xkcd

Dave_Wise wrote:Candide by voltaire. Just finished it. Awesome short book. If anything deserves to be a Terry Gilliam film, it's this.

It's already a Leonard Bernstein opera. Quite entertaining.

Doesn't the flag on the eight note go on the right? Or are the notes upside in the last two panels? flag changes when you flip the direction of the stem The flag (if there is one) always goes on the right. Which side of the stem the notehead goes on depends on whether the stem points up or down (up...

tzvibish wrote:Actually, Casimir Pulasky Day was the first song that actually brought me to the verge of tears.

This.

charliepanayi wrote:(let alone another US state album)

I'm given to understand that there was never any Fifty State Project. It was just a gimmick.

Man, I will have to do some searching till I find it but a couple years ago I saw a similar study where they compared people who'd gotten into elite schools but didn't go, to people who graduated from them, and it found the same thing this one did That sounds about right, since that's exactly what ...

There is, and it's called a palpably unfair act. It's the only penalty that can yield points. Well...if a penalty is called on the offense, the spot of enforcement for the penalty is the spot of the foul (such as grounding or holding behind the line of scrimmage), and the foul occurs in the end zon...

George Blanda died. Article. It really is a different league when Brett Favre seems terribly old and Blanda was playing at 46 and was perhaps most successful later in his career in Oakland. Packers v Bears: Wow. I went and bought a ref whistle to give to my Packers fan coworker so she could feel li...

In fairness, what I actually did type was the reverse of what I meant to type. It should have read: That only makes sense if you're saying that a good/great quarterback is a necessary condition for winning a championship, rather than just a sufficient one. Which is both (a) clearly absurd, and (b) n...

The thing is, most of your sportswriters are going to hold that the QB is the one position on the field that you cannot win with if you don't have someone good. I think it's fairly clear here that the consensus is that having a "quarterback...you [can] win with" implies that a good quarte...

Are you aware of the distinction between "necessary" and "sufficient"?

So, again, do you believe that Mark Rypien and Jeff Hostetler were better than Dan Marino?

I'll be impressed when he manages Lombardi number the second. Marino was a great QB, but no hardware could make up for the no-SB win. Peyton is a demon behind the center, but again, he's only won one. Because, obviously, Mark Rypien and Jeff Hostetler were so much better than Marino. I mean, it goe...

Etymology note: soccer isn't called "football" because of the kicking, but because it's played "on foot", as opposed to on horseback like polo or something. So American football is a perfectly sufficient football, as is rugby football and Aussie Rules Football. Even more, it's c...

Looks like Peyton's on his way to MVP #5...after three games, 1012 yards, 69% completion, 9 TDs, no INTs, and 116.something passer rating (please, don't call it "quarterback rating"...it's not)!

This wouldn't happen with Slackware's package-management system.

If you install locusts on Slackware, it's because you WANT to install locusts on Slackware.

Mozart did not create music. He created complex arrangements of sound, that are respectable for the degree of technical achievement they represent. But they are mechanical, regular, predictable, and mathematical. They lack any emotional, human content whatsoever; therefore, they do not constitute m...

Mozart did not create music. He created complex arrangements of sound, that are respectable for the degree of technical achievement they represent. But they are mechanical, regular, predictable, and mathematical. They lack any emotional, human content whatsoever; therefore, they do not constitute mu...

Sounds like more low-culture trash with no valid cultural value.

Many have recommended Mstislav Rostropovich's 1983 recording with the National Symphony Orchestra, but regrettably it seems that that one is not being published anymore.

Leonard Bernstein, who wouldn't know a proper and effective tempo if it jumped out of Hell and bit him in the balls, gets infinitely more acclaim than he deserves as a conductor of the compositions of others (presumably, of course, he knows how to interpret his own compositions). Particularly egregi...

Recommendation: Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond. A very, very, interesting, explanatory book about why Eurasian peoples developed sooner/faster than other peoples, and eventually ended up controlling most of the world. Explains away all of the racist misconceptions about the reasons using ...

Did anyone else listen to NPR's "Way With Words" radio program yesterday afternoon?

This comic reminds me of why I'm glad I got out of a boring, simple, meaningless technical field (aeronautical/astronautical engineering) and into something worthwhile, interesting, complex, and relevant to the human experience: history. It's because I don't have to deal with such nonsense-masquerad...