“droll”
103 posts under this tag.
Of course! A 3-legged table wouldn’t wobble! Why? Any three points define a plane. Why did I never think of that?
So you’ve purchased your coffee and chosen to sit at one of those round outdoor tables. As you lean on the table to write comments on a paper, it rocks annoyingly, possibly spilling some of your coffee. You try moving the table slightly on the uneven pavement, hoping to stumble into a stable configuration for its four feet, but several attempts fail. Eventually you resort to shimming one of the table feet with a piece of folded up paper, or a stack of sweetener packets, and this creates at least a metastable condition. Looking around, you notice that many other tables have similar combat repairs, so that the cafe looks like a furniture trauma ward.
Why don’t these tables have three legs instead of four? With three legs, they wouldn’t rock on uneven surfaces because any three points define a plane. You wouldn’t need those adjustable table feet that no one ever bothers to adjust because it’s so awkward to lean down and twist them. While each leg would have to be slightly bigger, you’d have fewer assembly or machining steps to perform. Is a 60 degree angle that hard to produce in this day and age?
Which is quite amazing, I must say. Always thought the English colony would have English at the top, by far.
Check the US Census press release where this was reported for definitions and more context.
A map of relations among scientific paradigms, this is a masterpiece of information design. Both1 data, algorithms, and design (particularly typography) are awe-inspiring. Read up on them on Seed magazine, which has an article on it and hosts the 3.5MB graph, and on Information Aesthetics, where you can buy (or soon will, they’re experiencing some technical difficulties) a gorgeous print for 10 bucks (shipping and handling included!).
A: There are great, quirky restaurants a plenty in Guadalajara!
B: Fex?
A: Nippondo, La Zanahoria, Los Burritos de Moyagua, Las Corajes, La Fuente, Hotel Victoria, Santuario,...!
The classic example of the Web 2.0 era is the “mash-up”— fex, connecting a rental-housing Web site with Google Maps to create a new, more useful service that automatically shows the location of each rental listing.
With markets becoming saturated and mobile operators’ revenue-growth slowing—there are already 112 mobile devices for every 100 Austrians, fex—providing information about travel patterns could be a lucrative opportunity for telecoms firms.
The day has been, I grieve to say in many places it is not yet past, in which the greater part of the species, under the denomination of slaves, have been treated by the law exactly upon the same footing as, in England fex, the inferior races of animals are still.
Think of the arms races that go on between one or two animals living the same environment. Fex the race between the Amazonian manatee and a particular type of reed that it eats. The more of the reed the manatee eats, the more the reed develops silica in its cells to attack the teeth of the manatee and the more silica in the reed, the more manatee’s teeth get bigger and stronger.
Never had read anything by Larry WallWP before. I’m dazzled, through and through. Don’t walk, run out to read his Perl, the first postmodern computer language speech. It’s an important rambling, with a scope far beyond that of programming.
While I was digesting this, and thinking about how it applied to computer science, [My daughter] went on, “Well, it’s like, you know, we have this saying at school, when somebody gets uptight about something, we say: ’Tsall good. If someone is depressed, we say: ‘Tsall good.’’’
“But you don’t actually think everything is good, do you?”
“No, of course not.”
“Are you saying that everything has good elements in it?”
”No, Dad, I think when we say that, we’re saying that, overall, things are good. Like, look at the big picture, don’t just focus in on the two or three bad things that are happening to you right now.”
I report this conversation to you not just because I think my kids are cute and smart, but also because I think it’s important that we know where our culture is going, and because it’s our kids that will shape our culture in the future. I don’t think I could have defined postmodernism better than Heidi. Look at the big picture. Don’t focus in on two or three things to the exclusion of other things. Keep everything in context. Don’t go out of your way to justify stuff that’s obviously cool. Don’t ridicule ideas merely because they’re not the latest and greatest. Pick your own fashions. Don’t let someone else tell you what you should like. ’Tsall good.
That’s all well and good, but I ask you, if it’s all good, why, in every other breath, does my daughter say “That sucks.”?
My first (self-)published joke. They should lock me.
”No, compadre,” le dice mi abuelo a mi papa, “el mundo esta muy cambiado. Los buenos negocios son cada vez mas dificiles de encontrar. Antes salia uno a la calle y luego luego se encontraba uno diez tarugos. Ahora lo encuentran a uno.”
”No, compadreWP,” says my grandfather to my dad, “the world has changed too much. Good businesses are harder and harder to find. Before, one could go out to the street and find ten dupes at once. Now it us they find.”
...and yet you’ve gotta grant it to this stop-motion action-figure video: it’s pure comic genius. (2.3 million views!; 1,814 comments; 15,417 favorites; 6,648 ratings)
The diptych is a fascinating art form—the boundary object between comic and picture.
This really won’t save you any work at all but it’s sure to baffle casual onlookers.
At heart is just the usual distributiveWP algorithm we all use when multiplying arabicsWP, rearranged and visually rewritten using the immediate correspondence of crisscrosses to multiplication:  .
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