GOODNIGHT.Today, 011110
For some reason I expected this to be binary. If it were a base two numeral, its value would be thirty.
Reblog of algebraic.
Cosmo Catalano
This is childish nonsense. Healthy dose of salt req'd. Click for Serious Cosmo.
An Abominable Etymology
Was listening to “My Word!” on the Beeb a few moments ago. I suppose I shouldn’t be upset because the show has been in reruns since 1990, but the host just insisted on the correctness of a very innaccurate etymology:
The root of “abominable” is frequently taken as a combination of the Latin “ab” (“away from”) and “homo” (“man”—more accurately “person” or “human”.) Many Early Modern English writers, Shakespeare included, even spelled it “abhominable”, futher suggesting the relationship.
But if Shakespeare had studied his Latin a touch more carefully, he’d have come across the Latin word “abominabilis”, the adjectival form of “abominari”, “to detest”. The “h” appears to have been erroneously inserted into many Middle English texts, including Wyclif’s Bible. Luke 16:15 contains the word “abhomynacioun”—the Latin Vulgate from which it was translated reads “abominatio”.
The Latin meaning actually stems from “ab” and “omen” (meaning, unsurprisingly, “omen”). The Romans recoiled from “abominable” things not because they were so distant from humanity, but because humanity had judged them as ill-omened—something which many modern people would consider an abomination in itself.
Lessons I Need to Learn
- If it crashes Disk Utility more than once, throw it out.
- If the optical drive won’t recognize a CD, throw it out.
- There’s a reason why it’s so cheap.
- Running OS 9 is neither cool nor functional.
- No, dual booting doesn’t make it ok.
- You have better things to do than set up an emulator.
- No one cares if it runs Linux.
- No, not even if it dual boots.
via Swiss-Miss:
Almost as good as the shirt with the glucose molecule that says “Sweet”. Almost.
Reblog of ideas are awesome
“
Having seen the destruction of the Empire’s two most powerful weapons, the Imperial Fleet lost the stomach to fight and fled. This action is most curious: despite the loss of Executor, the numerical and qualitative advantages of the Star Destroyers should have permitted the Imperial fleet to maintain tactical superiority over their Rebel foes
— Wookiepedia. I have been saying this for years.
Dear internet “social media experts”:
If you’re trying to be interesting to anyone beyond… yourself, you have to consider whether anyone else in the world will benefit from spending a tiny slice of their time learning where you’re having coffee or holding a meeting.
Don’t you mean “his or her”, pronoun Nazi? (boldface is my own). Or do you consider “anyone” to be plural?
Reblog of Marco.org
Reblog of Life Aquatic
Why is it that Internet users have no idea how to use the Internet?
Maybe you’ve seen that viral that’s going around, the one that has an image of some Mr. Men characters, relabeled as “The Good Friend”, “The Slow One”, etc. The idea is that you post the picture on Facebook or in a forum, and tag them as people you know.
Or rather, maybe you’ve seen that blurry, pockmarked hunk of slop that passes for an image of the Mr. Men characters.
JPEG has done some wonderful things for the Internet, but pretty isn’t one of them. Sure, it creates detailed photos at drastically reduced filesizes, but it also creates swirly, blocky noise when it compresses files, especially when you use a crummy piece of software, like say, MS Paint.
The worst part is when people start to edit these JPEGs; they get recompressed every time the file is saved. You kids probably don’t remember trying to copy an audio cassette, but the effect is called “generation decay”; basically, tiny distortions create their own new distortions, and pretty soon, your initial work is unrecognizable.
Sites like Facebook that resize and recompress your uploads only make it worse. And when a JPEG, edited in MS Paint and re-compressed to a JPEG, gets uploaded to Facebook, and then reuploaded a dozen times by 4,800 of your closest friends— lordy, is it awful.
The PNG file format was created specifically to address these issues, as well as to resolve some copyright conflict over GIF (which, coincidentally, also sucks). It’s sharp and clean, and creates files with no blocky noise, blurry lines or washed out colors. Best of all, for simple drawings like this, the file size is smaller than JPG.
So someone, anyone: if you can find me the source of this image, I will get the Mr. Man book from Amazon, scan it as high-res TIFF, save it for web as a PNG-24 in Photoshop and post the resulting, crystal clear, 20k image on my website. And then you can tell your friends to come back here and download it before they post their version of the viral.
And the rest of you: stop friggin’ re-uploading the blurry-ass JPGs you find on the Internet. Seriously. Site developers need to start refusing photo submissions that aren’t lossless.
Spotted in Central Square this morning.
Badass in a nerdy sort of way. I put in a few minutes’ Googling but couldn’t find it, so I’m hoping it’s homemade. The attention to detail is stunning; note the crown at the top of the tree.
(1/2)
next »
Hi, I'm Cosmo. That's my real name. I'm good at lots of stuff. I make of awesome things in my spare time. I'm on twitter. I live in Boston Proper. I ride my bike.
The opinions expressed on this page are solely those of the author and are in no way representative of his friends, family, patrons, clients, employers, business associates, teammates, classmates, fellow citizens, drinking buddies, and/or neighbors.
