abby: i am good mcgee, but i cannot work miracles. this is impossible. i told you once, i told you a thousand times -
mcgee: there is no substitute for quality source imagery, i know.
I have found the Leica M8 to be unreliable, poorly designed, and to deliver substandard results in most of the situations in which I have used it. I can’t think of any camera--or for that matter any electronic device I have recently used--that so thoroughly fails to live up to its potential and its heritage.
the moon's the same old moon,
the flowers exactly as they were,
yet i've become the thingness
of all the things i see!
bunan (1602-72)
yeah, don't give me any ideas. i am getting too farfetched! -- eren yigit [age 10]
there is no pause button on reality. -- eren yigit [a remarkable observation that gives difficulty to many religious fanatics and republicans]
i love the word "smear"... -- laura calder [french food at home]
The life of a contrarian is inherently frustrating. Whenever you point out the flaws in a particular dogmatic position, there is a tediously-predictable, reflex reaction that you must be a dogmatist, for the opposite extreme. -- david brin [Airline deterioration, the new elite, levees and clkimate deniers]
Thought, without the data on which to structure that thought, leads nowhere. -- victor stanger [has science found god?]
I bought it because I'm a sucker for finishing a series. DON'T DO IT. Put the mouse down and walk away. Do NOT check that box. -- from a review of stross's "clan corporate" at amazon [we get reviews]
[...] but I trust my family jewels only to Linux. -- donald knuth [interview with knuth]
hating bit fields in c structs. dat shit nevah werkz -- peter honeyman [tweet]
finding a needle in a haystack isn't hard when every straw is computerized. -- dexter
We need to kick the bishops out of the House of Lords, ban the Police and judiciary from taking donations from religious organizations, and get religion out of politics by any means necessary. -- charlie stross [when is a cult not a cult?]
i do not even know what a square looks like. i operate from a circle. -- dolores pitcher
fear is a frighteningly effective sales pitch. -- arianna huffington [right is wrong]
this morning's fun task: feeding twitterrific to appzapper.
spring flies -
a delicate encounter
all blacked out.
If content is king, why is there so little of it on the web? And why are content providers like Salon always whining about their huge bandwidth costs, given that 99% of what they ship — and that is an exact measurement, not hyperbole — is spam? -- charlie stross [why your internet experience is slow]
i would rather eat tomatoes than listen to this. -- eren yigit [in response to kelly pickler's singing about red shoes. eren really dislikes tomatoes]
design with skepticism, and you will achieve resilience. -- michael t. nygard [release it! design and deploy production-ready software. - yes, this book is really very good.]
some people take pictures, i find them. -- jane bown [unknown bown]
who wants to go through life not ever singing? -- roger ebert [review of woody allen's everyone says i love you]
here are people we don't care about, doing things they do not understand, in a movie without any rules. triple play. -- roger ebert [review of "an american warewolf in paris"]
based on the evidence, the bible isn't scripture. it's a Rorschach test. -- solomon short
dtrace is the MRI of software. -- gil hauer
As long as ads are aimed at children, as long as luxury SUVs are presented as necessary, as long as the difference between "want" and "need" is blurred on purpose, I'll think of advertising as immoral. -- fraxas [on advertising]
People who brandish naturalistic principles at us are usually up to mischief. -- peter medawar [the future of man]
Philosophically, I believe the designer's goal involves making decisions for the user. If the decisions are good, it's a good design and the user is content. I do not believe it's the designer's goal to defer everything to the user. As a bonus, making decisions early tends to simplify the design. -- rob pike [9fans mailing list]
faith is the invisible means of support for a belief when reasons fall out from under it. -- austin dacey
unfortunately, consulting entrails has never been a reliable guide to truth, even when those entrails are your own. -- austin dacey [the secular conscience]
I DISLIKE YOU! -- anonymous canadian baseball fan [against detroit tigers pitcher]
An unhandled exception was generated during the execution of the current web request. Information regarding the origin and location of the exception can be identified using the exception stack trace below. -- Microsoft .NET Framework [another amusing and informative manifestation of enterprise-level public debugging infrastructure]
We could just assume all trust fund babies are sipping latte at Starbucks and refer to figure 1, but that wouldn't serve the interests of science. Instead, let's assume that trust fund babies have one thing in common, money, and look at how wealth stacks against voting habits.
