MemeMachineGo!
Wouldn't you like to be a vector, too?
- Last build:
- Fri, 29 Feb 2008 07:50:04 -0800
- Language:
- en
- Feed URL:
- http://www.mememachinego.com/index.xml
RSS FEED IDEMS: MemeMachineGo!
- Online references
Bartleby offers a large number of references online, many of them public domain and available elsewhere, like Project Gutenberg, many of them not.
Some highlights are:
- The American Heritage Dictionary,
- The American Heritage Book of English Usage
- Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations
- Gray’s Anatomy
- The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy
- The Encyclopedia of World History
- Roget’s Thesaurus
- The Harvard Classics
- Bulfinch’s Mythology
There are tons more.
Elsewhere you can find the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica. And For convenient downloading (and sharing), Project Gutenberg offers large numbers of books packaged as CDs and DVDs. Get them with BitTorrent to ease their server load.
Fri, 29 Feb 2008 07:50:04 -0800 - Every lecture will have a lie
This professor had an interesting technique to keep his students’ attention.
“Now I know some of you have already heard of me, but for the benefit of those who are unfamiliar, let me explain how I teach. Between today until the class right before finals, it is my intention to work into each of my lectures … one lie. Your job, as students, among other things, is to try and catch me in the Lie of the Day.” And thus began our ten-week course.
This was an insidiously brilliant technique to focus our attention - by offering an open invitation for students to challenge his statements, he transmitted lessons that lasted far beyond the immediate subject matter and taught us to constantly checksum new statements and claims with what we already accept as fact. Early in the quarter, the Lie of the Day was usually obvious - immediately triggering a forest of raised hands to challenge the falsehood. Dr. K would smile, draw a line through that section of the board, and utter his trademark phrase “Very good! In fact, the opposite is true. Moving on … “
Read the rest. It gets better.
Thu, 28 Feb 2008 20:51:48 -0800 - Reading is fundamental
A man is claiming he taught high school for 17 years while illiterate.
For 17 years Corcoran taught high school for the Oceanside School District. Relying on teacher’s assistants for help and oral lesson plans, he said he did a great job at teaching his students.
“What I did was I created an oral and visual environment. There wasn’t the written word in there. I always had two or three teacher’s assistants in each class to do board work or read the bulletin,” said Corcoran.
I find this story hard to swallow, though it would also be an odd thing to lie about. (Then again, he’s made his current career out of being the formerly illiterate teacher who promotes literacy.)
Wed, 27 Feb 2008 07:11:49 -0800 - Potpourri
The Unburdened Mind Ever think one of your co-workers was a psychopath? Odds aren’t bad — about 1% of everyone is.
Wonderland: re-creating children’s drawings as photos.
Embodied cognition — humans don’t think by brain alone.
An sf story I read a while back included people being teleported by representing their bodies as data, transmitting the data, and creating a physical body based on it at the destination. Conventionally, the data was compressed by using templates for various body parts, instead of representing every nuance of the real parts. In the story, one such transmission was taking a long time due to the transportees having insisted on foregoing compression. “There’s something awfully precious about making sure you have your very own small intestine,” the narrator said.
It’s a good line, but I’m not sure that it’s a precious concern after all.
Tue, 26 Feb 2008 07:52:35 -0800 - Geekiest night ever?
I attended an engineering school. I’ve participated in programming contests. I’ve attended science fiction conventions, comic book conventions, gaming conventions, a furry convention, programming language user group meetings, Linux expos, technical conferences. I know geeky. I’ve worked with geeky. Geeky is a friend of mine.
And Friday night’s Jonathan Coulton concert may have been the geekiest event I’ve ever attended.
The opening act was Paul and Storm, half of what used to be Da Vinci’s Notebook. I saw Da Vinci’s Notebook in Berkeley a while back, in their last tour before breaking up. Between songs, Paul said “We have a theory about our demographic. Raise your hand if you’ve ever owned a d20.” At least half the hands in the audience went up. “Now keep your hand up if you still have it,” he said. Most of those hands stayed up. And one audience member threw a d20 onto the stage. Yes, he’d had it on him.
So that tells you something about the geekiness level of the opening act. While I was disappointed when I heard Da Vinci’s Notebook had broken up when I only got to see them once, Paul and Storm’s act has consoled me — they’re funny as hell and I’d pay money to see them headline anytime.
Then came Jonathan Coulton. I’d heard references to him in the blogosphere, but was first really aware of him when I followed a link to the Code Monkey remix contest. and listened to Code Monkey.
