User:Deb.dale

Creations

 * A calorie is a calorie
 * Category:Psychiatric hospitals in Montana
 * Cry for help (disambiguation)
 * Extra credit (disambiguation)
 * Eye of the Needle (Montana)
 * Fat camp (disambiguation)
 * Library cat
 * Matanuska Valley Colony
 * Promethea Pythaitha
 * Story time (disambiguation)
 * Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education
 * WWAMI Regional Medical Education Program

Ideas
Many hands make light work, so feel free to write any of these yourself, if you feel so inclined. If any of these ideas already exist in some fashion, then let me know and I'll update this list to reflect that. I generally search for them first, and then add them to the list when I'm unable to find anything. It's also possible that some of these may be more appropriate as a Wiktionary entry, rather than a Wikipedia page, so any constructive input to that end is also appreciated. Some ideas are better than others. Warning: If any of these ideas offend you, then... Grow up. I don't really care.


 * Accident of birth
 * Alumafandango (similar to WBCCI)
 * Baby fever
 * Ballistics soap
 * Baptismal certificate
 * Batsquatch (Pacific Northwest cryptid)
 * Battle scar (also known as a war wound)
 * Benjamin Franklin's 'The Whistle' (Dispersed knowledge)
 * Bible camp (possibly also known as church camp)
 * Bio ching (pseudoscience)
 * Blobology (in the context of brain scanning and radio-astronomy)
 * Book/reading lamp/light (something akin to this: )
 * Buck teeth (closest thing I can find is malocclusion, which doesn't seem the same)
 * Buffalo theory of alcohol consumption (as popularized by 'Cheers')
 * Charlie Brown tree
 * Chest bump
 * Coin snap toss
 * Conestoga hut
 * Conversion therapy camp
 * Darby, Montana Creationism v. Evolution spat
 * Dead tooth (a.k.a. non-vital tooth)
 * Desert island list
 * Digital detox (unplugging from technological burnout)
 * Dizzy bat (the children's game)
 * Door frame height marker (either in convenience stores, or at home as a way to track growth)
 * Door propping
 * Driving record
 * Ear rape
 * Egg-sitting (mock babysitting, sometimes alternatively with a sack of flour or sugar, intended to teach adolescents the responsibilities of child care)
 * Elizabeth Wiltsee
 * EPSCoR (Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research)
 * European drinking model/approach to alcohol (giving it to kids when they're younger, in modest amounts, so as to supposedly inoculate them, as it were, from the tendency to abuse it when they're more susceptible to such pressures)
 * Evidence wall
 * Exercise-induced orgasm (also known as "coregasm")
 * Exploration window (I heard this term used, but can't seem to find any widespread acceptance of it.)
 * Farton (pastry commonly eaten with horchata)
 * Fat jiggling machine (for lack of a better known name)
 * Flaming bag of dog poop (classic childish prank)
 * Flipkey (vacation rental site)
 * Foap (iPhoneography app that facilitates undercutting professional photography in the context of selling stock images)
 * Foot tapping (in music education)
 * Former athletes and auto dealerships
 * Four horsemen of technology (currently Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon, previously Intel, Microsoft, Dell and Cisco)
 * Frontier science
 * Gentleman's C
 * Gold watch (as a conventional retirement gift)
 * Grease jar/keeper
 * Hand vagina (childhood wonderment, nothing more)
 * Having it all (feminism or otherwise)
 * Hendecagonal number (See Polygonal number.)
 * High school (alternatively college) sweetheart
 * Hilldale Hutterite colony
 * Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities
 * House hunting
 * Hunter harassment law
 * Ice boulders (recently observed on the shores of Lake Michigan )
 * Idiot tax (also known as the "stupid tax")
 * Impossible sit-up (classic adolescent prank)
 * Income donut (as it exists around major metropolitan areas)
