What I say about law he says about science: that with very, very rare exceptions, there aren’t ultimate unchangeable truths and that a brilliant mistake is the most important contribution a scientist can make. For example, phrenology, which was just totally wrong, contributed an important thing to science, because it was really the first pseudo-science that said there’s a connection between the mind and the brain. Phrenologists got everything wrong, but they were right that in some ways the brain determines the content of the mind. So that was a grand mistake, a great mistake. Neuropsychology and neurobiology-almost all the neurosciences emerged from the great mistake of phrenology.
“You can either be right or be in a relationship.”
The “banana phenomenon” was encountered when processing a character string by taking the last 3 letters typed out, searching for a random occurrence of that sequence in the text, taking the letter following that occurrence, typing it out, and iterating. This ensures that every 4-letter string output occurs in the original. The program typed BANANANANANANANANA…. We note an ambiguity in the phrase, “the Nth occurrence of”. In once sense, there are five 00’s in 0000000000; in another, there are nine. The editing program TECO finds five. Thus it finds only the first ANA in BANANA, and is thus obligated to type N next. By Murphy’s Law, there is but one NAN, thus forcing A, and thus a loop. An option to find overlapped instances would be useful, although it would require backing up N-1 characters before seeking the next N character string.
Lyle Lovett.
People who are falling in love seem to kind of fuse together for a while; you sort of surrender your own personhood. But at some point you differentiate. You say, “I am me and not you, and this is what I think and not that.” And “Actually, I don’t really enjoy that kind of movie,” or “I really like butter pecan ice cream better than vanilla, even though it was fun to eat it with you sometimes.” For the other person, it’s like: “You really think that? Did you lie to me?” But nobody lied. There’s a kind of collusion in romantic love not to breach reality.
Dying used to be accompanied by a prescribed set of customs. Guides to ars moriendi, the art of dying, were extraordinarily popular; a 1415 medieval Latin text was reprinted in more than a hundred editions across Europe.
Besides, how do you attend to the thoughts and concerns of the dying when medicine has made it almost impossible to be sure who the dying even are? Is someone with terminal cancer, dementia, incurable congestive heart failure dying, exactly?
Stripped of all power as children, and never given either power or responsibility, they drowned in freedom and looked for a practical solution to their existential crisis: everything always has a higher authority. Call the school, call the cops, call the government. The joke used to be, “hey, lady, don’t make a federal case out of it!” but that’s no longer a joke, it’s the preferred method. The idiocy of such parents is mind boggling, certainly, but even more compounded by the message that it sends to their own kids: higher authorities always exist for everything. Just not God. That’s for stupid people.
Lessig, you've got better at pandering to the public.
Whenever the upper management guys at CHE or The National Review pretend to disagree about the “classics” or “Great Books” or the “value of a liberal education,” after five minutes it becomes clear that even they haven’t read all those books, or most of them, or even a respectable minority, or three. They’ve read about them, ok, but when you finally pin them down and they admit they haven’t read it— which would be fine— their final response is, “there’s no point in reading that stuff now since we’ve all moved beyond that.” Oh. And those are supposed to be the smart ones; everyone else in the generation thinks that the speed at which they can repeats the words they heard on TV or read on some magazine’s website is evidence of their intellect.
If a student can skip class and still ace the class, the kid is either very bright or the professor is utterly useless.
In ordinary medicine, the goal is to extend life. We’ll sacrifice the quality of your existence now—by performing surgery, providing chemotherapy, putting you in intensive care—for the chance of gaining time later. Hospice deploys nurses, doctors, and social workers to help people with a fatal illness have the fullest possible lives right now.
In ordinary medicine, the goal is to extend life. We’ll sacrifice the quality of your existence now—by performing surgery, providing chemotherapy, putting you in intensive care—for the chance of gaining time later.
By this strategy, consider the universe, or, more precisely, algebra: let X = the sum of many powers of two = …111111 now add X to itself; X + X = …111110 thus, 2X = X - 1 so X = -1 therefore algebra is run on a machine (the universe) which is twos-complement.
