"We are just destined to be really, really good friends who only hang out when I don't have a boyfriend, but still need male attention to boost my fragile and all-consuming ego."
- Ana
from Bookmarklet
"Don't worry. You're so funny and smart and amazing, any girl but me would be lucky to date you. You'll find someone, I know it. And when you do, I'll be right by your side to suddenly become all flirty and affectionate with you in front of her, until she grows jealous and won't believe it when you say we're just friends. But when she dumps you, that's just what we'll be."
- Dan Hsiao
The conclusion of this article finds the Onion in top form.
- Andrew C
translation: I am not into you like that. You don't do it for me in that way. Never did. never will. Sorry, but only sort of...
- Morgan Haley
The "my mom says hi" part is a nice way to twist the knife a bit.
- Brian Chang
"The matter of what exactly goes on in the mind of a dog is a tricky one, and until recently much of the research on canine intelligence has been met with large doses of skepticism."
- Ňicķ
from Bookmarklet
"This is an open question: What is this fractal? It's a method for filling a 2D plane with circles in an orderly way - circles made of circles, all the way down. There are published examples of similar systems, like the Apollonian Gasket, the Kleinian Groups, Indra's Pearls, but I've never seen this particular arrangement before, and I've been looking for over ten years."
- Ňicķ
from Bookmarklet
"'People have been running barefoot for millions of years and it has only been since 1972 that people have been wearing shoes with thick, synthetic heels,' said Daniel Lieberman, a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University"
- Ňicķ
from Bookmarklet
From Discover Magazine: "What was it that so impressed these men? These giants? It was that a magnet could move things without touching them. In science this feat is known as “action at a distance,” and it was something that used to impress people. People would see a magnet move a piece of metal, or a moon trapped in orbit around a planet, or a man in a restaurant levitate a saltshaker just by looking at it, and they would wonder how it was possible. After all, as Isaac Newton pointed out in his Principia, the notion “that one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in philosophic matters a competent faculty of thinking could ever fall into it.”"
- Mark Trapp
"I set out on what I assumed would be a minutes-long odyssey to understand the phenomenon. Seventy-one days later, I am here with astonishing findings. For one thing, as far as I can tell, nobody knows how a magnet can move a piece of metal without touching it. And for another—more astonishing still, perhaps—nobody seems to care." Loving this article.
- Michael W. May
"As far as I can tell, these virtual particles are composed entirely of math and exist solely to fill otherwise embarrassing gaps in physics, such as the attraction and repulsion between magnets." *cackle*
- Michael W. May
Book Review - 'Look at the Birdie - Unpublished Short Fiction,' by Kurt Vonnegut - Review by Dave Eggers - NYTimes.com - http://www.nytimes.com/2009...
"The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) is an international organisation of states considering themselves not formally aligned with or against any major power bloc."
- Ňicķ
from Bookmarklet
"Neocolonialism is a term used by post-colonial critics of developed countries' involvement in the developing world. Writings within the theoretical framework of neocolonialism argue that existing or past international economic arrangements created by former colonial powers were or are used to maintain control of their former colonies and dependencies after the colonial independence movements of the post World War II period."
- Ňicķ
from Bookmarklet
"The Aptera 2 Series (formerly the Aptera Typ-1) is a high-efficiency passenger three-wheeled automobile produced by Aptera Motors. The California-based company is currently allowing residents of California to pre-order the car, which is in the final stages of the design process"
- Ňicķ
from Bookmarklet
"Beatnik, a media stereotype of the 1950s and early 1960s, was a synthesis of the more superficial aspects of the Beat Generation literary movement of the 1950s into violent film images and a cartoonish misrepresentation of the real-life people and the spirituality found in Jack Kerouac's autobiographical fiction. Kerouac spoke out against this misdirected detour from his original concept."
- Ňicķ
from Bookmarklet
"The Summer of Love refers to the summer of 1967, when as many as 100,000 people converged on the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco, creating a phenomenon of cultural and political rebellion."
- Ňicķ
from Bookmarklet
"Anthony Trollope (24 April 1815 – 6 December 1882) became one of the most successful, prolific and respected English novelists of the Victorian era. Some of Trollope's best-loved works, known as the Chronicles of Barsetshire, revolve around the imaginary county of Barsetshire; he also wrote penetrating novels on political, social, gender issues, and conflicts of his day."
