nikhil.io

I can die, they can do my picture. I have 84 years, but I am still creating. All my life I create, and is more and more and more.

The mind is like a universe. It’s constantly expanding. Like the universe, exactly like the universe, open the mind. The opening of the mind is every day, is open. That was this picture. Open the mind of all the persons who worked there. From the producer to the artists. From the workers… for every one was an opening of the mind, this work.

Was ambitious, but not too ambitious. Myself, I have the ambition to live 300 years. I will not live 300 years. Maybe I will live one year more. But I have the ambition. Why you will not have ambition? Why? Have the greatest ambition possible. You want to be immortal? Fight to be immortal. Do it. You want to make the most fantastic art of movie? Try. If you fail, is not important. We need to try.

Watched with LD. What an incredible story. His vision would’ve strayed a bit far from the book but what a wonderful thing it would’ve been to experience.

I am going to read The Incal posthaste. It’s a set of highly regarded graphic novels by Jodorowsky and Moebius. I’m told it’s a heavily copied work too. Lovely stuff. Never give up.

“Garlic is divine. Few food items can taste so many distinct ways, handled correctly. Misuse of garlic is a crime. Old garlic, burnt garlic, garlic cut too long ago and garlic that has been tragically smashed through one of those abominations, the garlic press, are all disgusting. Please treat your garlic with respect. Sliver it for pasta, like you saw in Goodfellas; don’t burn it. Smash it, with the flat of your knife blade if you like, but don’t put it through a press. I don’t know what that junk is that squeezes out the end of those things, but it ain’t garlic. And try roasting garlic. It gets mellower and sweeter if you roast it whole, still on the clove, to be squeezed out later when it’s soft and brown. Nothing will permeate your food more irrevocably and irreparably than burnt or rancid garlic. Avoid at all costs that vile spew you see rotting in oil in screw-top jars. Too lazy to peel fresh? You don’t deserve to eat garlic.”

If this resonates with you, you might love Sri Lankan Garlic Curry

(Source unknown)

TIL that (a) tentacles and arms are two different things and (b) there is a lot more diversity to this family¹ than I’d imagined!

1. I don’t mean “family” in a taxonomic sense.↩︎

This beautiful piece was sculpted in Japan around the 13th century and is about three feet tall. The subject is a Zen Buddhist monk Shinchi Kakushin, who lived till the ripe old age of 95. After his death, he was given the title “perfectly awakened national teacher of the Dharma lamp” which is what “Hotto Enmyo Kokushi” means.

It’s at the Cleveland Museum of art. More info here.

The key takeaways in no particular order.

• Use <noscript>. If you are using it, use it a lot more.
• There is no guarantee that chunks will load after the main one does; the user’s location and/or network access might have changed! Think CalTrain.
• ISPs, Corporate VPNs, and Browser Plugins¹ can mess with the downloading and execution of JS.

I’m omitting CDN uptime (can’t do anything about this) and Browser compatibility (supporting 5+ year-old browsers is not something I care about doing given the work I do.)

Finally, not every fucking thing needs to be an App. For instance, your Terms of Service page can actually be a document on the Internet 😱

1. And not just the ones you install. I know of situations where a Chrome plugin was mandated by Corporate IT security (not my current employer.)↩︎

by Ned Gulley at Star Chamber from a long, long while ago.

If you’ve ever installed a program using “curl XYZ | sh” don’t worry about what’s in the vaccine

♥️♥️♥️

I remember complaining about having too many books to read at The Mill (RIP) in Iowa City, and getting a weary “We know” to my “Did you know the Japanese have a word for this?”

I remember telling them I’d resolved to have no more than, say, a hundred books on my shelves at any given time, and them telling me about an essay (or at least I think it’s an essay) in this book.

I’ve never come by anything by him before. Reading him is like watching a bee bob and weave and float around and just be and have fun. Words¹ and ideas, lists and taxonomies: It’s a lot of serious whimsy.

Even if Georges Perec had not written a novel without the letter “E”—“La disparition,” later rendered into “E”-less English as “A Void”—he would still be one of the most unusual writers of the twentieth century. Among his works are a treatise on the board game Go, a radio play about a machine that analyzes poetry, an autobiography cast in the form of a novel about a city of athletes, an approximately twelve-hundred-word palindrome, a crypto-Marxist anatomy of consumerist Paris, a scrupulously researched history of a wholly fictional painting, a deeply eccentric bucket list (“buy a number of domestic appliances” and “travel by submarine” are among the entries), a memoir composed of four hundred and eighty stand-alone sentences that all begin “I remember,” a novella in which the only vowel used is “E,” a lyric study of Ellis Island, and, from 1976 until his death from cancer, in 1982, a weekly crossword puzzle for the newspaper Le Point. It would be hard to disagree with Italo Calvino that Perec “bears absolutely no resemblance to anyone else,” or with Perec himself, who said, in an interview a few years before his death, that he had never written the same thing twice.

1. Translated from French but still.↩︎

I bought this print at a thrift store a decade ago because it looked ‘nice’ and warm and I loved the colors. It’s an innocent celebration at a glance and from a distance, and a total bacchanal when you examine its scenes up close.

I never knew who painted it until now. It’s Pieter Bruegel the Elder (not to be confused with the Younger) who “was the most significant artist of Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painting, a painter and printmaker from Brabant, known for his landscapes and peasant scenes (so called genre painting); he was a pioneer in making both types of subject the focus in large paintings.” (Source.) I’m glad that’s settled.

A simple-enough argument about a dangerous, toxic worldview.

[…] To highlight that contradiction let’s try to explain these facts with individualist logic. Women and non-white people, by sheer coincidence, all individually chose to be paid less for more demanding jobs. Also by coincidence, they chose to work those jobs and be paid less than women and non-white people in other similarly developed countries. Simultaneously, people born in the same zip codes all just happened to make choices that led them to similar incomes, similar lifespans, and similar rates of disease. Those born to poor families chose, with little or no outside influence, to work lower paying jobs. The rich also chose, of their own accord and without significant systemic advantages, to work higher paying jobs. The huge differences in the inequalities between America and other wealthy nations is also a coincidence caused by Americans choosing to be lazier.

Rather than consider that centuries of enslavement and systemic racism has sabotaged the quality of life for black americans, individualists insist that black individuals choose to live in poverty more frequently than non-black people. Rather than consider that society exists, individualists have created a web of absurdities and chosen to live there. They also insist that none of these absurdities are racist, sexist, or classist. We shouldn’t temper our language here: anyone who claims that individual choices rather than systems entirely determine how most people live should be dismissed outright. It’s an embarrassing and absurd worldview and even the tiniest bit of research should make that clear.

[…] Individualism is a worldview created not to explain the world but to control it. It’s designed to fragment strong communities, turn workers against each other, and diminish the power of solidarity among the people. When you see yourself as the morally upright hero and everyone else has competition, you’re turning your back on what it means to be human. There’s plenty to go around, or at least there would be if it weren’t all funneled straight to the top, to the people who manufactured the idea of individualism.

