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Martha Nussbaum
reviews three recent books on Shakespeare and philosophy. The essay offers an excellent analysis of love in
Antony and Cleopatra and
Othello, and an excellent discussion of the interaction between philosophy and literature.
posted to MetaFilter by painquale
at 6:38 PM on May 5, 2008
(17 comments)
Words for things you eat: edibles, comestibles, food.
Words for things you drink: potables, drinks.
Is there a generic term for things that you eat
or drink?
posted to Ask Metafilter by painquale
at 4:16 PM on March 17, 2008
(30 comments)
Two posts today accidentally link to Metafilter instead of their intended targets. On the main page, they link to metafilter.com, but within their individual threads, they link to their own individual threads. How is this done? Also, this seems like a pretty common mistake; I've seen it happen a few times before. To prevent the admins from having to go in and fix things, maybe the New Post code should check to see if any links point to the the main site (and if so, ask the user whether this was intended).
posted to MetaTalk by painquale
at 3:48 PM on January 21, 2008
(32 comments)
"A few years ago a psychologist and a philosopher got into an argument over whether we can accurately describe our thoughts. "Yes," said the psychologist; with training and the help of my special technique, we can accurately describe our thoughts. The philosopher doubted it. To resolve their argument, they recruited a young woman who agreed tell them her thoughts, so that they could argue over whether she was credible." Eric Schwitzgebel and Russ Hurlbert debate
the transparency of inner experience. See also Schwitzgebel's extremely interesting
blog.
posted to MetaFilter by painquale
at 7:39 PM on January 13, 2008
(34 comments)
According to
these pages on the U.S. Bureau of Justice site, imprisonment for public order offenses suddenly fell by a third in 2002. Why?
posted to Ask Metafilter by painquale
at 9:43 PM on January 12, 2008
(11 comments)
Help me remember the name of this British cartoon show. It starred a bunch of little blue guys that had noses like faucets. That's all the information I have. Good luck!
posted to Ask Metafilter by painquale
at 6:55 PM on June 28, 2007
(13 comments)
I've been asked to give a reading at a friend's wedding, so I'm looking for a poem that would be appropriate. Ideally, it should be modern (written after 1900) and sweet, but not sexual, religious, schmaltzy, or emetic. Most suggestions online are variations of Maya Angelou's "Touched By An Angel". I found the
previous two AskMe questions on this topic helpful, and I have some ideas, but I'm hoping to generate a few more.
posted to Ask Metafilter by painquale
at 2:40 PM on May 14, 2007
(20 comments)
Since
Wordplay has come out, crossword puzzles have been on the rise. If you want to join in on the fun, read
this primer by Will Shortz to get started, then download
Across Lite, head to
Cruciverb, and do free puzzles in the right-hand sidebar.
Will Johnston's page contains a huge repository of Across Lite puzzles. If you get stuck, can't figure out why an entry is correct, or just want to chat about a grid's brilliant construction, try reading the crossword blogs. The best two are
Diary of a Crossword Fiend and
Rex Parker Does the New York Times Crossword Puzzle. (Caution! Spoilers abound!) And, if you want to try your hand at constructing some crosswords of your own (submission guidelines for various papers
here),
Crossword Compiler is an outstanding piece of software.
[Via this AskMetafilter question]
posted to MetaFilter by painquale
at 1:07 PM on January 22, 2007
(26 comments)
There's Joe Btfsplk from the L'il Abner comic strip, Mr. Mxyztplk from Superman comics, and Metafilter's own
XQUZYPHYR. What other characters, fictional or otherwise, have names that are a deliberately impossible-to-pronounce mishmash of consonants?
posted to Ask Metafilter by painquale
at 4:54 PM on May 6, 2006
(36 comments)
Graphs, Maps, Trees.
The Valve is hosting a literary event for professor Franco Moretti's new book,
Graphs, Maps, Trees. Moretti aims to reinvigorate literary studies by constructing abstract models based upon quantitative history, geography, and evolutionary theory. PDFs of the original articles:
Graphs,
Maps,
Trees. A review at n+1 is
here.
posted to MetaFilter by painquale
at 9:54 AM on January 13, 2006
(10 comments)
I'm having trouble remembering a playwright I read about long ago. IIRC, this playwright is considered an heir to the Brechtian tradition, and he accordingly hated using professional actors with practiced mannerisms. In order to achieve
verfremdungseffekt when directing, he would sometimes cast high schoolers with no previous acting expreience. I
think it might be Edward Bond, but I'm not sure. Any ideas? I'm pretty sure that he's British.
posted to Ask Metafilter by painquale
at 10:35 AM on December 12, 2005
(3 comments)
The power cord keeps falling out of my laptop. How can I fix this?
posted to Ask Metafilter by painquale
at 7:44 PM on November 6, 2005
(12 comments)
Is Civilization Decaying?
Will technological progress be accompanied by moral progress? Notes on a 1923 debate between J. B. S. Haldane (
Daedalus) and Bertrand Russell (
Icarus).