I could make a very compelling argument that Open XML has done more to revive the reputation of international standards than any other standard before it.
Ventus is a novel of information apocalypse set in the far future. For a thousand years the sovereign Winds have maintained the delicate ecological balance of the terraformed planet Ventus. Now an alien force threatens to wrest control of the terraforming system away from the Winds...
Jordan Mason, a young tradesman, is thrust into the midst of an ancient galactic conflict when he becomes the only human on Ventus who can locate the source of the alien threat. But will he side with the Winds, who have brutally suppressed technological development among the human colonists of Ventus? Or will he throw in his lot with an entity that may be planning to remake Ventus in its own, deathly image? Ventus incorporates ideas about nanotechnology, terraforming, and information theory in an epic tale of war, tragic love, betrayal and transcendence.
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lock-ins are never good for customers: a business that isn't confident that it can keep your business by providing the best product at the best price is a business that isn't planning on providing the best product at the best price. -- cory doctorow [in defense of complaining]
look, she is nuts, but we cannot give her 10ccs of atheism and send her home. -- tal [house, m.d.]
Don't you have paint to watch dry? -- cosma shalizi
Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity. —- marshall mcluhan
This page was last updated in 1984 by a gifted psychic who foresaw all that is described here. -- mr bunny's hutch
ah, complexity: the mother of all consulting fees! -- marco tabini
you may have an invisible opponent, but you still have to see him. -- sandra jorgenson [iaido 5th dan sensei, mu mon kai]
i paid a life to get these parents. [because i pay a lot more, i get better parents] -- eren yigit [age 9]
properly implementing a singleton requires a number of the tricks shown earlier. -- the ruby programming language
people don't change. for example, i will keep repeating: people don't change! -- house [house, m.d.]
cyborg: do you even have opposable thumbs?
beastboy: most of the time! -- teen titans [fourth season]
why is the notion of a fundamentalist comedian funny, or at least quite odd? -- john allen paulos [irreligion]
the incongruity necessary for appreciating humor is only recognizable with an open mind and fresh perspective. -- john allen paulos [irreligion]
people want interesting clutter. people want clutter that is on sale. -- matthew powell
left to its own devices, the mind runs off in random directions as synapses connect to others that happen to be in the neighborhood. -- jack hart [a writer's coach]
Dear site operators: Here's a quarter, go buy a terabyte from Amazon S3 and stop complaining. -- cory doctorow [17 tips for getting bloggers to write about you]
[addendum: yes i know i can take my blog elsewhere, but quietely walking away is not good enough. i want google to be informed. i want it to know that blogger is mediocre, and should be improved. google did not get to where it is by being the second or third best.]
[april update: at least one blog entry become entirely un-savable in draft form. several other drafts have had intermittent autosave failures. this is gone from bad to disgusting.]
Creationist: There are no transitional whale fossils!
Scientist: Oh, dear, really? That's terrible! We should teach the students about that, don't you think?
Creationist: Yes, we should. That information must go into the science standards for our state.
Scientist: I quite agree. When we mandate that our teachers must offer instruction in the details of whale transitional fossils, the gaps will be so obvious.
Creationist: Good. Let's insert, "Teachers will discuss the nature of evolutionary transitions, emphasizing the kinds of evidence needed to support claims that land animals evolved into whales, and that cats give birth to dogs."
Scientist: Well, as a compromise, let's leave out the bit about cats and dogs, and we'll have to clean up and standardize the language in committee, but let's do it. The committee might even make this broader, pushing for discussion of all kinds of transitional fossils, which, of course, are absent. Boy, you sure got me over a barrel, forcing me to include discussion of an evolutionary flaw in our public schools. I hope you aren't going to continue to outwit me with your Mastery of Science.
Creationist: <preening smugly> Ha ha, our cunning plan is working!
prevent the domain name from resolving to the wikileaks.org website or any other website or server other than a blank park page, until further order of this Court.