 * Indoor/Outdoor pets (possibly discussing tradeoffs between quarantine from pests versus loss of freedom)
 * Intensity and precision frontiers of physics
 * Lead foot law (intended to combat political opposition attempts at impeding legislative votes by arresting/delaying legislators on the way to the capitol to make a vote)
 * Learning the value of a dollar
 * Malmstrom AFB 1967 "UFO" incident
 * Meat grain (along the lines of wood grain)
 * Meter reader (from the power companies)
 * Microgrowery
 * Miniature backpack (Wasn't this a thing once?)
 * Mini-fridge/micro-fridge (a common staple in any college dormitory)
 * Miss Rodeo America
 * Miss Rodeo USA
 * Montana Dental Association
 * Montana State Tuberculosis Sanatorium in Galen
 * Muscle failure
 * New hire
 * Office party (the holiday variety or otherwise)
 * Oklahoma octopus (Cryptid)
 * Open v. closed campus
 * Ordo Cognoscendi (Order of Knowing)
 * Ordo Essendi (Order of Being)
 * Oregon Dental Association
 * Origami jumping frog
 * Ovarian lottery (a term popularized by Warren Buffet, along the same lines as 'lucky sperm club')
 * Parents Without Partners
 * Passion project
 * Passport Olympians (people who compete, but not for their home country)
 * Paypal Here (competitor to Square)
 * Pencil grip
 * Pepsi Touch Tower
 * Permanent record
 * Podbean (some sort of podcast service)
 * Potty dance
 * Psychic income (I hear Charlie Rose use this term sometimes. I think he's referring to something along the lines of intellectual satisfaction in/from your job.)
 * Psychic knowledge (pseudoscience)
 * Rape whistle (possibly even rape horn?)
 * Reading over-the-shoulder
 * Reformatory camp (something along the lines of a boot camp or correctional facility)
 * Rehoming (for adopted kids, not pets)
 * Repeat business
 * Research Board (panel of high profile CIO's)
 * Robert A. Kehoe (coprophagist who misled the public concerning the toxicity of lead)
 * Rubber-band effect (possibly also known as the 'wave effect', and generally in the context of car traffic, but possibly also dating, game difficulty balancing, see also Yo-yo effect)
 * Rubber pencil (stupid childhood gimmick)
 * Scale indication
 * Science humor
 * Second genesis
 * Sex appeal in broadcast journalism
 * Sinkhole alley (location in central Florida, along the lines of Hurricane Alley, Tornado Alley and Dixie Alley (not so much Cancer Alley, Silicon Alley or Tin Pan Alley))
 * Skill ladder
 * Soap carving
 * Spray-on hair
 * Spinning wheels ball launcher (name unknown; for football, tennis, soccer practice)
 * Squashing (fat chicks sitting on dudes for pleasure)
 * Star map (the Hollywood variety, not the astronomical kind)
 * Stash box/Stash house
 * Stratified stability (as mentioned in the 'Ascent of Man')
 * Strut (an ostentatious style of walking)
 * Stuntman fire suit
 * Substantivalism
 * Swag bag
 * Swear jar
 * Tastemaker (studio executive that green-lights what gets produced)
 * Tech neck (from all that damn texting you kids do)
 * Time voting (Think Foot voting and Dollar voting, or anything where there is an obvious Opportunity cost that exists.)
 * Tot finder stickers
 * Train graveyard (or boneyard, whichever)
 * Trolls (transient red optical luminous lineaments), as well as pixies, and gnomes (possibly as additions to Upper-atmospheric lightning)
 * Ultraparanoid computing
 * Use it or lose it (e.g. education, money, muscle, relationships, time)
 * Video village
 * Walker's Wagon Wheel (historically significant Silicon Valley bar/pub/tavern, gone since 2003: )
 * Wally Byam Caravan Club International (nomadic elder Airstream trailer enthusiasts)
 * Wastebook (Citizens Against Government Waste)
 * Wedding superstitions
 * William A. Clark Theatre (near Montana State Prison, burned down in the 1970's)
 * Winter weight
 * Wooden hanging newspaper rack sticks (I don't know what else to call them, but I always see them in libraries.)
 * World stage
 * Xooglers (along the lines of the Traitorous eight and the PayPal Mafia)
 * Zoot Enterprises, Inc.

