English in Montreal
May 14th, 2010
Montreal’s heterogeneous linguistic environment has done some interesting things to the English language:
“Instead of turning off the lights, you close the lights. You have a coffee instead of having coffee. You fall pregnant instead of getting pregnant,” he says.
Battle: Hummus
May 8th, 2010
I can’t write a better summary than that of the BBC article:
Lebanon has claimed the latest victory in the continuing battle with Israel over which country can make the largest serving of hummus.
Lebanon’s in the lead after cooking up a 10-ton vat. The Middle East needs more of this kind of conflict.
Wikipedia In Print
May 8th, 2010
A new feature of Wikipedia allows users to compile articles into books, arrange them, and have them printed, bound, and shipped. This video demonstrates.
books, video, web | No Comments »
Rachmaninoff on Mars
May 7th, 2010
Apparently David Bowie based the theme of Life on Mars? on the second movement of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2. My head exploded.
Compare for yourself:
Debt Webs
May 6th, 2010
In the wake of today’s stock-market-crash-cum-partial-recovery, here’s a diagram1 documenting the loans that a few of Europe’s weaker economies owe to each other. Figures are in billions of dollars. Click for a larger view.
While there seems to be plenty to criticize about the fiscal policy of the Eurozone, it’s worth noting that America’s national debt is at $12.31 trillion (as of Q4 2009). For the infographically-minded, if we were to extrapolate from the size of the European debt circles then attempting to represent the US debt would exceed the size of the diagram.
1 Diagram blatantly stolen from the NYT.
Dr. Strangelove
April 30th, 2010
One of my very favorite movies is now available on Hulu!
Go learn to protect your precious bodily fluids, watch Peter Sellers play every character, and enjoy a nasty bit of commentary on Wernher von Braun.
Philosophers’ Football
April 27th, 2010
Hegel is arguing that the reality is merely an a priori adjunct of non-naturalistic ethics, Kant via the categorical imperative is holding that ontologically it exists only in the imagination, and Marx is claiming it was offside.
The not-quite-classic Python sketch is being re-enacted. Enjoy, Londoners!
The Turbo-encabulator
April 25th, 2010
Oh, man, I hope the turbo-encabulator can interface with my old DMC-12 flux capacitor.
On an extremely unrelated note:
Don Quixote: the first LARPer?
Brains, man, brains.
April 16th, 2010
A Croatian girl apparently awoke from her coma speaking German.
The girl, from the southern town of Knin, had only just started studying German at school and had been reading German books and watching German TV to become better, but was by no means fluent, according to her parents.
Since waking up from her 24 hour coma however, she has been unable to speak Croatian, but is able to communicate perfectly in German.
Assuming this isn’t just an awesome hoax, we need to figure out how to induce this kind of state artificially.