Code Monkey get up get coffee
Code Monkey go to job
Code Monkey have boring meeting with boring manager Rob
Rob say Code Monkey very diligent
But his output stink
His code not functional or elegant
What do Code Monkey think
Code Monkey think maybe manager wanna write goddamn login page himself
Code Monkey not say it out loud
Code Monkey not crazy just proudI was singing it so much that Pocahontas adapted it to
Code Monkey drive his wife crazy
Singing Code Monkey songSo he sang his set about code monkeys, zombies, mad scientists, Mandelbrot sets (you’re one badass fucking fractal.) He took out a Zendrum to play Mr. Fancy Pants, explaining that he needed to get one for the song “and because it’s frikkin’ awesome!”, obviously beside himself over how cool a toy it is. He played his theme song to Portal, one of the huge video games of 2007, and then later reprised it by bringing up prominent bloggers to play the Rock Band version.
And he owned the audience, who had variously dressed as zombies, brought homemade monkey-pony hybrid stuffed animals to wave during Skullcrusher Mountain, sang along. It was like it was the most important holiday of the year.
Come to think of it, I don’t think that’s far off.
Mon, 25 Feb 2008 05:46:33 -0800 - Free Tor e-books
Tor Books has a current promotion: sign up on a mailing list, and each week, you’re mailed links to download free e-book novels of theirs. Coming up next is 2006 Hugo Winner Spin by Robert Charles Wilson, a fine novel.
Then again, I’ve never managed to read a novel-length e-book, despite having taken a couple of stabs at 2007 Hugo nominee Blindsight. I look forward to the day e-paper readers get cheap.
Mon, 25 Feb 2008 05:37:45 -0800 - Formal address
The Prince of Seborga is addressed as Sua Tremendità — Your Tremendousness.
(Via The Volokh Conspiracy)
Tue, 29 Jan 2008 07:41:21 -0800 - American aborigines make good workers
Warren Buffett describes why he had become so bearish on the dollar that in 2002, for the first time ever, he invested in foreign currencies.
To understand why, take a wildly fanciful trip with me to two isolated, side-by-side islands of equal size, Squanderville and Thriftville. Land is the only capital asset on these islands, and their communities are primitive, needing only food and producing only food. Working eight hours a day, in fact, each inhabitant can produce enough food to sustain himself or herself. And for a long time that’s how things go along. On each island everybody works the prescribed eight hours a day, which means that each society is self-sufficient.
Eventually, though, the industrious citizens of Thriftville decide to do some serious saving and investing, and they start to work 16 hours a day. In this mode they continue to live off the food they produce in eight hours of work but begin exporting an equal amount to their one and only trading outlet, Squanderville.
The citizens of Squanderville are ecstatic about this turn of events, since they can now live their lives free from toil but eat as well as ever. Oh, yes, there’s a quid pro quo — but to the Squanders, it seems harmless: All that the Thrifts want in exchange for their food is Squanderbonds (which are denominated, naturally, in Squanderbucks).
Over time Thriftville accumulates an enormous amount of these bonds, which at their core represent claim checks on the future output of Squanderville. A few pundits in Squanderville smell trouble coming. They foresee that for the Squanders both to eat and to pay off — or simply service — the debt they’re piling up will eventually require them to work more than eight hours a day. But the residents of Squanderville are in no mood to listen to such doomsaying.
Meanwhile, the citizens of Thriftville begin to get nervous. Just how good, they ask, are the IOUs of a shiftless island? So the Thrifts change strategy: Though they continue to hold some bonds, they sell most of them to Squanderville residents for Squanderbucks and use the proceeds to buy Squanderville land. And eventually the Thrifts own all of Squanderville.
At that point, the Squanders are forced to deal with an ugly equation: They must now not only return to working eight hours a day in order to eat — they have nothing left to trade — but must also work additional hours to service their debt and pay Thriftville rent on the land so imprudently sold. In effect, Squanderville has been colonized by purchase rather than conquest.
Weak Dollar Fuels China’s Buying Spree Of U.S. Firms.
In 2007, acquisitions in the United States by foreign ventures hit $407 billion, up 93 percent from the previous year, according to Thomson Financial. The top countries investing were Canada, Britain and Germany; the Middle East and Asia — especially China — are quickly catching up.
The biggest deals in recent months have involved Wall Street firms hit by losses from exposure to mortgage-related investment vehicles. […]
“The U.S. dollar is getting weaker and weaker, and many medium to small U.S. companies are in economic crisis. So they need investments from China. It is very good timing,” said Yu Dan, a representative for the state of Pennsylvania in China.
Yu, who is one of about 30 people in China who represent American cities and states, said at least six Chinese companies are in the process of closing deals in Pennsylvania. One will make some purchases in the food industry. Another will invest in the wood industry, because as Yu put it, “Pennsylvania has very good hardwood resources, and the aboriginal people in the north Pennsylvania woods are good workers.”
