Comments for Corner Cases

Comment on The Sweet Spot of Success by W.P. McNeill

W.P. McNeill — Mon, 20 May 2013 20:36:04 +0000

They're pretty much deepities. Maybe not exactly if you call a deepity a truism that disguises its vacuity in obscure language, since this quote isn't particularly obscure. But there's definitely less here than meets the eye.

Comment on The Sweet Spot of Success by Yulia

Yulia — Mon, 20 May 2013 18:40:08 +0000

So they( the quote&cousins) seem to be deepities but actually aren’t?

Comment on Pass Back by Elle

Elle — Thu, 16 May 2013 16:08:19 +0000

This just happend to me and the bus driver just sat there staring at me do I just sat down. I probably would’ve looked much less idiotic in front of other riders if he had just told me the first time that I had already scanned it

Comment on An Example Configurable Partitioner by Shashank Gupta (@shashank_bits)

Shashank Gupta (@shashank_bits) — Mon, 06 May 2013 18:27:53 +0000

Saved my day! Thanks man!

Comment on Rollin’, Rollin’, Rollin’ by Yes, Virginia, Meaning Really is Use | Corner Cases

Yes, Virginia, Meaning Really is Use | Corner Cases — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 14:20:21 +0000

[...] but one captured in the wild just might. Recently I proposed an analysis of the expression “That’s how we roll”, as in “You mess with one of us, you mess with all of us–that’s how we [...]

Comment on A Message From America to the Rest of the World by Essentially American | Corner Cases

Essentially American | Corner Cases — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 14:54:19 +0000

[...] from what its component parts would indicate. (For example, here in America the game we call football only occasionally involves kicking a ball with your foot.) Nor is this an occasion to make some [...]

Comment on Pass Back by Cruseydr (@Cruseydr)

Cruseydr (@Cruseydr) — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 16:29:01 +0000

The worst part is that since people don’t understand what the pass back message means, they will often try a few more times to get the device to read their card until it works or the driver tells them to move on.

Comment on Rollin’, Rollin’, Rollin’ by W.P. McNeill

W.P. McNeill — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 23:19:26 +0000

Keep in mind that I just made up that bit about Desert Storm. It’s not true, but fits my general sense of the phrase’s machismo and my guess at its vintage. Nevertheless, you’re right that it is easy to come up with violent and specifically martial metaphors. Off the top of my head–in addition to the ones you listed–ideas get “torpedoed”, comedians either “kill” or “bomb”, and an unsuccessful attempt at anything is a “dud”. It be interesting to know whether the number of violent metaphors really is higher in the languages of more bellicose cultures. You could imagine the opposite being true: that in order for them to be more attention-getting, people tend to choose metaphors that reflect unusual experiences, so that less violent cultures would actually have more violent language. (Conversely, Klingons would call a wildly successful movie a “double scoop of ice cream”.) This is one of those sociolinguistic experiments whose results would be fascinating, but is probably impossible to perform because 1) define bellicose culture and 2) define metaphor.

Comment on Dopamine of the Masses by W.P. McNeill

W.P. McNeill — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 23:18:32 +0000

You’re right. I was overly-inclusive in my “we”, and there are people who believe that Prozac is cheating. Theirs is another example of dualism.

Empirically testable hypothesis: dualistic beliefs about a particular body chemical diminish as general familiarity with that chemical goes up.

Comment on Dopamine of the Masses by David Brodbeck

David Brodbeck — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 22:46:44 +0000

“If taking Prozac lifts the mood of a depressed person, we don’t think that the SSRIs are tricking them out of their “true” unhappy state.”

Actually, a lot of people DO still believe this. I’ve known people who were seriously depressed but refused to try antidepressant drugs because they didn’t want to be “tricked” in to a “false sense of happiness.”