Anthology of Ideas

The following text comes from an American Army guidebook that was distributed during the second World War to soldiers stationed in Iraq. (Emphasis added to some lines.) SOME IMPORTANT DO’S AND DON’TS Keep away from mosques. Smoke or spit somewhere else””never in front of a mosque. If you come near a mosque, keep moving (away) and don’t loiter. Keep silent when the Moslems are praying (which they do five times a day) and don’t stare.

XHTML specifications provide three types of lists ordered lists , unordered lists and definition lists . Ordered lists are meant for content that must be arranged in a specific order — things like instructions, or lines of code. Unordered lists are meant to be used for content that can reasonably be displayed in any order such as navigation menus or shopping lists. The rarely used definition lists is meant to be used where one list item is logically defined by a subsequent item (a definition term followed by a definition description ) it functions the same way as a FAQ or glossary.

In general, although Benjamin Whorf was obviously well-read and has mastered the use of language, I find him to be rather culture bound and egocentric. Although he is able to construct his writing in such a way as to appear intellectual to the average person by using a large number of obscure and obtuse words, his words say very little. His claims about language are, in general, very egotistical. He seems to think linguists superior to the rest of the world because they understand the concepts of language when no one else has.

How can you beat a line like: The good news is we understand a lot about the universe; the bad news is it makes no sense. I used the mysterious beauty of dark matter and dark energy as an excuse to make some didactic points about science and rationality and politics. (If I weren’t an atheist, I would have made a good preacher.) hat tip: cosmicvariance

If you have tried to use AJAX with WordPress, most likely you have stumbled upon the wp_die() function which completely kills the response you expect to get. However, we can trap the wp_die() by using PHP’s output buffering and the ob_start callback function to process the output of wp_die() even though a die() is called. This is a very special case, and will only work when you are able to ensure output buffering can be called before the die is called.

Aside from a brief flirtation with a couple payed projects, I’ve been heavily focusing on rewriting the code for INAP 3.0, and it has almost reached the point of a private beta (which means I start running it on this site.) I have selected the new name for INAP 3.0, but I’m not going to reveal it just yet. Here is a small preview of what you can expect from INAP 3.0: INAP 3.0 is now truly modular with a main Javascript/PHP core that other features hook into to function.