January 2009
“… that stupid kid in me cheered the guy who spat. Something in me loved...”
– Jack Shedd. (YES, Big Contrarian appears to be updating again!)
The trouble with literally.
→
Or rather the lack thereof.
every second counts →
Test your sense of time: this game challenges you to hold a button for 0.2 seconds, then 0.4, then 0.6, 0.8, and so on. You’re allowed 100 milliseconds of leeway either way of the target. 0.2 and 0.4 are easy, but how do you time 1.8 and 2.0? I got to 2.2, but no further. (via kottke)
Comic: Garfield ohne Garfield →
Travors found a German review of G-G:
Review of G-G on a German newspaper site. Which is nice. Um… I think.
Instead of doing inane exercises, I spent my German class trying to decipher the text (and probably butchered in the process). A few excerpts:
Garfield alone was already funny. But Garfield minus Garfield is much funnier still. The quite sober pictures the Irishman Dan Walsh displays on...
I finally saw Man on Wire. Beautiful film. Even more so because it doesn’t mention 9/11.
Also, I now have that French accent stuck in my head.
“Science is not a monument of received Truth but something that people do to look...”
– Dennis Overbye.
Jonathan Raban: How did Obama's inaugural speech... →
I had just about given up. I thought it was impossible to write anything about Obama’s speech or Inauguration speeches in general that wasn’t boring and uninteresting. Then this shows up in The Guardian, of all places. It’s a bit long, though. (via aldaily)
Some etymological fictions
When Tumblr informs me I’ve got a new follower, I often skim through their blog, and that’s how I found this list of “interesting crazy facts”. The proper response to this kind of list — ducking accusations of being a party pooper — is “[citation needed]”. The list contains four etymological myths, that is, myths about the origins of words and...
Zorse →
A zorse or zebrula is the offspring of a zebra stallion and a horse mare; the rarer reverse pairing is sometimes called a hebra.
Word of the day.
HDI Rankings 2008 →
Something tells me Iceland won’t be topping this list next year. Looking forward to seeing Norway restored to its rightful place (:).
Crisis claims Iceland government →
Six days of protests was apparently enough.
HeLa cells →
There are several bizarre aspects of this story. One is the whole immortality through death by cancer thing. HeLa is an immortal cell line derived from cancer cells taken from a woman named Henrietta Lacks. This means, if I understand it correctly, that researchers can keep this line of cells alive indefinitely, and they are all derived from the original cancer cells in Henrietta Lacks’s...
Hey look! It’s a blog that copies writing from all manner of websites without attribution! Just what I was looking for to cheer me up! Thx.
A Syntopicon: An Index to The Great Ideas →
The Syntopicon must be one of the weirdest and most ambitious projects in the history of literature. In the 1950s Encyclopaedia Britannica published its 52-volume series Great Books of the Western World, which contains the most important works in the Western canon (according to its editors). The Syntopicon, created as a kind of novely to set the series apart from similar collections of canonical...
Specimen one
Ideas I get just before going to bed:
I want to create an IQ test in which none of the logical answers are correct. Instead, the answers will be constructed in such a way that they are non sequiturs, but one specific kind of non sequitur that is formed by applying some kind of complicated, logically invalid operation — that nonetheless has its own logic, once you know it — to the...
8 Racist Words You Use Every Day →
Someone needs to teach Cracked.com’s writers about the etymological fallacy, meaning as use, and the concept of descriptive linguistics.
Of course, one should always take everything on that site with, like, three and a half tons of salt.
Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And... →
Today is a good day to read (or re-read) this one.
“Al-Jazeera’s brand of news - you could call it “blood...”
– The violence network, a brilliant article about Al-Jazeera’s biased but honest reporting.
Chill writes (via inky):
I was just reading this blog post about Memetics and my little brother who looked at my screen said, “There are people who study memes? Why? It’s just people posting shit.”
Memetics is such a joke.
The original concept — the meme as Dawkins defined it, a cultural analog to the gene — is a brilliant metaphor. It makes perfect sense. When I first heard about...
Melt-in-the-Mouth Cookies, a brief history →
Hunting down the source of an old recipe, the saga. (via waxy)
“yo dawg i heard you like flying so we put a bird in your plane so you can oh...”
– Reddit.