jeremyswank

if sifter is out, then something like sift could be winnow or winnower. might be a bit obscure for non-agrarians, but it has 'win' in it!

well, a sieve sifts, how about sifter?

the short answer is i don't know. however the kartvelian group consists of only four languages, geographically near each other, and they are 'closely related[1]' according to wikipedia. one might expect a some degree of mutual intelligibility, as between czech and slovak, for example.

[1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kartvelian_languages)

in georgian, 'mama' is father, and 'deda' is mother. it is a striking exception.

Indeed, also possible.

Either that, or our methods for dating geological strata are flawed.

This is interesting. Superficially at least, it reminds me of MAX/MSP or PureData, which are used to create music and other media. For me, it has the same shortcoming: it is very 'mousey', and with MAX/MSP and PureData at least, I grow tired of using them quickly because of this. Basically, I would like to use the keyboard for everything. Still, I respect the work, and I imagine this type of environment could be given a (perhaps VIM-like) mode that could enable keyboard selection and chaining of widgets.

Agree. Beyond that, I'd say that it is more of an expression of culture than it is an expression of technology. (Carefully noting that these cannot be easily separated, anyway.) "The Web" as currently practiced is more of a craft (and at best, and art) than it is a technical exercise.

Certainly, is inelegant and even ugly in places: much like the tool we humans (maybe should) value most: natural language. Natural language is fraught with inconsistencies and wtf's we have kind of made it up as we've gone along (standards academies notwithstanding).

Think of how lovely an eflorescence it is of the workings of the mind, and how well it serves one of our deepest aspirations: to connect with another thinking being and share our thoughts.

I am familiar with flicker fusion, and many of the theories that account for it, as well as Purkyně's pionering work in these matters. But my sense of it is that it is a neurological phenomenon, the brain and the eye working together (happy to be corrected, though).

So I still conclude that light falls continunously on the retina, and is continuously processed. But, I will further nuance this, by stating that, in the very contrived and special circumstance of very similar images in sequence, representing motion, appearing in rapid progression at a certain controlled rate, are spontaneously perceived as motion (an illusion) by the brain and the eye working together to make sense of a visual phenomenon that does not exist in nature, but only under artificial circumstances.

Our eyes don't have a 'frame rate' at all. Light falls on the retina continuously and is continuously processed, if I understand correctly.

I don't think it would work very well if it were the people who agreed with a study to somehow also have the obligation to point out its flaws. Could we believe that they were being thorough in finding problems if the conclusions supported their own beliefs? It works better, I think, if the challenger takes an adversarial, but not actually hostile, position. And, of course, for both sides to have open minds, but I realize that is often too much to ask.

I don't really understand the hate on Times. It's more or less the perfect neutral font when you want to say "I didn't make a choice because this document is of a nature where a design choice need not or should not be made." It is sufficiently serious that the reader is not distracted from the content of the writing by the character of the letter forms. It's neutral, and a non-choice, in my opinion.

philosophical (or philological question): is having a word for 'nothing' the same as having a number 'zero'? my answer would be no. when zero entered western civilization from the east, my understanding is that it triggered profound changes. yet indo-european languages have probably pretty much always had a word for 'nothing'.

I picked up a similar system a few years ago, I don't remember the source, but it depends on always using 2 sets of brackets (thus, fewer rules to remember):

blah blah [][add something] blah blah

blah blah [delete this][] blah blah

blah blah [error][correction] blah blah

Read it as: "replace the first brackets' contents with contents of the second bracket".

An optional third set of brackets would be a comment or explanation.

In my opinion, this simplified ruleset can be used even to correct texts for people who do not dig being asked to memorize 'a lot of rules' and they often end up really liking its clarity.

edit: formatting

when british english was transplanted to north america, a separate geographic context was created for one and the same language. a relative isolation was imposed by an ocean between them, and each continued to change over time. british and american english descend from a common ancestor.

you're going to have to take that argument a bit farther for it to be convincing.

if by "flaws" you really mean "unique qualities" that give a medium its character.

"Don’t allow yourself to fall in love with the camera. Keep it in its place and keep your eye open for those little moments you didn’t plan for. It’s my definition of what it is to be a movie director: A man who presides over accidents." -Orson Welles

Sublime Text

SEEKING WORK. remote, US citizen based in Prague. Long or short-term projects. Specialize in cultural and artistic contexts, but willing to work on any interesting project. General skills, HTML, CSS, PHP, Javascript/jQuery, Drupal, git, photoshop, final cut pro, after effects, logic. Combine skills of a visual artist with ability to solve problems in code. MFA from U of Iowa.

couple of points:

in english usage 'human race' generally equates to 'human species'

the singular is 'species' with an 's'. if you look it up you will find that 'specie' means something quite different (it has to do with money).

fundamentally, how do we distinguish between 'simulation' and 'reality'? if a simulation (of any sort) exists, it is therefore real. how would a hypothetically 'simulated' universe be any different from a 'real' one?

further, proposed research that seeks to 'reveal' the universe as a 'computer simulation' suggests a limited vision. why must it be a 'computer' doing the simulating? maybe the universe (in some sense) 'computes' itself in coming into existence (think cellular automata or things of the like). if so, then it is not a 'simulation' coming into being, but 'reality' itself.

i will simply state that it is not surprising to me that 'simulations' and 'realities' have much in common -- so it is not surprising that might be mistaken for the other.

in any event, these ideas are off the top my head, i don't know how seriously to take them.

either that, or you have a rope, or "line", attached to something heavy, such as a barge on a canal, and you have to help "tow the line" to get the cargo moving.

sounds to me like they were trying to feed the hungry. i suppose it all comes down to your perspective.

how about this: copyright is a moral right pertaining to the creator (or group of creators). it cannot be transferred. it cannot be sold to a corporation. it cannot be inherited. it lasts 14 years without fee, and you can renew it up to 2 times for a fee (as was the tradition before, if i am not mistaken).

my assumption is (roughly) that if copyright is intended to encourage and support creative output, then only the actual creators should be the beneficiaries of it.

(i don't know if i really think this would be the best -- or even a good -- system, in a way i'm trying it on for size and want to hear what others think.)

this has interesting possiblities. but i consider it broken unless/until it supports scrolling with the spacebar, like ever other web page. fyi, i'm on firefox 11 osx.

if you use [add-on compatibility reporter](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compat...) then you can tell firefox to use 'incompatible' extensions anyway. most of the time they work just fine.

agreed; i've been runing quicksilver non-stop since before the developer passed the project on to others. for a time, it was sluggish and caused some problems. but i have no complaints to speak of about the last couple iterations.

i switched to quicksilver from launchbar, in spite of the fact that i'd paid good money for launchbar. it's not so much that something was wrong with launchbar; it's only that quicksilver was noticeably better in many respects (flexibility, esthetics, flow), imho.

1) invoke spotlight 2) hightlight the file of interest (arrow keys work) 3) do command R 4) a new finder window will appear with your file selected.

however, i much prefer quicksilver; it does a lot more than spotlight.

Prague (Vršovice)