CNET goes behind the scenes at the land of the rising meatball and finds out what it takes to design an IKEA chair from the ground up.
Recently in Flotsam Category
The Times has a cute story today about “Googlegängers”, otherwise known as people who you can find on the Internet with the same name as yourself.
I’d like to apologize right now to all the other Paul Frankensteins out there (I know of at least two more in the United States—one in Washington State and one in California (and no, we’re not related, thanks for asking)—and one in Germany) for completely dominating the Google search results for our name. Apparently, my Google-Fu is a bit too strong.
Anyway, here’s a link to a picture of another one of my Googlegängers (though I’m not sure which one he is, exactly) (I’m guessing from context that this particular Paul Frankenstein has long since shuffled off this mortal coil).
Arthur C. Clarke has gone and become one with the Starchild.
I’ve been meaning to post about the Boltzmann’s Brain problem for a while now, but this is as good a time as any. The basic issue is that under some cosmological models, it’s far more likely that we’re just disembodied brains floating in the vacuum of interstellar space than not.
Trippy, huh? And of course, the question is, how do we know that we’re not?
Tragically, Boxing Day “has nothing to do with pugilistic expositions between tanked-up family members who have dearly been looking forward to taking a round out of each other for the past year.”
Well, that’s what I always thought when I was growing up….
In the Algonquin language, the phrase “metro-north” means “nap”.
Act V: The act of remembering
Another possible change: with connected books, the tether between the author and the book is still active after purchase. Errata can be corrected instantly. Updates, no problem. — Newsweek, The Future of Reading
Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. — George Orwell, “1984″, Book One, Chapter 3
The name of the city of Annapolis means “Anna’s/Ann’s/Anne’s City”. It was named so because the city founders sought to immortalize their city in literature (plus they thought they could make a mint on the tourism and licensing fees). It never quite worked out that way, though; Anne of Green Gables was set in northeastern Canada; Anne of The Thousand Days was set in England; and the writers of Anna and the King, though perhaps tempted by the lucrative incentives offered by the city, ultimately thought that Maryland was just too mundane, choosing to set their work in the exotic kingdom of Siam. I have heard, however, that some of the early drafts of Anna Karenina were set on the shores of Chesapeake Bay rather than St. Petersburg.
my neighbors turn their
heat on my flat gets warmer
winter not so cold
the washing machine
cross the hall thumps against the
wall do less laundry
comes morning gloaming
bleats of garbage trucks stir me
trash gone and I sleep
is that they’re never long enough, and one always finds oneself wishing for just one more day away from the office.
But on the other hand, if you did actually have all the time off you wanted, you’d get bored…
