The goat is on a pole

Goatonapole is the philosophy of being that holds that there is a Goat and a Pole and that the Goat is on the Pole. In the relation of Goat and Pole we Goatonapolists find an eternal thread of unfathomable cosmic significance, a point of reference in which all opposites dissolve into a unity of infinite breadth, a universal truth underlying the very fabric of existence. Upon contemplation of the Goat, the Pole, and their relative positions, one cannot help but realize that we’ve always been talking about Goatonapole. Whether we accept, reject, or live in ignorance of Goatonapole, we are all Goatonapolists.
The goat is on a pole! (Via)

I hereby convert to Goatonoapolism.  I can already see a schism looming on the debate on how, precisely, to pronounce “Goatonapole”, however. Does one say it as if one was reading the component words, or does one say “goaton-” as if one were saying “Croatoan”?

Schrödinger’s Schnake

Schrödinger’s Schnake: is it on a motherfuckin’ plane, or not?

Sometimes the strangest questions go through your head.

I just discovered -and installed- the sinhala-gnu-linux package from the brand-new Sinhala package repository. It must be because the damn book is on my brain, but fiddling around with SCIM and typing laboriously in Sinhala (I still haven’t figured out how to type my name -it has a rakaransaya in it. How the heck do you type a zero-width joiner? It’s too late in the evening for this… or rather, I’m getting old.) reminded me of the time my father wanted me to fix up an old PC for him to write on.

My father is a writer, if you didn’t know. He’s nearly seventy now. His last book was a year or two ago, and he’s writing another one. Said once that it was going to be the last one -he’s a little morbid sometimes. He’s never used a computer in his life. Or a typewriter, for that matter. Couldn’t type to save his life. I think he just saw somebody, sometime back in the late 90s, using one of those keyboards with the little stickers pasted on, so that you could get the Sinhala letters.

He once kept the sole electronic copy -which someone else typed up for him, of course… it was the Middle Ages- of one of his novels on a floppy disk for a year. Imagine that.

Google’s Secret Weapon

See, apparently Marissa Mayer is a hologram. Or an android. (Technically, she can’t be an android -andros means male. A female-shaped robot would have to be a… gynoid? Unfortunately, anthropoid is taken. By monkeys.) Do you realize what this means? All these years, we’ve bought the “we have a secret algorithm” line that Google’s been handing out, when in truth it’s much simpler. Marissa Mayer is a super-intelligent AI who personally indexes the entire web and answers all Google search queries. You heard it here first.