Wikipedia informs: Verlan is a type of jargon in the French language, featuring inversion of syllables in a word, and is common in slang and youth language. […] Some verlan words, such as meuf, have become so commonplace that they have been included in the Petit Larousse. Like any slang, the purpose of verlan is to create a somewhat secret language that only its speakers can understand. Words becoming …
Tag: macro
Notes on 2001: A Space Odyssey
Pushed by the recent flurry of articles on Apollo and the history of space flight, I went and watched for the millionth time 2001: A Space Odyssey. Every time I go back to Kubrick’s masterpiece, there’s always something new to find and notice. This is what caught my eyes this time. Earth seen from space …
The Global Consciousness Project
[Citation not needed] The Global Consciousness Project (GCP, also called the EGG Project) is a parapsychology experiment begun in 1998 as an attempt to detect possible interactions of “global consciousness” with physical systems. The project monitors a geographically distributed network of hardware random number generators in a bid to identify anomalous outputs that correlate with …
The thin line between quaint-retro and plain-obsolete
In 2016 the news of an auto shop in Poland still using a Commodore 64 for balancing driveshafts became very popular. The idea of a 25 years old computer still performing its task seemed to both fuel the story of ancient technology being sturdier than the modern one, and instill respect towards a mechanic who refuses to bend …
Reading air
[Citation not needed] A common phrase “Ba no Kuuki wo Yomu”, “understanding the situation without words” or “sensing someone’s feelings”, is a very important concept for understanding Japanese culture. […] Sensing and practicing “Bano Kuuki wo Yomu” is considered social manners or social intelligence in Japan. Unlike the individualistic and expressive cultures in Western countries, …
Letter to the opera singer I met last night
Dear opera singer, I wish I asked your name after meeting you in the cafe des artistes of Luxembourg yesterday night. Instead, all I’m left with is the feeling that you are a great guy and that being an opera singer is a fabulous “job”. You tried to convince me that it’s a job like …
Turn your Twitter history in a micro-blog
Imports tweets, images and videos from your tweet archive to your Wordpress blog. Ever more distrustful of social media companies, I decided to import my tweets on my blog.
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Just Call Apeldoorn
The small city of Apeldoorn is home to one of the most successful Dutch insurance companies: Centraal Beheer. The company built a reputation creating tv advertisements that prove in 30 to 60-second the importance of being insured. In each ad, some kind of disaster looms (but is rarely shown) and the historical slogan reminds viewers …
…and deep work
In the previous post I described my personal history of regular increments of RAM in my working computers with the notable exceptions of the transitions Desktop->Laptop and Laptop->Handheld and how those transitions allowed me to appreciate a brand new type of productivity. But what does it mean to use a very low memory device on a daily …
Shallow RAM…
The first computer I played with, in the late 80s, was a Commodore 64 that came with 64 Kilobytes of RAM. Early in the 90s, I was lucky enough to upgrade to a Commodore Amiga, which was a bounce in capabilities the likely of which I rarely saw ever since. The Amiga came with half …