Baradu
(a fragment)
By dark Mordor did Sauron once
a black and monstrous tower devise
on Gorgoroth the haunted plain
that rotted with an unclean stain
under the sunless skys.
So there on hills of smoldering ash
orcs toiled beneath the screaming lash,
and there were turrets builded of black stones
that iron-crowned rose into Mordor-night
and dungeons sunk into Earth’s tortured bones
whose topmost levels never knew the light.
But, oh!, that abyss iron-bridged that moated
the Barad-Dur about with emptyness—
a chasm steep, rock-tumbled and soot-coated
where ever and anon the black mists floated
up from the pits flame-filled and bottomless…
(at this point, unfortunately, a person from Pasadena intruded, destroying the mood.)
==========
Saurry about that.
Andrew Plotkin @ 60 --
I recall reading about someone vibrated to death by a very large experimental infrasonic levavasseur whistle. There's been a lot of sonic weapons research, but it tends to be for specialized uses.
ACW @ 8: I just followed Abi's spelling; I haven't looked at my Láadan dictionary in ages. But my question was the important part. Has there been a Láadan language-building effort?
Has Laádan grown enough vocabulary for a Wikipedia?
Jason Battersby extrapolates the technology to great-looking rideable four-legged robots:
http://www.coroflot.com/public/individual_set.asp?individual_id=95515&set_id=310275
Meanwhile an onion processing plant is converted to get its electric power from onion juice:
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-onions-fuel17-2009jul17,0,5226835.story
I like Rice Boy (URL below), which takes place in a very strange universe that has no human characters, but is (I think) much more accessable than the comics on Dresden Codak (which I also like), and the universe is less strange than the one that Beanworld takes place in. Rice Boy is a 439-page graphic novel (divided into five books, totaling 39 chapters and an epilogue), and is complete in itself.
http://www.rice-boy.com/
Bruce E. Durocher II @ #41: Wow. I used to collect all these neat structural things that never got used. And I spent some time trying to get people interested in a company I had run across that was injection molding tiny octet truss sections for structural cores. I was able to stand on one of their half-inch-thick samples which looked flimsier than a toothpick model.
OtterB @ #53, and others, down to at least
Erik Nelson @ #77: "Fleury's Ray, from Kipling's With The Night Mail, is an explanation so elaborate you don't notice it doesn't make any sense."
Really good handwaving, as we say, and one of my favorites. The story is available on the net, with the illustrations and the original fake ads designed to run with it, from the same "universe".
Bucky Fuller calculated that you could build workable super-light vacuum-filled structures, if you had a technology that let you make them out of vast numbers of nanoscale geodesic elements. So the actual limit seems to be slightly-heaver-than-vacuum, with trade-offs for making implosions less likely. Maybe lots of vacuum-filled microballoons?
Tom Whitmore @ #78, #79: I am always apalled by the way we throw away helium. I shall avoid ranting here. (Arrrrg!!!!!)
I checked out the walkability site, and got a 94 for where I live, but their list missed most of the local businesses. There are three farmers' markets close by. There were a couple of huge second-hand places here, but they moved farther off, and I now often take the bus instead of walking to them. There's a local place where volunteers rebuild old computers and household electronics and get them to people who need them. And so on.
I've been doing most of this stuff for ages, mostly by accident (for instance, I didn't move here for the walkability or the many wonderful small businesses, and I picked a highly rated local bank because it was the closest one), or from the educational effects of many years of not knowing where the next month's money would be coming from. But I do a bunch of it Because It's A Good Thing, too. A good neighborhood is a treasure.
Rogues of Wool is some of the best of that sort of thing I've seen since Walt Kelly's Pogo comics. Wow.
Madeline Kelly @188 - Lots of places do just say "Digital Art Prints", but others use "giclee" (ideally with a tic mark over the first "e"), which means "invented french word for ink-jet print":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giclee
I thought that Being There was pretty true to the book. It helped that it was a short book.
rm @ 31 -- What I most object to about the Disney Mary Poppins is that it is so mundane and prosaic compared to the books. Total failure of nerve and imagination. Feh.
You people are awesomely good. (Trolls excepted.)
Going to the whocalled.us page, I noticed this ad in the lower right corner:
----------
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Ads by Google
----------
Serge (40) - I was in the Army, which has the same saying (right way, wrong way, insert-appropriate-authority-here way); and the official, or by-the-book way has the virtues that everybody knows it (or should) and everybody can expect it. In other words, standards are good. Decades of experience with hardware and software have convinced me that this is "true enough for government work". Though, as Admiral Hopper implied, the good may be the enemy of the better. Also, the saying involving problems and sufficient amounts of high explosives ("If you have a lot of high explosives, every problem looks like...") may sometimes lead to sub-optimal solutions.
The "type casting" or "too easy" cast:
Curly - Wash
Ado Annie - Kaylee
Will Parker - Simon
Aunt Eller - River
Laurey - Zoe
Ali Hakim - Mal
Andrew - Book
Jud Fry - Jayne
Gertie - Inara
(obviously some of these fit way better than others)
In "actual practice", or "Serenity dynamics", substitute
Ali Hakim - Jayne
Andrew - Mal
Jud Fry - Book
(obviously arguable, else why this thread?)
Or we can re-write all paradoxes to include an omnipotent God. Can an omnipotent God say, truthfully, that all its statements are false?
Ginger @ 31: "When I studied toxicology I learned that there are no such animals as "side effects". There are "wanted effects" and "unwanted effects". The unwanted ones come in flavors like "benign" and "adverse"."
I have a hard time getting this across to people, especially the idea that this applies not just to drugs, but to everything. As some Brit engineer once said, things have no purpose, they just do what they do, and the purpose of engineering is to arrange things so that the results you like are maximised and the results you don't want are minimised, so far as is possible; these two goals sometimes being antagonistic and therefor requireing trade-offs. Not understanding this principle leads to ideas like "if one pill is good for you, two pills must be twice as good".
Kip W @ 449 -- What I want is a text file of the lyrics to Yama Yama Man. And now that I've heard Mysterious Rag, I'd like a text file of those lyrics also....
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 10 |
| 2008 | 13 |
| 2007 | 6 |
| 2006 | 4 |
| 2005 | 3 |
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