Items Shared by Bigode

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

2011-09-16T12:46:48-07:00

Imprensa Marrom - HOAX: CAIR, TODOS CAEM. MAS, NO CORRIGIR? A DOSE!

2011-09-16T12:46:48-07:00

Post-Medium Publishing

2011-09-16T12:46:47-07:00

iTunes is more of a tollbooth than a store.

stinkygoat: Computing at the Dawn of Time

2011-09-16T12:46:47-07:00

Mock Me If You Will, But This Huge Cock Has Gotten Me Out Of Some Tough Scrapes | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

2011-09-16T12:46:47-07:00

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

2011-09-16T12:46:47-07:00

xkcd - A Webcomic - Troll Slayer

2011-09-16T12:46:47-07:00

Dilbert comic strip for 04/19/2009 from the official Dilbert comic strips archive.

2011-09-16T12:46:47-07:00

Hello World

2011-09-16T12:46:47-07:00

Dilbert comic strip for 07/21/2009 from the official Dilbert comic strips archive.

2011-09-16T12:46:46-07:00

Real trends in word and sentence length

2011-10-31T06:34:36-07:00

A couple of days ago, The Telegraph quoted an actor and a television producer emitting typically brainless "Kids Today" plaints about how modern modes of communication, especially Twitter, are degrading the English language, so that "the sentence with more than one clause is a problem for us", and "words are getting shortened". I spent a few minutes fact-checking this foolishness, or at least the word-length bit of it — but some readers may have misinterpreted my post as arguing against the view that there are any on-going changes in English prose style.

So I wrote a script to harvest the inaugural addresses and state of the union addresses from the site of the American Presidency Project at UCSB, and some other scripts to (I hope) extract the texts of the speeches from their html wrappings, and to count word and sentence lengths. Why use these sources? Well, different kinds of writing have their own norms, and so it wouldn't be good evidence of an overall historical trend to show (for example) that 20th-century sports reporting is stylistically different from 19th-century sermons, or that 21st-century blogging is different from 18th-century pamphleteering. U.S. Presidential addresses are one accessible example of a body of texts, spanning more than 200 years, which ought to be fairly consistent in genre and register.

The results suggest that mean word lengths have decreased slightly in these addresses over the past century — by 5% or so — while mean sentence lengths have been falling since the founding of the republic, and have undergone a cumulative drop of perhaps 50%.

(In the plots above, the red lines track the address-by-address measurements as my scripts calculated them, while the blue lines are smoothed approximations produced by locally-weighted scatterplot smoothing in R.)

There are lots of obvious questions, if you care about things like this — for example, how much of the fall in mean sentence length is due to using less clausal embedding, and how much is due to splicing fewer sentences together paratactically, e.g. with semi-colons?

But whatever is going on, we can't blame (or praise) Twitter for it, since Twitter was founded in 2006, and thus could possibly have affected only the last datapoint in the Inaugural graphs, and the last five datapoints in the SOU graphs.

For a more anecdotal picture of the trend, here is the first paragraph (five sentences) of George Washington's 1789 Inaugural Address:

Among the vicissitudes incident to life no event could have filled me with greater anxieties than that of which the notification was transmitted by your order, and received on the 14th day of the present month. On the one hand, I was summoned by my country, whose voice I can never hear but with veneration and love, from a retreat which I had chosen with the fondest predilection, and, in my flattering hopes, with an immutable decision, as the asylum of my declining years — a retreat which was rendered every day more necessary as well as more dear to me by the addition of habit to inclination, and of frequent interruptions in my health to the gradual waste committed on it by time. On the other hand, the magnitude and difficulty of the trust to which the voice of my country called me, being sufficient to awaken in the wisest and most experienced of her citizens a distrustful scrutiny into his qualifications, could not but overwhelm with despondence one who (inheriting inferior endowments from nature and unpracticed in the duties of civil administration) ought to be peculiarly conscious of his own deficiencies. In this conflict of emotions all I dare aver is that it has been my faithful study to collect my duty from a just appreciation of every circumstance by which it might be affected. All I dare hope is that if, in executing this task, I have been too much swayed by a grateful remembrance of former instances, or by an affectionate sensibility to this transcendent proof of the confidence of my fellow-citizens, and have thence too little consulted my incapacity as well as disinclination for the weighty and untried cares before me, my error will be palliated by the motives which mislead me, and its consequences be judged by my country with some share of the partiality in which they originated.