- Ňicķ
from Bookmarklet
"Airsoft is a sport, in which participants organize meetings at dedicated airsoft battlefields often adapted to provide walls, bunkers, trenches, buildings, towers, and other similar man-made field enhancements to simulate real combat environments."
- Ňicķ
from Bookmarklet
"The monomaths do not only swarm over a specialism, they also play dirty. In each new area that Posner picks—policy or science—the experts start to erect barricades. “Even in relatively soft fields, specialists tend to develop a specialised vocabulary which creates barriers to entry,” Posner says with his economic hat pulled down over his head. “Specialists want to fend off the generalists. They may also want to convince themselves that what they are doing is really very difficult and challenging. One of the ways they do that is to develop what they regard a rigorous methodology—often mathematical. “The specialist will always be able to nail the generalists by pointing out that they don’t use the vocabulary quite right and they make mistakes that an insider would never make. It’s a defence mechanism. They don’t like people invading their turf, especially outsiders criticising insiders."
- Paul Buchheit
from Bookmarklet
There is definitely a place for polymaths in some form: someone needs to be that people-person guy from Office Space who takes information from two or more disparate groups to form a coherent picture. But the requirement of an agreed lexicon from specialists isn't a defense mechanism: there's a lot of time that can be spent on trying to flesh out terms which could be better spent...
more...
- Mark Trapp
I do think there is a tendency for specialists to overcomplicate things though. Even though I know quite a bit about computers, I still don't know what people are talking about half of the time (and it usually turns out to be something simple). Making up fancy terms makes the work seem so much more magical and important, like you're on the Star Trek or something. Now go realign the tachyon beams with the anti-matter stabilizers :)
- Paul Buchheit
Haha. My background is in philosophy, where everything one can talk about probably has an -ism or a -ness or a -itude attached to it. The terms lock out people who only dabble in the hard problems, but they are great shorthand for those who are versed in it. Descartes writes about a philosophy of mind in his Meditations on First Philosophy, and a bunch of people over the course of 300...
more...
- Mark Trapp
"The question is whether their loss has affected the course of human thought. Polymaths possess something that monomaths do not. Time and again, innovations come from a fresh eye or from another discipline. Most scientists devote their careers to solving the everyday problems in their specialism. Everyone knows what they are and it takes ingenuity and perseverance to crack them. But breakthroughs—the sort of idea that opens up whole sets of new problems—often come from other fields."
- Clare Dibble
The problem with specialization is that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Then if you encounter a screw, and hammering a screw is precisely the wrong thing to do. That's why you need generalists.
- Piaw Na
it's axiomatic that: a specialist is someone who knows more and more about less and less, until he finally knows everything about nothing
- Ervin
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." - Robert A Heinlein
- Bill de hÓra
I have to disagree with you Mark, as also having a background in philosophy, I find it is just as easy to get locked into a semantic argument about some term as it is a possible shortcut to a broader discussion. Most of time time I find people who throw around -isms would prefer not to discuss things deeply because they don't want to ever re-evaluate the basics, it's too frightening,...
more...
- Ňicķ
"Flipism, sometimes written as "Flippism" is an imaginary philosophy, letting all decisions be made by flipping a coin. It originally appeared in the Disney comic "Flip Decision" by Carl Barks, which was first published in 1953."
- Ňicķ
from Bookmarklet
"Give a bunch of computer geeks a new medium to play around in, and you could probably guess that the first thing they'd think to do with it is... no, not that, we're talking role-playing games."
- Ňicķ
from Bookmarklet
"Gangs have existed in Santa Cruz County for decades, but in recent years their members have become increasingly mobile, and areas once known as strongholds for either Nortenos or Surenos are now in flux."
- Ňicķ
from Bookmarklet
"There are several hundred active gang members in the county who are a part of about a dozen gangs. The gangs are affiliated with either Nortenos, who claim red, or Surenos, who claim blue, but have sub-groups that consider certain streets or neighborhoods their territory."
- Ňicķ
from Bookmarklet
Watsonville is almost all Northsiders. There's a lot less Southsiders but are in Pajaro and around the Boardwalk.
- Rodfather
"A sun dog or sundog (scientific name parhelion, plural parhelia, from "beside the sun"; also called a mock sun) is an atmospheric phenomenon that creates bright spots of light in the sky, often on a luminous ring or halo on either side of the sun."
- Ňicķ
from Bookmarklet