Posts by BenWilson
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It never catches my 2 most common typos - "on" for "one" and "to" for "too". Grammar checking in MS Word used to do a sterling job for that, and also opened my eyes to the whole world of split infinitives. But it did piss me off that it always pulled me up for using the passive voice, or any sentence with more than 15 words. Would have been good if you could turn certain warnings off, as 'my style' settings.
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is [redacted] the new smurf?
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Nah, the penicillin took care of the itching, thanks for asking though!I'm just keen to start partying...
Crikey. I was actually referring to the locks on your 6 bottles of [redacted]. But I'm glad to hear the [redacted] is all cleared up too.
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Your locks are itching to be picked? (one your [redacted])
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I waive all copyright, just for you. All I ask is that you relate how you pulled it off. I'll be metaphorically buggered if I can work out how you could.
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Did the same for my 7th form stats project. Never got pinged either. The method works.
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I seem to be surrounded by people who suffer from some weird pseudo-homonym dyslexia...
The linguistic community has a name for these - they're called eggcorns
I thought the word for this is was 'malapropism'. My wife does them all the time and they seriously crack me up. Some of them are really quite apt.
btw, I withdraw my entry 'Fizzer' in awe of 'Sub-prime' capturing it much better. Now I won't trust Fizzer with a tin-foot barge pool.
I agree with Robyn that 'World Class' really means 'World Class in Oceania'.
Well, you can't be literally buggered if you're supine.
Don't make me show you a picture. The only thing you can't be literally buggered in is a chastity belt.
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poveyjo, of course simulation is useful in many ways. My point was that the immersiveness is not enough to capture a massive market - there is way more to it than that. If Second Life did anything you have in your examples well it might be a lot more useful.
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beat that for weird.
LOL very very good. I wonder if that's the amazing new intel. CIA codecracking machines have finally had Allah speak directly to them.
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More seriously though; how is it people don't know what a scientific theory is?
I blame the way science is taught. My experience of the scientific method at school was "Hypothesize theory taken from textbook. Conduct experiment with dodgy equipment under severe time constraints. Discard evidence not fitting theory". This was after doing what I actually consider science "Notice phenomenon. Hypothesize theory. Attempt to disprove by consequences of theory conflicting existing observations. Attempt to disprove via experiment or new observations. When disproved, hypothesize altered theory. Repeat until failure to disprove". Unfortunately this meant disproving just about all of accepted science (usually through experimental error) and landed me very poor marks.
My favourite example was proving that objects do not fall with constant acceleration. This was done with ticker tape attached to a falling object. A device made marks on the tape every 0.1 of a second. We then examined the ticker tape and found the acceleration was very strange indeed. Very dense collections of dots at both ends suggested it fell slowly at first, picked up speed, then slowed down, and then stopped. This was repeated 3 times.
It was only at the end of the year that we discovered how this had happened, when during a teacher's 10 minute absence we got into a ticker tape battle. We noticed that every single roll of ticker tape had already been used, probably for the acceleration experiment. We must have used ones in the reverse direction that they had been used before, presumably because a previous student (or an underfunded teacher) had rolled them up that way.
What was interesting to me about this was that no other students had concluded that the accepted laws of science were all wrong. Many of them must have had exactly the same thing happen to them as happened to my team. Everyone, without exception, had come up with the 'right' answer. Did they use the scientific method? Or did they simply conclude, as I did, that the scientific method being taught was to look stuff up in a textbook?
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