. . . muttered the ogre

mall.montreal.com, whoever you are

Posted on Saturday, 2005 October 22 by Anton

Why go to the bother of generating referral spam for a page with no content?

Posted in spam | 1 Comment

Brent gets desperate

Posted on Thursday, 2005 October 20 by Anton

how to impress chicks?

Posted in cartoons, mathematics | Leave a comment

layers of language

Posted on Tuesday, 2005 October 18 by Anton

In the chaos that is my mind at this hour —

Brain damage such as stroke can take away the symbolic processing ability known as language. I wonder: does the most obvious kind of sign-language, pointing and miming, go with it? And do Deaf signers so afflicted lose more or less of the naïve sign-language than the hearing do? In one sense these questions have no meaningful answer, because every stroke is different; but there must be interesting correlations.

Does stroke ever take away the ability to process conditional or relative clauses?

Posted in language | 1 Comment

with friends like these

Posted on Saturday, 2005 October 15 by Anton

Argh. I just tried to back up my home ~~directory~~ folder to a DVD. When the burn was nearing completion, it aborted because Finder “cannot find data fork of file <unable to locate file path>”. Got that? Four gigabytes of files can’t be archived because one of them — which may not really exist, for all I can tell — is corrupt. And why didn’t this error message show up during the “Preparing data” phase, to save me from wasting a blank?

Later: It occurred to me that this could have happened because a temporary file was deleted between the preparation and the burn. So I closed all applications and tried again; no luck. Then I noticed on the packaging that these Memorex 8X blanks apparently cannot be burned properly by my 2X drive. (sigh)

Posted in neep-neep | Leave a comment