Why do people insist on jamming emdashes into adjacent words? Unlike the hyphen or endash, they're intended to separate not join. Omitting the space looks ugly and causes unnecessary confusion.

Update: I find this particularly irritating when I'm reading aloud (especially in a dim light, when I'm tired, or when I'm concentrating on the audience ( Read more... )

I attended a presentation yesterday which featured a pie chart. The chart had six categories, each labelled with an integer percentage. Apparently it was inappropriate to point out that they only added to 93%.

At dinner, my four-year-old daughter turned down the offer of chocolate tapioca pudding and instead requested (tortilla) chips and salsa for dessert.

We took the kids to storytime at the library today. They had a special guest author who read from her series of books. Every double-page spread had four lines of text (intended to be two rhyming couplets) over a picture. The pictures were drawn by an illustrator, so the author's contribution to the project was the text, on which she apparently ( Read more... )

I just finished A Scanner Darkly, by Philip K. Dick. I have been listening to it in the car in ten minute snatches on my way to and from work ( Read more... )

From Firedoglake:
Michelle Obama has led a life that sounds like a really bad B-movie, the sort of life that brings out the gossip hound in every journalist. Her first brush with controversy came when she was still in her teens, and killed a male friend who was rumored to have just broken off a serious relationship with her. Some years later, she ( Read more... )

At the end of a yoga class, there's a part where you're just supposed to think about your breathing and nothing else. I always have trouble with this because my mind wanders. Today I made an especial effort to concentrate. I started off by thinking about breathing, then I moved on to thinking about the fact that I had to think just about ( Read more... )

An article I want to have to hand the next time someone starts trash-talking "socialized medicine".

Sara Robinson, Mythbusting Canadian Healthcare: Part I, Part II.

Many years ago (some time in the late '90s), rhsk came back from the supermarket with a new fruit we hadn't encountered before: an avocado pear. We weren't sure how you were supposed to eat it. The skin was tough, so clearly you couldn't just bite into it like an ordinary pear ( Read more... )

Many years ago, back when I was an undergraduate, chard and I were chatting in a computer laboratory when a first-year student approached us diffidently and asked, "Excuse me. Do you know anything about C?" Dreading a long and complicated problem, I hesitantly answered, "Yes." "I'm having trouble with getchar()," he continued. "It returns an int," I ( Read more... )