Aboriginal people? The Amish, Yu clarified.
Mon, 28 Jan 2008 07:31:20 -0800 - Jefferson calls it
Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to James Madison, 1796:
I view [a proposition respecting post roads] as a source of boundless patronage to the executive, jobbing to members of Congress and their friends, and a bottomless abyss of public money. You will begin by only appropriating the surplus of the post office revenues; but the other revenues will soon be called into their aid, and it will be a source of eternal scramble among the members, who can get the most money wasted in their State; and they will always get most who are meanest.
Fri, 25 Jan 2008 07:44:56 -0800 - Love story
This is simultaneously the most creepy and heartwarming thing you’ll read all day.
(Via The Pawn Shops of Isher)
Thu, 24 Jan 2008 07:24:07 -0800 - Thousand Wordsworths
Bibliodyssey provides beautiful pages scanned from various odd books.
Strange Maps does the same for maps.
This Flickr photoset has scans of dozens of sf pulp paperbacks.
Fri, 18 Jan 2008 06:45:37 -0800 - Everything Burns
I can’t believe I’d never heard of this.
In the space of about 27 years, everything turned upside down. Out of all of the major bronze age cities [in and around the Middle East] we know of, all but two were attacked and burned viciously to the ground by unknown invaders or rebels. The first city burned around 1225 BCE. The last sighting of the city burners was when they were defeated at great cost by Ramses II in the Second Battle of the Sea Peoples in 1198 BCE.
And we don’t know who did it.
Wikipedia’s article on the Bronze Age Collapse.
(Via The Early Days of a Better Nation)
Wed, 16 Jan 2008 07:40:02 -0800 - Of Maids and Minds
Here’s a provocative story. 67% hotel maids reported that they didn’t exercise, over a third of that 67% saying they didn’t get any exercise at all, despite having an obviously physical job. A researcher educated one group of maids in just how many calories their jobs burned, and tracked them and a control group of maids whom they didn’t tell anything.
One month later, Langer and her team returned to take physical measurements of the women and were surprised by what they found. In the group that had been educated, there was a decrease in their systolic blood pressure, weight, and waist-to-hip ratio — and a 10 percent drop in blood pressure.
One possible explanation is that the process of learning about the amount of exercise they were already getting somehow changed the maids’ behavior. But Langer says that her team surveyed both the women and their managers and found no indication that the maids had altered their routines in any way. She believes that the change can be explained only by the change in the women’s mindset.
The article makes no mention of the researchers recording even self-reporting on the groups’ food consumption. I’m inclined to suspect that the one group may have changed their habits, some of them possibly without thinking about it.
It remains an interesting suggestion of the mind’s power over the body, though.
Fri, 11 Jan 2008 07:33:26 -0800 - Books recommendations, for and against
A MetaFilter user has collected all of the Ask MetaFilter book recommendation threads on the MetaFilter wiki.
One thread I’ve meant to post for a while is what single book is the best introduction to your field? nominated as the most expensive thread in the history of Ask Metafilter.
For some counter-recommendations, here’s a Making Light thread on books citing which will make you look like an idiot to people knowledgeable in the relevant field.
Thu, 10 Jan 2008 07:59:22 -0800 - Of fonts, and dogs, and race
Fraktur is a Gothic typeface that was popular in Germany in the early 20th century. Then Martin Bormann issued a decree condemning it as Jewish.
It is false to regard or describe the so-called Gothic typeface as a German typeface. In reality the so-called Gothic typeface consists of Schwabacher-Jewish letters. Just as they later came to own the newspapers, the Jews living in Germany also owned the printing presses when the printing of books was introduced and thus came about the strong influx into Germany of Schwabacher-Jewish letters.
The German Shepherd was the product of Captain von Stephanitz’s efforts to breed a working shepherd dog. He defined the breed standard for German Shepherds; the original dog recognized as a German Shepherd was dark-coated, but his grandsire was a white dog, and he sired both white dogs and dark-coated dogs that bore the recessive white coat gene. But then the Nazis decided that white German Shepherds were racially inferior.
The Nazis, including Hitler, saw the white coat as an undesirable trait, and further assumed that the white coated dogs’ genes paled the darker coated dogs’ colors. With little knowledge of science, they blamed the whites for many diseases as well. Germany soon barred white German Shepherds from the conformation ring and the breeding pool.
I imagine one could dedicate a daily blog to wacky Nazi beliefs and have material for years.
Wed, 09 Jan 2008 07:16:42 -0800
