin Islands.
This bird is most famous for its unusual diet. The Vampire Finch occasionally feeds by drinking the blood of other birds, chiefly the Nazca and Blue-footed...
Kaiten | Wikipedia →
Kaiten (Japanese: 回天, literal translation: “Return to the sky”, commonly rendered as: “The turn toward heaven”, “The Heaven Shaker” or “Change the World”) were manned torpedoes and suicide craft, used by the Imperial Japanese Navy in the final stages of World War II.
In recognition of the unfavorable progress of the war, towards the end of...
The Boston Marathon Bombing: Keep Calm and Carry... →
Bruce Schneier:
As the details about the bombings in Boston unfold, it’d be easy to be scared. It’d be easy to feel powerless and demand that our elected leaders do something — anything — to keep us safe.
It’d be easy, but it’d be wrong. We need to be angry and empathize with the victims without being scared. Our fears would play right into the...
A letter to The Monthly Magazine regarding the... →
A nerd writes in to The Monthly Magazine, discussing the proper method of coffee preparation. (Use a biggins. Duh.) He also dismisses another reader of The Monthly who boils an egg in his coffee.
In 1814.
Some things never change.
via Best of Metafilter
March 2013
2 posts
List: What Your Favorite Classic NES Video Game... →
By John Peck. Some of my favorites:
*Metroid: You have killed a mosquito with hairspray.
*Metal Gear: You have eaten astronaut ice cream as a meal.
*The Legend of Zelda: You have carried a piece of string cheese behind your ear for a whole day.
*Zelda II: The Adventure of Link: You have used an oversized licorice whip as a jumprope.
*Ninja Gaiden: You have used an elastic headband as a belt or...
The importance of stupidity in scientific research →
Martin A. Schwartz:
My Ph.D. project was somewhat interdisciplinary and, for a while, whenever I ran into a problem, I pestered the faculty in my department who were experts in the various disciplines that I needed. I remember the day when Henry Taube (who won the Nobel Prize two years later) told me he didn’t know how to solve the problem I was having in his area. I was a third-year...
February 2013
3 posts
Vincent Wigglesworth
Just so you know, there was a real person named Vincent Wigglesworth, and he was an entomologist. Wigglesworth! He did a great job, too, he figured out some crazy stuff about how hormones regulate metamorphosis.
Costa Rica declares national emergency to tackle... →
A two-year emergency bill, signed jointly by Costa Rica’s Vice President Luis Liberman and the national coffee institute ICAFE, provisions about $4 million to pay for fungicides to tackle the roya, or leaf rust, outbreak.
Jorge Ramirez, technical manager at ICAFE, said that 11,350 hectares of Costa Rica’s roughly 93,000 hectares of planted coffee are expected to be lost during...
January 2013
1 post
December 2012
6 posts
Dropbox Tech Blog » Welcome Guido! →
Guido van Rossum is moving from Google to Dropbox.
Comparison is toxic | Only A Model →
Ben Deaton writes on “CV anxiety”. His description of looking at someone else’s CV and becoming stymied for the rest of the day, man, I do that too.
I eventually hit a wall and had to get help, which I received at different levels and in different ways from friends, family, colleagues, and yes a counselor or two. What I eventually learned is this:
What other people...
November 2012
5 posts
Salman Rushdie: The Disappeared | The New Yorker →
The New Yorker has an excerpt from Salman Rushdie’s new book, Joseph Anton. Joseph Anton is a third-person account of Rushdie’s crisis due to the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini for Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic Verses. The excerpt tells the part of the story from his hearing of the fatwa to his going into hiding under police protection; his death seems inevitable. My favorite...
Nation's Lower Class Still Waiting For First... →
October 2012
16 posts
PHD FUEL
whatshouldwecallgradschool:
credit: Mehmet
I accidentally watched this all afternoon last Tuesday. It turns out that it’s on a loop.
India: What are some English phrases and terms... →
The top answer to this Quora question is amazing. The answer is in the form of a letter to a friend. Here’s an example of discussion of food in Indian English:
My niece is having PG-accommodation only so I will be putting up at the Taj hotel. Although, the staff there acts very pricey. But more better to avoid dicey food and the loose motions, and the gentry there is good only. Their...
