Isotropic is …
... my personal blog.
Unless otherwise indicated, anything I write here is simply my personal, probably ill-formed, opinion and does not represent the views, beliefs, positions, or opinions of any other person or entity.
Tag Archives: phrases
22 Jun 2009
Cornucopia of Stupidity
Thanks to Mark Dominus for today’s wonderful title, scarfed from the punchline of his post “A child is bitten by a dog every 0.07 seconds…“. Postal Bulletin 22258, in a section about dog bites, says “Children are the majority of victims and are 900 times more likely to be bitten than letter carriers.” However, according [...]
09 Sep 2008
Ambient Awareness
“This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. [...]
14 Aug 2008
Eliminate Infrastructure Kinetically
“… they could have [...] eliminated the infrastructure kinetically”, according to Gadi Evron in “Internet Attacks Against Georgian Websites” (and followup). There is a plethora of commentary on the Georgian situation, so I’m not going to discuss it here. However, the concept of eliminating infrastructure kinetically did ping my interesting phrases meter, so I’m sharing [...]
04 Aug 2008
Social Connectivity Constant
As I’ve said before, I like interesting phrases. Here’s another one: What we’re seeing suggests there may be a social connectivity constant for humanity. –Eric Horvitz, Microsoft Messenger project Wow, that sounds profound. See the BBC News article “Study revives six degrees theory” for the full story. Background information is available in the Wikipedia article [...]
01 Jun 2008
Day of the Squishy Things
I’m always inordinately delighted by interesting phrases (Ooh, shiny!). So much so that I’ll make a post just so I can reference the phrases. That isn’t to say that the posts I link to aren’t interesting in themselves — I didn’t find them while actually looking for quotes, after all. I’m just sayin’. I’ll try [...]
26 May 2008
Uniquely Human
I couldn’t miss the chance to refer to an article titled “Critters with attitude”. (Critter is one of my favorite words.) To accompany the article So you think humans are unique? we have selected six articles from the New Scientist archive that tell a similar story. We have also asked the researchers involved to update [...]
24 May 2008
Contemporary Theater of Contrition
I’m sorry you’re likely to get hit. I’m sorry you were hit. I’m sorry I hit you. I’m sorry I got caught hitting you. I’m sorry if my hitting you was misconstrued as an attempt to cause you pain. “The news is full of headlines about Senator Clinton’s “apology” for her tone-deaf comment about the [...]
19 May 2008
Unauthorized Propagation Prohibited
Sadly, the grumpy pansies have been replaced by these orange zinnias. I happened to pick up one of the potting tags and discovered the phrase “Unauthorized Propagation Prohibited” printed on the back, as you can see in the image. It so happened that a tag from the pansies was still buried in the small plot; [...]
12 May 2008
Safety Deprivation
It seems that we shouldn’t even be allowed to check on our own safety. Here are a couple examples, below. Ostensibly they’re to protect us from ourselves by avoiding panic or loss of business (which is even worse, of course). But that’s not true — it’s about control. It’s about denying anyone outside of authority [...]
06 May 2008
Plant Indignity
According to Alison Abbott in Swiss ‘dignity’ law is threat to plant biology (Nature News), “The Swiss federal government’s ethics committee on non-human biotechnology has mapped out guidelines to help granting agencies decide which research applications deeply offend the dignity of plants — and hence become unfundable.” Maybe I need to rethink my Grumpy Flowers [...]