See also: “We Ought to Live in a Society, not an Economy”

It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.

My university just announced that it’s dumping Blackboard, and there was much rejoicing. Why is Blackboard universally reviled? There’s a standard story of why “enterprise software” sucks. If you’ll bear with me, I think this is best appreciated by talking about… baby clothes!

There are two types of baby outfits. The first is targeted at people buying gifts. It’s irresistible on the rack. It has no fewer than 18 buttons. At least 3 people are needed to get a screaming baby into it. It’s worn once, so you can send a photo to the gifter, then discarded.

Other baby outfits are meant for parents. They’re marked “Easy On, Easy Off” or some such, and they really mean it. Zippers aren’t easy enough so they fasten using MAGNETS. A busy parent (i.e. a parent) can change an outfit in 5 seconds, one handed, before rushing to work.

The point is, some products are sold directly to the end user, and are forced to prioritize usability. Other products are sold to an intermediary whose concerns are typically different from the user’s needs. Such products don’t HAVE to end up as unusable garbage, but usually do.

OK, back to Blackboard! It’s actually designed to look extremely attractive to the administrators (not professors and definitely not students) who make purchase decisions. Since they can’t easily test usability, they instead make comparisons based on… checklists of features. 🤦🏽‍♂️

And that’s exactly what’s wrong with Blackboard. It has every feature ever dreamed up. But like anything designed by a committee, the interface is incoherent and any task requires at least fifteen clicks (and that’s if you even remember the correct sequence the first time).

Software companies can be breathtakingly clueless when there’s a layer of indirection between them and their users. Everyone who’s suffered through Blackboard will have the same reaction to this: try having less functionality! edscoop.com/how-canvas-cam…

The grumbling about Blackboard has finally gotten loud enough that schools are paying a modicum of attention to usability when evaluating alternatives. Blackboard’s market share has dropped dramatically and this will probably continue. Good.

Here’s the kicker, though. It’s extremely likely that whichever vendor emerges on top will fall into the same trap. The incentives almost guarantee it. Once profs and students put down the pitchforks, committees will go back to their checklists, and feature creep will resume.

Blackboard is 20 years old. If Twitter is around in 20 years, let’s see how this prediction holds up. And now I have to go rescue a three-month old from an extremely cute and equally uncomfortable outfit.

Simply delightful. Here’s an article about him.

I have a dying peace lily. I’m a bit attached to it and don’t know that I’ll be able to save it. Searching the internet for any hope led me to this post (cached) which made me feel slightly better about my inexperience.

The first mistake is relying upon the plant’s visual cue that needs water: the leaves droop. But, as the post notes, this can happen when they’re both over and under-watered!

[…] This would be a good indicator of when to water, except that by the time things reach the point of laying flat, damage has been done: the roots die back slightly each time this happens, and if it happens often enough, it will eventually fail to come back at all.

[…] it’s difficult to get the watering just right. […] If it’s too wet, there’s a tendency for plants to rot where they sit, except that they do it in such a way that you don’t necessarily realize what’s going on. One day you go to pull off a dead leaf, and a whole rootless plant comes out. This will generally not be salvageable. To make things trickier, the plant (like a lot of other plants) responds to being too wet by – you guessed it – drooping, which would make an inexperienced grower think that it needs more water.

I think I ruined mine by transferring it to a larger pot, thinking I was ‘suffocating’ it in a smaller one.

However, it’s been my experience that, nine times out of ten, a peace lily with black leaf edges is suffering from root suffocation, either because its soil has broken down and compacted, or because part of the soil never gets to dry out. Especially in a very large pot, and especially especially in a plant that’s been overpotted (put in a pot that’s too large for the plant), and especially especially especially in a plant that’s in a very large pot, too big for the plant, with no drainage hole, the top of the soil can dry out while everything after the top three inches is soaking wet.

Contrary to marketing material, they are not easy beginner plants:

In the time I’ve been at Garden Web (since Dec. 2006), I’ve seen more people post about issues with their peace lilies than any other plant, no contest: too many marketers think that the only important thing about a plant is how much light it needs. It’s true that Spathiphyllum doesn’t require a lot of light; that doesn’t make it the best plant for you, any more than knowing Jennifer Anniston’s name makes her your best friend.

So what does one do?

Common sense is important. If your plant is droopy and the soil feels wet, the plant is obviously not drooping because it’s too dry: don’t give it water. If the plant looks fine and the soil feels dry, the plant doesn’t need water just because the soil is dry: wait for the leaves to get a little limp first. Spathiphyllums are nothing if not good communicators.

And don’t worry about humidity. And use progressively larger pots. I think mine is too far gone at this point 😔

Not sure why this actually got to me.

From an interview with Vincent Connare, creator of Comic Sans:

Q. What do you think of comic sans’ detractors?

A. I think most of them secretly like Comic Sans — or at least wish they had made it. Interesting fact: the main designer at Twitter tweeted that the most server space is used by complaints about: first, airlines; second, Comic Sans; and third, Justin Bieber. So not even The Bieber can beat Comic Sans!

Here’s the tweet he’s talking about (it’s from 2010.) Also:

Regular people who are not typographers or graphic designers choose Comic Sans because they like it, it’s as simple as that. Comic Sans isn’t complicated, it isn’t sophisticated, it isn’t the same old text typeface like in a newspaper. It’s just fun — and that ‘s why people like it.

I tend to ignore gatekeeping bullshit when it comes my typographical loves 😛 And from that NYTimes article, emphasis mine:

“It’s like, ‘Not only am I going to refuse to submit these documents, but I’m going to use a typeface that doesn’t submit to the solemnity of the law, and Congress and public institutions,” said Michael Bierut, a partner at the design firm Pentagram. “Or maybe he just likes Comic Sans. It’s hard to say. Few typefaces are this freighted with public opinion.”

I think these are the final words on the matter from the creator himself:

If you love Comic Sans you don’t know much about typography. And if you hate Comic Sans you need a new hobby.

Once a year, I spend $75 on a good bottle of Scotch Whisky and bring it to Karla’s birthday party. Last year, I brought Talliskers; this year, I brought Cragganmore. I break open the bottle, and ask everyone to take a taste. In this way, we can slowly get an idea of the difference between the various kinds of whiskies. And so it came to pass that I was sitting there with Nate and Genevieve, snobbing it up.

“It’s not as peaty as the Talliskers,” Nate noted, sipping the Cragganmore with relish.

“And it has a really quick drop off the back end,” Geneveive sighed, swishing it around in his mouth.

Bill was standing there, looking confused and envious. “I don’t taste any of that,” he said, looking down in his glass as though he might be able to see the peat if he squinted hard enough. “I don’t have a really good palate. You guys all taste these zillions of things, but I don’t get anything.”

