Ramblings & ephemera
From Gene Weingarten’s “The Peekaboo Paradox: The strange secrets of humor, fear and a guy who makes big money making little people laugh” (The Washington Post: 22 January 2006): Even before they respond to a tickle, most babies will laugh at peekaboo. It’s their first “joke.” They are reacting to a sequence of events that [...]
Posted on November 6th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: language & literature, science | No Comments »
Q: How do you tell an introverted computer scientist from an extroverted computer scientist? A: An extroverted computer scientist looks at your shoes when he talks to you. Knock, knock. Who’s there? very long pause…. Java. Saying that Java is nice because it works on every OS is like saying that anal sex is nice [...]
Posted on October 30th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: cool stuff, language & literature | No Comments »
From David Foster Wallace’s “Laughing With Kafka” (Harper’s Magazine: July 1998, pg. 26): … the really central Kafka joke – that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. Related [...]
Posted on April 18th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, language & literature | No Comments »
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Posted on April 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, language & literature, on writing, science, writing ideas | Enter your password to view comments.
From Natalie Angier’s “In One Ear and Out the Other” (The New York Times: 16 March 2009): In understanding human memory and its tics, Scott A. Small, a neurologist and memory researcher at Columbia, suggests the familiar analogy with computer memory. We have our version of a buffer, he said, a short-term working memory of [...]
Posted on March 17th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From THE MATHEMATICS OF LOVE: A Talk with John Gottman (Edge: 14 April 2004): So far, his surmise is that “respect and affection are essential to all relationships working and contempt destroys them. It may differ from culture to culture how to communicate respect, and how to communicate affection, and how not to do it, [...]
Posted on February 6th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From James Bennett’s “Let’s talk about Python 3.0” (The B-List: 5 December 2008): There’s an old joke, so old that I don’t even know for certain where it originated, that’s often used to explain why big corporations do things the way they do. It involves some monkeys, a cage, a banana and a fire hose. [...]
Posted on December 7th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, politics | No Comments »
From “Fort Henry and Fort Donelson“: Shortly after the surrender of Fort Sumter, Confederates built two forts just south of the border of Tennessee and Kentucky. … Fort Henry guarded the Tennessee River while Fort Donelson guarded the Cumberland. … The key to rolling up the Confederate defense of the Mississippi River was the capture [...]
Posted on April 16th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: Fort Sumter to Perryville (166): Asked how he enjoyed his office [of President], [Lincoln] told of a tarred and feathered man out West, who, as he was being ridden out of town on a rail, heard one among the crowd call to him, asking how he liked it, high [...]
Posted on April 16th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, language & literature, politics | Comments Off
A postmodern joke from Disinfotainment: How many deconstructionists does it take to screw in a light bulb? Even the framing of this question makes a grid of patriarchal assumptions that reveals a slavish devotion to phallocentric ideas – such as, technical accomplishment has inherent value, knowledge can be attained and quantities of labor can be [...]
Posted on November 27th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book | Comments Off