"As John Brunner pointed out in an article in the New Scientist in 1993, these two books ... inspired two generations of science fiction writers."
posted to MetaFilter by painquale
at 1:00 AM on July 10, 2005
(11 comments)
The Academic JFK Assassination site
is an unbelievably thorough compendium of information on the Kennedy assassination. It's an excursion into conspiracy theories without any crackpottery. Some of the articles are immensely readable. See, for example, Richard Popkin's 1966 New York Review of Books article
The Second Oswald.
posted to MetaFilter by painquale
at 2:01 PM on April 17, 2005
(21 comments)
I'm trying to locate two cartoons (both possibly from the New Yorker). 1 - A group of lost hikers are examining a map. One, pointing to a mountain in the distance, is saying, "I've got it! We're on that mountain over there!" 2 - Tribal setting. A witch doctor wearing a mask and a weeping widow are standing over a dead villager. The witch doctor is saying, "There's still so much we don't know."
I have the Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker CDs, but I can't find either of these cartoons using the search capabilities. If you can give me date and author information, that'd be great.
posted to Ask Metafilter by painquale
at 6:53 PM on April 14, 2005
(2 comments)
I used to live in Montreal, and heard somewhere that on certain nights the cross on top of the mountain would flash various colours (I never saw this happen myself). Rumour had it that this was for bulb-testing purposes, and that the city lit up the cross with different colours when certain rare and important events took place. Supposedly, one of these events was the death of a pope, which was purported to merit a purple cross. Is the cross purple right now? Is it really outfitted with various coloured bulbs, or is this all wild hearsay? Maybe someone was just pulling my leg.
posted to Ask Metafilter by painquale
at 6:09 PM on April 6, 2005
(8 comments)
Are there any natural languages that allow pronouns to appear in sentential position?
posted to Ask Metafilter by painquale
at 5:51 PM on February 28, 2005
(10 comments)
Patty's coming out on tonight's episode of
The Simpsons made me wonder how often it happens that one sibling in a pair of identical twins is gay and the other straight. Does anyone know of any twin studies about homosexuality?
posted to Ask Metafilter by painquale
at 6:11 PM on February 20, 2005
(21 comments)
It's Carnival Time! In 2002,
Silflay Hraka launched the internet's first carnival:
The Carnival of the Vanities. Carnivals are showcases of the best that blogs have to offer; bloggers send in posts they have made that they are especially pleased with, and a rotating editor collates them into a weekly edition with editorial comments. Think of carnivals as best-of-the-blogosphere magazines. The Carnival of the Vanities (current edition
here) doesn't have any particular focus, but a number of offshoots dedicated to specific fields have popped up. Stay up to date on blog postings about
philosophy,
science,
history,
the early modern period,
sex,
Canada, and (if desperately bored)
cats. A new carnival about atheism,
The Carnival of the Godless, will be coming out at the end of the month.
posted to MetaFilter by painquale
at 5:25 AM on January 23, 2005
(5 comments)
What can I do with guava paste?
posted to Ask Metafilter by painquale
at 1:02 PM on January 20, 2005
(15 comments)
Can anyone recommend any good recent articles or papers on whether the universe is infinite or finite? I've heard that scientists suspect that the universe is flat, which lends credence to the infinite-universe hypothesis. I've decided I don't know enough about this. Nothing too technical, please, though I'd prefer something more complex than an article from a newspaper science section.
posted to Ask Metafilter by painquale
at 12:27 PM on January 12, 2005
(20 comments)
The Ethics of Deep Self-Modification.
What will happen when machines gain the ability to modify their own psychology? Do we have a responsibility to step in? What happens when we have the ability to modify
ourselves? Philosopher
Peter Suber has dedicated himself to issues of self-modification... not just in psychology, but also in
constitutional law. Small wonder that this is the guy who invented
Nomic. His site is littered with great stuff; he now is primarily involved with the open access movement. Check out his
open access primer and
blog.
posted to MetaFilter by painquale
at 4:45 PM on January 3, 2005
(14 comments)
Paging all color blind users! I'm curious about the fact that some dichromats and anomolous trichromats can live through a large portion of their adult lives without realizing that they're color blind. When did you first recognize that you were color blind? Does the world look different to you now than it did then? Before you were diagnosed, did you use different words ('red' and 'green') to refer to perceptually similar colors? In general, I'm hoping to get the lowdown on the subjective experience of being color blind.
posted to Ask Metafilter by painquale
at 11:58 PM on December 7, 2004
(27 comments)
Etymology-wise, which hormone is an island? What word both denotes a prime and euphemizes Satan? What word denotes "the future" and abbreviates the unknown? Is urine pith? These are some of the questions from "
Moot: The World's Toughest Language Game," a homemade and little-known board game for lovers of words.
Some puzzles are available online; there are a few more available on a page detailing the
interesting story behind the game's creation. You can
sign up to have a new language puzzle e-mailed to you every week.
posted to MetaFilter by painquale
at 12:09 PM on December 4, 2004
(8 comments)
