February 2011
0 posts
Le Scandal - By Eric Pape | Foreign Policy →
The Arab world’s revolutions have exposed the moral bankruptcy of France’s foreign policy.
It is one thing to have state-to-state relations. It is another to pat a dictator on the back.
What makes a great speech? | The Guardian →
Mary Beard :
I’m not meaning by this that women have in some way “failed” to master the art of public speaking. Not at all. The point is that “great oratory” is a category that has been consistently defined to exclude [women] – and the more you search for the roots of our own oratorical traditions in the classical past, the more obvious that exclusion...
“When you’re forced to be simple, you’re forced to face the real problem. When...”
– Paul Graham on Simplicity
“You know a conjurer gets no credit when once he has explained his trick; and if...”
– Sherlock Holmes (via aboyinmidair)
The Day the Movies Died --GQ →
Mark Harris on the state of the Hollywood machine.
With that in mind, let’s look ahead to what’s on the menu for this year: four adaptations of comic books. One prequel to an adaptation of a comic book. One sequel to a sequel to a movie based on a toy. One sequel to a sequel to a sequel to a movie based on an amusement-park ride. One prequel to a remake. Two sequels to cartoons....
BBC News - How 'OK' took over the world →
Allan Metcalf, on his book : OK: The Improbable Story of America’s Greatest Word
Almost every language has an O vowel, a K consonant, and an A vowel. So OK is a very distinctive combination of very familiar elements. And that’s one reason it’s so successful. OK stands apart.
Ordinarily a word so odd, so distinctive from others, wouldn’t be allowed in a...
Apple's Three Laws of Developers
yourhead:
A developer may not injure Apple or, through inaction, allow Apple to come to harm.
A developer must obey any orders given to it by Apple, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A developer must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
— I. Developer
“According to Hoyle - Correct, by the book. “Hoyle” is a dictionary...”
– Old slang, lingo, & phrases
from the Old West
Semantic satiation →
wikipedia :
Semantic satiation is a cognitive neuroscience phenomenon in which repetition causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose meaning for the listener, who can only process the speech as repeated meaningless sounds.
FBI Targets V For Vendetta Mask Owners -Bleeding... →
The agent in charge of my particular warrant actually asked me if I owned a Guy Fawkes mask. I told him no and then asked him if he was disappointed that he wouldn’t have a picture of “a real live Anon’s mask” to hang in his office. He actually said yes.
I ENJOY THE LULZ →
criminalwisdom:
How one man tracked down Anonymous—and paid a heavy price. “Anonymous got into HBGary Federal’s e-mail server, for which Barr was the admin, and compromised it, extracting over 40,000 e-mails and putting them up on The Pirate Bay. In an after-action IRC chat, Anonymous members bragged about how they had gone even further, deleting 1TB of HBGary backup data.
They even claimed...
Moral Combat : Why do liberals play computer games... →
I’m not the one who made Sim cities run more smoothly if underpaid workers are lulled into submission and Sim households more entertaining if moms stay home—the games’ designer, Will Wright, did.
This article assumes that gamers do not partake in fantasy.
“Of course we must all respect differences, but we do not want… a society...”
– President Sarkozy.
Oh hey I voted for the other guy.