Xah's A Word A Day — the making of belles-lettres

Trevor, Max's snitch, supplies him with information that leads him to three drug addicts in an empty train station.

Webmasters face a number of situations where it's helpful to redirect users to another page. Unfortunately, redirects left open to any arbitrary destination can be abused. This is a particularly onerous form of abuse because it takes advantage of your site's functionality rather than exploiting a simple bug or security flaw. Spammers hope to use your domain as a temporary “landing page” to trick email users, searchers and search engines into following links which appear to be pointing to your site, but actually redirect to their spammy site.

On November 18 McPherson was involved in a minor car accident. Paramedics initially left her alone because she was ambulatory, but after she began to remove her clothes, the paramedics decided to take her to the hospital. At one point she remarked that she had taken off her clothes in hopes of obtaining counseling. Hospital staff agreed that she was unharmed, but recommended keeping her overnight for observation. Following intervention by fellow Scientologists, McPherson refused psychiatric observation or admission at the hospital and checked herself out after a short evaluation.

Arriving for the inauguration, those around Bush looked increasingly old and weary. Dick Cheney turned up in a wheelchair, having injured his back moving boxes into his new home in suburban Virginia. Bush's father, former president George HW Bush, appeared doddery, swaddled against the cold and leaning heavily on a cane.

The two presidents made a joint effort to exude bonhomie. Earlier in the day, as they arrived at the White House for morning coffee, the Obamas presented a gift wrapped with a red ribbon to George and Laura Bush. The smiles were warm and Obama made a point of publicly thanking his predecessor for his “generosity and cooperation” during the transition.

He ignored chants of “no more Bush” and “bye bye Bush” from the masses in the Mall, grinning gamely as he glad-handed the VIPs sitting alongside him.

While not quite new, the concept is recent - largely confined to Twenty-First Century films such as “Saw” and its sequels, and Roth's earlier films “Cabin Fever” and “Hostel.” In addition, “Captivity,” which premiered last Friday, June 13, has attracted the “torture porn” label - with its billboards becoming especially controversial. How long will it be before the MPAA follows the lead of movie reviewers in labeling films “torture porn”? (Meanwhile, in the context of television, Senator Sam Brownback may well succeed in convincing the FCC to move aggressively against depictions of violence, especially explicit ones - a move that has led to significant blowback from the ACLU.)

More recent projects stir the imagination, even if the field is still young. Computer programs have generated over one thousand conjectures in graph theory, expressing numerical relationships between different graph invariants. One open conjecture is described in the box “An Open Computer-Generated Conjecture”. No technological barriers prevent us from unleashing conjecturing machines in all branches of mathematics, to see what moonshine they reveal.

every pusillanimous creature that crawls on earth or slinks through slimy seas has a brain.

At the man's heels trotted a dog, a big native husky, the proper wolfdog, gray-coated and without any visible or temperamental difference from its brother, the wild wolf. The animal was depressed by the tremendous cold. It knew that it was no time for traveling. Its instinct told it a truer tale than was told to the man by the man's judgment. In reality, it was not merely colder than fifty below zero; it was colder than sixty below, than seventy below. It was seventy-five below zero. Since the freezing point is thirty-two above zero, it meant that one hundred and seven degrees of frost obtained. The dog did not know anything about thermometers. Possibly in its brain there was no sharp consciousness of a condition of very cold such as was in the man's brain. But the brute had its instinct. It experienced a vague but menacing apprehension that subdued it and made it slink along at the man's heels, and that made it question eagerly every unwonted movement of the man as if expecting him to go into camp or to seek shelter somewhere and build a fire. The dog had learned fire, and it wanted fire, or else to burrow under the snow and cuddle its warmth away from the air.

The woolly community process by which mathematical proofs become accepted seems all the worse when one considers the fact that mathematics is applied in the real world.

Verisimilitude in its literary context is defined as the fact or quality of being verisimilar, the appearance of being true or real; likeness or resemblance of the truth, reality or a fact’s probability. Verisimilitude comes from Latin verum meaning truth and similis meaning similar.

