lol, wp

I test drove a Ford Escape this weekend and thought it a good ride, tight and well built, and a useful vehicle. I have three more on the list to test drive and evaluate: a Honda CR-V, a Subaru XV Crosstrek and a Mazda CX-5 (I love the nomenclature). Once done with that it will come done to quality/cost.

SAP seeks employees with autism:

http://www.mercurynews.com/business/...e-their-unique

31 Charts That Will Restore Your Faith In Humanity

http://www.businessinsider.com/chart...umanity-2013-5

since masque is all about optimism....

Children eat more candy than average, right? Do old people?

some interesting observations:

taken from https://plus.google.com/107475727645...ts/3BVKXUhqSrV

That describes how people act. They don't think of it that way, and aren't even making efforts to pretend it is iterative. We just don't like people (including for the vast majority of us ourselves) who play life gto one-trial optimal, which makes gto one-trial optimal play incorrect.

Which is awesome.

In other news, I just made my woman watch The Stepford Wives (the good version from the 1970s) with me and her reaction was troubling.

She said something or other along the lines of "bitch, if you ****ing cleaned up after yourself you wouldn't be a robot. Karma for the win."

Why is it hard to hold a stable mental image of something? Like when I stare at an object and then try to remember it, I can only grasp the image for a second before it fades and my mind sort of refreshes to some other state. It really requires 'effort' to hold the image. On the other hand, if I don't try to hold the image and let my mind wander, I find that with no effort at all I can build infinitely complicated and unique images and sequences of almost anything, objects, landscapes, faces, patterns; like if you could printscreen my mind I guarantee you would get a museum quality masterpiece each time.* But I can't 'hold' these images either, they just flit by very fast; an interesting observation, the more tired I am the faster this gets.

* Perfectly sober (I noticed this effect when I was like 4).

Is your question "Why is it hard?", or "How does it work?" I am sure that the 4 year-old version of the question didn't take into account that you are a ****ing horrible observer with nearly no memory.

The first is easy. It is hard because it would be hard to code it. Your memory (beyond a couple of seconds) is no better than a tweet with some things hard coded (specific faces are pretty well hard-coded for the vast majority of us)

As for the second, there is no value in you having the ability to remember fine-but-non-salient details of actual events, so no reason for you to have the ability. You are well-built for playing around with the salient stuff and moving little bits of this sort of salient thing around to see how it affects other salient stuff without actually trying it out.

Just enjoy the light show.

New Chariot purchase last week: Ford Escape, intelligent 4-wheel drive, 2.0L 4-banger turbocharged engine that generates 240 horsepower:




Base model but still has enough electronic gadgetry to choke a horse.

I put some lol commentary vs your car but decided to censor it so you don't have to

nice car

do u drive that car out to the field where you dig your wells? =P

The boys in marketing must have had a good laugh the day they came up with that.

Or, maybe not -- most of the marketing people I've known have been frighteningly sincere (but charismatic enough to pull it off most of the time).

I like the blue and the fact that the front headlight makes it look like the car has an angry glare. I could see it beating up a Mazda 3 for cruising around with that dumb smile on its face all the time.

Gimmicky propaganda is persuasive in the auto industry (to say nothing of all others) and I enjoy all of it. I like what they name cars and then the letters/numbers after. X’s V’s and Z’s are ubiquitous within this framework and a trinity is standard. The engine on the vehicle I just purchased is called an EcoBoost. Ha-ha-ha. I love it.

This is my cool driving car. I kept my old 4x4 truck (all manual gearing) and plan to fix it up for the upcoming Apocalypse. That truck is still a work horse for all the rough work.

I like the blue as well. Color of the car is among the most important things imo. In the end, that's what you will have to be looking at the next decade or two every time approaching the car. After sitting in, it's more or less just a matter of space.

I have two Chevy Impalas (one of which I own, the other is a company car), so I can only look upward at any sense of style.

Doing a paper for my history class and I'm trying to find when the saying "like a well-oiled machine" first started (or if it was before / after 1150 c.e.) because it might work for an inaccuracy in a movie. Google isnt helping, ideas?

If you want to trust etymology.com, "machine" didn't enter the English language until well after 1150.

And apparently in the late 19th century it was slang for penis and vagina. Nice to learn something new.

i thought it went back to ancient greek
they also had oil
It seems unlikely they used the phrase 'well oiled machine' except they did go into that naked sports type stuff and maybe oiling up helped.

Yeah, I ended up with a gray car and regret it but not enough to replace it.

But I also bought a corolla thinking it would be a good car for city driving -- and it is -- but 90% of my driving is on long trips out of the city with my wife and kid and 3-6 nights worth of luggage.

So, that plus it being gray seems like a good enough reason to go trade it in for a blue CR-V or red Forester or something like that, but I might be getting fired this summer, so I think I'm stuck with the gray corolla for now.

Machine has certainly been kicking around in some form for a long time, but if the origin of the phrase is (1) english and (2) referring to mechanical machines that perform well oiled, then it is likely post 1400s.

But if it is non-english in origin and refers to other things that benefit from application of oil, it could certainly be a much older phrase.

Yes looking for non-english uses, otherwise it seems obvious later.

The Ancient greeks has genuine machines (archimedes invented some of them). It seems unlikely they referred to athletes as machines but they definitely were into oil on humans so it seems plausible they noticed how much it helped with their machines.

Obvious unless you've had as much wine as I've had and are generally and muddy headed as I am.

Etymology 101: There are nearly no words that aren't euphemisms for the important people parts.

Carrot. Owen. Cucumber. Heart.