I'm glad to see the e-mail addresses are gone from the VAB links. I was hoping that would get fixed in the upgrade process. On those very same comment history pages, you have either the default of "view past 20" or the overkill "view all by". It would be very nice to have some form of pagination on those.
I also noticed while previewing this comment that on the preview comment pages you're using a different template than on the main post page. It's just a slight thing, but there ought to be a way to include the same template/sub-template so you don't have to change things in two places every time you update the site. (I'd know, except I've never used MT.)
Good to hear things are getting better on the backend. Those are the changes that are least noticed by the end-users, but still extremely important. Keep it up :)
Last summer my family (visiting me at the end of a semester abroad in the UK) took a day to drive through the Alps from Luzern to Lugano. What astonished me was an old cobblestone road that meandered alongside the modern highway. On the other side of St. Gotthard, coming down an endless series of switchbacks, we saw people making road improvements. Next to them, of course, was a pile of cobbles.
Coming back down out of the Alps is pretty astonishing as well. A mere fifteen minutes or so between ringing cowbells and sun-drenched vineyards. They brought to mind those early landscapes that dealt with aerial perspective, with the rich blues of the deep background against the vibrant greens of the foreground. I think the most amazing thing about European mountain ranges is the complete integration of civilization into the terrain. Castles on the rocky outcroppings, churches on hillocks, and villages nestled into narrow valleys. Like Chinese landscapes, they seem much more impressive when you can see the tiny figures against the cliffs.
I love both extremes, but I'm more familiar with mountains as remote wilderness. So the Alps were particularly intriguing.
I'm afraid there's not much contrast between subject and style, but here's the tagline from The Nest, by Gregory A. Douglas:
It was an ordinary Cape Cod town — until the huge mutants began to leave their nest...
And here's an excerpt. The entire book is just as bad:
The vermin were squealing with agony as they sprang into the night air. Their writhing bodies were as bizarre as their gyrations and screaking; they were covered not with fur, but with what seemed to be shells, scintillating in the moonlight. The pinpricks of fire on their rodent bodies flashed crazily over the dump with a metallic sheen until there was a quick change to the crimson of blood. The rats were cloaked in sequins of death; a nightmare scene out of an animal hell.
As Dave @ 9 has said, you seem to be forgetting that heaviness must be the reason he can't move it. Heaviness requires gravity. It also requires an external gravitational gradient to work against. It seems that a rock in a universe composed strictly of itself would not cut it, because "lifting" requires a higher position.
Answers that rely on choice fail, because the question isn't "will he move it" but "can he move it".
Answers that rely on definitional aspects of God show some potential, because we can say he is constitutionally unable to do things. The problem then becomes how God is defined. If he cannot cause evil things to occur, then Jeff R. @ 46 comes close. But in his example, all God has to do is lift the load himself while removing the rock and lifting it. It would be very difficult to invent a situation where an omnipotent being cannot solve it in another way. Especially if he can bend the laws of the universe.
But all this is just beating around the bush. When you come down to it, the term "omnipotence" as it is used in this paradox is meaningless. As meaningless as saying that God can create a Turing machine that can solve the halting problem. It may be fun to think about, but it has very little to do with theology.
Sadly, I'm contributing not at all to the humor. So my contribution is just as meaningless as the serious part of the discussion. *sigh*
DavidS @ 56:
Very nice. I was wondering if there was a more comprehensive grep dictionary somewhere out there. I guess there's a tradeoff between having more words and being less searchable -- the Regex Dictionary could search for particular parts of speech, etc.
(Since DavidS's link didn't actually get posted, here it is: National Puzzlers' League Dictionary Grep.)
Manifeste du surréalisme, his greatest work. Certainly the most important brtn to ever grace the Earth.
Regex Dictionary: ^[aeiou]*b[aeiou]*r[aeiou]*t[aeiou]*n[aeiou]*$ (case insensitive)
It seems to me that Packbat's second bullet point is phrased so as to obscure the true intent:
A copyright ... should be restricted to precisely as long a term as would make equivalent the harm done to the public by monopoly and the good provided by encouraging the creation of new works.
Unless I'm mistaken, the actual goal should be to minimize the "harm done to the public by monopoly" and to maximize the "good provided by encouraging the creation of new works." To balance the two would render the law pointless, as it would have no net gain.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 3 |
| 2008 | 2 |
| 2007 | 3 |
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