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Silly Word Games
A word has “vertical symmetry” when you can draw a vertical line in the middle and it’s the same on both sides — this is not quite the same as a palindrome, because it’s not just the same letters; it has to be visual symmetry. For that reason it matters whether the word is all… Continue reading
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A great summation
David Roth wrote an incandescent piece at Defector: Billionaire Dipshit And His Strike Team Of Greasy Beavises Are Stripping The Wires From The Federal Government. “…Musk just isn’t a very smart or principled guy, and has been insulated from any accountability by his wealth for long enough that he has liquefied into a slurry of… Continue reading
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Nice idea for spreadsheet design
I don’t mean the design of a spreadsheet; I mean the design of the spreadsheet application. As far as I know, nobody has proposed anything new for spreadsheet apps in ages. But here’s an idea: Ambsheets. A cell can contain multiple “ambiguous” values, making it easier to explore alternatives. Via Simon Willison. Continue reading
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It’s obvious
My human family has no clueAbout this fact I have for you:When they can’t sniff, although they try,It’s ’cause their nose is up too high! If they watch me, they might learnTo recognize, detect, discernTheir local world (the stuff I know).The key is simple: nose down low! -Chocolate Continue reading
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The mistaken mistake
If you’ve read Jane Austen’s Emma, you may have noticed an odd little detail. Just a single word, in fact. You have to have read the right edition to have seen this, because some modern editions have changed the word in the mistaken belief that Austen herself made a mistake. But she didn’t. The word… Continue reading
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Pulicidal, pulcivorous, zoilist, phtheirophagous persons
In 1863, the Lady’s Newspaper of London printed a letter that’s gone down in the annals of insulting texts as a classic. It was from somebody called “J. Hooker,” and although it’s not really known who that might have been, there’s some speculation that it was Joseph Dalton Hooker, who was a well-known biologist of… Continue reading
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Tick tock
Dogs like me, we know the time;we do not need a clock.I know, you see, when breakfast’s dueand when we take a walk. I do enjoy my schedule;I like a set routine.It helps me feel relaxed and safeif you know just what I mean. My new friend Birdie likes her mealsto come when she awaits,But… Continue reading
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On the beach
If you find yourself on a desert island without a boat, what you are is “stranded.” On the face of it, that seems like an unusual term to use for that situation; why not “trapped” or something? By the way, if your pirate crew got tired of always having to let you win at Scrabble… Continue reading
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The Web is social media
Replicating SMS messages in a monolithic silo bought by a delusional megalomaniac, or another monolithic silo owned by an insecure sociopath, or even another monolithic silo not (yet) owned by some ultrarich control freak is not really very useful. Take more time to consider what you write. Take more time to consider what you read… Continue reading
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Emergent behavior in human organizations
Responding to a hilarious headline, Meta warns that it will fire leakers in leaked memo, John Gruber observes that “company cultures are infused by the personalities of their founders. Meta employees have no scruples surrounding the privacy of internal communications because, by definition, they’re the sort of people who never saw any problem with Meta’s… Continue reading
About Me
I’m Pete Harbeson, a writer (among other things) located near Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to writing my own content, I’ve learned to translate for my loquacious and opinionated pup Chocolate Bossypaws. No surprise, she mostly speaks in doggerel. You can find her contributions tagged with Chocolatiana.
Check out my other blog, Techlimitics, where I’m grappling with the nature of simplicity. You can also find some of my minor software projects at GitHub. Nothing very impressive. I mostly write tiny utilities in Python.
I find myself suddenly de-corporatized (their choice, not mine). To help keep the lights on, buy me a coffee!
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Contact
peterharbeson@me.com