Wisdom
"It is remarkable, the character of the pleasure we derive from the best books. They impress us with the conviction, that one nature wrote and the same reads. We read the verses of one of the great English poets, of Chaucer, of Marvell, of Dryden, with the most modern joy, — with a pleasure, I mean, which is in great part caused by the abstraction of all time from their verses. There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had wellnigh thought and said. But for the evidence thence afforded to the philosophical doctrine of the identity of all minds, we should suppose some preestablished harmony, some foresight of souls that were to be, and some preparation of stores for their future wants, like the fact observed in insects, who lay up food before death for the young grub they shall never see."

"When I came to the last two years of school, I wanted to specialize in mathematics and physics, [...] but my father was very much against it. He thought there wouldn't be any jobs for mathematicians except as teachers. He would really have liked me to do medicine, but I showed no interest in biology, which seemed to me to be too descriptive and not sufficiently fundamental. It also had a rather low status at school. The brightest boys did mathematics and physics; the less bright did biology. [My father] was very hard-working and dedicated to his research. He had a bit of a chip on his shoulder because he felt that other people who were not so good but who had the right background and connections had gotten ahead of him. He used to warm me against such people. But I think physics is a bit different from medicine. It doesn't matter what school you went to or to whom you are related. It matters what you do."

"I do remember one formative influence in my undergraduate life. There was an elderly professor in my department who had been passionately keen on a particular theory for, oh, a number of years, and one day an American visiting researcher came and he completely and utterly disproved our old man's hypothesis. The old man strode to the front, shook his hand and said, "My dear fellow, I wish to thank you, I have been wrong these fifteen years". And we all clapped our hands raw. That was the scientific ideal, of somebody who had a lot invested, a lifetime almost invested in a theory, and he was rejoicing that he had been shown wrong and that scientific truth had been advanced."

"A large part of mathematics which becomes useful developed with absolutely no desire to be useful, and in a situation where nobody could possibly know in what area it would become useful; and there were no general indications that it ever would be so. By and large it is uniformly true in mathematics that there is a time lapse between a mathematical discovery and the moment when it is useful; and that this lapse of time can be anything from 30 to 100 years, in some cases even more; and that the whole system seems to function without any direction, without any reference to usefulness, and without any desire to do things which are useful."

"Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insights and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all of our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. Public libraries depend on voluntary contributions. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries."

"For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk and we learned to listen. Speech has allowed the communication of ideas, enabling human beings to work together to build the impossible. Mankind's greatest achievements have come about by talking, and its greatest failures by not talking. It doesn't have to be like this. Our greatest hopes could become reality in the future. With the technology at our disposal, the possibilities are unbounded. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking."

"What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."

"The real question is not why the project died, but rather why it survived as long as it did with no meaningful sales. ... The project's longevity is a testament to the force of will and the compelling power of belief in an idea. It is comforting to know that the human impulse to make the world a better place is not today confined to the young or the foolish. It is alive and well among the people that live and work in Silicon Valley."

"Fredkin believes that the universe is very literally a computer and that it is being used by someone, or something, to solve a problem. It sounds like a good-news/bad-news joke: the good news is that our lives have purpose; the bad news is that their purpose is to help some remote hacker estimate pi to nine jillion decimal places."

"In all these situations we need self-restraint, honest analysis of what is involved, a willingness to admit when the fault is ours, and an equal willingness to forgive when the fault is elsewhere. We need not be discouraged when we fall into the error of our old ways, for these disciplines are not easy. We shall look for progress, not for perfection."

"Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin. For, as has been pointed out several times, there is no such thing as a random number. There are only methods to produce random numbers, and a strict arithmetic procedure of course is not such a method."

"Whenever a phenomenon is encountered that seems complex it is taken almost for granted that the phenomenon must be the result of some underlying mechanism that is itself complex. But my discovery that simple programs can produce great complexity makes it clear that this is not in fact correct."

"In some circumstances it can be safely assumed that if a certain event had occurred, evidence of it could be discovered by qualified investigators. In such circumstances it is perfectly reasonable to take the absence of proof of its occurrence as positive proof of its non-occurrence."

"Of all the offspring of Time, Error is the most ancient, and is so old and familiar an acquaintance, that Truth, when discovered, comes upon most of us like an intruder, and meets the intruder's welcome."

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

"[I do not] carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books. ...The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think."

"Certainly there is nothing which renders a library more recommendable than when every man finds in it that which he is in search of, and could no where else encounter."

"There are a lot of things you can give a man. Your body, your time, even your heart. But the one thing you can never, ever, ever let go of is your power."

"A man walks down the street. He says "Why am I soft in the middle now? Why am I soft in the middle? The rest of my life is so hard.""

"Majority rule don't work in mental institutions. Sometimes the smallest softest voice carries the grand biggest solutions."

"If your desires are not great, a little will seem much to you; for small appetite makes poverty equivalent to wealth."

"The most important thing is this: To be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become."

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."

"Humans are allergic to change. They love to say, "We've always done it this way." I try to fight that."

"Give them the third best to go on with; the second best comes too late, the best never comes."

"The truth can indeed be a finger down the throat of those unprepared to hear it."

"The drops of rain make a hole in the stone, not by violence, but by oft falling."

"I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space."

""All that is very well," answered Candide, "but let us cultivate our garden.""

"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

"The worst kind of contest is the one you don't realize you're in."

"Only Robinson Crusoe had everything done by Friday."

"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

"Metaphysicians are musicians without musical ability."

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

"You do not truly know someone until you fight them."

"A multitude of words is no proof of a prudent mind."

"Physics, as we know it, will be over in six months."