Governments establish property systems. The minimal obligation on a government is that it make its system efficient. Copyright is a property system established by the federal government. Yet that government has failed in its minimal obligation toward this property system. Copyright is among the least efficient property systems known to man. It is practically impossible—that is, without projectdefeating costs—to identify who owns what for the vast majority of work regulated by our copyright system.
Ideas don’t desert you, ideas aren’t treasonous to you, but people can be.
I don't agree but the quotee is far more in touch with this tha me.
across what time span? This is a almost textbook place for irrational decisions.
If the Holocaust revisionists of the world stopped playing “if the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit,” and spent a tenth of the time explaining what happened to the shtetl Jews who weren’t gassed by the SS, they might have a chance of convincing me.
For Dahl, none of these encounters seems to have involved any serious emotional commitment. But, whereas it was said of Ian Fleming that he got off with girls because he could not get on with them, this was not true of Dahl, who truly delighted in female company.
In truth, when we see that even a sophisticate like Hassell understands America so poorly that he can fall for Henry Wallace as a staunch anti-Communist, we find it easier to explain if not excuse Hitler. How on earth was Hitler to know that FDR wasn’t a puppet of the Elders of Zion? Hassell was a jet-setter avant la lettre, comfortable in all European capitals; Hitler was a rube, who had never been west of Ypres. What basis would he have for distinguishing the YMCA from the Elders of Zion, messianic Protestantism from messianic Judaism, liberalism from freemasonry, Anglophilia from Hebrolatry? Zero.
[Eugene Zamiatin’s] We—that
“Did you know Alan Turing committed suicide with a poison apple? And he had a van that he used to travel around the country with his wife in. He called it the Touring Machine.”
House of Usher
Somebody who’d be very interesting to speak to on this is Grant Achatz [one of the pioneers of molecular gastronomy]. Here’s a guy who’s been trained in the classics, who knows the quote-unquote “right” away to do everything, but made a very deliberate decision to subvert it all. I think that’s admirable. We need people like that. We would never have had Jimi Hendrix if he’d stuck to the right way to play guitar.
You’ve described vegans as “the hezbollah-like splinter group” of vegetarians, and Alice Waters as “Pol Pot in a muumuu.”
Safran Foer, while I liked the book, I disagree completely with it. I don’t understand how we can acknowledge the importance of the human dimension of turkey dinner yet forgo it anyway. I guess it’s just a question of priorities.
The pirates were scrawny and barefoot young men, dressed in rags, and edgy under the effect of the stimulant khat.
A crew of pirates high on E.
Everyone keeps wanting Dick Cheney to be interviewed. Gosh, I guess we're all liberals here...
“In a sense, Britain inadvertently, through its actions in Hong Kong, did more to reduce world poverty than all the aid programs that we’ve undertaken in the last century,” Romer observes drily.
When I was in college, I was a semiotics major, which is this hopelessly pretentious body of French literary theory. But there were a few pieces of writing in the field that were not about how language is a conspiracy theory to hold us in our place—which
In the case of a well-known conversational programming language I have been told from various sides that as soon as a programming community is equipped with a terminal for it, a specific phenomenon occurs that even has a well-established name: it is called “the one-liners”. It takes one of two different forms: one programmer places a one-line program on the desk of another and either he proudly tells what it does and adds the question “Can you code this in less symbols?” —as if this were of any conceptual relevance!— or he just asks “Guess what it does!”. From this observation we must conclude that this language as a tool is an open invitation for clever tricks; and while exactly this may be the explanation for some of its appeal, viz. to those who like to show how clever they are, I am sorry, but I must regard this as one of the most damning things that can be said about a programming language.
Male, female, gay, straight, legal, illegal, country of origin—who cares? You can either cook an omelet or you can’t. You can either cook five hundred omelets in three hours—like you said you could, and like the job requires—or you can’t. There’s no lying in the kitchen.
