Oh, that's a shame. One of the last of the old school. But he was 91, and at least he lived long enough to see:
Uh, content warning, but that should be obvious from the title.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
08:05 AM
| No Comments
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 39 words, total size 1 kb.
Monday, April 02
Um...
This is either the most elaborate April Fool's joke I've seen in years, or the dumbest thing I've seen in... Sadly, just the past week. There's a lot of dumb in the world.
1
Mr. Pixy, The 'italics' button doesn't seem to work over at AoS. At least it doesn't work if you highlight the text anc click 'I' (test here. This should be italics.) It looks like it works, but when you click 'post', it reverts to normal text.
I'm doing this one by hand. italics
Posted by: Kevin at Monday, April 02 2012 10:02 AM (3o64G)
2
Weird.Both ways work on your site, but not AoS?Maybe I'm wrong and everything works fine... but I don't think so. Anyway, just a head's up.
Grats on solving spam. I'm still jazzed about that.
Posted by: Kevin at Monday, April 02 2012 10:05 AM (3o64G)
3
I did another test, and italics are definitely dead in the water over there. I typed:
<pre> 119Another test... apologies. I cant get <i>italics</i> working
unless I type the html myself. <em>emphasis</em>
</pre>
and that's exactly what it looked like in the comment section, tags and all.
Posted by: Kevin at Monday, April 02 2012 10:11 AM (3o64G)
4
Ok, I DIDN'T type the <pre> tags ion the original... You get what I was doing, right? Anyway, apologies for spamming you. And thanks in advance for fixing it over at AoS.
Posted by: Kevin at Monday, April 02 2012 10:14 AM (3o64G)
5
Yeah, the pre was inserted by your cut and paste.
I'll have the editor fixed up this week. Been submerged with work at my day job recently, but it should be slightly easier for the next couple of weeks before I get flooded again.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, April 02 2012 05:26 PM (p0Hxa)
6
And yeah, I'm impressed with how well the spam filter has been working recently. The changes I made weren't that extensive, but seem to have done the trick. If it buys me the time to train up the new Bayesian/Markovian superfilter, I'm happy.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, April 02 2012 05:28 PM (p0Hxa)
Okay, they're "young adult" novels, but that doesn't actually require the writing to be eye-gougingly awful. I'll stick with Terry Pratchett or Garth Nix, thanks all the same.
Amazon gets told what highlighting I do? The hell you say.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Sunday, March 18 2012 09:59 AM (+rSRq)
2
Apparently yes. You can turn it off, but it sounds like its on by default.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 18 2012 01:39 PM (PiXy!)
3
I just looked around and I can't find anything like that. But that doesn't prove anything. It's obviously the kind of thing they don't want me to find easily.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Sunday, March 18 2012 01:51 PM (+rSRq)
4
From Slashdot, Home -> Settings -> Popular Highlights -> Turn Off.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 18 2012 02:52 PM (PiXy!)
5
On my Kindle Fire, there isn't any "Popular Highlights" choice in "Settings". Probably that was in the earlier versions of the Kindle.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Sunday, March 18 2012 11:09 PM (+rSRq)
6
Yeah, on the Fire it's likely completely different.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, March 19 2012 01:18 AM (PiXy!)
7
I actually loved reading Garth Nix back when I was in sixth grade. Those were the days.
Posted by: Chelsea Rose at Friday, March 30 2012 06:21 AM (fTmKZ)
8
His Old Kingdom series (Sabriel / Lirael / Abhorsen) is particularly good.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, March 30 2012 11:19 AM (PiXy!)
Does anyone remember the year - probably in the late nineties, maybe 2000 or so - when suddenly every woman in the world took to wearing orange and black and it looked like the planet had been invaded by giant anthropoid bees?
There is actually a reason I ask. Well, two reasons, one being that I can't remember.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
07:01 PM
| No Comments
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 62 words, total size 1 kb.
Sunday, March 04
You Will Believe A Sheep Can Fly
Downstream Benefits, an ABC* report on the upside of the flooding here in Eastern Oz. With flying sheep.
Residents of four towns have been evacuated as floodwaters covering an area the size of France sweep across NSW.
We don't do things by halves.
Oh yes: Warragamba Dam, Sydney's main reservoir (about two trillion litres), is expected to overflow tonight, into the already swollen Nepean River. Sydney is still on water restrictions.
As Douglas Adams wrote of a rather different president:
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
12:15 AM
| No Comments
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 68 words, total size 1 kb.
The science wars were a series of intellectual exchanges, between
scientific realists and postmodernist critics, about the nature of
scientific theory which took place principally in the United States in
the 1990s. The postmodernists questioned scientific objectivity, and
undertook a wide-ranging critique of the scientific method and of
scientific knowledge, across the gamut of the disciplines of cultural
studies, cultural anthropology, feminist studies, comparative
literature, media studies, and science and technology studies. The
scientific realists disintegrated them with a laser.
1
Have you ever tried to disintegrate something with a laser? Especially one from the '90s? It's not very efficient! Real scientists would use some kind of pressurized solvent spray.
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Thursday, January 26 2012 11:57 AM (pWQz4)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, January 26 2012 01:17 PM (PiXy!)
3
I punched holes in coins with a laser. The sound is similar to a gunshot. As the metal vapor expands into the air, it creates a similar shockwave. It's funny that we never hear such a sound effect in anime where lasers strike anything.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Thursday, January 26 2012 04:49 PM (G2mwb)
4
Coincidentially, my mum worked on battle lasers at some point. We had a collection of melted bricks used as a backstop in the lab. They turned into glass.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Thursday, January 26 2012 04:51 PM (G2mwb)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Friday, January 27 2012 03:38 AM (+rSRq)
6
Yes. The coin was during my exploration tour of various universities.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Friday, January 27 2012 05:26 AM (G2mwb)
7
I had a buddy working in the high energy lab at Urbana-Champaign. Went to visit, ended up blowing up some business cards in the lab. Laser wasn't really amazingly powerful, but it really was interesting to see the damage - it really does explode from the inside. (Paper, so it's the water trapped within exploding into steam...)
The laser we were working with was a pulse model with a very rapid pulse, so the sound was more like a string of firecrackers.
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Friday, January 27 2012 08:25 PM (GJQTS)