Robert de La Rochefoucauld - Wikipedia →
Count de La Rochefoucauld was a French spy during World War II, working for the British. He did everything: explosions, parachuting, disguises, shooting, hand-to-hand combat, sabotage, and escapes. Here’s just one bit of his story:
However, Robert de La Rochefoucald was soon imprisoned by the Germans once more in Fort du Hâ. In his cell, Robert de la Rochefoucald feigned an epileptic...
A Generation Lost in the Bazaar - Poul-Henning... →
Poul-Henning Kamp on how nuts the results of the “Bazaar” model of software development can be:
I updated my laptop. I have been running the development version of FreeBSD for 18 years straight now, and compiling even my Spartan work environment from source code takes a full day, because it involves trying to make sense and architecture out of Raymond’s anarchistic software...
Human Ancestors Were Nearly All Vegetarians | Rob... →
Which paleo diet should we eat? The one from twelve thousand years ago? A hundred thousand years ago? Forty million years ago? If you want to return to your ancestral diet, the one our ancestors ate when most of the features of our guts were evolving, you might reasonably eat what our ancestors spent the most time eating during the largest periods of the evolution of our guts, fruits, nuts, and...
Great Space Race! - Dropbox →
Dropbox is giving away extra space for two years for people in school or college. Go here and type in your school email address. You get extra disk space even if you already have a Dropbox account. If you don’t have a Dropbox account, go ahead and sign up. You get 2 GB of storage that syncs across all of your computers and also mobile devices.
Again, if you have a school email...
Archaeologists Officially Declare Collective Sigh... →
Richard Wenkel, a biostatician who chaired the panel, explained: “As long as the diet of an individual keeps them alive long enough to successfully mate, then that diet has conferred an evolutionary advantage. By that metric, the agricultural revolution has proven to be the most effective dietary system in the history of our species. We are the most prolific higher-order vertebrate on the...
New Caledonian crows reason about hidden causal... →
A paper in PNAS by Alex H. Taylor, Rachael Miller, and Russell D. Gray, warning us of the dangers of crows. As I had previously suspected, crows are now known to be capable of reasoning about hidden causal agents.
The ability to make inferences about hidden causal mechanisms underpins scientific and religious thought. It also facilitates the understanding of social interactions and the...
Structured Procrastination →
An essay by John Perry on how to procrastinate effectively:
The trick is to pick the right sorts of projects for the top of the list. The ideal sorts of things have two characteristics, First, they seem to have clear deadlines (but really don’t). Second, they seem awfully important (but really aren’t). Luckily, life abounds with such tasks. In universities the vast majority of...
The Embodiment →
Last week, Mitt Romney picked Paul Ryan, the Republican architect of Congress’s radical right-wing budget plan, as his running mate. Ryan has previously cited Rage Against the Machine as one of his favorite bands. Rage guitarist Tom Morello responds in this exclusive op-ed…
Ryan claims that he likes Rage’s sound, but not the lyrics. Well, I don’t care for Paul...
1 tag
Enchanted Aisles | Los Angeles magazine →
Because Trader Joe’s is so secretive, good articles on it are rare. This is one of the good ones.
He earned an MBA at Stanford, which, according to Coulombe, was then a near-worthless piece of parchment. “The degree was new,” he says, “and corporations couldn’t make sense of it.”
Also,
If Coulombe appeared in my story, the question of who owns the company would come up—and Trader...
Letters of Note: What a world →
Ken Kesey on the death of his son, Jed. The end made me tear up on the Metro.
53 'Arrested Development' Jokes You Probably... →
The TV show, Arrested Development, is noted for its “intertextuality” and “reflexivity”, which is interesting for postmodern literary theorists. Another words, the show has subtle running gags. I’ve seen every episode at least twice, and didn’t catch most of these.
In “Meet the Veals,” a drug dog sniffs Buster’s hook and tackles him. This is because Oscar...