“Who says we do?” I asked. “We could be faking it. It’s really easy, and you can look all cultured without tasting a damn thing. Want me to show you how?”

Step 1: Smell the Drink.

Stick your nose into the glass. Sniff deeply, then close your eyes as though you’re processing a lot of things simultaneously. Even if you smell nothing, act as though this drink is a cornucopia of sensations and you’re sorting through all of them.

Do not speak. Scent is pretty easy to verify, so if you guess wrong then everyone will know what a yutz you are. If someone ventures their own review as to what it smells like, frown as though you’re too busy concentrating on this intense bouquet to interrupt it with stupid words. This automatically gives you the edge, since as a conneisseur you know enough not to discuss anything until the full tasting is over.

Step 2: Drink the Drink.

Take a mid-sized sip, then roll it around in your mouth. Don’t swish - that’s for chumps - but kind of splash it around on your tongue.

Then - and this is the most important part - hold the glass away from you at an angle. Freeze as though your entire body is concentrated upon analyzing this taste in your mouth. Narrow your eyes and look upwards as you pretend to process this beverage, taking your time as you give every impression of savoring the flavor.

After a minute, bob your head just a little, as though coming to a conclusion.

Step 3: Finish the Drink.

Swallow it and then open your mouth, breathing in. Some people claim they can feel the drink mutate upon their palate as the air rushes over their tongue; they are liars, but convincing ones. And now you can be one of them.

Nod again.

Step 4: Decide Upon Your Pronouncement.

Now, to understand how to be a proper snob, you must understand two things about taste:

1. Taste is a bell curve.
2. Nobody fucking knows what they’re talking about.

The first point is easy; you don’t taste everything all at once. There’s actually a rise and flow to the taste process, starting from when the food touches your tongue, building to the intense mid-section, and then dropping off into an aftertaste. In the case of a McDonald’s hamburger, what you’d taste first would be the squishiness of the bread and the oversalted burger, rising to the chewy dog food of the burger itself as you mash it around, ending with that greasy oil slick that coats your throat at the end.

You may never experience this yourself, but trust me when I say that it does happen. You just gulped some whisky, but the foodies experienced a three-act play in their tastebuds. So you must be aware of this flow.

The second part involves understanding that taste is an intensely personal experience, which is to say that you can say pretty much anything and nobody knows any better. In fact, unless you’re drinking with a sommelier who knows what she’s doing - in which case let her tell you what’s in it and nod a lot - then everyone is afraid that maybe they’re the ones who don’t know what they’re doing.

If you say, “I taste a faint hint of paprika,” they don’t go, “Wow, what a liar” - they become paranoid because they don’t taste it. Maybe you’re the guy with the super taste buds who catches everything. There they are, sipping this drink and only getting a third of its full bouquet, and if they really had the genetics to appreciate it the way that you do they would taste paprika.

You can say anything. You think people taste oak in a wine? Fuck no. Who the hell eats oak? These fuckers want you to think they’re walking around taking bites out of dogwood trees so they can tell what kind of barrel the wine came from - they’re awful, awful fakers. And if they can tell you what country the oak came from, the first note you should mark in their aroma is a seething, overwhelming bullshit.

So fake away! But there are guidelines.

First, if you’re faking it, everything is faint - you want to talk in terms of hints, notes, and shades. Give the impression that you only barely caught this delicate wisp of a flavor because you were concentrating so intensely back in Step 2. You want to let them tell you what the overwhelming taste of the drink is; it’s your job to bat clean-up and talk about shit they might have missed.

Second, some flavors are better than others. Paprika is actually a bad example, since that’s a spice. Generally, you want to only talk about flowers and fruits, with maybe some hints of leafy spices when you want to show off. (“Mint” is bad, but “oregano” can be gotten away with if you’re an expert.) The only exception is beer, where you want to talk about breads and chocolate flavors; starches are good for beers.

And remember: natural is better than fake.

GOOD: “I taste a hint of blackberry.”
BAD: “The tang of Fruit Roll-Ups.”

So pick a taste, and pick a place - which is to say it’s at the beginning or the end of the curve. (You never want to taste anything in the middle, where the intense flavors are. Remember, you’re picking up the transmissions from Alpha Tau.)

When in doubt, go with blackberry. It shows up everywhere.

Step 5: Making Your Pronouncement

When you speak, speak slowly, as though you’re coming to a conclusion. Then break out with it.

“I taste a hint of blackberry just at the finish.”

Either people will agree with you, or they won’t. If they agree with you, great! They don’t taste shit, either. You can now tell them you’re catching a splash of Strawberry Go-Gurt in the fourth and down, and they’ll just nod and stare. You have bolloxed a bunch of clueless snobs; take a bow!

If they don’t agree, then frown a little. They won’t ever say, “Bullshit! You fucker!” Instead, they’ll say, “Really? I don’t taste that…”

Stick to your guns. You caught it. Take another sip as though to confirm, repeat the process and say, “No. Still there for me. Not for you, though?” Then laugh about how weird taste is, that some folks catch things that others do. Then spend the rest of the evening nodding and agreeing with the other snobs, only occasionally venturing a guess, because if you spend the entire evening contradicting them then the game is up.

And that’s it! By the end of the evening, Bill had learned his lessons, and now he can stare quietly at the ceiling and then talk about the bouquet along with the rest of us awful, awful liars.

Now you, too, can fake anyone out. Remember: use this power only for good, never evil. Or to get laid, whichever comes first.

A lecture at UCSB by Douglas Adams (RIP)

Translation copyright 2001 John T. Quinn; all rights reserved.

Introduction

Philogelos (The Laughter Lover) is a collection of some 265 jokes¹ likely made in the fourth or fifth century CE. Some manuscripts give the names of the compilers as the otherwise-unknown Hierocles and Philagrios. Other manuscripts drop the name of one or other or both.

Although The Laugher Lover is the oldest surviving example, joke-books already had a long pedigree. According to Athenaeus 614d-e, Philip the Great of Macedon had paid handsomely for a social club in Athens to write down its members’ witticisms. At the dawn of the second century BCE, Plautus twice has a character refer to joke-books (Persa 392; Stichus 400).

Modern scholars such as Rapp and Baldwin have noted how women are infrequent targets of the humor - earning, in fact, attack under only one category of their own, “Horny Women”, a category containing just two jokes. Yet one may wonder, for instance, whether the jokes under “Misogynistic Men” have as their primary target the female sex rather than the men who hate them. Baldwin also remarks on the virtual absence of homosexual themes in the collection.

I have included in this selection all jokes in which women are mentioned or appear as characters. Also included are jokes that seemed particularly relevant for gender studies. I follow the Greek text edited by R.D. Dawe (Bibliotheca Teubneriana, 2000). All the headings, except the last one (“Miscellaneous”), have some manuscript warrant. I decided to translate the alternate versions of the same joke to underscore the fact that these jokes represent primarily an oral rather than a written tradition; the humor lies in the conceit and not in a canonical text.

