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| Saturday |
the Twenty-Fifth of May, 2002 |
Bierce proposed "an improvement in punctuation - the snigger point, or
note of cachinnation: it is written thus \___/! and presents, as near
as may be, a smiling mouth. It is to be appended, with the full stop,
to every jocular or ironical sentence".
Astonishing; the smiley
was invented by Ambrose Bierce in 1912, as sarcastically
as you'd expect. I'm sure he'd be horrified to see the sorts of
dictionaries that the devil owns now.
[via Crummy]
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| Friday |
the Twenty-Fourth of May, 2002 |
| I enjoy random numbers too much. Assigning unique ID codes by picking
a random digit, seeing if a code with that number already exists, adding another random digit to the end if it does, repeating until it arrives at something unique. Far messier
and even riskier than simple incrementation, but pleasingly alive.
The illusion of an ineffable consciousness in the patterns, the blind
hand of (admittedly very boring and unlimited) evolution.
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| The Taxonomy of Biscuits, with
related analysis and postulation. Superb.
I was suitably disorientated to discover that Safeway's
own-brand cheap-and-nasty bourbons are heretically custard-cream shaped, the other week, shattering the site's proposed
SI unit of measurement.
Harrowing. [via Graham@MCiOS]
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"Counting the number of CDs sold is a trivial way of measuring the depth of antipathy towards the monarchy, but it's no less a scientific method than pointing to the crowds outside Buckingham Palace as proof that, at heart, we are still a nation of royalists."
The nation has until tomorrow evening to buy Billy Bragg's
Take Down The Union Jack single, for it to chart in Jubilee week. Power to the
people. If I had some tigers, I'd train them.
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| Wednesday |
the Twenty-Second of May, 2002 |
| How long, I wonder, before the Web is strewn with
fake weblogs,
lazily auto-generated from a stock of standard posting formats to
boost the search engine rankings of referenced clients? I can
barely tell random journals from
random scripts as it is.
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| | "What's green and goes red at the flick of a switch?" "A manually operated traffic light."
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The Google Set for
"As Above", in full:-
- Stationary shelving
- Gramophone disks require vertical storage
- Behind your back court gossip intensifies
- Others treat you with more suspicion
- Obstructing movement of other party
- Decreases in blood pressure
Four out of six isn't bad.
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| | Stephen Jay Gould dies at home in his library,
an impressive twenty years beyond
the median. The loss of a
great science writer, with or without baseball and punctuated equilibrium.
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| Tuesday |
the Twenty-First of May, 2002 |
| Every American should have a
WTC Memorial $2001 Dollar
Bill, apparently; "legal tender for the wretched hides of all
terrorist cowards". Seems to be a Photoshop joke with a mystifying
affiliate program attached, but who knows.
A simpler aide memoire - fold a $20 bill
to reveal secret pictures. What can it all mean?
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