But there’s a really fascinating instance of what you’re talking about in Chuck Klosterman’s new book [Eating the Dinosaur]. I feel like this is a really weird example to bring up, but he interviews me and Errol Morris about interviewing. It’s a really funny chapter because I give all of these totally Pollyanna answers—I mean, things I really believe, but I’m like [here he goes into an earnest falsetto, like a very sincere Chipmunk] “I just think that people open up because they sense that somebody’s really interested. It’s just a natural human thing.” And Errol is like “I DOUBT WHETHER WE KNOW OURSELVES, AND THE ACT OF BEING INTERVIEWED IS AN ACT OF ASSERTING A SELF WHICH WE HOPE IS TRUE.” Seriously, every answer is like this. I’m like, “I just think it’s really swell being interviewed!” And he’s like “THERE IS NO SELF.”
The most obvious advantage of a culinary education is that from now on, chefs won’t have to take time out of their busy day to explain to you what a fucking “brunoise” is.
And I’m not going to tell you here how to live your life. I’m just saying, I guess, that I got very lucky. And luck is not a business model.
The dialogue is as wooden as an Eberhard Faber, the characters as thin as a sneer, the plots as forced as a laugh at the boss’s joke, the style as overwrought as this sentence.
In the United States, airlines are legally prohibited from advertising based on their safety record. The feeling was, if you let airlines compete for customers based on safety, there will be an incentive not to report problems.
If, as the metaphor goes, a market economy is governed by an invisible hand, competition is surely the brass knuckles by which it enforces its decisions.
There are still many people that don’t understand that the crew of the Challenger didn’t die until they hit the water. They were all strapped into their seats in a basically intact crew module; their hearts were still beating when they hit the water. People think they were blown to smithereens, but that’s not what happened.
(Readers who want to enrage themselves and frighten their families should turn to William Poundstone’s 2008 book, “Gaming the Vote,” a masterly account of the way electoral mathematics is manipulated in America.)
It is tempting to see this seamless combination of Islam and flirting and dating as a symptom of the repression of the Islamic Republic, but according to one of my mother’s friends, Ashura in her day was the same. Iranians have always had an irrepressible sense of fun and growing up in 1960s Iran, girls were sheltered; in the days before mobile phones and internet chatrooms, she told me how numbers were exchanged. If eye contact was made with a handsome boy in the procession, and smiles were returned, then the boy would announce the digits of his phone number in between the chanting and chest beating, so that she could memorize it and call him later. It would go something like this: “ya Hossein—7—ya Ali—6.”
Robert L. Wilson, who was elected to the Illinois state legislature with Lincoln in 1836, found him amiable and fun-loving. But one day Lincoln told him something surprising. Lincoln said “that although he appeared to enjoy life rapturously, Still he was the victim of terrible melancholly,” Wilson recalled. “He Sought company, and indulged in fun and hilarity without restraint, or Stint as to time[.] Still when by himself, he told me that he was so overcome with mental depression, that he never dare carry a knife in his pocket.”
Satow’s Diplomatic Practice
My first thought was that I had been poisoned. Also that I had swallowed a live wire and had been electrocuted. Also that I might go into some kind of allergic shock and die. They hurt, you see. They were barbed things, and they were in my throat, and they felt like iron filings and they tasted like aspirin. Though some of them were already down the hatch, I ran to the bathroom and started spitting them out, while at the same time trying to determine how many I had swallowed. I spat into the sink, and the spittle was not just flecked brown, it was marbled red. I had ants in my mouth, and my tongue was bleeding.
The cigar-chomping Texan was the kind of eccentric, larger-than-life executive that any modern PR handler would keep tightly muzzled. He celebrated his 60th birthday by riding a rented elephant around the grounds of his mansion, and he kept a plastic breast on his desk that made a gong sound when he pressed the nipple. It was how he called for more coffee.
In 1999, Marine General Charles Krulak wrote an influential article in which he coined the term “strategic corporal.”
La culture en clandestins: L’UX, published by the French imprint Hazan,
The habit of money at interest also originates in Sumer – it remained unknown, for example, in Egypt. Interest rates, fixed at 20 percent, remained stable for 2,000 years. (This was not a sign of government control of the market: at this stage, institutions like this were what made markets possible.) This, however, led to some serious social problems. In years with bad harvests especially, peasants would start becoming hopelessly indebted to the rich, and would have to surrender their farms and, ultimately, family members, in debt bondage. Gradually, this condition seems to have come to a social crisis – not so much leading to popular uprisings, but to common people abandoning the cities and settled territory entirely and becoming semi-nomadic “bandits” and raiders.
