Category Archives: quotes

books, quotes, science

The Zen of Taxonomy

These ambiguities, redundances, and deficiences recall those attributed by Dr Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopedia entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. On those remote pages it is written that animals are divided into
(a) those that belong to the Emperor,
(b) embalmed ones,
(c) those that are trained,
(d) suckling pigs,
(e) mermaids,
(f) fabulous ones,
(g) stray dogs,
(h) those that are included in this classification,
(i) those that tremble as if they were mad,
(j) innumerable ones,
(k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s hair brush,
(l) et cetera,
(m) those that have just broken a flower vase,
(n) those that resemble flies from a distance.

[Jorge Luis Borges in his essay “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins”. Quoted in Finding Moonshine by Marcus du Sautoy]

current affairs, quotes

Where we are now …

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The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
[HL Mencken]

Somehow this has a worry ring of veracity in these trying times.

H/T Julian Allason

amusements, memes, photography, quotes

ABC Meme


ABC Meme, originally uploaded by kcm76.

This week’s Flickr meme was an alphabet meme … a word for each letter of the alphabet (but we were allowed to drop one letter to make a 5×5 square. Of course yours truly has to do it all — and put a different (I hope) slant on it by doing the English comic alphabet as first produced by the variety duo Clapham and Dwyer in the 1930s. So I give you the not entirely original …

A for ‘Orses
B for Mutton
C for Yourself
D for Dumb
E for Brick
F for Vescent
G for Police
H for a Beer
I for Novello
J for Oranges
K for Restaurant
L for Leather
M for Sis’
N for Lope
O for a Pee
P for Relief
Q for a Bus
R for Askey
S for Teeda
T for Two
U for Me
V for La France
W for a Bob
X for Breakfast
Y for Husband
Z for Breezes

The two centre images are the first and last Greek letters, Alpha and Omega, so beloved of Christian symbolism.

As always the photographs are not mine so please click on individual links below to see each artist/photostream. This mosaic is for a group called My Meme, where each week there is a different theme and normally 12 questions to send you out on a hunt to discover photos to fit your meme. It gives you a chance to see and admire other great photographers’ work out there on Flickr.

1. Horse Eating Hay, 2. Assorted Beef & Mutton satay, 3. The day the little rocket hit a tiny little planet, 4. Pennsylvania Institution for the Deaf and Dumb, 5. Heaved bricks, Glencoe between Reading Way and Kings Way, 6. Sweet and Bubbly, 7. Chief of POlice, 8. Felix having a beer., 9. Ivor Novello Plaque, 10. Jaffa Oranges, 11. Caff, 12. Gerald Tobin Hells Angel Funeral , 13. Tiny? Bite me! (101/365), 14. A (alpha), 15. Omega, 16. embroidery envelope 1, 17. Mannekin Pis, Brussels, Belgium, 18. Cafe Achteck (Pissoir) am Chamissoplatz, 19. Bus Queue, 20. British Film Icons, 21. Ferula asa-foetida, 22. ~Tea for two~, 23. 365 day one hundred & fourty-nine: will you for me, 24. vive la france, 25. 100708_Shilling_1955, 26. Egg for breakfast on pain complet in France., 27. husband and wife, 28. zephyr

Created with fd’s Flickr Toys

amusements, arts, current affairs, environment, quotes, sexuality

You couldn’t make it up …

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More amusing snippets from recent online BBC News items. If you wrote most of these in a nvel you would be accused of being unreasonably inventive.

11 June
Gabonese have turned out to see the body of the late President Omar Bongo arrive back home from Spain, where he died on Monday (8 June).

11 June
The Rubble Club has been set up to help architects through the “trauma” of seeing one of their creations demolished in their own lifetime.

11 June
A man with a fetish for Ugg boots has admitted using the internet to harass a group of schoolgirls.

11 June
Acer chairman JT Wang strenuously denied any suggestion Acer was copying someone else’s invention. “We are not copying,” he said in an interview at … “Innovation is improving on a competitor’s product. That is still innovation for consumers’ value.”

12 June
A burned-out ice-cream van is among 100 works Banksy has installed at Bristol’s museum. “This is the first show I’ve ever done where taxpayers’ money is being used to hang my pictures up rather than scrape them off … many people will say: ‘You should have gone to Specsavers'”, Banksy added.

14 June
As I went closer, I realised with delight that while they had got the tune off pat, the words were just slightly off the mark. Standing tall and proud, the children were calling on the Almighty to “sieve the Queen and her setter, Victoria.” … A French friend of mine, preparing a few snacks to hand round at an English drinks party, implored her guests to help themselves to nipples.

18 June
“Man who catch fly with chopstick accomplish anything.”

current affairs, medical, quotes, science

Pandemic or Not?

Revere over at Effect Measure, has been writing a lot recently about the so-calle “Swine Flu” outbreak; not suprising as the editors are public health practitioners. A post the other day caught my eye; it explored when is a pandemic not a pandemic. Basically Revere explores the position with the current Influenza A/H1N1 outbreak and touches on some of the posturing going on by governments, WHO etc. to avoid declaring this a pandemic.

Yes, all very well; this is what we would surely expect of politicians. What struck me though was this wonderful paragraph:

The argument boils down to this. We shouldn’t call a pandemic a pandemic, because people might misunderstand that this means it’s a pandemic. And then they would do things like panic, like UK officials are doing now when the prospect is broached we are having a pandemic. And since even the considerable wiggle room of the current definition of a pandemic is insufficient to avoid calling this one a pandemic, please provide us with some more wiggle room by adding severity to the mix, so we can then argue about whether the pandemic is severe enough to be a pandemic.

The original post isn’t technical and it isn’t long but it does highlight the way in which governments etc. use as much (and more) wriggle room as is available in their own interests. Politics was ever thus!