Select Bibliography

• Baldwin, Barry, trans. with commentary, The Philogelos or Laughter-Lover (Amsterdam, 1983)
• Jennings, Victoria, review of R.D. Dawe’s text, BMCR 01.04.05
  [http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/2001/2001-04-05.html]
• Rapp, Albert, “A Greek Joe Miller” Classical Journal 46 (1951), pp.286-290 & 318
• Thierfelder, Andreas, German trans. with commentary, Philogelos, Der Lachfreund (Munich, 1968)

Translation

Intellectuals

#27. An intellectual, falling sick, had promised to pay the doctor if he recovered. When his wife nagged at him for drinking wine while he had a fever, he said: “Do you want me to get healthy and be forced to pay the doctor?”

#43. When an intellectual was told by someone, “Your beard is now coming in,” he went to the rear-entrance and waited for it. Another intellectual asked what he was doing. Once he heard the whole story, he said: “I’m not surprised that people say we lack common sense. How do you know that it’s not coming in by the other gate?”²

#45. An intellectual during the night ravished his grandmother and for this got a beating from his father. He complained: “You’ve been mounting my mother for a long time, without suffering any consequences from me. And now you’re mad that you found me screwing your mother for the first time ever!”

#51A. An intellectual caught sight of a deep well on his country-estate, and asked if the water was any good. The farmhands assured him that it was good, and that his own parents used to drink from that well. The intellectual expressed his amazement: “How long were their necks, if they could drink from something so deep!”

#51B. An intellectual visiting his country-estate asked if the water in a well there was good to drink. He was told that it was good, and that his own parents used to drink from the well. The intellectual was amazed: “How long were their necks, that they could drink from something so deep!”

#53. An intellectual was eating dinner with his father. On the table was a large lettuce with many succulent shoots. The intellectual suggested: “Father, you eat the children; I’ll take mother.”³

#57. An intellectual got a slave pregnant. At the birth, his father suggested that the child be killed. The intellectual replied: “First murder your own children and then tell me to kill mine.”⁴

#64. An intellectual bought a pair of pants. But he could hardly put them on because they were too tight. So he got rid of the hair around his legs.⁵

#69. An intellectual checked in on the parents of a dead classmate. The father was wailing: “O son, you have left me a cripple!” The mother was crying: “O son, you have taken the light from my eyes!” Later, the intellectual suggested to his friends: “If he were guilty of all that, he should have been cremated while still alive.”

#70. An intellectual came to check in on a friend who was seriously ill. When the man’s wife said that he had ‘departed’, the intellectual replied: “When he arrives back, will you tell him that I stopped by?”

#72. An intellectual had been at a wedding-reception. As he was leaving, he said: “I pray that you two keep getting married so well.”

#73. The same intellectual said that the tomb of Scribonia was handsome and lavish, but that it had been built on an unhealthy site.⁶

#97. Upon the death of his wife, an intellectual was out shopping for a coffin and got into a big fight over the price. When the salesman swore that he couldn’t sell it for less than fifty thousand, the intellectual said: “Since you’re under an oath, here’s the fifty thousand. But throw in for free a small casket, in case I need it for my son.”

#98. A friend met an intellectual, and said: “Congratulations! You’ve got a baby boy!” The intellectual replied: “Thanks to buddies like you!”⁷

Men on the Make

#106. A professional beggar had been letting his girlfriend think that he was rich and of noble birth. Once, when he was getting a handout at the neighbor’s house, he suddenly saw her. He turned around and said: “Have my dinner-clothes sent here.”

#107. There was another man, just like the last one - a big talker, but in fact impoverished. By chance he got sick, and his girlfriend, coming into his place without warning, found him lying on a humble mat made of reeds. Turning over, he claimed that the doctors were responsible: “The best and most famous doctors in the city ordered me to sleep on a mat like this.”

Abderites⁸

#114. An Abderite saw a eunuch and asked him how many kids he had. When that guy said that he didn’t have the balls, so as to be able to have children, the Abderite asked ⁹

#115. An Abderite saw a eunuch talking with a woman and asked him if she was his wife. When he replied that eunuchs can’t have wives, the Abderite asked: “So is she your daughter?”

#116. An Abderite who was a eunuch had the misfortune to develop a hernia.¹⁰

#252. An unlucky eunuch developed a hernia.

#117. An Abderite shared a mattress with a man who suffered from a hernia. In the night, he got up to relieve himself. When he returned, he accidentally (since it was still dark) stepped right on the spot of the hernia. When the man let out a howl, the Abderite asked: “Why weren’t you lying down heads-up?”¹¹

#123. An Abderite followed custom and cremated his dead father. He ran home and said to his ailing mother: “There are a few fire-logs still left. If you want to stop suffering, get yourself cremated on them.”

Jokesters

#145. When a jokester who was a shopkeeper found a policeman screwing his wife, he said: “I got something I wasn’t bargaining for.”

#151. When a jokester saw a pimp renting the services of a black prostitute, he said: "What’s your rate for the night?¹²

#151 (bis) A. When a jokester saw an ophthalmologist busy rubbing away on a girl, he said: “Watch out, young man, that you don’t, in healing her sight, ruin her ‘I’”.¹³
#151 (bis) B & #260. When a jokester saw an ophthalmologist busy rubbing away on a girl in her prime, he said: “Don’t, in healing her sight, ruin her depths.”

#262. A jokester went abroad; there, he developed a hernia. Coming home, he was asked if he had brought a present back. “Nothing for you - just a headrest for my thighs.” ¹⁴

#263. Someone needled a jokester: “I had your wife, without paying a dime.” He replied: "It’s my duty as a husband to couple with such a monstrosity. What made you do it?’

Kymeans¹⁵

#159. A Kymean constructed a huge threshing-floor and stationed his wife on the opposite end. He asked her if she could see him. When she replied that it was hard for her to see him, he snapped: “The time will come when I’ll build a threshing-floor so big that I won’t be able to see you and you won’t be able to see me.”¹⁶

Rude People

#187A. A rude astrologer cast a sick boy’s horoscope. After promising the mother that the child had many years ahead of him, he demanded payment. When she said, “Come tomorrow and I’ll pay you,” he objected: “But what if the boy dies during the night and I lose my fee?”

#187B. A rude star-gazer cast a sick boy’s horoscope. After promising the mother that the child had many years ahead of him, he demanded payment. When the mother said, "I’ll pay tomorrow, " he objected: “But what if the boy dies during the night? Do I lose my fee?”

Incompetents

#197. An incompetent schoolteacher was asked who the mother of Priam was. Not knowing the answer, he said: “It’s polite to call her Ma’am.”."¹⁷

#201. A man, just back from a trip abroad, went to an incompetent fortune-teller. He asked about his family, and the fortune-teller replied: “Everyone is fine, especially your father.” When the man objected that his father had been dead for ten years, the reply came: “You have no clue who your real father is.”