The institution of wage labour, for instance, has historically emerged from within that of slavery (the earliest wage contracts we know of, from Greece to the Malay city states, were actually slave rentals), and it has also tended, historically, to be intimately tied to various forms of debt peonage – as indeed it remains today. The fact that we have cast such institutions in a language of freedom does not mean that what we now think of as economic freedom does not ultimately rest on a logic that has for most of human history been considered the very essence of slavery.
Émile Zola,
Masanobu Tsuji, a notorious Japanese spy who is portrayed as a figure of ultimate evil, masterminding mayhem and intrigue all over Asia.
Born neither rich nor famous, he had once lived an ordinary life too, in which ‘networking’ was but a buzzword and leisurely hours spent in the company of another were in pursuit of friendship or sex and rarely much else.
But a deal is a deal, if fairly undertaken, and we find disclosure was fair and unshaken. Appellant may shun that made once upon a time, but his appeal must fail, lacking reason (if not rhyme). ¶ 28 Order affirmed.
North Philly, May 4, 2001. Officer Sean Devlin, Narcotics Strike Force, was working the morning shift. Undercover surveillance. The neighborhood? Tough as a three-dollar steak. Devlin knew. Five years on the beat, nine months with the Strike Force.
Career civil servants despised Republican political appointees, and vice versa.
Tells you where the civil service, and thus the whole government, actually stands.
The dangers are obvious. Stores of gasoline in the hands of people interested primarily in profit would constitute a fire and explosive hazard of the first rank. Horseless carriages propelled by gasoline might attain speeds of 14 or even 20 miles per hour. The menace to our people of vehicles of this type hurtling through our streets and along our roads and poisoning the atmosphere would call for prompt legislative action even if the military and economic implications were not so overwhelming…
Saudi Arabia is one of the premier pilgrimage sites in the world, outstripping Jerusalem, the Vatican, Angkor Wat, and every other religious destination, except for India’s Kumbh Mela (which attracts as many as 50 million pilgrims every three years).
There’s no date night in Saudi Arabia. The romance strictures here—a few virginal meetings, a peek under the veil, a marriage contract, an all-female wedding reception, and a check of the bloody sheets—make The Rules look like the Kama Sutra.
Rights are a Roman idea; Judaism deals instead with duties. Kindness to animals is not a right enjoyed by cows and elephants but a duty that binds every human being.
It was the first time, a columnist for The Crimson observed later, that a suicide note took the form of a policy memo.
Ramirez-Lopez: Isn’t the jury supposed to have all the facts? Lawyer: Not all the facts. Some facts are cumulative, others are hearsay. Some facts are both cumulative and hearsay. Ramirez-Lopez: Can you say that in plain English? Lawyer: No.
It is very late in the day to start dealing with these problems, but it will never get earlier.
In 1984 one of their men rented a room at the Grand Hotel in Brighton, where the Conservative Party was scheduled to have its yearly meeting. He put the bomb under the flooring, paid his bill and left. A month later the long-delay timer went off while Thatcher and all her allies were sound asleep in their rooms. They missed Thatcher—they didn’t call her the Iron Lady for nothing—but she had the novel experience of seeing a few floors fall into her room at 3 am. And the IRA statement afterwards was a model of guerrilla patience: “Today you were lucky, but you will have to be lucky always. We only have to be lucky once.” That’s the way you play it, for the long haul.
We were approaching the hotel—a Best Western in Luxembourg—but first Li briefed us on breakfast. A typical Chinese breakfast consists of a rich bowl of congee (a rice porridge), a deep-fried cruller, and, perhaps, a basket of pork buns. In Europe, he warned, tactfully, “Throughout our trip, breakfast will rarely be more than bread, cold ham, milk, and coffee.” The bus was silent for a moment.
“What does a man care about? Staying healthy. Working good. Eating and drinking with his friends. Enjoying himself in bed. I haven’t any of them. You understand, goddamn it? None of them.”