"Keep looking up! / Cause that's where it all is!"

"You know it's art when the check clears."

"Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur."

"A little learning is a dangerous thing."

"Nobody listens to mathematicians."

"The truth is common property."

"I'm still at it after mathematics."

"Inter arma enim silent leges."

"I know that I know nothing."

"Know thyself."

Have

 * Lisa Birnbach: The Official Preppy Handbook
 * Matt Ridley: Genome

Long

 * Douglas Hofstadter: Gödel, Escher, Bach
 * Stephen Wolfram: A New Kind Of Science

Available

 * Betty Friedan: The Feminine Mystique
 * Carl Sagan: Pale Blue Dot
 * Edward Gibbon: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
 * Lawrence D. Burns: Autonomy
 * Michael Lewis: The Big Short
 * Richard Feynman: Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track
 * Richard Feynman: What Do You Care What Other People Think?
 * Stephen Hawking: A Brief History Of Time

Link+

 * Carl Sagan: The Dragons of Eden
 * Daniel Roos/James P. Womack: The Machine That Changed The World
 * Fred Brooks: The Mythical Man-Month
 * Upton Sinclair: The Brass Check

Mood

 * I feel like this sometimes.

Samples

 * Acai
 * Baked Alaska
 * Cherries Jubilee

Pow
"When I have asked thinking men what reason they had to believe that every fact in the universe is precisely determined by law, the first answer has usually been that the proposition is a "pre-supposition" or postulate of scientific reasoning. Well, if that is the best that can be said for it, the belief is doomed. Suppose it be "postulated": that does not make it true, nor so much as afford the slightest rational motive for yielding it any credence. It is as if a man should come to borrow money, and when asked for his security, should reply he "postulated" the loan. To "postulate" a proposition is no more than to hope it is true. There are, indeed, practical emergencies in which we act upon assumptions of certain propositions as true, because if they are not so, it can make no difference how we act. But all such propositions I take to be hypotheses of individual facts. For it is manifest that no universal principle can in its universality be comprised in a special case or can be requisite for the validity of any ordinary inference. To say, for instance, that the demonstration by Archimedes of the property of the lever would fall to the ground if men were endowed with free will, is extravagant; yet this is implied by those who make a proposition incompatible with the freedom of the will the postulate of all inference. Considering, too, that the conclusions of science make no pretence to being more than probable, and considering that a probable inference can at most only suppose something to be most frequently, or otherwise approximately true, but never that anything is precisely true without exception throughout the universe, we see how far this proposition in truth is from being so postulated. ...

Those observations which are generally adduced in favor of mechanical causation simply prove that there is an element of regularity in nature, and have no bearing whatever upon the question of whether such regularity is exact and universal, or not. Nay, in regard to this exactitude, all observation is directly opposed to it; and the most that can be said is that a good deal of this observation can be explained away. Try to verify any law of nature, and you will find that the more precise your observations, the more certain they will be to show irregular departures from the law. We are accustomed to ascribe these, and I do not say wrongly, to errors of observation; yet we cannot usually account for such errors in any antecedently probable way. Trace their causes back far enough, and you will be forced to admit they are always due to arbitrary determination, or chance. ...

I believe I have thus subjected to fair examination all the important reasons for adhering to the theory of universal necessity, and have shown their nullity. I earnestly beg that whoever may detect any flaw in my reasoning will point it out to me, either privately or publicly; for if I am wrong, it much concerns me to be set right speedily. If my argument remains unrefuted, it will be time, I think, to doubt the absolute truth of the principle of universal law; and when once such a doubt has obtained a living root in any man's mind, my cause with him, I am persuaded, is gained."

"What I wish to make clear in this last chapter is, in short, that from all we have learnt about the structure of living matter, we must be prepared to find it working in a manner that cannot be reduced to the ordinary laws of physics. And that not on the ground that there is any 'new force' or what not, directing the behaviour of the single atoms within a living organism, but because the construction is different from anything we have yet tested in the physical laboratory. To put it crudely, an engineer, familiar with heat engines only, will, after inspecting the construction of a dynamo, be prepared to find it working along principles which he does not yet understand. He finds the copper familiar to him in kettles used here in the form of long, long wires wound in coils; the iron familiar to him in levers and bars and steam cylinders is here filling the interior of those coils of copper wire. He will be convinced that it is the same copper and the same iron, subject to the same laws of Nature, and he is right in that. The difference in construction is enough to prepare him for an entirely different way of functioning. He will not suspect that the dynamo is driven by a ghost because it is set spinning by the turn of a switch, without furnace and steam."