waffle

Screw one thing per post for a while. Remember when we did this? Let’s do that, starting now.

• NEW MATH = indexed – graphics
• ^ (& →) Self-referential.
• “Exceedingly” is constantly misused. “Exceeding” means “being greater than something” or “reaching beyond a boundary”; without the reference point, it’s just a mal-adjusted synonym for “very”, “quite” or “rather”. I realize that you managed to get this into the dictionary, but that doesn’t mean I enjoy watching it rot. When something actually exceeds, what are you going to use?
• While we’re on the subject of maddening tics, the next time I see “it is, however,” or “which is, of course,”, I’m going to hit someone over the head with some sort of anvil, for related reasons. Update: Peter Hosey points out that Strunk was wise to this 91 years ago. I don’t so much hate the form as the unqualified, permeating repetition.
• Pulp Fiction with web browsers. Sadly not in kinetic type, but this way is probably more fitting.
• College Humor makes the case for comments. Is it just me or did College Humor acquire some sort of general acceptability diploma two years back? Five years back, it was the cesspool of the Internet (which wasn’t called the tubes back then). Now, every twentieth video or so is actually funny.
• Two things from TED: Clifford Stoll, who’s hysterical and thought-provoking, and Shai Agassi, who basically makes me believe that the shortcomings of electric cars needn’t actually be as applicable in practice as in theory, and that they’ll scale.
• Another thing about TED: they’ve changed their intro sound. I like it for the first second before the volume goes up. The first intro sound was asinine and bombastic. The second intro sound was less worse and bombastic. The current intro sound is almost good and bombastic. I think the platonic ideal they’re shooting for is burly men doing an angel choir over the THX sound. Blow minds, not eardrums.
• Unrelated: at the time this is posted, it’s the third of four posts on the front page referring to “burly men”. “You’ve got some issues, Stan, I think you need some counseling…“