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A good friend was telling me about mistakes his students had made in essays. My favourite was "In America today, rape is on the incline."
Quentin Stafford-Fraser's blog
One should always have something sensational to read on the net...
A good friend was telling me about mistakes his students had made in essays. My favourite was "In America today, rape is on the incline."
A very cute Flash animation. Pointless, of course, as is so much Flash stuff, but cute none the less. [Scripting News]
Scott Kirsner: IM is here. RU prepared?. See also John's Observer column.
Anyone with an academic background who also knows Tolkien will appreciate Dave Pritchard's The Lord of the Rings: an allegory of the PhD?.
John Naughton forwarded this to me originally, but I found it, with lots of other rather good stuff, on Danny Yee's Humour Collection. Tolkien enthusiasts who are also familiar with Microsoft's operating systems might enjoy One OS to rule them all.Have you ever noticed how often characters in films say things twice? It's generally used to end a scene, along the lines of:
Frodo: I'm glad you're back, Gandalf! Gandalf: So am I, Frodo Baggins.It's the modern equivalent of Shakespeare's rhyming couplets, and it happens all the time. No matter how realistic the movie dialogue in general, people still repeat themselves like this. Try it in real life to make yourself sound more like a movie star.
Actually, of course, you'll just sound silly. It only works at the end of a scene before the lights go out, so it's a little trick, perhaps, best saved for your deathbed, to make your last words stick in people's minds.
Just make sure you don't misjudge the length of that thoughtful pause.
Splendid! Nottingham City Council has started 'fining' its staff for incorrect use of the apostrophe. A marvellous idea.
If only they would do the same thing in schools...
One of the things I love about the Mac is the way that applications are usually self-contained on your disk. They don't dump miscellaneous files into system folders, for example, like Windows apps do, thus requiring an uninstall procedure. For most Mac apps, the uninstall procedure is 'drag to the Trash'. Similarly, backing up and restoring your programs is easy.
Of course, this tidiness also makes this sort of thing easy!
From "Import This: the Tenth International Python Conference":
"Tim [Berners-Lee] became a Python enthusiast when he tried to learn Python on a plane trip. He had already downloaded Python and its documentation on his laptop, and between takeoff and landing he was able to install Python and learn enough to do something with it, "all on one battery." "
(Python is a programming language. Just in case anyone thinks this is an unhealthy obsession with reptiles.)
Andrew Sullivan's very interesting Blogger Manifesto:
"...the nascent Napster of the journalism industry"I'm a bit behind the times, posting a link to this. He wrote it about four days ago. Which illustrates something or other about the world we live in.