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Quote of the week
Autumn has placed her russet hand over the country, the leaves blushing red at the thought of the winter nakedness. Now the great once summer trees have cried their leaves to the ground. Dead hollow spiders cling transparently to once geometric webs that now hang with dawn water pearls. The gold penny that was the sun devalued with the passing ( Read more... ) -
Don't wear it out
fredwass wrote to me:
For years, people have gone to universities and academies to hone their young minds, but you are 100 percent convinced that your trick of working yours firmly against an oiled whetstone does the job faster and just as well.
This puzzled me for about 20 seconds, after which I laughed a great deal. fredwass, you see, gets on quite well ( Read more... ) -
Three wishes
This isn't a meme, I promise, it's just something I was musing about while walking about in the crater of an active volcano earlier this week. It's what I would do with three wishes.
The first wish is easy: long life and happiness for all beings. I've been thinking about this one for years and it seems pretty watertight, provided the genie is ( Read more... ) -
Copywrong
From The Public Domain, a short essay by Lawrence Lessig:
The private domain will swallow the public domain. And the cultivation of culture and creativity will then be dictated by those who claim to own it.
Backed by force of arms, no doubt. Of course, the USA only started respecting copyrights itself when it became profitable to do so, and ( Read more... ) -
Not convinced
Will I go to hell for reading over 300 proofs of God's existence? (I really did read them all, too.)
My favourite: An idiot could see that God exists. I am an idiot. I can see that God exists. God exists.
I heard Pat Robertson use number 266 on television. I find 328 quite appealing, but only because I've read "A Fire Upon the Deep".
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If you can't refuse, resist!
I will actively support those people who, on behalf of all of us*, refuse to register for an ID card, and I pledge to pay at least £20 into a fighting fund for them but only if 50,000 other people will too.
Many people have told NO2ID that they really want to refuse to register but they feel that their professional or family responsibilities ( Read more... ) -
Marking the object with が
[This was originally a mail message, but I want to collect these kinds of things on my journal.]
On Monday Suzuki-sensei claimed that sometimes "が" is an object marker. Actually, I don't buy this. It seems to me much more natural to consider "が" as always the subject, but instead consider some of the verbs to be passive. For example, in " ( Read more... ) -
Mate, spawn, and die
It's summer in Japan, and that means the semi (蝉, Japanese cicada) are out in the trees. You don't see them all that much, but boy do you hear them. In fact, if you're standing within about 5 metres of one it's difficult to talk to someone standing next to you.
I'm curious about just how much energy they're putting out. Must be more than a ( Read more... )