I should have checked out http://www.craigkerstiens.com/2013/02/21/more-out-of-psql/ years ago. A challenge since it had not been written years ago, but there you are.
I resisted getting too familiar with SQL for a long time. This was arguably a mistake, although, in my defense, it the SQL model has a lot wrong with it. But I’m slowly coming around to appreciating postgres anyway.
First, while Weird Al talks about “grammar,” most of his prescriptions do not pertain to what linguists consider the “grammar” of English, and this reflects a widespread divide between the use of the term “grammar” in everyday language and “grammar” by linguists. This divide frustrates linguists, because it makes them feel like everyone misunderstands the very substance and nature of their field of study.
Irony from the profoundly unironic. This happens occasionally.
[…] Weird Al’s violent reactions against “bad grammar” raises deep and longstanding questions of social equity regarding class, education, race, age, ethnicity, gender, and how these relate to languages, dialects, and social registers.
Fear the foisted foibles.
The original blog post is here.
A transient and not really unpleasant fishy smell in Puerto Escondido a few days ago reminded me of A Shadow Over Innsmouth, so I started to read it.
I first read it about fifteen years ago. My assessment of Lovecraft then was that he was strong on ideas, weak on character, plot, and style. But a revision of my opinion was in order. Stylistically Lovecraft was much stronger than I had realized. Indeed, I was surprised by how Borgesian Shadow was, especially in its opening pages.
A worthy rediscovery.
I bought an Android phone in January. I did not like it. At least it was cheap. (See here; defns 1, 3, and 5 are all relevant).
How cheap? It couldn’t even display polytonic Greek! Madness, I know.
This was a not insignificant factor in my decision to get a new iPhone (I lived with the same phone from 2009 through 2013 and now I’ve had two new ones in 2014) only a few months later.
Also at play was the all around Windowsiness of Android.
On the other hand: holy crap has iOS improved. It’s far more useful as a platform than it was when my first iPhone was new. And the current aesthetic is a good one.
Wikitravel’s Mexico City articles are full of information that is only relevant to people who live here or who are coming to visit from less developed and (even) less cosmopolitan places.
Nobody visiting from the US or Europe would ever waste a moment at most of the places mentioned at http://wikitravel.org/en/Mexico_City#Buy—certainly at none of the malls.
What it’s really about, of course, is signaling. How else can we explain this disgrace of a paragraph?
Although it is easy to assume that Mexico City is the world capital of tacos, you can find almost any kind of food in this city. There are regional specialties from all over Mexico as well as international cuisine, including Japanese, Chinese, French, Polish, Italian, Argentinean, Belgian, Irish, you name it. The main restaurant areas are located in Polanco, Condesa, Centro, Zona Rosa, along Avenida Insurgentes from Viaducto to Copilco and more recently Santa Fe.
Yeah, this city is cosmopolitan and wikitravel readers will now know it!
What we have here is a somebody is wrong on the internet problem and as such I don’t think it has a direct solution. But I do think it’s solvable. I’ll write about that later, probably months or years from now.
The brouhaha about Lottie Dexter being unable to code is a red herring. Even if the UK’s best programmer were in her spot the concept of teaching programming en masse is doomed from the start. Most people don’t have the ability to deal with the kinds of abstractions that you need to program. This ability is one that can’t be acquired through hard work; you either have it or you don’t. Replace Dexter with someone—anyone—else and the program(me) will still be a failure.
You heard it here first, unless you already heard it somewhere else.
Parentheses /pəˈrɛnθɨsiːz/ (singular, parenthesis /pəˈrɛnθɨsɨs/) (also called simply brackets, or round brackets, curved brackets, oval brackets, or, colloquially, parens/pəˈrɛnz/) contain material that could be omitted without destroying or altering the meaning of a sentence (in most writing, overuse of parentheses is usually a sign of a badly structured text)[according to whom?].
Humor from the humorless. (I think.)