Yesterday's not here.

[reddragdiva]

• Never let anyone try to claim or imply that the Daily Mail is not as blatantly racist as it thinks it can get away with.

• It's not just Conservapedia — other Christian fundamentalists actively fight ungodly mathematics.

• A fine "shut up and take my money!" rant.

• She did four whole marijuanas.

• For all that the GNOME devs talk about GNOME 3 being for touch, the evidence is that not a single GNOME dev owns a touchscreen device.

• RationalWiki: NXIVM, Rick Ross.

More stuff clearance. Lorenzo M-1 Mandolin with hard case and chord book, £30 start £50 buy it no. The violin went in about three hours, get in quick.

I really need to get the records put up and sold. Troy Tate hit "Love Is ..." is the only good song on a really terrible album that's deservedly forgotten. I should learn. Deckchairs Overboard were a thoroughly pointless entity: one good 2'26" single and a world of suburban funk. Pete Shelley XL-1 and Homosapien have two good songs between them and sound like demos (Rushent Human League plus guitars) because Homosapien was actually supposed to be the fourth Buzzcocks album AAAAAAAA. I suppose I should stop telling you these things.

Captain Vorpatril's Alliance, like Cryoburn, reads like author-written fanfic. Horribly fluffy, nothing happens to the characters, the fannish exposition on names.

Freda is going utterly stir-crazy on holiday. It seems two adults aren't that entertaining to a five-year-old. The museums are getting a fair whack of our cash, though.

Comments

I'm forever blowing Beelzebubbles

[hairyears]

I think the Wingnuts have a problem with Set Theory because of the name: should've called it Job theory or Elijah theory, anything that doesn't sound like Set-Ankh.

Re: I'm forever blowing Beelzebubbles

[reddragdiva]

Ecclesiastes-theory; it's one of the few well-written bits, so they never actually look at it.

[holdthesky]

The recent paradigm shift gambit for tablets reminds me of the screenreader argument a few years ago, as a conversation-closing argument for people who were so convinced that the world was as they believed that they were prepared to marshal any argument which might convince someone of their position whether or not it was sound.

When screenreaders became a significant issue for work (ie when it became a legal matter), I went to speak to a couple of people in the screenreading business who described the state of the art to me and the amount of penetration and direction of change. I then got a couple of screenreaders. It was obvious that people who used the screenreader gambit for semantically-marked up HTML or lack of javascript-delivered content had never used one. (There are important accommodations for screenreaders but they were very little to do with any of the causes they were applied to: much of it is actually around copywriting).

The reason this was particularly galling was that I usually agreed with the cause of the people who arguing for good HTML and unobtrusive and minimal javascript. There are all kinds of reasons for this, and I'm sure you know them, and I think it's right to do your best to explain to people in power of the dangers of ambiguity in grotty parsers, of the ability to better index and reuse content, of the possibilities semantic web, and so on. And if you can't argue that case to the people who make the decisions, then you shouldn't do it.

These days, everyone is a designer, and wants to choose colour-schemes and interaction paradigms and be minimalism dictators despite no background or experience in the field. Ontology is out and Aesthetics is in. Rich fellows say "You must do it like this for design reasons" when they mean, "I want to design this", [which if you are employed by them you probably should, but you should probably also tell them that you disagree (once), and not believe that the decision was anything other than the consequence of power unless more compelling evidence comes to light].

The reason the screenreader worked was that most people didn't have access to a screenreader, didn't really want to "soil" their perfect selves in the world of disability, and there was enough legal FUD that people payed attention.

The reason the tablet argument works (for now) is that tablets are insanely expensive toys (for what you get for them) which you're increasingly likely to own and have access to as you move up the power pyramid.

If someone manages part of a corporation where this game is played I recommend they buy a tablet and say "show me", when someone tries!

When tablets become cheap and ubiquitous I look forward to the next "my invisible gadget says you must" gambit.

[tcpip]

I suspect the fundies aren't happy with the way Cantorian set theory treats zero, either.

[greylock]

Pete Shelley XL-1 and Homosapien have two good songs between them

Not sure I agree, but you may have a point with XL-1. I can't remember the last time I listened to that.

Homosapien was actually supposed to be the fourth Buzzcocks album

That I did not know. It sound so not Buzzcocksy.

[loosechanj]

FIVE YEAR OLD? But she was just born last month! O_o