And the first five sentences of Barack Obama's 2009 Inaugural Address:

My fellow citizens, I stand here today humbled by the task before us, grateful for the trust you have bestowed, mindful of the sacrifices borne by our ancestors. I thank President Bush for his service to our Nation, as well as the generosity and cooperation he has shown throughout this transition.

Forty-four Americans have now taken the Presidential oath. The words have been spoken during rising tides of prosperity and the still waters of peace. Yet every so often, the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms.

In between, the first five sentences of Lincoln's 1861 Inaugural:

In compliance with a custom as old as the Government itself, I appear before you to address you briefly and to take in your presence the oath prescribed by the Constitution of the United States to be taken by the President "before he enters on the execution of this office."

I do not consider it necessary at present for me to discuss those matters of administration about which there is no special anxiety or excitement.

Apprehension seems to exist among the people of the Southern States that by the accession of a Republican Administration their property and their peace and personal security are to be endangered. There has never been any reasonable cause for such apprehension. Indeed, the most ample evidence to the contrary has all the while existed and been open to their inspection.

Comic for October 31st: halloween party

2011-10-29T21:24:36-07:00

Girls shouldn’t try to act hard to get if they’re...

2011-10-30T06:52:21-07:00

Shared by UCY
Girls who say "you make me sick" are sick by themselves.

Girls shouldn’t try to act hard to get if they’re already hard to want.

A maconha, Walter Benjamin, hippies em fúria: Protesto na FFLCH/ USP

2011-10-28T11:57:00-07:00

Comprando malemolência pela internet

2011-10-28T10:13:11-07:00

Usando métodos nunca jamais vistos na parte de baixo do planeta, pesquisadores suecos chegaram à conclusão de que, aos 22 anos, a maioria das pessoas já passou mais tempo na internet do que defecando em toda a sua vida.

A experiência utilizada baseou-se em macacos submersos de ponta-cabeça, realizando equações derivadas de segunda ordem. Mesmo que isso não faça nenhum sentido, você DEVE confiar nessa pesquisa pois são PESQUISADORES SUECOS.

Esse tipo de conhecimento nos dá base suficiente para assumir que, mesmo as pessoas conhecendo melhor a internet do que seu próprio sistema excretor, ainda se tem a idéia errada sobre muita coisa presente neste mundo virtual do ciberespaço.

- Olha mãe, estou na internet!

Qual foi a última vez que você ouviu a palavra “ciberespaço”?

Fato é que, em pleno século vinte e um, pessoas ainda têm a noção errada dessa tal Internet – e para exemplificar isso, vamos explorar o fabuloso mundo das compras online, talvez o setor mais afetado pelo desconhecimento da realidade interwébica.

Separaremos as pessoas em três grupos:

1- As pessoas que assistem televisão demais

- Oh meu Deus, ele está comprando pela internet!

O primeiro grupo se destina às pessoas que, como o nome diz, assistem televisão demais. E como diz a 5ª LEI DA INTERNET, quanto mais televisão você vê, mais medo da internet você tem.

O quê? Você não conhece as LEIS DA INTERNET? Em que mundo você vive? A quinta lei é exatamente o que eu disse: a quantidade de televisão que você assiste afeta diretamente o seu jeito de usar esta ferramenta inovadora chamada interwebs.

Praticamente todos os dias vemos na televisão matérias sobre “como comprar usando a Internet”, “como proteger seu computador dos vírus da Internet” ou “como evitar que sua filha de 13 anos seja estuprada por um homem de 36 anos chamado Romeu que ela conheceu pela Internet”. Isso faz com que eles, virgens da malemolência exigida por este meio selvagem, tenham medo de se aventurar pelas ondas do mundo mágico da internet.

