April 2010
18 posts
“I taught myself the only way to vaguely get along in love is to like the other...”
– Los Campesinos! (“We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed”) (via maggieinthemovies)
The 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica online. →
Robot High School by My Robot Friend.
1 tag
'cool is from africa,' or, 'defining cool.'
The Yoruba language’s itutu literally translates to “dead.” Robert Farris Thompson of Yale University, however, translates the term as “mystic coolness.”
This may be the biggest lexical disagreement in translational history. However, Thompson argues that itutu does not so much describe death as it does the transcendental calm of the peacefully deceased. This...
“There is, of course, no necessary relationship between emotional health and...”
– Jerrold M. Post, Terrorist psycho-logic: Terrorist behavior as a product of psychological forces.
2 tags
'in waves.'
regarding that thing you always told me. “bottle your regrets and throw them out to sea.” you never addressed the fundamental problem with tides and their randomness and the dice games that the moon plays.
i mean, i can throw my regrets as far as the wind will take them but what if the waves wash them back.
2 tags
“My son told me many, many times- he said, “Mom, I don’t know why God...”
– Nora Mosquera about Jose Antonio Guttierez. Gutierrez left his orphanage in Guatemala, journeyed to the US, posed as a minor, and got to Torrence, California where Mosquera raised him as her own son.
And Gutierrez joined the marines. He died in a tank battle in southern Iraq. He was not a citizen...
3 tags
“In network theory, a node’s relationship to other networks is more important...”
– Kazys Varnelis (via butdoesitfloat.)
4 tags
'interrogative action,' or, 'asian-americans at my...
Asian-Americans make up 19% of Northwestern’s student body compared to a Census-estimated 4.4% of the US population.
In 2005, Yale student Jian Li filed a civil rights complaint against Princeton University. Li claimed that Asian-American students were significantly less likely to be accepted to the university, claiming that Princeton’s affirmative action policies for African-American and...
3 tags
sorry, I had to take something down, so here is a...
our faces are promises, now. tiny plans coated in silver chloride, framed by your shining future and mounted on the tip of your ginsu-knife tongue to be forever blessed among the undying eternities of the present tense.
“The starships of the future exploring the high frontier of the unknown will be...”
– Terence McKenna, Ordinary Language, Visible Language and Virtual Reality.
As computers become more able to accept our commands, we gain an ability to use language to shape our habitat. Here, McKenna talks about this grammatical future: in this future, when we can make our intentions known to our...
an open letter to software developers.
Please include a dictionary list of common newspapers and publications so the program can italicize them for me. It’s 2010, and I should not have to manually italicize the words “New York Times.”