This one comes from flatmate Ella, it happened to a friend of hers (not deliberately).
Choose a nice complicated mystery novel you haven’t read before. One where you’ll have to keep track of lots and lots of clues and remember who knows what when and so on. Buy it as an audio book, with chapters as separate [...]
Our institute is about to move to a new location. We all have to pack our books and papers into crates to be taken to the new building, where we will unpack them again (if they arrive intact, or at all). Of course that means going through old files deciding if they should be packed [...]
Ooer. As counterpoint to the coffee-madness song-and-animation I posted about recently, here’s Early Modern Whale with a pamphlet from 1674:
For the continual sipping of this pitiful drink is enough to bewitch Men of two and twenty, and tie up the Codpiece-point without a Charm. It renders them that use it as Lean as [...]
Oh dear. Charles Babbage, of difference engine fame, apparently had a hatred for buskers: “[N]o man having a brain ever listened to street musicians.” The context of that quote is even better, and can be found at Futility Closet.
Not-my-supervisor Robert put me onto this hilarious design, which it seems he found at Laughing Squid (original by Steven Frank):
Laughing Squid has a follow-up with a bunch of other typophile tees.
Hans H. Wellich is responsible for Indexing from A to Z, for which he may someday be forgiven. G. Norman Knight, on the other hand, for Indexing, The Art of never will be.
The references are from the Preface to the less frolicsomely titled Indexing Books (Nancy C. Mulvany), which arrived from India (!) today. Yes, [...]
Fair warning: this post will make absolutely no sense to anyone who thinks creationism is as dead as it should be.1 In the US it’s alive and well and trying to get itself into school curricula. PZ Myers writes a lot about it; it’s horrifying but often horribly funny.
Yesterday he quoted an Intelligent Design blog [...]
Olga is trying to get me to give up coffee. She seems to think some mad musical Frenchman is going to convince me. Silly girl. (Black, one sugar, thanks.)
Growing up in this tiny little country must be weird. Flatmate Ella was shocked this morning to discover that Olga didn’t know Winnie the Pooh. “You know,” she said, “Winne the Pooh from the Seven-Acre Woods!”
I’ve noted recently a certain zoological obsession on the part of formal semanticists. It’s not just formal semantics, it turns out, but philosophy of language in general. I hope, in fact, that this will turn into an irregular Friday feature (Friday being the day we usually have talks).
Today’s speaker, Herman Cappelen, told us that he [...]