E é lógico: quem tem medo de cobra, jamais vai entrar na Amazônia. É onde nascem diálogos como este:

- Celular legal, onde comprou?
- Ali na loja de informática do Maurício. Top de linha. Paguei 1300 reais.
- Pô cara, acho que te passaram a perna, esse modelo já tá ultrapassado e na internet tá 699.
- CE TÁ MALUCO QUE EU VOU COMPRAR NA INTERNET CARA!!!
- Qual o prob
- FORA QUE É TUDO FALSIFICADO, VOCÊ VAI COMPRAR UM CELULAR E RECEBE UMA CABRA EM CASA!!!! OLOLOLO
- Não é bem assim e…
- É A INTERNET CARA VOCÊ NÃO PODE PASSAR DADOS PESSOAIS PELA INTERNET
- Mas você tem orkut.
- n add quem ñ conheço flw abs

2- As que fazem compras online normalmente;

O segundo grupo é um pouco mais liberal, mas nem tanto. É como aquela sua namorada que abre as portas da felicidade na segunda semana de namoro, mas demora três anos pra te deixar tocar a fronteira final.

- Eu não vi o cadeado nesse site ucraniano e comprei mesmo assim!

Essas pessoas já têm menos medo de fornecer dados críticos como CPF e cartões de crédito pela internet, simplesmente porque confiam no conhecimento adquirido durante algum tempo. Sabem que, mantendo o anti-virus atualizado e não entrando em sites desconfiados – state the obvious – elas estarão seguras.

São também comuns usuários de Internet Banking, a invenção mais evoluída da história da humanidade depois do e-mail e das barrinhas de cereal. São pessoas inteligentes, mas até certo ponto.

- Celular legal, onde comprou?
- Comprei pela Internet, na lojavirtualshoponline.com.br. Não é bem top de linha, mas paguei só 699.
- Cara, você acha esse celular por 500 reais no MercadoLivre.
- VOCÊ TÁ MALUCO QUE EU VOU COMPRAR NO MERCADOLIVRE CARA!!!
- qual o p
- ELES VÃO ME ROUBAR CARA!!
- de novo isso
- VÃO ENVIAR UMA CABRA NO LUGAR!!!!

Imagina cara, isso nunca acontece!!

Esse pessoal demora um pouco a aprender, mas é como mergulhar numa piscina de lava: tem que ir aos poucos. Isso nos leva ao terceiro grupo:

3- As que fazem compras online normalmente e no MercadoLivre.

Estes usuários são aqueles formados na faculdade da vida, que provavelmente já se foderam alguma vez usando a Internet e adquiriram experiência com isso. Com mãos calejadas, penetra nas entranhas da rede mundial de computadores e quase sempre consegue o que quer.

Quer um exemplo? Tente comprar um iPhone 4 de qualquer operadora, em qualquer loja. Você terá que desembolsar não menos que duas mil pelotas de bode para adquiri-lo, enquanto no Mercadolivre, a mesma versão custa pouco mais da metade disso.

No começo, eu concordo, o ML era terra de ninguém. Comprar no MercadoLivre (assim como o Ebay e qualquer outro tipo de comércio direto à distância) envolvia uma questão complexa filosófica.

Depositar dinheiro na conta de um estranho, para somente após dois ou três dias descobrir se a outra pessoa cumpriu com sua parte no acordo, era estarrecedor.

Era mais ou menos como se alguém chegasse pra você e dissesse “ei, eu tenho aqui esse Playstation com dez jogos , estou a fim de fazer negócios. Pra tê-lo, você tem que passar três dias e três noites com a cabeça enfiada dentro de um formigueiro. Ao final do terceiro dia, talvez eu envie um mensageiro para lhe entregar o produto”.

Embora seja o mais sapequinha da rede virtual, geralmente os “Mercadolivrers” se tornam persona non grata após um tempo. Qualquer que seja a conversa, o MLer sempre vai dizer EU ACHO MAIS BARATO NO MERCADO LIVRE.

A ironia é que, geralmente, são esses caras que compram Playstation e recebem tijolos, rs.

