It occurred to me that I should say a little about the common thread that underpins pretty much everything I've written here since lifting radio silence, and will continue to do so for some time.

So I alluded to the whole aspie thing 1 a few posts back. The interesting thing there is, when I first decided to look into the various non-normative ( Read more... )

Lately I have much been enjoying the blog Slate Star Codex, which treads in sparkling prose much of the same rationality, ethics, cognitive science, &c ground that Less Wrong has gotten bad about stomping into dittoheady mud lately. By which I mean it's actually good and stuff. One recent post sparked off some recollections from, of all things, ( Read more... )

"You are Zaphod Beeblebrox?" it squeaked.

"Yeah," said Zaphod, "but don't shout it out or they'll all want one."

"The Zaphod Beeblebrox?"

"No, just a Zaphod Beeblebrox, didn't you hear I come in six-packs?"
--Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

One of the cooler things about living in Belgium is that it is basically impossible to live in a reasonably-sized town and not be within a couple of blocks of a bakery. (We're a block from one, and within four blocks of two more.) This has had a really positive impact on my life in terms of breakfast. Every morning, post-caffeine, I hike over to ( Read more... )

Seriously. I wish I'd had this as an example when I was teaching about prestige dialects in sociolinguistics; he knows the theory and the practice.

Click to view

...but the kriek is so tasty.

Anyway, I was recently snarked at on IRC for uttering the following sentence:

I.e., you start with the functional spec, you hand it in to the professor, he grades it, then you do whatever the next bit of the process is?
The snarker in question took issue with my use of the word 'he' as the anaphor, or "pronoun that ( Read more... )

It should not take two three and a half fucking hours to convince a computer to print out a PDF generated from a PostScript file generated from LaTeX. Even if that computer is a crippled Windows box in a business centre of an apartment complex ( Read more... )

BoingBoing reports on an unintentionally (?) hilarious lead sentence for an article about monks who wanted to watch the Pope's funeral on TV:Catholic monks living on an island off the coast of Wales have flown in a satellite dish to watch the Pope's funeral.
They refer to the sentence as a "crime against the English language," an assessment which I ( Read more... )

Weber: (6:36pm) Actually, here's a lesson on presuppositions. The phrase "her BDSM porn" carries the presupposition that she *has* BDSM porn. You can't interpret the phrase if the presupposition isn't true. It's distinct from normal assertions in that it survives if you put a negation or question around it; e.g. "I don't like her BDSM porn", or "Do ( Read more... )