Then the scorpion changed to a vulture and the serpent became an eagle, which set upon the vulture and hunted him for an hour's time, till he became a black tomcat, which miauled and grinned and spat. Thereupon the eagle changed into a piebald wolf and these two battled in the palace for a long time, when the cat, seeing himself overcome, changed into a worm and crept into a huge red pomegranate which lay beside the jetting fountain in the midst of the palace hall. Whereupon the pomegranate swelled to the size of a watermelon in air and, falling upon the marble pavement of the palace, broke to pieces, and all the grains fell out and were scattered about till they covered the whole floor. Then the wolf shook himself and became a snow-white cock, which fell to picking up the grains, purposing not to leave one, but by doom of destiny one seed rolled to the fountain edge and there lay hid.

They also revealed the immense scope of crimes and abuses, which included campaign fraud, political espionage and sabotage, illegal break-ins, improper tax audits, illegal wiretapping on a massive scale, and a secret slush fund laundered in Mexico to pay those who conducted these operations.

A human being traveling on a bicycle at low to medium speeds of around 15-25 km/h, using only the energy required to walk, is the most energy-efficient means of transport generally available. Air drag, which is proportional to the square of speed, requires dramatically higher power outputs as speeds increase. A bicycle which places the rider in a seated position, supine position or, more rarely, prone position, and which may be covered in an aerodynamic fairing to achieve very low air drag, is referred to as a recumbent bicycle or human powered vehicle. On an upright bicycle, the rider's body creates about 75% of the total drag of the bicycle/rider combination.

The Terracotta Army is a form of funerary art buried with the Emperor of Qin (Qin Shi Huang) in 209-210 BC (his reign over Qin was from 247 BC to 221 BC and unified China from 221 BC to the end of his life in 210 BC). The Terracotta Warriors were discovered in March 1974 by local farmers drilling a water well to the east of Lishan (Mount Li). Mount Li is also where the material to make the terracotta warriors originated. In addition to the warriors, an entire man-made necropolis for the emperor has been excavated.

By the mid 1980s, Leary had begun to incorporate computers, the Internet, and virtual reality into his aegis of thought. Leary established one of the earliest sites on the World Wide Web, and was often quoted describing the Internet as “the LSD of the 1990s.” He became a promoter of virtual reality systems, and sometimes demonstrated a prototype of the Mattel Power Glove as part of his lectures (as in From Psychedelics to Cybernetics). Around this time he cultivated friendships with a number of notable people in the field, including Brenda Laurel, a pioneering researcher in virtual environments and human-computer interaction.

She was Carlotta Monti in the biopic W.C. Fields and Me (1976) and one of her most famous movie roles came as Miss Eve Teschmacher, moll of criminal mastermind Lex Luthor, in Superman (1978). For this role she was nominated for the 1979 Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actress.

Glenn Gould usually hummed while he played, and his recording engineers varied in how successfully they were able to exclude his voice from recordings... This became “an unbreakable and (notorious) habit”. Some of Gould's recordings were severely criticised because of the background “vocalise”. For example, a reviewer of his 1981 re-recording of the Goldberg Variations opined that many listeners would “find the groans and croons intolerable”.

“But you know, when he's got a bunch of half-naked poontang walking the floor of his lake house, he just likes to pay us a visit and make sure we got everything we need.”

Stempel told the U.S. House Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight what he told Stone. Particularly jarring was Stempel's revelation that, on the day he was to lose to Van Doren, he was strong-armed into answering incorrectly a question about the Academy Award for Best Picture for 1955: Marty, one of his favorite films. The incorrect answer he was forced to give was On the Waterfront—which won the same Oscar for the year before.

Herb Stempel (born December 19, 1926) is an American teacher who was famous for his celebrity as a television game show contestant — and for helping to expose what became known as the quiz show scandals after his long run as champion on the 1950s show Twenty One was ended by Columbia University teacher and literary scion Charles Van Doren.

