They mocked partial differential equations as “partial irreverential equations” and finite differences as “fine night differences.”

Featured Fact of the Month: The Shrouded Entity is not a real demon. He’s a Blue Spectral Marlquaanite who often impersonates one.

The instrument’s name comes from the Greek word ophis (ὄφις)“serpent” + kleis (κλείς) “keys”, since it was conceived of as a serpent with keys.

Balfour’s will was too strong to admit philosophy, unless it was of the soundest empirical sort; his liberality could make no sense of despair, which was to him as a fathomless shaft, possessed of depth but not of breadth, stifled in its isolation, navigable only by touch, and starved of any kind of curiosity.  He had no real fascination with the soul, and saw it only as a pretext for the greater, livelier mysteries of humor and adventure; of the soul’s dark nights, he had no opinion.  He often said that the only inner void to which he paid any kind of notice was appetite, and although he laughed when he said it, and seemed very well pleased, it was true that his sympathy rarely extended to situations where sympathy was expected to extend.  He was indulgent toward the open spaces of other men’s futures, but he was impatient with the shuttered quarters of their pasts.

(Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries)

I got The Luminaries as a Christmas present, and so far it is as dazzling as they say

I wondered how she would survive in the world without an ass.  Everyone needs a cushion.  Maybe I could be that for her.

Ironically, the people who were most convinced of their own objectivity discriminated the most.  Although self-reported endorsement of sexist attitudes didn’t predict hiring bias, self-reported objectivity in decision making did.

However, an interest in Star Trek and an antisocial lifestyle may not, in fact, be unassailable correlates of talent in computer programming.

In this context, we don’t even need to talk about physical existence or life as opposed to non-life inanimate kinds of frameworks. Each existence has its own special quality which can only be perceived in the N dimensional framework of a larger helical expansion outwards implying some kind of interface area.

In another, which happened a bit after my semi-retirement, the micronational world’s largest communist country, with thirty highly active citizens and a prominent international role, was found to be just one guy posting under thirty different names.

“I’m going to make you a plate of cruciferous vegetables, baby,” she said, and that sentence alone halved my fears.