#202. An incompetent astrologer cast a boy’s horoscope and said: “He will be a lawyer, then a city-official, then a governor.” But when this child died, the mother confronted the astrologer: “He’s dead – the one you said was going to be a lawyer and an official and a governor.” “By his holy memory,” he replied, “if he had lived, he would have been all of those things!”

#204. An incompetent astrologer cast a man’s horoscope and said: “You are unable to father children.” When the man objected that he had seven kids, the astrologer replied: “Look after them well.”¹⁸

Gluttons

#219. A glutton betrothed his daughter to another glutton. Asked what he was giving her as a dowry, he replied: “A house whose windows face the bakery.”

Drunkards

#227A. While a drunkard was imbibing in a tavern, someone approached and told him: “Your wife is dead.” Taking this in, he said to the bartender: “Time, sir, to mix a drink up from your dark stuff.”¹⁹

#227B. While an intellectual was imbibing in a tavern, someone approached and told him: “Your wife is dead.” The intellectual said: “Time, my good man, to mix me some dark wine.”

People with Bad Breath

#232. A man with bad breath, kissing his wife over and over, said: “My Lady, my Hera, my Aphrodite.” And she said, turning away: “My - o Zeus an ozeus!”²⁰

#234. A man with bad breath asked his wife: “Madame, why do you hate me?” And she said in reply: “Because you love me.”

#239A. A young actor was loved by two women, one with bad breath and the other with reeking armpits. The first woman said: “Give me a kiss, master.” And the second: “Give me a hug, master.” But he declaimed: "Alas, what shall I do? I am torn betwixt two evils!’²¹

#239B. An actor who was a jokester was loved by two women, one with bad breath and the other with reeking armpits. One said: “Give me a kiss.” And one said: “Give me a hug.” But he declaimed: “Alas, what shall I do? I am torn betwixt two evils!”

Horny Women

#244A. A young man said to his libido-driven wife: “What should we do, darling? Eat or have sex?” And she replied: “You can choose. But there’s not a crumb in the house.”

#244B. A young man said to his libido-driven wife: “What should we do, darling? Eat or have sex?” And she said: “You can choose. But we don’t have a crumb.”

#245A. A young man invited into his home frisky old women. He said to his servants: “Mix a drink for one, and have sex with the other, if she wants to.” The women spoke up as one: “I’m not thirsty.”
#245B. A young man was hosting frisky old women. He said to his slaves: “Mix a drink for the one that wants it and have sex with the one who wants that.” And the women said: “I’m not thirsty.”

Misogynistic Men

#246. A misogynist stood in the marketplace and announced: “I’m putting my wife up for sale, tax-free!” When people asked him why, he said: “So the authorities will impound her.”²²

#247A. A misogynist paid his last respects at the tomb of his dead wife. When someone asked him, “Who has gone to rest?,” he replied: “Me, now that I’m alone.”

#247B. While a misogynist was paying his last respects to his wife, someone asked him: “Who has gone to rest?” He replied: “Me, now that I’m alone.”

#248A. A misogynist was sick, at death’s door. When his wife said to him, “If anything bad happens to you, I’ll hang myself,” he looked up at her and said: “Do me the favor while I’m still alive.”

#248B. When a misogynist took sick and his wife said to him, “If you die, I’ll hang myself,” he looked up at her and said: “Do me the favor while I’m still alive.”

#249. A misogynist had a wife who never stopped talking or arguing. When she died, he had her body carried on a shield to the cemetery. When someone noticed this and asked him why, he replied: “She was a fighter.”²³

Miscellaneous

#250. A young man was asked whether he took orders from his wife or if she obeyed his every command. He boasted: “My wife is so afraid of me that if I so much as yawn she shits.”

#251. The lady of a house had a simple-minded slave. But when she got a peek at just how thick his other head was also, she lusted after him. She put a mask over her face so that he wouldn’t recognize her, and played around with him. Joining her game, he had sex with her. Then, grinning as he usually did, he reported to his master: “Sir, sir, I fucked the dancer and the mistress was inside!”²⁴

Other Ancient Jokes On the WWW

• A Roman jokes about his wife:
  http://www.stoa.org/diotima/anthology/aulgell_4.20.shtml
• A (modern) anthology of ancient jokes, including a few more examples from The Laughter Lover:
  http://www.curculio.org/Ioci/

---

Permission is hereby granted to distribute for classroom use, provided that both the translator and Diotima are identified in any such use. Other uses not authorized in writing by the translator or in accord with fair use policy are expressly prohibited.

1. An exact count is elusive because some jokes appear twice in the collection, often with minor modifications.↩︎

2. This is the only joke with homoerotic undertones. It was a common trope that a boy lost his desirability as a “beloved” when his beard filled in. I have adopted Baldwin’s suggestion of reading a further joke here in a play on the Greek word that means both “anus” and “gate”.↩︎

3. The main stalk of the lettuce is the “mother” and its shoots are the “children.” Mythological background helps color the black humor: Cronus swallowed his own children; Oedipus married his mother.↩︎

4. The father’s suggestion was likely the “common sense” attitude. Fathers in the classical world could indeed reject their infant children and have them killed.↩︎

5. Originally barbarian garb, trousers became fashionable in late antiquity. The intellectual here adopts this he-man style – but proceeds to pluck out the hair on his legs & groin in the manner of an effeminate.↩︎

6. The same jest appears in the collection as #26, but without the name “Scribonia.” The most famous Scribonia was the second wife of the emperor Augustus, whom he divorced on the alleged grounds of moral turpitude. Baldwin doubts the identification, conjecturing that the Augustan Scribonia would not have had a notable tomb. But reality hardly needs to intrude on a joke. Thierfelder noticed that in Philogelos the initial formula “The same” links two jokes with similar content – but thought #73 an exception to the pattern. However, if the joke’s Scribonia is indeed the famous one, the use of “The same” in #73 is not an exception, for both #72 and #73 allude to divorce and remarriage. Perhaps even we are to understand that the remark in #73 was made at the wedding-reception which is the setting of #72, where mention of tombs, and of Scribonia, would have been ill-omened.↩︎

7. The intellectual gives thanks for the congratulations, but the rest of us understand the thanks as a comment on how his wife got pregnant.↩︎

8. Abdera was a city in Thrace, whose inhabitants bore the brunt of dumb-ethnic jokes since at least the days of Cicero in the first century BCE.↩︎

9. The joke is missing its punchline in the manuscripts. “But do you at least have some grandchildren?” has been suggested as a possibility. It seems to me, rather, that the jest should hinge on the otherwise more-explicit-than-necessary mention of the missing balls, and I have completed the joke accordingly.↩︎

