I love these: telling stories with book spine sequences (via Boing Boing).
Imagine such interplay of spines as a device for picking a title for the opus you're surely writing, or thinking of writing. You might play along with such titles as these:
From the world of professional standards:
We are all set and ready to do the show, but the promoter has failed to take care of the necessary means, such as booking flights and actually booking the venue.
Also, as you may have noticed, tickets had not gone on sale either.
We can reasonably suppose that the campaign to prevent certain niche words' removal from the Collins English Dictionary is an engineered publicity stunt, but I'm still confused by Collins' picking target words that make them look such poor researchers.
Dictionary compilers at Collins have decided that the word list for the forthcoming edition of its largest volume is embrangled with words so obscure that they are linguistic recrement. Such words, they say, must be exuviated abstergently to make room for modern additions that will act as a roborant for the book.
Readers who vilipend the compilers' decision and vaticinate that society will be poorer without little-used words have been offered a chance to save them from the endangered list Collins... has agreed that words will be granted a reprieve if evidence of their popularity emerges before February, when the word list is finalised.
One of the words on death row is apodeictic, which of course appears in Kant: the OED's definition notes that fact, so presumably it isn't even limited to one translation. (I don't know whether the alternative form apodictic, familiar to me from Husserl, is also down for the chop.) Compossible, meanwhile, should be familiar from Leibniz.
These sources (with their copious secondary literature) are rather far from obscurity, so Collins appear to be announcing that they have no intention of producing a dictionary adequate to the needs of even an undergraduate student.
"My first reaction was semi-outrage that anyone should be allowed to tamper with this incredible series," he said. "But on reflection I realised that this is a wonderful opportunity to work with characters I have loved since childhood and give them something of my own voice while holding on to the spirit of Douglas Adams."
BBC News
I find it interesting to read this statement in light of the knowledge that http://www.fanfiction.net/book/Hitchhikers_Guide_to_the_Galaxy/ alone lists 471 works.
I'm still working on the SaGa Frontier field script when I get time, but I decided to take a moment to look at the title screen graphics when I noticed that Fuse's sprite, seen in the bottom left of the prototype screen shown in The Essence of SaGa Frontier (immediately below) but cut from the final one (below that) with his entire quest, actually still exists and is even loaded into VRAM.
Below are the raw tiles after I applied their palette, followed by the assembled frames.
And here he is in motion, though I'm afraid the GIF conversion isn't terribly good, and – be warned – the sequencing may turn out to be inaccurate; maybe I'll try to make a better version later. To the left is an idling animation, and to the right is the thumbs-up (at least, I hope that's what it is) he'd have given on being selected.
People who sneer that Friedrich 'live dangerously' Nietzsche never courted any danger greater than a stumble on an Alpine walk will be shamed into silence with news that philosophers regularly imperil themselves for their art: intellectual exertion may increase your risk of (naturally) obesity. (Université Laval, the source of the suggestion, just created 'an international research chair aimed at understanding and explaining insulin resistance and the risk of cardiovascular complications in diabetic obese patients'; perhaps obesity is a research speciality.) The very brief press release appears actually to say that people seem to eat a bit more after mental effort; that this 'may' arise from stress, or then again from a need to replenish glucose; and that overcompensation 'could' contribute to levels of obesity—i.e. this research looks possibly oversold. I haven't the necessary background knowledge to read the actual paper, though, and anyway am eager to collect my danger money.
[Insert cheap jibe about political enthusiasm for tackling this source of obesity.]
