pigbucket

13 ms·

91.
by pigbucket 16y ago
I don't quite know why, but I'm imagining that guy walking in one day and saying, "My name is Tran. Khang Tran. I get stuff done." He sounds like the kind of person I would like to have always behind me, kicking my butt. Also, this was a re
92.
by pigbucket 16y ago
Can I cure my narcissism? Yes I can!!!
93.
by pigbucket 16y ago
Blue really does get around. It's associated, in my troubled mind, with pornographic movies, melancholic music, police forces, and super-cleanness (the whiter-than-white, bluey whiteness promised by Daz laundry detergent), and the word "blu
94.
by pigbucket 16y ago
A neat example from Joyce (early in Ulysses) of how to calculate the milk bill when a shilling is 12 pence (in case it's unclear, the bill is two shillings and two pence; the boys end up paying a florin (24 pence) and owing 2 pence): -- Ha
95.
by pigbucket 16y ago
So it's designed to make me say "this is awesome" twice. That's really manipulative.
96.
by pigbucket 16y ago
The knowledge of enclosed vespine corpses just adds one more item to my growing list of things I hate about fig trees, of which I have two. Two fig trees are at least one and probably two fig trees too many. Too much pruning is required bec
97.
by pigbucket 16y ago
Your inordinately thoughtful response to a few glib comments merits a better reply than this necessarily incomplete one. Intended to be constative, not interrogative, those comments arouse in you nonetheless the doubtless frustrating and no
98.
by pigbucket 16y ago
Unless you're doing the Hyperion/Satyr contrast thing, putting Borges and Houellebecq in the same context is always a problem, but: 1. A cento is a poetical work wholly composed of verses or passages taken from other authors; only disposed
99.
by pigbucket 16y ago
Bede's was not a history of a homogeneous socio-political people, and Arthur, if he was any kind of early mediaeval king, was certainly not King of all Britain. The island was politically fragmented. Record keeping was poor. The very except
100.
by pigbucket 16y ago
This is a great idea. It's also a two-thousand year-old idea, updated to include golf and "art (specifically design)." Missing from the list of possible courses is a study of elevated language as a tool of persuasion (as in Longinus' On the
101.
by pigbucket 16y ago
It sounds kind of scary when you put it like that, but generally I've no principled objection to a server policing its hosted content for contract compliance as long as it's not the only hosting game in town. If I'm looking for a server, I
102.
by pigbucket 16y ago
There was a great post and a slightly crazy discussion about infinity and the Hilbert Hotel here a few months ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1333424 The penultimate paragraph of the present post sounds like a conversation you mi
103.
by pigbucket 16y ago
Right, but the school v. university model is breaking down for more than one reason. The problem has two edges. Just when you want, because of the expanding boundaries of knowledge, increasingly well-prepared undergraduates, you get the opp
104.
by pigbucket 16y ago
Engineering the extinction of this kind of hugely prolific and adaptive species looks to me like a mind-bogglingly hard problem, which the smart people linked to in the post are not directly working on (they're doing local control with supe
105.
by pigbucket 16y ago
That's a good point. Hawking's argument presupposes a purely natural universal gravitation, the problems with which assumption were exposed several years ago by Burdett et al., as reported here: < http://www.theonion.com/articles/evang
106.
by pigbucket 16y ago
Do we have to earn the right to be condescending nowadays? To me that's kind of like asking do you have to climb the stairs in order to look down from the balcony, so, yeah, I think it needs to be earned, and I think you have earned it if
107.
by pigbucket 16y ago
In the article to which you refer ( http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/health/research/13genome.h... ) Wade suggests that diseases are partly caused by "a host of rare genetic variants" and that "with most diseases, the findings [about disea
108.
by pigbucket 16y ago
I learned the truth at seventeen ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_Seventeen )
109.
by pigbucket 16y ago
I found this article massively disappointing just because it drowns out the central, important question (is technological progress really accelerating and to what end?) in all this human-interest nonsense about the quaint fervency of futuri
110.
by pigbucket 16y ago
Not that there's anything wrong with that! (courtesy nod to Seinfeld). It is odd (I don't say telling!) that the standard term for sex partner is a preferred term for a guy's male friend in some places.
111.
by pigbucket 16y ago
Buying drinks is actually a BAD idea. This hypothesis was tested by Feynman ( Surely You're Joking ... ), naturally with success. I think I'd feel a little weird trying to psychologically hack my love life (if I had a love life). Also, th
112.
by pigbucket 16y ago
The paper should do better. But one of the things it tries to do well is language use, and one of the reasons it does it well is that it has people like Corbett working on the problem of what constitutes good writing and usage. Words matter
113.
by pigbucket 16y ago
Yes, the question is not merely one of penetration, nor of avoiding arcane usage, but rather whether the word is standard English. There's no easy way to define that, which is why NYT employs someone to decide for its writers. Three criteri
114.
by pigbucket 16y ago
It's graduation time, so I'm reminded that high school kids are horribly ill-prepared for making the kinds of decisions they have to make and for appreciating the consequences.
115.
by pigbucket 16y ago
One reason might be that he was trying to wring another 2500 out of them by saying Bing instead.
116.
by pigbucket 16y ago
"Usually ships in 1 to 3 months." America holds its breath, while somewhere trees are falling for the sake of the free market. Amazon need to conspire with Beck et al. to get these books in stock before the show airs. What would be really i
117.
by pigbucket 16y ago
The fact that there are ways to learn and develop knowledge without infringing on an absurdly over-broad copyright are irrelevant It's relevant to the extent that it would have to be true in order to argue that the $150,000 fine promotes
118.
by pigbucket 16y ago
This would make a brilliant show. If they do it, you should sue them.
119.
by pigbucket 16y ago
So you tell me — what promotes knowledge and learning: letting people rearrange music and learn to use a video camera, or threatening new artists with $150,000 fines? Since this is a relatively cheap rhetorical question, let's play devil'
120.
by pigbucket 16y ago
Poetry is code.

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