10. In the most common type of hernia suffered by men, some of the lower intestine enters the scrotum (which, of course, a eunuch lacks), distending it. For a joke on that swelling, see #262.↩︎

11. Part of the joke plays on “head” as “tip of the penis”. The collection plays on the obscene meaning of the word also in #251 & #262. Brushing up against an erect penis would have been a warning sign to the Abderite not to step down on the man.↩︎

12. In Greco-Roman antiquity, black-skinned people were often compared to the night.↩︎

13. The doctor is rubbing ointment into her eye, but the jokester foresees a more sexual sort of friction. My use of “I” aims to capture some of the pun in the Greek word which means both “eye” and “girl”.↩︎

14. A play on the obscene meaning of the word “head”, as in #117.↩︎

15. The people of Kyme, a coastal city of Asia Minor, are made the butt of more jokes in the Philogelos than even the people of Abdera. Strabo, at the start of the first century CE, remarks on the proverbial stupidity of the Kymeans.↩︎

16. Commentators have puzzled over the joke. I take it that the humor is quite simple, and hinges on the expression “it was hard for her” – the wife means only that she can just barely see him, but the husband misconstrues it to mean that she doesn’t like looking at him.↩︎

17. No wonder the schoolteacher was at a loss: there were six different names current for the mother of the king of Troy.↩︎

18. “Look after them well”: the astrologer insinuates that his client won’t be able to have another child, if one that he already has were to die.↩︎

19. The drunkard wants wine that is dark-colored as a sign of mourning – to the extent that imbibing after hearing such news is a sign of mourning at all!↩︎

20. Unable to find a suitable English equivalent, I have reproduced the Greek, in which “ozeus” is a word for “person with bad breath.”↩︎

21. The declamation is a line in tragic diction; however, no known Greek tragedy contains this line.↩︎

22. The joke depends on the fact that black-market goods, sold without the proper tax assessment, were subject to confiscation.↩︎

23. The bodies of war-heroes in archaic Greece were sometimes honored by being carried on a shield.↩︎

24. Dancing-girls often wore masks as part of their outfit. The “straight meaning” against which the punchline plays is this: the slave worries that the lady was unexpectedly inside the house, and so had caught him having unauthorized sex. In the middle of this joke, Dawe emends the text slightly and indicates a lacuna. I follow Jennings in preferring to ignore these changes.↩︎

By Michael Dearing. Couldn’t find any video and not sure if this is tongue-in-cheek (like the “48 Laws of Power”.) The distortions are:

1. Personal Exceptionalism
   “I am special.”
2. Dichotomous Thinking
   “X is sh*t. Y is genius.”
3. Correct Overgeneralization
   “I see two dots and draw the right line.”
4. Blank-Canvas Thinking
   “Painting by numbers isn’t art. And I want to make art.”
5. Schumpeterianism
   “I am a creative destruction machine.”

TL;DR be a ruthless, inflexible, self-absorbed dick so you can identify, refine, and deliver Value™.

Lovely stuff. Cached here.

Being a long and informative post that leads to “Use /dev/urandom” and features a quote by DJB and a list of computationally secure PRNGs. Cached here.

>>> n = 0
>>> print "%d item%s" % (n, "s"[n==1:])
0 items
>>> n = 1
>>> print "%d item%s" % (n, "s"[n==1:])
1 item
>>> n = 2
>>> print "%d item%s" % (n, "s"[n==1:])
2 items

# If you might want to print negative items, add abs to the test:
>>> n = -1
>>> print "%d item%s" % (n, "s"[abs(n)==1:])
2 items

# If a word has irregular plural morphology, use a list:
>>> n=1
>>> print "%d %s" % (n, ['abacus','abaci'][n!=1])
1 abacus
>>> n=2
>>> print "%d %s" % (n, ['abacus','abaci'][n!=1])
2 abaci

Source.

See also: “Where profits come from”