Charges of sexism have become Hillary's rote strategy for evading scrutiny. But by entangling the noble movement of modern feminism with her own knotty psychodrama, Hillary is reinforcing hoary stereotypes about women. Will every losing woman candidate now turn on the waterworks and claim to be maimed by male pride and prejudice?

Hillary has tried to have it both ways: to batten on her husband's nostalgic popularity while simultaneously claiming to be a victim of sexism.

Those who think she will withdraw gracefully in a few weeks are living in cloud cuckoo land. The Clintons are ruthless scrappers who will lock their bulldog teeth in any bloody towel.

Alice's parents are killed in a fire. Driven catatonic and having attempted suicide (note her bandaged wrists), she is institutionalised in Rutledge Asylum. Years later Alice is called by the White Rabbit to the aid of a radically altered Wonderland, under threat from the Red Queen, the evil despot who has enslaved its people. The Cheshire Cat is a frightening incarnation, and is her constant companion throughout the game, popping up now and again to guide the player or offer advice.

In 1997, she ended her estrangement with the entire Jackson family and returned home to Hayvenhurst. That year, she divorced Gordon. Jackson has no children and currently resides in Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

The design remained relatively unknown in the West for almost another 200 years, until an American, Nathanael Herreshoff, began to build catamaran boats of his own design in 1877 (US Pat. No. 189,459), namely 'Amaryllis', which immediately showed her superior performance capabilities, at her maiden regatta (The Centennial Regatta held on June 22, 1876, off the New York Yacht Club's Staten Island station[1]). It was this same event, after being protested by the losers, where Catamarans, as a design, were barred from all the regular classes[1] and they remained barred until the 1970's.

We have recently resolved Bet 117 on Long Bets about the adjusted cost of energy. It was an interesting case where we had very specific criteria for who would win the bet, yet we could not adjudicate it when the time came. The bettors cited the Department of Energy published numbers to resolve their bet. However in the first quarter of 02006 when the DOE posted their numbers, they then quickly retracted them. It turns out they had several years worth of data incorrect due to the deceptive data from the Enron energy kerfuffle. It took the DOE over a year to straighten it all out.

Trimarans are popular with many sailors for their stability; however, if capsized (for example by a rogue wave), they are virtually impossible to right, in contrast to monohulls, and this would typically be a fatal disaster for the boat's crew.

In the bet Winer asserts, “In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 02007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times's Web site”. The premise of this bet is excellent, but unfortunately the arguments were quite vague on how to adjudicate the bet. Long Bets encourages bettors to construct arguments that involve the least amount of interpretation possible. Once this bet came up for adjudication we urged both parties to come to their own decision, but they asked Long Bets to be the final arbiter. We have done our best with the information and resources available to us, but this process should be a good instructor both to future bettors and ourselves...

Is Hillary Clinton the saviour of feminism? Or its albatross, dragging feminism backwards under a weary weight of old-guard victimology and male-bashing?

The highlighting faces are my own choices, because I felt it was important for me to foist my personal style choices on the general public.

Prior to winning the Nobel Prize, her work was largely unknown outside the German-speaking world and was said to resemble that of acclaimed Austrian playwright Thomas Bernhard, with its pathology of destruction and its concomitant comedic abrogation.

Disemboweling is evidently the theme du jour. As the political wars rage in this amazingly acrimonious primary season, the skin has been ripped off the establishment in both parties, and their guts have been exposed. We're seeing the pulsing inner workings of partisan ideology as never before.

The house dust mite, is a cosmopolitan guest in human habitation. Dust mites feed on organic detritus such as flakes of shed human skin and flourish in the stable environment of dwellings.

Now the veneer of credibility, already bruised by allegations of tamper-prone data, secret food caches and smuggled supplies, has cracked. ... The Biospherians will soldier on, but their two-year experiment in self- sufficiency is starting to look less like science and more like a $150 million stunt.