Category Archives: humanities

necessary and sufficient conditions

Tibor Machan misreads the Declaration of Independence: It requires “a long train of abuses and usurpations,” which reduce a government to “absolute despotism,” before secession is justified. On the contrary, the sentence containing that phrase states a sufficient condition. The … Continue reading

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the dark side of Sanrio

“Hello Cthulhu“. (Sent to me by Astraea, under the title “NEXT election”)

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yet another way in which I’m like Einstein

“I have never belonged wholeheartedly to a country, a state, nor to a circle of friends, nor even to my own family.” Found in Quotations from Mathematicians

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two colors are better than . . more

Ananova: EU rejects call to change flag. Whew, and yet – Is anyone somehow a bit disappointed?

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I’m a poet and don’t knoet

Charlie Stross describes the FBI Carnivore email-snooper as “an indiscriminate Hoover”. That’s twice this month he’s made a pun such that I can’t tell whether he was aware of it. (The other was “Genetic Algorithm That Ate Calcutta”.)

Posted in language | 3 Comments

missing energy

Got a spam (three or four times now) from a Christian kook. In the middle of the prophecies about nuclear war and the biochip of the beast is a paragraph about Creation, including: THE LATEST RESEARCH IN MOLECULAR PHYSICS HAS … Continue reading

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successful turns of phrase

The phrase “Iron Curtain” was coined by Churchill in a speech in Missouri, if memory serves. Is there a known source for “Cold War”? Update: Dan Kohn did the legwork and got the goods: Cold War This term for a … Continue reading

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