So we tell people that this new phone is not just an incremental upgrade, but rather is the biggest breakthrough since the original iPhone in 2007. We say it’s incredible, amazing, awesome, mind-blowing, overwhelming, magical, revolutionary. We use these words over and over.
It’s all patently ridiculous, of course. But people believe it.
2 Listen to my cry for help,
my King and my God,
for to you I pray.
3 In the morning, O LORD, you hear my voice;
in the morning I lay my requests before you
and wait in expectation.
4 You are not a God who takes pleasure in evil;
with you the wicked cannot dwell.
5 The arrogant cannot stand in your presence;
you hate all who do wrong.
6 You destroy those who tell lies;
bloodthirsty and deceitful men
the LORD abhors.
7 But I, by your great mercy,
will come into your house;
in reverence will I bow down
toward your holy temple.
8 Lead me, O LORD, in your righteousness
because of my enemies—
make straight your way before me.
9 Not a word from their mouth can be trusted;
their heart is filled with destruction.
Their throat is an open grave;
with their tongue they speak deceit.
10 Declare them guilty, O God!
Let their intrigues be their downfall.
Banish them for their many sins,
for they have rebelled against you.
11 But let all who take refuge in you be glad;
let them ever sing for joy.
Spread your protection over them,
that those who love your name may rejoice in you.
12 For surely, O LORD, you bless the righteous;
you surround them with your favor as with a shield.
The Korean wave or Korea fever[1] (a.k.a. Koreanophile) refers to the significantly increased popularity of South Korean culture around the world since the 21st century, especially among the Net Generation. It is also referred to as Hallyu (Hangul: 한류; Hanja: 韓流; RR: Hallyu), from the Korean pronunciation. The term was coined in China in mid-1999 by Beijing journalists surprised by the fast growing popularity of South Koreans and South Korean goods in China.[2]
I did not know this. This is some scary crap.
There is a small gathering for the MuchMusic Video Awards. Gangly 15 year-old have pitched tents around the site of the old CityTV.
Most seems to be here for Justin Bierber. One told me that she is skipping school and work till Saturday -- when the show starts.
In a recent blog post on delinkification. Nick gives the beloved hyperlink a suspicious stare:
Links are wonderful conveniences, as we all know (from clicking on them compulsively day in and day out). But they’re also distractions. Sometimes, they’re big distractions – we click on a link, then another, then another, and pretty soon we’ve forgotten what we’d started out to do or to read. Other times, they’re tiny distractions, little textual gnats buzzing around your head. Even if you don’t click on a link, your eyes notice it, and your frontal cortex has to fire up a bunch of neurons to decide whether to click or not. You may not notice the little extra cognitive load placed on your brain, but it’s there and it matters. People who read hypertext comprehend and learn less, studies show, than those who read the same material in printed form. The more links in a piece of writing, the bigger the hit on comprehension.
Ads (obnoxious or otherwise), sidebars, caked on layers of navigation – they all get in the way of the reading experience. Hyperlinks are a different animal. They’re potentially useful, but their temptation is distracting. Nick nails it: it’s a “more violent form of a footnote.”
The article clearly struck a nerve around the Internet, and it also struck a nerve with us. In response, we’ve decided to add a subtle but important option to Readability. Just below the style, size and margin options, you’ll find an option to Convert hyperlinks to footnotes:
This guys are incredible.
They really get it.
he historian Robert Darnton describes this tangled mix of writing and reading:
Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end, early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your personality.
Each rereading of the commonplace book becomes a new kind of revelation. You see the evolutionary paths of all your past hunches: the ones that turned out to be red herrings; the ones that turned out to be too obvious to write; even the ones that turned into entire books. But each encounter holds the promise that some long-forgotten hunch will connect in a new way with some emerging obsession.
Whoa.
I've been doing this for years. But it was always hard to have a system. Between a few webapps and a couple of paper notebooks, I tried this before, but I can never find something that flows right.
Interesting, nevertheless, to see how useful methods are often repeated.
