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My ratings (R) are from 1 to 9. My Dates are also permalinks. Click on the column headers to sort Jots. Feel free to use the address bar like a command line interface by setting the optional query string parameters: Dtm1 (10, 20, 30, YYYYMMDDhhmmss), Dtm2 (YYYYMMDDhhmmss), IsJot (Jot or Not), Tag (zero+ times), NotTag (zero+ times), OrderBy (PostForDate, PostTitle, PostLink, PostText, PostSource, PostRating, PostSize) & Desc(Desc), and Limit(integer).

1. I'm the Batman TAGS: Animation. Batman. Comics. Crude. Funny. Images. Language. Live Action. Movies. NSFW.
2. Saddlebacking TAGS: Crude. Cyber Life. Funny. Language. Politics. Pr0n. profanity. Saucy. Sex. Text. USA.
3. The Word that Science RUINED TAGS: Language. Science. Statistics. TECH.
4. The 10 Coolest Foreign Words The English Language Needs TAGS: Cool. Culture. Funny. Language.
5. War of the Gargantuas TAGS: Books. History. Language. Literature. Movies. Text. Videos.
6. God is not the Creator, claims academic TAGS: Atheism. Books. Faith. Language. Literature. Text.
7. The Web Way to Learn a Language TAGS: Cyber Life. Education. Language. Self Improvement. World.

Date	Text	Link	Source	Tags	Note
20080722 140353 Z	Not Giving a Fuck!	www.youtube. … S5xOZ7Rq8&fmt=18		Crude, Funny, Language, Live Action, NSFW, Saucy, Videos	Funny, profane stuff by jonlajoie. Leads to other goodies like Everyday Normal Guy [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PsnxDQvQpw]. Of course it's possible to "not give a fuck" (non-fixation) without fucking up.
20090807 202234 Z	Wolfram Alpha for crossword puzzles	www.wolframa … put/?i=cr_ssw_r_		Cyber Life, Language, Text	Apparently you can use Wolfram Alpha to help with crossword puzzles, hangman, and the like.
20100502 210943 Z	"Checking on Cynthia" by Sextus Propertius (poetry reading)	www.youtube. … ch?v=0_t-BVOQRuE		Beauty, Language, Literature, Reading, Relations, Saucy, Videos	Delightful. I had not thought about finding poetry readings on YouTube.
20100510 201333 Z	QUT physicist corrects Oxford English Dictionary (w/ Video)	www.physorg. … ws192688538.html		Books, Language, Physics, Science, TECH, Videos	Yes, a siphon works by means of gravity and where the "column of water acts like a chain with the water molecules pulling on each other via hydrogen bonds". Wiggling the tube in the fish tank can start a siphon because of the initial surge of momentum. No need to suck on the lower end and get fish water in your mouth! A similar phenomena occurs when "sticking" with someone as you "wave" them into a throw and use gravity.
20100527 161401 Z	The Fall of Rome -- W H Auden	wonderingmin … e-w-h-auden.html	www.crossfit … ive2/005447.html	Language, Literature, Quotations, Text	Three words of the day: somatotonia, viscerotonia, and cerebrotonia.

The Dark Knight (2008) novie comes out today so it makes sense to post something Batman related. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986) [W] comic by Frank Miller was a totally different story, but pretty dark too. It's set in an alternate future where Superman has become a government yes-man and Batman has to fight him. Someone made this animated gif that captures the essence of the story and uses Christian Bale (who co-stars in today's movie along with Heath Ledger) as Bruce Wayne. As in the usual Batman v Superman stories, Batman usually wins because he planned something ahead of time.

I've read Dan Savage's sex-advice column Savage Love before, and while it is well done, it frequently pushed well past my personal comfort level. I am not a very profane person but I do appreciate those who are versed in the poetic art, and Savage has even pushed it into the realm of politics with santorum [W].

