xkcd’s 1190th, Time, alone, is quite a large comic temporally speaking. (It’s currently about 50 days long.) Some guys have decided to group each individual frame into periods, eras and eons, in imitation of the geologic time scale of Earth, and of course I would like to diagram it out. Scale is 2 px = 1 panel; the scale is repeated twice for ease of break-pointing.
A fully horizontal variant, without any breakpoints, will be scaled out of recognition by Tumblr, so have a here.
Black-box technology is a general catch-all terminology for technology that uses only naturally-found machine components, and combinations of those components, to do the desired work, rather than discovering more basal principles that may expand them. Sometimes this is done because the users do not know the inner workings of such components (hence the term “black box”), but it may be because of other reasons as well, some of them more irrational than others. In any case, the term is only used to describe a technology if it wholly depends on only naturally-found machine components – to qualify a civilization to be of tech-type black-box technology, all parts of any technology that this civilization creates must be found lying around in its natural environment.
- On The Vehicular Gender In Egonyota Pasaru, footnote 2. (Yes, I am writing this at long last. I did promise to do so after all.)
As promised, the data sheet!
A hierarchy of knowns and unknowns.
(Suggested pronunciation: -|coddle|-.)
Otherwise known as: let’s take troll quirks and attempt to describe them in a funny syntax! Here’s what I got.
Last eight under the cut.
# a DECAP; TRANS o 0; EMOT 0_0; # b DECAP; CAP _firstLetterInSentence; ELONGATE uh h; PUNCT TRANS *all ,; EMOT PREFIX }; # c DECAP; TRANS i ii; TRANS to 2; TRANS two 2; TRANS too 2; TRANS s 2; # d CAP;
This is a poem that is simultaneously written in Classical Chinese and Modern English! Passages from a modern English learning textbook were transliterated into Chinese characters based on Mandarin. The characters are carefully selected so that they form meaningful Classical Chinese sentences, resulting in this simultaneously mundane-and-ethereal feel.
This video can be viewed without knowing both languages, though you must know at least one.
(Also note the author can be found at the “source” link below.)
(Source: jonathanstalling.com)
I’m quite interested in The Cloud Factory (specific article why!?) at the moment, so I celebrate it in the only way I know: staring intently at the background world blithely ignoring everything in front of it. This is the solar system. I’ll draw a globe later on. All planets to scale, except the sun, which isn’t a planet and hence isn’t to scale.
…I do realize that the setting’s planet doesn’t even have a name yet, hence the strange names!
This map turned out a lot smaller than what I expected because a Major Problem caused the rest of the map, which was not particularly relevant anyway, to be wrong.
Common office phrases, Egonyota Pasaru. (By no means should you then infer that these phrases are commonly uttered in Pseudo!)
One alteration to my mental word filter: the show “Strip Search” is now recoded as “four dishes of shredded pork”, approximately.
Larger numbers in HI.
Small numbers in Hesmai Iok, and a throwback to Hesmai numerals.
Adverbs in Hesmai Iok, and a bit of an accidental sing song as well as revelation on the Hesmai culture’s way of thinking.
Reduced Spelling in Hesmai Iok: for when you can’t take the bars anymore.
About Ninety-Eights and Ninety-Nines
