Photo reblogged from Y'all want some sweet tea? with 22 notes
I prefer the serial comma. My employer still does not.
Aux barricades!Style rules adjusting to the web? What’s the temperature in hell these days?
I thought that was a grammatical thing rather than style? Like in a will, if you wrote, “I leave everything to Betsy, Tacy and Tib,” that could be (and actually was, I think?) interpreted in court as, “I leave half to Betsy. Tacy and Tib should split the other half.” That serial comma is grammatically mandatory!
There are some great examples of when the serial comma (aka the Oxford comma or Harvard comma) on the wikipedia page.
Traditionally, the serial comma has been shunned by journalists because of the space/newsprint it takes up (and going even farther back, the time it would take to set the type for the extra comma by hand). But even there, it’s accepted in cases where it would eliminate ambiguity (see the CJR, or if their site is still down Google’s cache). Your example wouldn’t count in the AP’s book though (I’d argue that no comma-wrangling would make the sentence imply a division other than thirds - you’d need something like “I’d leave half to Betsy and half to Tacy and Tib.” to get that effect).
<3 <3 <3 grammar nerdery.
Source: nicksummers
Post with 5 notes
Reason #723 Why I Use a Mac
My MacBook speakers are pretty pathetic, so I always have the volume near maximum.
But I also use my headphones quite frequently with my MacBook, and my (awesome) headphones can get extremely loud.
You could imagine this being a big problem. Volume is cranked up for the MacBook, I plug in headphones, only to go deaf because the volume is way too high.
But no, Mac OS X actually remembers two volume settings - one for the internal speakers and one for the headphone jack. When you unplug headphones, OS X remembers the volume setting and restores it when you plug your headphones back in*. My ears are very thankful.
- There may even be a third for the digital audio output (or a USB audio output)… Does anyone know?
** This is vaguely similar to another Apple UI niceness - recent iPods automatically pause the song that is playing when the headphones are unplugged.
C. Northcote Parkinson
Inspired by his work in the British Civil Service, Parkinson penned two laws on bureaucracy which bear his name today:
- Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
- Simple decisions are more prone to pointless bickering than complex ones.
Some of Parkinson’s other observations are equally spot on:
- “An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals”
- “Officials make work for each other.”
- The total of those employed inside a bureaucracy rose by 5-7% per year “irrespective of any variation in the amount of work (if any) to be done.”
(inspired by a comment by biblio-bot on this article on cutting Harvard administrators)
The End of Free Money →
The House + Senate both passed a credit card reform bill with quite a few provisions (see the link), including:
Let’s say you’re paying many different interest rates on the debt on a single card, one for a cash advance, another for a balance transfer and a third for a new purchase. Now, when you make a payment over the minimum balance, banks will have to apply it to the highest-interest debt first. I bet you can guess how many banks used to handle this sort of situation.
This is probably a Good Thing. But one of the unintended consequences of this law will be to kill the free money credit card schemers (like myself!) have been enjoying over the past few years.
The scheme was as follows:
- Make sure you have a high credit score + sufficient credit history.
- Assemble a list of credit cards with “0% balance transfer offers.” If you have a mailbox, you’ve probably trashed junk mail offering you one of these. The way it works is the credit card companies extend you a 0% loan for a given period of time (usually one year), but if you’re not careful (i.e. you’re late on a payment, use the card for a regular purchase, don’t pay the entire loan off in time) you can get stuck with boatloads of interest.
- Apply to all of the cards (often 10 or more) with balance transfer offers at the same time. This process is known as the App-O-Rama. Every time you apply for a credit card, your credit score gets “dinged.” Applying for cards simultaneously allows you to get in a bunch of applications before your score goes down.
- Put your 0% money in a safe investment. When interest rates were higher, it wasn’t hard to find a one year CD paying 6% or more.
- Profit. I “only” made about $500 from this scheme, but others on the internet spent years earning ~6% interest on $100,000 of free money.
Now that payments will have to go to the part of your balance with the highest interest, banks won’t be able to earn enormous fees on people who mess up the balance transfers and thus are unlikely to offer them at all.
And the restrictions placed on 18-21 year olds in the Senate bill are outright absurd… but that’s worth another post.
(h/t to fatwallet finance for teaching me all that I know)
Post reblogged from Marco's stuff with 79 notes
What that they don’t understand, maybe, is that being a real geek is a very bad thing for a lot of people. Geeks generally had a pretty rough time in school, socially, and rarely have much romantic success during the first portion (if not the entirety) of their lives. Many have crippling social or psychological problems that severely limit their ability to interact with others or work on any sort of team.
Sure, some geeks eventually make something of themselves with knowledge and passions, but many can never overcome their social problems enough to succeed in any field. Many, while they may like geeky things with associated careers (e.g. programming, math, science), aren’t actually very good at them. Many geeky people just don’t have any strong interests in the job-relevant areas — and the job market’s pretty small for experienced LARPers, fanfiction authors, and Trekkers. And many others are socially treated like geeks but don’t have the associated knowledge or passions — they just had some other social problem that caused them a lot of trouble in school, such as disorders, disfigurements, unattractiveness, or poverty.
