If there were visual #quotes this image could be one of them
(via shadowpeoplearejerks)
gen-adder
replied to your post “My cowardice …, my weakness … seemed to – I don’t know how to put it!…”
What is this from?
A Glastonbury Romance by John Cowper Powys. Actually, a whole bunch of my quotes from the last few months have been from this book, which is very, very good and which I highly recommend.
But it’s also very long, and I’m only (!) on p. 548 of 1120. I’ll probably write more about it when I’m done.
eka-mark
replied to your post “As a grad student at Harvard, Nelson would one day study strategy with…”
wait, is this Ed “arithmetic is inconsistent” Nelson?
Nope, it’s Ted “Computer Lib/Dream Machines” Nelson
baroquespiral replied to your post
OK what actually is this
John Cowper Powys, “A Glastonbury Romance”
Basham, he noted, was smart, knew model tricks about posing and makeup, and used social media hacks such as SEO and A/B testing. (“For example, although her Instagram photos are G-rated, any hint of side-boob adds at least 10% to her engagement.”)
n.b. this is probably one of the *less* surreal passages from that article
Yeah, the whole article is pretty fun, at least if you’re in the mood to read about Scott Adams being very Scott Adams
The hope may be that other scientists, and the rest of us who don’t care about 248-dimensional objects, may profit from this math, but there’s no guarantee.
E8?
Sounds like someone cares about 248-dimensional objects ;)
In this island, called California, there were many griffins, on account of the great ruggedness of the country, and its infinite host of wild beasts, such as never were seen in any other part of the world. And when these griffins were yet small, the women went out with traps to take them. They covered themselves over with very thick hides, and when they had caught the little griffins, they took them to their caves, and brought them up there. And being themselves quite a match for the griffins, they fed them with the men whom they took prisoners, and with the boys to whom they gave birth, and brought them up with such arts that they got much good from them, and no harm. Every man who landed on the island was immediately devoured by these griffins; and although they had had enough, none the less would they seize them, and tarry them high up in the air in their flight; and when they were tired of carrying them, would let them fall any where as soon as they died.
I went to community college in California, and I remember there was a required class that we had to take (that I think was in the English department) where we had to read the thing that this was from.
I love how it’s from the fifth book in a series of chivalric romances (a genre which you could not-too-badly approximate as “high fantasy novels”). It’s effectively like the state is named after a minor location from The Wheel of Time or something
(via theaudientvoid)
eka-mark
replied to your post “Albert says, tongue in cheek, that an agent should care about branches…”
i think you need a hidden variable theory to have just one kind of probability :)
If you’re interested, the quote was from The Emergent Multiverse by David Wallace, an extensive modern defense of MWI (from the Deutsch-Wallace decision-theoretic perspective)
(I never did get a good sense of what to make of the Deutsch-Wallace stuff, it seems like a lot of people have issues with it but Deutsch and Wallace are sticking to their guns?)
I’m curious about the author of the self-published book this is from – the grammar is so bad that it immediately looks like the work of someone whose first language is not English, but what’s odd is that it’s only the grammar that’s bad. HIs vocabulary is actually really good, and he often uses somewhat technical or esoteric terms correctly.
It’s conceivable that this could be done with heavy use of a [langauge]-to-English dictionary, but I’d expect more “totally out of place” word choices if he was doing that. Instead, the only (arguably) real problem with the diction is the frequent use of dry scientific terms, like “precipitation” in the above quote. And yet, grammar-wise, he can’t do something as simple as figure out whether he’s writing in present or past tense (it constantly shifts with no apparent rhyme or reason).
Here’s a typical sentence (p. 14):
It can be distinguishing in the distance three great rivers of lava and sulfur, zero vegetation and all is desolation.
Some of this works very well even on a phrase as opposed to word level – “three great rivers” and “all is desolation” sound convincingly elevated and Biblical. Yet the grammar is next to nonexistent.
Where do you find this stuff?
You seem to have a neverending supply of weirdness from far corners of the internet. I mean, we all see some strangeness here, but you clearly see enough for ten people.
Do people send it to you? Do you want me to link you whenever I come across anything particularly bizarre?
People will occasionally send weird stuff to me, but that’s not how I get most of it.
I find all this stuff in the natural course of browsing the web or reading books, so if I see more weirdness than other people, it’s because my natural way of interacting with these resources is different. I think it’s that I have a lot of curiosity, but it takes effort to get myself to focus on any one thing. So if you give me a web browser, and I use it in the most relaxing, minimal-effort way, I’ll end up bouncing quickly from page to page, following the links that make me most curious, and often moving continually from page to page (or opening many pages in tabs) without fully reading any one page. Of course Wikipedia is good for this. But I also do a lot of Google searches, and am willing to click on search results that make me curious even if they have nothing to do with what I was looking for.
As an example, here’s how I found the above book (reconstructed with the help of my browser history):
Last night, I reblogged a gifset from a movie called Matewan, written and directed John Sayles. I haven’t seen the movie and the gifset made me interested, so I looked it up on Wikipedia. Then I went to the Wikipedia page on John Sayles. I noticed that he was a novelist as well as a filmmaker, and wrote a novel called “A Moment in the Sun,” which I remembered noticing in bookstores when it came out because it had a cool-looking cover. I googled the book and read a review, which mentioned that it was sometimes sentimental and sometimes weird/pomo, and kicked off this observation by noting that the book mentions both Harriet Beecher Stowe and (via a minor character’s name) Thomas Pynchon. I was pretty sure Harriet Beecher Stowe was the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but I wanted to make sure, so I googled her, and ended up on her Wikipedia page, where I read a part about her writing a letter to an abolitionist named Gamaliel Bailey. Then I got curious about the origins of the name “Gamaliel,” which I had only encountered before in one other case (it’s Warren G. Harding’s middle name).
Typing “Gamaliel” into Wikipedia, I found that there was a famous 1st century CE rabbi named Gamaliel. This activated my curiosity about the topic of rabbinic literature, the Talmud, etc., which I have always wanted to learn more about, and I spent the next half hour reading many Wikipedia pages about rabbinic literature, with digressions to read about the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World (I hadn’t known that only one was still standing, nor that Greece was currently planning to build a new Colossus of Rhodes) and the Seventh-Day Adventists (I hadn’t known that they were one of the fastest-growing religious groups, or that most members lived outside the US).
While I was reading about the Babylonian Talmud (which is the text usually just called “the Talmud”), I saw that it was written in “Jewish Babylonian Aramaic,” and I wondered what that was, so I clicked on the link to its Wikipedia page. That page mentioned that “The most important epigraphic sources for the dialect are the hundreds of Aramaic magic bowls written,” and I was like “huh, what’s a magic bowl?” So I clicked that link, and on that page I found the sentence “See Jewish magical papyri for context,” and I clicked on “Jewish magical papyri.” On that page I found:
The language of the papyri may be:
• Aramaic, as in Bodleian Heb.d83, a small fragment intended for placement in a metal magical amulet, found in Oxyrhynchus with twelve lines with an invocation “by the eye of Shemihaza” “for a dog to bite someone”.[4]
[…]
Then I thought, “that invocation sounds like it might make a good #quote, but I’ve got to find it in another source, because it would be confusing to quote this sentence fragment with ‘Aramaic’ at the start.” So I tried a bunch of Google search terms – it was hard to find ones that didn’t just get me the Wikipedia page and copies of it – and at one point Googled “by the eye of Shemihaza” without hits.
And the fourth hit on that Google search was the Google books page for a book called “Heavenly Disturbance,” and I thought “huh, cool title.” So I clicked on it, and it was the self-published book I quoted in OP.
This is, more or less, how I spent a lot of my free time.
(via philippesaner)
I’m curious about the author of the self-published book this is from – the grammar is so bad that it immediately looks like the work of someone whose first language is not English, but what’s odd is that it’s only the grammar that’s bad. HIs vocabulary is actually really good, and he often uses somewhat technical or esoteric terms correctly.
It’s conceivable that this could be done with heavy use of a [langauge]-to-English dictionary, but I’d expect more “totally out of place” word choices if he was doing that. Instead, the only (arguably) real problem with the diction is the frequent use of dry scientific terms, like “precipitation” in the above quote. And yet, grammar-wise, he can’t do something as simple as figure out whether he’s writing in present or past tense (it constantly shifts with no apparent rhyme or reason).
Here’s a typical sentence (p. 14):
It can be distinguishing in the distance three great rivers of lava and sulfur, zero vegetation and all is desolation.
Some of this works very well even on a phrase as opposed to word level – “three great rivers” and “all is desolation” sound convincingly elevated and Biblical. Yet the grammar is next to nonexistent.