• Ablative absolute
• Ablaut
• Abulia
• Acephalous
• ACTH
• Adit
• Adumbrate
• Agrapha
• Ailanthus
• Aleatory
• Alfresco
• Algolagnia
• Alpestrine
• Ament
• Anecdotage
• Androsterone
• Anemone fish
• Anneal
• Antiphon
• Antipode
• Apathetic
• Apercu
• aphagia
• Aphotic
• Apocarpous
• Appoggiatura
• Aquavit
• Arc-boutant
• Archimedean screw
• Archine
• Arcuate
• Argon
• Armamentarium
• Arrière-ban
• Arris
• Ascites
• Asco-
• Aspheric
• Astrolabe
• Athabasca/Athabaska
• Atony
• Auscultate
• Autolysis
• Azygous
• BAL
• Banderole/banderol
• Banquette
• Bathyscaph
• Benthos
• Bespoke
• Bialy
• Bibulous
• Bisque
• [Bonded warehouse](https://www.dictionary.com/browse/Bonded warehouse)
• Bregma
• Cachexia
• Cachinnate
• Cairngorm
• Caisson
• Calenture
• Caliposis
• Caparison
• Carbinol
• Carpophagous
• Cartouche/cartouch
• Cassis
• Catachresis
• castellated
• Catarrhine
• Catastasis
• Cecum
• Cete
• Chalcedony
• chatelain
• Chatoyant
• Chthonic
• Citronella
• Clastic
• Clavate
• Climbing irons
• Clinometer
• Clinquant
• Cobnut
• Coir
• Collective bargaining
• Conchoidal
• Condonation
• Confluence
• Contredanse
• Corporation
• corvée
• corvine
• coryphaeus
• couvad
• coxcomb
• crasis
• cunctation
• curettage
• deadeye
• debouch
• decalcomania
• decrepitate
• deforce
• delectation
• delft
• deliration
• delitescence
• demotic
• demulcent
• deracinate
• descant
• desiderate
• desinence
• desuetude
• diadem
• dicast
• digitate
• dihedral
• diopter
• dioptometer
• dioptric
• dioptrics
• diriment
• dissimulate
• distichous
• divaricate
• domino
• double-tongue
• durbar
• edema
• ejecta
• Elaine
• elan
• emulous
• entrepôt
• enucleate
• eparchy
• epopee
• eruct
• eructation
• esker
• espadrille
• espalier
• estovers
• esurient
• etiolate
• euhemerism
• exergue
• [facial index](https://www.dictionary.com/browse/facial index)
• fastigiate
• fauces
• fazenda
• feculent
• fibroin
• fictile
• fiduciary
• fisc
• flagitious
• flense
• flitch
• fluvial
• foamflower
• folium
• forensic
• fornication
• fossorial
• fourfold
• fraktur
• fraxinella
• fulgurant
• gallimaufry
• gallinaceous
• garniture
• gavage
• gerent
• girasol
• glans penis
• Glengarry
• glycine
• gnosis
• gnostic
• Gnosticism
• graminivorous
• gravid
• guttate
• hagiarchy
• haik
• Havelock
• Heliogabalus
• hematuria
• heterodox
• heterogeneous
• heteroplasty
• horripilation
• hyperopia
• hyperplasia
• hypnagogic
• hypocaust
• hypocorism
• iatric
• illation
• imbricate
• imperforate
• inanition
• indene
• indurate
• inextirpable
• internecine
• intinction
• intussuscept
• invidious
• kakemono
• kala-azar
• Kallikaks
• karabiner
• kohl
• laciniate
• lamia
• landau
• legatee
• leptosome
• litotes
• logical positivism
• longeron
• lordosis
• lucubrate
• lugubrious
• luxate
• macaronic
• mage
• Mahabharata
• maieutic
• mammillate
• mansuetude
• mantic
• mantua
• manumit
• marcescent
• mare clausum
• massif
• mavourneen
• mazurka
• meatus
• meninx
• mercer
• meretricious
• meristem
• mesomorph
• metacenter
• metagenesis
• misericord
• misogamy
• misology
• misoneism
• mitzvah
• moiré
• moke
• Molly Maguire
• molybdenum
• monel metal
• monitory
• monody
• monoplegia
• morganatic
• motile
• mucronate
• multipara
• mures
• murra
• nacelle
• nappe
• narghile
• nekton
• neroli
• névé
• nevus
• nictitating membrane
• niddering
• nigrosine
• obsequy
• ocarina
• officinal
• omasum
• ombudsman
• ommatophore
• onyx
• opalescence
• ophidian
• ornithosis
• orology
• orpine
• orrery
• ort
• orthochromatic
• orthoepy
• orthogonal
• oscitancy
• Osiris
• osmic
• osmium
• osteophyte
• oviform
• ovine
• paillette
• parotitis
• parturient
• parvenu
• peccant
• pedalfer
• pedicel
• pelf
• pellicle
• penumbra
• peplum
• pepo
• perdition
• perfidy
• pergola
• periodontics
• periotic
• peripeteia
• periphrasis
• periphrastic
• peripteral
• permittivity
• pertussis
• petroglyph
• petrolatum
• phlox
• photogravure
• phylactery
• piaffer
• pilose
• pinchbeck
• pinnate
• planation
• pleach
• pleasance
• pleonasm
• plethoric
• plication
• plimsoll
• plissé
• polder
• pons asinorum
• pons varolii
• poplar
• portcullis
• prebend
• preferment
• premonition
• preterition
• pronate
• pronephros
• proptosis
• prosopopeia
• puerperal fever
• quinate
• quondam
• raga
• ramulose
• realgar
• rebarbative
• rebec
• rebus
• recrudesce
• recruit
• rectus
• recurvate
• recusant
• red lead
• relaxin
• relict
• reliction
• remarque
• replevin
• réseau/reseau
• rete
• revetment
• rogation
• ruth
• salient
• saliferous
• saprophagous
• sarcastic
• sarcoptic mange
• sassafras
• sateen
• saturnalia
• saturnine
• scabrous
• scarious
• scholium
• seborrhea
• sedilia
• sepsis
• serous
• shako
• shinplaster
• sibilate
• sibyl
• siphonophore
• skirl
• [slime mold](https://www.dictionary.com/browse/slime mold)
• sociometry
• socle
• Sogdian
• soke
• solander
• sordino
• soubrette
• spavin
• splendent
• spline
• sprachgefühl
• Stabat Mater
• stative
• stato–
• steatopygia
• steatorrhea
• stipule
• stochastic
• stoup
• strickle
• stridulate
• suborn
• succussion
• sudd
• sudorific
• suint
• sumptuary
• supernatant
• surcingle
• sylph
• sylphid
• symposiarch
• syntax
• sypher
• tabanid
• tabes
• tabla
• taiga
• talapoin
• talion
• tanist
• Tantalus
• tartuffe
• telium
• tenesmus
• tennis
• tepefy
• tercel
• [tertium quid](https://www.dictionary.com/browse/tertium quid)
• tetrastichous
• thigmotaxis
• thymus
• timbale
• tontine
• tr.
• trabeated
• traduce
• traducianism
• trepan
• trephine
• trews
• tropophyte
• tympanites
• Tyr
• tyro
• urticant
• urticate
• urushiol
• uxorial
• uxoricide
• uxorious
• valgus
• vang
• varletry
• varve
• veloce
• venule
• vernier caliper
• versant
• versicolor
• vinculum
• virilism
• vitelline
• vivandière
• viva voce
• viviparous
• volant
• volar
• votary
• witenagemot

LaTeX, pdfTeX, XeTeX, LuaTeX and ConTeXt. That’s a lot of TeX! This was most helpful, even though MacTeX solves all my problems.

Our learning objectives are straightforward. After taking the course, you should be able to:

• Remain vigilant for bullshit contaminating your information diet.
• Recognize said bullshit whenever and wherever you encounter it.
• Figure out for yourself precisely why a particular bit of bullshit is bullshit.
• Provide a statistician or fellow scientist with a technical explanation of why a claim is bullshit.
• Provide your crystals-and-homeopathy aunt or casually racist uncle with an accessible and persuasive explanation of why a claim is bullshit.

Further,

We will be astonished if these skills do not turn out to be among the most useful and most broadly applicable of those that you acquire during the course of your college education.

I don’t think there’s more critical a juncture than now for courses like these. Just wish more people took them.

By Barry Deutsch, September 2009. Things are much better now.

Ayn Rand is to philosophy what Twilight is to horror fiction - being that the only people who like it have absolutely no experience of what the subject is really about and as a result have nothing to compare it to. Her influence only extends to the general public and she is pretty much ignored by academia, and even then she is more or less unknown outside of North America. I suppose that if you’re a fan you might think this is due to her ideas being so radical that they threaten the liberal elite of University Academia, who plot to turn the USA into a communist country, or whatever. However the reality is that it’s just really bad to the point of being actually quite painful to read if you know anything at all about real philosophy. Reading the woman is to philosophiers like watching CSI if you know anything about computers - just painful.

What Ayn Rand supposed is that there exists a absolute reality of the A=A. Essentially in her mind existence exists and everything that man does is merely the reordering of existence. She goes on to argue that things like art enable man to create metaphors in reality enabling their wildest metaphysical dreams to take flight. She’ll argue that things such as visual illusions, do not prove that that man can not trust their perceptions but rather their perceptions are always correct and any mistakes are mistakes of interpretation, rather than perception of reality. She argues that since you are able to draw absolute logical conclusions and concepts from reality, that the only valid form of logic is Aristotelian logic because it is the one most grounded in reality.

She argues that the ideal world is one where all men are following their own “rational self interest” that they have drawn from reality, which in her mind is represented via a perfect capitalist society, and that there exists a “conspiracy” to suppress men by making them “unsure” of reality. She’ll redefine terms like selfishness and altruistic towards this end. For example a moral individual is one who follows their own “selfish” interest to build houses or whatever but that this is always undermined by “altruistic parasites” who will loot the efforts these selfish individuals rather than going out and doing things for themselves, mainly because they envy the selfish.

Now, as far as philosophical views go this is a pretty loony view of the world. Here are some objections

Her views are over simplistic solutions to complex problems, for example even if you suppose that there exists an absolute reality then you’re still left with the problem of how you, as a subjective individual, reconcile your abstract ideas to it - these are the sort of problems that real philosophers attempts to address. Basically in saying “existence exists” you haven’t actually “solved” anything but merely misdirected attention away from the problem. It is like saying that to end war people should just stop fighting, yeah sure, that people would stop fighting might be a consequence but then how would people otherwise solve disputes? It is childish logic, essentially.

Her views are dogmatic, that is they are true because you believe them to be true rather than being able to prove it to be true. There is this attitude that no one shall enter the kingdom but through me, this is not the way philosohpy works - because philosophy is dialectical - but rather the way religion works. What she is doing in saying that reality objectively exists is to make her personal subjective views appear to be more concrete than they actually are. Which is what her true intent is: to turn her specific definition of what capitalism is into some weird religion for the gullible, and nothing more.

She simply makes stuff up, for example she supposes that the whole of 19th century Idealism is merely a conspiracy to make people unsure of their own existence so that they are easier to control by 'altruistic ’ dictators. She spends the vast majority of her time in her books simply constructing and then knocking down various strawmen, who are represented by her characters. For example Dr. Floyd Ferris.

Her work is just derivative of other better philosophiers such as Nietzsche, that she has simply rewrittern a bad interpretation of in order to sell her rubbish moral opinions. As a consequence you’re much better off just going to the source and cutting out the middle hag, espically since she seems to have a rather limited grasp of genuine philosophy, and much of anything in general. This is very apparent if you even have a basic working knowledge of philosophy.

She’ll just ignore her own arguments when they turn out to be inconvient. For example she’ll celebrate the triumph of the Apollo project which being a government funded collective effort is the very antithesis of everything she is about. Brushing it off with broad statments like: “It would have been done” etc. And everything about who she was, how she became who she was and how she lived her life point towards a high level of cognitive dissonance. In fact there are convenient loopholes in her philosophy that state that her arguments can be ignored based a emergency situation, such as being on a life boat etc.

But the greatest failing is that even if you subscribe to her “philosophy” and ignore the above, even then it still falls down by its own argument. For example suppose I give you $5 for a hotdog, now as a objectivist to suppose that some benefit has occured between both parties then you have to presume that money is actually worth something outside of a social context, otherwise nothing has been created in the transaction since at the end of the day all money is, is a abstract concept. To put this another way, if I gave you $5 for a hot dog then there would be absolutely no benefit to you if you are unable to spend it due to it not being legal tender. To quote Adam Smith: “All money is a matter of belief”, currency is only currency because of social and economic forces and not because it is instrinically worth anything. It is not linked to reality in anyway, at all, but is only symbolically representative of reality. Do you see how it defeats itself? if objectivism is followed to it’s logical conclusion then money is worthless, in a supposed capitalist utopia

In conclusion: Rand just wrote a very bad interpretation of Nietzsche for young adults. Where Nietzsche argued that the problem with society was that it was based in ideals, E.G., Christianity, that were essentially founded in nihilism and were therefore self-destructive because they were effectively internalizing resentment and suppressing human passions, and went on to argue that the cure to this was to be found in the “free spirits” being those able to break free from this endless pattern of idealized self-destruction by getting back in touch with their own human drives, who love fate, who are (or do not resent) the strong and who reject notions of absolute ideal truth. What Rand does is take this view literary and argue that rather than rejecting it you should buy into a ideal - that further that it is objectively the only ideal, there being only one reality - that is ultimately for the benefit of those at the top of the pyramid, that represent the ideal man - her interpretation of the free spirits - and that society should be constructed only for the benefit of these people. That all the problems of society come about due to rejecting this and suppressing the elite - who would magically solve all the world’s problems if they were given free reign to pursue their own selfish goals. Really, it’s like the difference between devil worship and atheism, the latter rejects religion itself while the former gives up and decides to join the comic relief.

–edit, Wow if I known that I would have made best of Reddit I would have actually spent more time editting the post for clarity rather than giving up half way through and deciding to go to bed. It’s a jumble to be sure.

A still-very-relevant 9-year old article. Pandas has gone from strength to strength since he wrote that.

In terms of expressing your computations, Hadoop is strictly inferior to SQL. There is no computation you can write in Hadoop which you cannot write more easily in either SQL, or with a simple Python script that scans your files.

SQL is a straightforward query language with minimal leakage of abstractions, commonly used by business analysts as well as programmers. Queries in SQL are generally pretty simple. They are also usually very fast - if your database is properly indexed, multi-second queries will be uncommon.

Hadoop does not have any conception of indexing. Hadoop has only full table scans. Hadoop is full of leaky abstractions - at my last job I spent more time fighting with java memory errors, file fragmentation and cluster contention than I spent actually worrying about the mostly straightforward analysis I wanted to perform.

If your data is not structured like a SQL table (e.g., plain text, json blobs, binary blobs), it’s generally speaking straightforward to write a small python or ruby script to process each row of your data. Store it in files, process each file, and move on. Under circumstances where SQL is a poor fit, Hadoop will be less annoying from a programming perspective. But it still provides no advantage over simply writing a Python script to read your data, process it, and dump it to disk.

In addition to being more difficult to code for, Hadoop will also nearly always be slower than the simpler alternatives. SQL queries can be made very fast by the judicious use of indexes - to compute a join, PostgreSQL will simply look at an index (if present) and look up the exact key that is needed. Hadoop requires a full table scan, followed by re-sorting the entire table. The sorting can be made faster by sharding across multiple machines, but on the other hand you are still required to stream data across multiple machines. In the case of processing binary blobs, Hadoop will require repeated trips to the namenode in order to find and process data. A simple python script will require repeated trips to the filesystem.

From over 10 years ago (I’m sorting through my old bookmarks). A single object looks like this:

{
    "ACCTOUNT_NUMBER":"1234567890",
    "CUSTOMER_NAME":"ACME Products and Services, Inc.",
    "ADDRESS":"123 Main Street",
    "CITY":"Albuquerque",
    "STATE":"NM",
    "ZIP":"87101-1234"
}

He tested the usability of a given browser while it loaded between 1 and 1,000,000 such records.

From this test, I am considering the sweet spot to be around 10,000 records at (1.55MB). The maximum number of usable records I would push to a browser would be around 25,000 records (3.87MB). Keep in mind there are numerous factors to keep in mind when determining how many records you should return to your JavaScript application. The purpose of this test was to help identify a general maximum number for conversations around large record sets with JSON.

Would love to see an updated version of the tests.