Photo

2011-10-28T07:55:12-07:00

http://www.papolog.com/luizpimentel/post/170888/ex-baixista-da-L

2011-10-29T06:10:05-07:00

http://www.papolog.com/luizpimentel/post/170888/ex-baixista-da-Legiao-Urbana-brutalmente-honesto

ZERO: Por que você acha que eles se sustentaram como banda tanto tempo?
R.R: O Renato gostava de homem bonitinho e chamou o Marcelo Bonfá e o Dado pra tocar. O Dado só entrou porque o Renato queria o nome Villa-Lobos na banda. Aí ele ensinou o Dado a tocar. E o Bonfá era um pilha fraca, não aguentava tocar um show inteiro, não ensaiava, não treinava, não malhava, não comia, era um merda.
"Saia coma namorada, não queria pagar a conta e a menina pagava. Queria fumar um baseado mas não apertava, eué que tinha que apertar. Folgado e mão-de-vaca. É um cara muito babaca, nem a mulher dele aguenta ele. Era uma agonia, pois o cara não sabia tocar nada."

AIDS VERBAL NÃO FAZ MEU ESTILO

October 28, 2011

2011-10-27T21:00:00-07:00

Epic teacher is epic.

2011-10-27T13:47:22-07:00

Shared by Magaiver
professor do oda

Submitted by: catierina
Posted at: 2011-10-20 08:12:50
See full post and comment: http://9gag.com/gag/383933

APRENDA A VIRAR HOMEM!

2011-04-25T13:19:26-07:00

~NÃO LEIA POSTS SOBRE COMO VIRAR HOMEM~

FIM!

Everyone’s doing it

2011-10-26T16:44:08-07:00

yeah.. but... but...

2011-10-25T20:29:23-07:00

Submitted by: skyrosicky
Posted at: 2011-10-25 03:40:13
See full post and comment: http://9gag.com/gag/410336

Waiting for the end of Reader sharing...

2011-10-27T13:42:30-07:00

Shared by Solon
que dias tristes, meus senhores.

Reader Merging With Google+

2011-10-20T17:27:00-07:00

Creating Miniature Worlds Inside The Alphabet

2011-10-19T14:58:28-07:00

London-based illustrator Jing Zhang opens up our imaginations with her intricately built letters.

Vida e Obra de Mim Mesmo: Outubro 2011

2011-10-20T13:29:20-07:00

Photo

2011-10-16T13:34:38-07:00

Who Are You?

2011-10-19T14:50:19-07:00

Shared by UCY
TEXTO DO ANO.

Sometimes a writer's job is to say what people are thinking, but say it better than they are thinking it. Watch me do that now.

Pause.

Have you ever wondered who you are? You're not your body, because living cells come and go and are generally outside of your control. You're not your location, because that can change. You aren't your DNA because that simply defines the boundaries of your playing field. You aren't your upbringing because siblings routinely go in different directions no matter how similar their start. My best answer to my own question is this:

You are what you learn.

If all you know is how to be a gang member, that's what you'll be, at least until you learn something else. If you become a marine, you'll learn to control fear. If you go to law school, you'll see the world as a competition. If you study engineering, you'll start to see the world as a complicated machine that needs tweaking.

I'm fascinated by the way a person changes at a fundamental level as he or she merges with a particular field of knowledge. People who study economics come out the other side thinking a different way from people who study nursing. And learning becomes a fairly permanent part of a person even as the cells in the body come and go and the circumstances of life change.

You can easily nitpick my definition of self by arguing that you are actually many things, including your DNA, your body, your mind, you environment and more. By that view, you're more of a soup than a single ingredient. I'll grant you the validity of that view. But I'll argue that the most powerful point of view is that you are what you learn.

It's easy to feel trapped in your own life. Circumstances can sometimes feel as if they form a jail around you. But there's almost nothing you can't learn your way out of. If you don't like who you are, you have the option of learning until you become someone else. Life is like a jail with an unlocked, heavy door. You're free the minute you realize the door will open if you simply lean into it.

Suppose you don't like your social life. You can learn how to be the sort of person that attracts better friends. Don't like your body? You can learn how to eat right and exercise until you have a new one. You can even learn how to dress better and speak in more interesting ways.

I credit my late mother for my view of learning. She raised me to believe I could become whatever I bothered to learn. No single idea has served me better.

What is this? A creative picture on Facebook?

2011-09-26T00:29:53-07:00

This is a great refresher from those other idiots who take pictures of themselves in the bathroom and say they hate the picture or they look ugly in it but for some reason decide to post it with the 197 other pictures of themselves just so that their friends will reassure them that the picture is awesome or they look gorgeous.

Flowchart Guides Readers Through the 100 Best SF Books

2011-10-19T13:51:00-07:00