- You know, if you’re going to get a tramp stamp lower-back tatoo…
- The other day, I posed a question on Twitter and Facebook: grammatically, should it be the Beatles or The Beatles? I wasn’t interested so much in this particular example, but what people thought about the capitalization of the lead-in article. My question brought in a flurry of responses, some very well thought out, most in favor of capitalizing the “The,” only one (not in favor) citing an actual style guide, but I don’t think we reached anything like a consensus. It’s one of those things that boils down, for the most part, to personal aesthetics. I almost always write the Beatles, lower-case t, just as I almost always don’t italicize the “the” before “the New York Times.” You can find lots of people (and style guides) that dictate one or the other, but it pretty much comes down to personal preference. This particular example wasn’t work-related, so I didn’t have the APA style guide to fall back on. Despite what I usually do, this time I went with the capital T.
I bring all of this up simply because I was amused to see my initial question listed among Wikipedia’s lamest edit wars. You have to know which battles are worth picking. [via]
- No E-Books Allowed in This Establishment. Just lame.
- On the one hand, I’m intrigued by the idea of an Outer Limits movie. On the other hand, maybe a financially troubled studio and a pair of Saw writers aren’t the best people to see it through.
I do find it curious that none of the reports I’ve seen mention the more recent ’90s adaptation of the show — which, for better or worse, ran 5 years longer than the original.
- And finally, Jacob Weisberg on Sarah Palin:
The non-Sarah Dittoheads among us have to decide whether to regard this babble—favoring creation science, aerial wolf-shooting, and freedom of the press, so long as the press is “accurate”—as scary or funny. During the 2008 campaign, when there was a real chance that Palin could become the automatic successor to an impulsive, elderly cancer survivor, I found it more scary than funny. After McCain lost, and after Palin terminated her governorship in the effusion of furious gibberish known as her resignation speech, I have found it mostly funny. To be alarmed by Palin today presumes a Republican Party suicidal enough to want her to do more than run its weekend paintball games.
Me, I’m still a little scared. In today’s politics of the right, crazy is quickly becoming the new sane, and crazy seems to love it some Sarah Palin, you betcha. [via]
various
Tuesday various
- Want to live in the Chicago Museum for a month? Then you have to apply by tomorrow. [via]
- Hey now! If any hack is going to come in and make s–t up, it’s going to be James Cameron himself, dagnabbit!
- Wondering what makes humans special and unique? One hint: it may be NSWF. [via]
- A Tiny Apartment Transforms into 24 Rooms. And he didn’t even have to shout, “Autobots, roll out!” or anything.
- And finally, Dr. Seuss was never like this when I was growing up! [via]
Monday various
- Maslow’s Hierarchy of Robot Needs. [via]
You know, I’m pretty sure I’d never heard of Maslow’s hierarchy before just a couple of weeks ago, and since then I’ve seen multiple parodies of it. Weird how that works. [via]
- Good news for Quantum Leap fans: there will be a new movie. The bad news: it probably won’t be about Dr. Sam Beckett.
- Man, Spock’s back must have been killing him at the end of the day!
- Google says there are 129,864,880 books in the world. If I’m lucky, I read about 50 a year. You do the math. Luckily, I intend to live to be several millions years old. [via]
Of course, Google may just have made that number up, so who knows how much I’ll have to Methuselah-it-up before I get through just what’s already been published. (At least I know I can skip that Justin Bieber book, so that’s a load off my mind.) [via]
- And finally, Guy Walks Across America [via]:
Thursday various
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Wednesday various
- Following up on the “there is no Triceratops, only Zuul” story I posted yesterday, here’s Caitlin R. Kiernan’s take on the whole thing:
People are used to looking at species as static entities. But biologists work with species (and all other taxonomic units— the case of Triceratops is a genus-level problem) as hypotheses. And any given hypothesis may be discarded by future discoveries. That is, the name Triceratops is a hypothesis seeking to explain a collection of seemingly related fossils of a Late Cretaceous horned dinosaur. The hypothesis says that all specimens of Triceratops are more closely related to one another than they are they are to any other genus of chasmosaurine dinosaur. But, like all hypotheses, it can be falsified in light of future discoveries. In this case, the discovery of new fossils giving us a more complete picture of Triceratops as a living population of animals, and allowing us to realize that the morph we used to call “Torosaurus” is actually only the very mature form of Triceratops. As an hypothesis, “Torosaurus” appears to have been falsified. Now, it’s possible that Scannella and Horner are wrong, and that future discoveries and/or research of old discoveries will show that Triceratops and “Torosaurus” really are two taxa (though I’ve read the paper, and this seems unlikely). All hypotheses are provisional. Nothing is ever certain. Never. The best argument may be in error. That’s how science works, even if the press seems unable to grasp this.
- Following up on the Gaiman/McFarlane legal battles I also posted about yesterday, Erik Larsen’s defense of McFarlane needs some work [via]:
It’s one thing to start a flame-war, or be a loudmouth, or try to argue that, say, a court ruling was unfair. That, after all, is just another Tuesday on Twitter. It’s a very different thing to blame a judicial ruling you disagree with on sexist caricatures of women as irrational, swooning groupies — especially if you’re starting to make a habit of it.
- FBI wants its seal removed from Wikipedia. Whichever side is right in this, I do like Wikipedia’s official response [via]:
While we appreciate your desire to revise the statute to reflect your expansive vision of it, the fact is that we must work with the actual language of the statute, not the aspirational version of Section 701 that you forwarded to us…
- Gio Clairval on Lightness: Italo Calvino’s hope for the future of literature. There are some really interesting thoughts here:
Steampunk is often—not always, but often—set during the industrial revolution, a time that revolves around the heaviness of steel. A weighty century, indeed. Too-heavy ships crossed the oceans. Eiffel’s tower represented Man’s victory over iron. The ponderous consciousness of matter—inevitable—dominated until the late eighties. Asimov imagined immense computers. Arthur C. Clarke let enormous steles fall from the sky.
But today, what fascinates us most in Steampunk? Airships pulled upward by light gasses. Impossibly floating cities.
- And finally, for something completely different, a dog mowing the lawn [via]: