xhxhxhx:

nostalgebraist:

The tiny public record reveals a man of exacting and perhaps unreasonable standards, sued by his household staff in a dispute over, among other things, partially filled shampoo bottles. He has emerged very occasionally and cast himself as a computer nerd with a romantic attachment to machines.

Mercer’s employees claim that they were given small-dollar demerits for poor performance. The Washington Post is not sympathetic:

In the laundry list of alleged offenses for which the employees said their pay was docked — including failing to replace shampoos if there was less than one-third of a bottle remaining, failing to leave extra towels in the bathroom, failing to level pictures and improperly counting beverages — one stands out.

Failing to properly close doors.

I must be missing something. Doesn’t everyone find failing to properly close doors intolerable? Or is this (merely) a telling anecdote?

I think they just singled that out as a metaphor for his desire to live a secretive existence, without necessarily implying that it’s an especially unusual preference.

(via xhxhxhx)

asocratesgonemad replied to your post: Not only is their life on other planets, and…

For a second I thought this was from the Sequences

It’s from John C. Wright, who, incidentally, turns up briefly in the Sequences as an example of the grave dangers of … believing in the existence of “universally compelling moral arguments.”  The passage sounds almost like an anti-drug PSA:

John C. Wright, who was previously writing a very nice transhumanist trilogy (first book: The Golden Age) inserted a huge Author Filibuster in the middle of his climactic third book, describing in tens of pages his Universal Morality That Must Persuade Any AI.  I don’t know if anything happened after that, because I stopped reading.  And then Wright converted to Christianity – yes, seriously.  So you really don’t want to fall into this trap!

Universal Morality That Must Persuade Any AI: Not Even Once

blashimov:

nostalgebraist:

The college handbook forbids students to embrace or promote “doctrinal errors” from the 4th through the 21st centuries, “such as Arianism, Socinianism, Pelagianism, Skepticism, Feminism.” If drawn to such ideas, they must “inform the administration immediately and honestly in a letter offering to withdraw from the College.”

Wtf college is this Clearly a hokey religious one But which

It’s New Saint Andrews College (quote is from this article), which is part of a weird, frightening little religious subculture I just spent a night of insomnia reading all about

(via blashimov)

Wherr the Hell are you getting this stuff

The last few quotes come from a blog called The Untranslated about notable books that have not been translated into English

nostalgebraist:

When Ernst Kol’man denounced his former teacher as an enemy of the revolution in 1931, it was on the grounds that Marxist mathematics must remain within the framework of philosophical materialism. Deploying the mathematical arguments developed by earlier mathematicians like Émile Borel against Cantor’s transfinite numbers, he criticized Luzin’s “inability to understand the unity of continuous and discrete” and denounced him for teaching that numbers “exist as a function of the mind of the mathematician.” Only Josef Stalin’s direct intervention saved Luzin from sharing the fate of his friend Florensky, freezing to death in Siberia.

#what’s the source?

“Badiou’s Number: A Critique of Mathematics as Ontology” by Ricardo L. Nirenberg and David Nirenberg

(Also notable for having an author description that ends with “The authors are father and son”)

(via squidwardsnowden-deactivated201)

I want to read this one cause I assume it’s lit analysis or meta lit

You’re in luck

Source? (Is it rude to ask sources for your quotes?)

Not rude at all!  Though I recommend Googling them if you’re curious, since many of them are from the web, and even if they’re from books, Google will often turn up the source via Google books.

This one is from a blog post by Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, who seems like … a much weirder person than one might expect from that claim to fame.

Source?

Here.

brazenautomaton:

nostalgebraist:

brazenautomaton:

nostalgebraist:

Social justice warriors (SJWs) are like the weather.

…Okay, your #quotes tag may be getting out of hand. This one is so abrupt and so short of context I can’t even tell what position it is supposed to be humiliating toward, or why. There are dozens of ways you could complete that thought, some of which are something you would want to shame, some of which are entirely reasonable. Depending on how you completed it, it could be advocating completely different viewpoints (for you to mock).

It’s like quoting “I like my women like I like my coffee.” and ending it there.

I think you’re reading my tag as having a more specific purpose than it does.  The only unifying feature is “I thought it would be fun to post this with no context.”

Sometimes that’s because it’s a self-evidently absurd statement and I want people to wonder why anyone might possibly say it, but in other cases it’s because the quote is just pretty, or enigmatic, or one of a bunch of other things.  Or elsewhere – which is what’s going on here – the “no context” part is doing most of the work: the quote has context that makes it clear what is meant, but without that clarification, it lends itself to various strange interpretations.  What you’re seeing as a bug is, in this case, the whole point of the exercise.

And there’s multiple contexts you could put “I like my women like I like my coffee” into, with multiple endings that change its meaning. But if you just say “I like my women like I like my coffee” and end it there, I’m going to be saying “…And the rest of that sentence is?” no matter how you insist it was the point of the exercise.

And then I will make up an ending on your behalf: “Ground up and in my freezer.”

This is a strange comparison.  “I like my women like I like my coffee” is a pre-existing joke setup – you are supposed to follow it with some sort of description that technically applies to both “women” and “coffee” but is otherwise jarring or odd.  The only reason it would feel incomplete is that there’s already a social convention of uttering that specific phrase with something else after it.

If there weren’t such a social convention, then “I like my women like I like my coffee” would absolutely be the sort of thing I would quote out of context – no obviously “correct” interpretation, lots of strange possibilities, generally just an odd thing to say (again, this is in a hypothetical world where that is not a familiar joke format).

And, okay, maybe you just don’t like that kind of broad-ambiguity-based humor, but at that point I’m not sure what I can do?  It’s hard to “prove” to someone that a joke is funny if they don’t find it funny.  One can’t refute a lack of laughter.

(via brazenautomaton)