December 2008
14 posts
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Fake Holocaust Memoir →
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All The Gold In The World: A 25 Meter Cube →
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Technology Improves Wine Quality →
“When aged in the traditional manner red wines need to be left to mature for at least 6 months before they become remotely palatable, with the best reds aged for over 20 years before they’re considered ready.
Considering Zeng’s technology manages to bring the best out of a wine after just 3 minutes of exposure to an electric field the implications for the wine industry are tremendous. For...
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“For the dialectic shows latent in common sense the dangerous implication that...”
– Herbet Marcuse, Reason and Revolution
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Digital Photo-Realism →
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Ernest Vincent Wright's Gadsby Online →
Ernest Vincent Wright’s Gadsby, a lipogrammatic novel written without the letter ‘E’ has been placed online. From 1939, it predates Perec’s La Disparition by quite a bit.
As the vowel E is used more than five times oftener than any other letter, this story was written, not through any attempt to attain literary merit, but due to a somewhat balky nature, caused by hearing it...
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“Criminals’ slang is cast in the image of their world: a mockery of the...”
– Alice Becker-Ho, Les Princes Du Jargon. Translated by John McHale.
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Gypsy Words
Some words and phrases whose origin lies in the slang of gypsies:
bash (as in: to party) bastard, bender (as in: drinking), bilge, bistro, bitch, blech, bollocks, bull-dyke, busk, can (as in: food tin), carney, chicanery, chore, dad, dig (as in: dig that), dodgy, flam (as in: flim-flam), flashy, flasher, flummox, fudge (as in: to spin stories), gaffe, gawk, goof, grub, lurk, lush (as in: a heavy...
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Genetically Programming the Mona Lisa →
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Bees, Dancing, Mathematics →
One day Shipman was busy projecting the six-dimensional residents of the flag manifold onto two dimensions. The particular technique she was using involved first making a two-dimensional outline of the six dimensions of the flag manifold. This is not as strange as it may sound. When you draw a circle, you are in effect making a two-dimensional outline of a three-dimensional sphere. As it turns...
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