This geek/faux-geek distinction was really evident at ROFLCon ‘08 when Tron Guy was brushing shoulders with iJustine. Maynard (Tron Guy) is the ultimate geek to me - he loves conventions, cosplay, and his airplane - and that wasn’t going to change no matter how many people on the Internet made fun of him. On the other hand, Justine is a total queen bee - the kind of girl that ruled the playground. She may really love Apple products, but she can never be a geek in the sense Maynard can.
I should add, Tron Guy was not in the geek appreciation video, while iJustine was.
Source: marco
Link reblogged from Give Me Something To Read with 9 notes
Secrets of the Phallus: Why is the Penis Shaped Like That? →
If you’ve ever had a good, long look at the human phallus, whether yours or someone else’s, you’ve probably scratched your head over such a peculiarly shaped device. Let’s face it—it’s not the most intuitively shaped appendage in all of evolution. But according to evolutionary psychologist Gordon Gallup of the State University of New York at Albany, the human penis is actually an impressive “tool” in the truest sense of the word, one manufactured by nature over hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution.
(thanks, Nostrich)
Ahh, the semen displacement hypothesis (that the “coronal ridge” on the end of the penis was evolved to remove semen from previous partners during intercourse).
When we talked about this paper in my Paternity, Fidelity, and Parenting class last semester, I think I dropped the best line of my discussion section career. We had just read about the study (described in this article as well), where college students males were found to “thrust deeper and faster, in the wake of allegations of female cheating.”
I argued that this wasn’t really a new discovery, rather it was a commonly held notion. To back up my claim, I quoted R. Kelly’s “Trapped in the Closet Part 4.” Kelly is suspecting his wife of cheating (“And a man picked up the phone…”), but has sex with her as soon as he gets home. But not just any sex, “And that’s when I started going crazy / Like I was trying to give her a baby.” I’m not sure my professor enjoyed the reference.
Source: givemesomethingtoread
Momzilla Attacks!
Well-educated, conservative mother Karin Morin writes a piece in the National Review about her family’s “adventures in gender-neutral housing.” According to the article, the daughter gets “stuck” by her co-op in a room with two guys and a girl and is unable to switch out of the room. When Stanford refuses to move her to a new room, the parents withhold tuition payments (“If Stanford had informed us that it was allowing such housing, we would have required her either to transfer out or to find another source of funding.”).
Nutty parent overreacts to liberal college policy is old news, though. It’s the “web two oh” that makes this story interesting.
First, the NYTimes’ college admission blog links to the article. The comment responses devolve into easily predicted chaos - but a two gems stand out among the flames.
Both Mom and Daughter have left detailed comments, explaining their positions. Mom claims she “take[s] no particular pleasure in putting my family situation into the public eye” (then why personalize the story?).
Daughter, on the other hand, summarizes the situation perfectly:
This conflict has very little to do with Stanford and gender-neutral housing. Is has everything to do with my parents having a hard time adjusting to the fact that I’m out of the house (I’m the oldest), I’m 3000 miles away, and -especially- that I’m a liberal agnostic while they are conservative Catholics. The NR really should have looked into this situation a little bit before publishing that article.
I can’t believe I’m having to write this in the NYT blog. This is ridiculous.
What’s a loony parent to do, when even your best attempts at turning your family drama into a conservative uprising can get shot down by your liberal daughter on the Internet?
Photo reblogged from Marco's stuff with 23 notes
Office 2010 Screenshots Preview What’s to Come
And… I’m glad I’m over here in Mac-webdev-land, not over there in Windows-Office-world. It’s amazing that anyone over there gets anything done at all. (Do they?)
They’ve come so far…
Marco’s right in a sense - it is impossible to get anything done in Windows-Office-world because of the countless feature design meetings, security/globalization/localization/compatibility/performance committee reviews, and so on.
That said, I think a lot of his snark is off-base; Office 2007 is a great app (Steve Sinofsky exercised some top-down control and a ton of bloat got cut out as a result). It’ll be interesting to see how 2010 shapes up, now that Sinofsky is over running Windows development now (I’m actually typing this on a Win7 machine - and it’s a huge improvement over Vista).
Source: Lifehacker
Link reblogged from midnight rodeo
savage inequalities live on →
(via kathychoi)
Tumblr-dilemma: What do you do when you like a post about an unpleasant topic (i.e. this one)? Is a “like” appropriate?
What about when someone writes something personal and mildly depressing? Sometimes I want to “like” the post, as sort of a “pat on the back, i’m with you” statement. But I’m afraid it will come off as “that jackass 2arrs2ells is basking in my misery.”
Source: kathychoi
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