In case he takes the site down at some point, I'm going to archive its content here:

Saddlebacking: sad•dle•back•ing ˈsa-dəl-ˈba-kiŋ vb [fr. Saddleback Church] (2009): the phenomenon of Christian teens engaging in unprotected anal sex in order to preserve their virginities

After attending the Purity Ball, Heather and Bill saddlebacked all night because she’s saving herself for marriage. Unfortunately her parents found out because they got santorum all over the sheets.

Savage is also capable of non-political profanity as he did with pegging [W].

The word is "significant".

In statistics, a result is called 'statistically significant' if it is unlikely to have occurred by chance. That's all it means.

A nearby word is "causation", as in "relation does not equate to causation".

In other words, just because the results of a study were found to be significant, it does not mean that one thing in the study actually caused the other. This is Causation and it is actually EXTREMELY difficult to prove. In fact, a good scientist will point out that causality can ONLY be proven by demonstrating a mechanism. Statistics and significance alone can never prove causality.

Here's how science ruined the word:

So why did science ruin the word significance? Well significant used to mean "important; or something of consequence." Which I would argue it no longer means. It is an overused, overhyped term that is more science-marketing than it is science. So we need a new word to describe the findings of research and whether they apply to the real world. I nominate 'Remarkable'. Especially if you define something that is remarkable as "worthy of notice or attention." So instead of asking if the results of the study were significant (which they almost always are these days) ask if the results of the study were remarkable.

Who knew that Cracked would come up with decent words and concepts and put them together with decent explanations and pictures? It's actually revealed in the digg thread that the words came from this link: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1621546/posts.

1. Bakku-shan (Japanese). "A beautiful girl... as long as she's being viewed from behind."
2. Espirit d'escalier (French). "When you think of the perfect verbal comeback... much too late."
3. Mamihlapinatapai (Yaghan). "A look between two people that suggests an unspoken, shared desire."
4. Backpfeifengesicht (German). "A face badly in need of a fist."
5. Nunchi (Korean). "The art of not becoming a Backpfeifengesicht."
6. Shlimazl (Yiddish). "Somebody who has nothing but bad luck."
7. Tatemae and Honne (Japanese). "What you pretend to believe and what you actually believe, respectively."
8. Sgiomlaireachd (Scottish Gaelic). "When people interrupt you at meal time."
9. Tingo (Pascuense). "To borrow from a friend until he has nothing left."
10. Desenrascanco (Portuguese). "To pull a MacGyver."

The thread has a few other nice ones like callipygian, and lagum (Swedish for the perfect amount).

Last night we watched "War of the Gargantuas" (1960) [W], a Japanese giant monster movie that Julia Hernandez saw when she was a kid. It was released in Japan as "Frankenstein's Monsters: Sanda versus Gaira". Interestingly someone in the chain of naming the English version must have been aware of "La vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel" [W], which Wikipedia describes as "a connected series of five novels written in the 16th century by François Rabelais. It is the story of two giants, a father (Gargantua) and his son (Pantagruel) and their adventures". Apparently Rabelais invented hundreds of words, some of which entered the French language.

This makes sense:

Prof Van Wolde, 54, who will present a thesis on the subject at Radboud University in The Netherlands where she studies, said she had re-analysed the original Hebrew text and placed it in the context of the Bible as a whole, and in the context of other creation stories from ancient Mesopotamia. She said she eventually concluded the Hebrew verb "bara", which is used in the first sentence of the book of Genesis, does not mean "to create" but to "spatially separate". The first sentence should now read "in the beginning God separated the Heaven and the Earth".

The sites they mention:

• rosettastone.com. Pay.
• tellmemore.com. Pay.
• livemocha.com. Pay later.
• babbel.com. Pay later.
• bbc.com/languages. Free.
• http://www.dw-world.de/dw/0,,2547,00.html. Free.
• japanese-online.com. Free.
• learn-korean.net. Free.

The /. thread mentions learning via foreign videos (esp. comedies), sites that that interest you, and DVDs with subtitles.

Page Modified: (Hand noted: 2007-07-19 21:41:10Z) (Auto noted: 2010-12-24 22:08:01Z)