All entries for Tuesday 25 July 2006

Answers Given to Questions Never Asked

Before I found the Python script that interprets my blog's RSS feed and allows me to have my blog mirrored on my website I investigated Google's Blogger as a way of getting my blog on to my website. This ultimately failed because I wanted to have all my past entries added to Blogger, which had to be done manually since this was before we could export our blogs. So my Blogger account sat there until just now when I randomly clicked the bookmark that's also been sitting around doing nothing since then.

In the profile is a "Random Question"; I kept telling it to generate new ones until I got one that inspired me, as it were…

I eventually settled for

How is an ankle unlike a consequence?

The random answer I came up with it, unfortunately, about 300 characters longer than their 150 limit, so I decided to blog it instead:

Well it's all relative, you see. If we take "ankle" to be "the bit between your leg and your foot" and we take "consequence" to be "what follows from an action", then we can quite clearly see that you'd find it very difficult to walk on a consequence and you'd be hard pushed to have your actions result in an ankle. But, of course, if we actually exist in a Universe where actions do not lead to consequences, and any examples of such are mere coincidence, then the whole issue falls to pieces and we are left with just an ankle that won't do anything…

Well, it amused me at least…

: 25 Jul 2006 21:24 |  Tags: Blogger Profile Random Question Randomness |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

10 Items or Less

I was waiting in Tesco’s “10 Items or Less” line the other day, staring at the sign and letting my mind wander when it suddenly occurred to me that the sign was wrong; it had never occurred to me before, but I think it did now because I’ve come across a lot of fewer/less confusions lately.

It should, as I’m sure you either know or have guessed by now, be “10 Items or Fewer” – if I had less than 10 items, I’d have 9 normal items and a carton of orange juice cut in half with the liquid magically retained in the remaining half… or something like that, anyway.

In case you didn’t know: less is amount, fewer is number. For example, a bowl of rice will have fewer than a million grains of rice and less than 10kg of rice.

Happy Tuesday to all, and to all a good night!

: 25 Jul 2006 00:17 |  Tags: Fewer Less Misprints Randomness |  Comments (8) |  Close comments |  Report a problem