Improving punctuation for quotes.
Saturday 14th of February 2009, 04:01:01 am
Let us consider quotes. "This is a quote", is a quote, and the grammatically anal among you might go "oh my god you put the comma outside the quote!".
You'll also take exception to my use of an exclamation mark, then a closing quote, and then a full stop.
What the hell is wrong with you?
Quotes indicate what was said; pulling interpunction into a quote makes absolutely no sense - it's not like the actual quote itself contained the comma, now did it? Same story for pulling full stops into quotes. My sentence ends with my full stop, not with someone else's full stop. Also, if the quote was yelled, then that doesn't mean my sentence has to be yelled too; why on earth would you pretend that only one -- normally -- sentence ending punctuation mark should be used in this case?
This post was mostly to say "you piss me off". Crazy anal-about-the-wrong-things people... Go combat improper spelling instead (and don't you dare talk about split infinitives... ENGLISH WAS NEVER LATIN, THE LATIN RULES OF GRAMMAR NEVER APPLIED!)
I love you all.
Friday 19th of September 2008, 07:48:20 am
You no doubt know of the spinny blady coffee grinders you can buy. I own one, and there are two major problems with it. 1) it gets quite warm while it's grinding, and 2) it doesn't grind. It punches the beans in the face until they explode in small fragments, which it then proceeds to punch in the face too. This doesn't lead to the most uniform grind. The following is my idea of a good coffee grinder: dual stone wheel on a variable height spring, which crushes by virtue of rolling over the beans at a height that the bean cannot accommodate. Slowly decreasing height means low-friction crushing, which means the coffee doesn't change flavour. The design would be reasonably simple too, I shall try to sketch it out in SketchUp soon and put the image link up for illustration.
Friday 19th of September 2008, 07:44:48 am
Modern folding bikes annoy me. They have small wheels, and they look ugly. What if you made a normal mountain bike, with a frame of interlocking pipes held together by the tension of metal wire running through the inside of the pipes? I can hear you think "Why, that sounds almost like modern tent frames..." and yeah, that's pretty much what I was thinking of too. Although in my idea, the fact that if there is no tension there is no bike means you can actually have a bike with a key that can lock the tensor in place. No key? Can't use the bike because it's just a jumble of pipes. Weld the pipes? Clearly you now have an illegal bike..
Friday 19th of September 2008, 07:44:29 am
I have a Nikon digital SLR. I also have a stack of old Canon lenses. I cannot use these two together and this annoys me a hell of a lot. Now, the only way to get these two to "talk" to each other would be to slot some kind of adapter ring between the two and then you have the problem that the lens' focal plain is somewhere in front of the camera's image plane. You'd need to move the image plane down from "inside the adapter" to "where it is supposed to be". So... why hasn't anyone made this yet? I figured it would make sense to use something like an adapter with interchangable mountings at either end (camera mount and lens mount), and a variable lens system in the actual adapter ring to move the image plane up and down. No one's made this. I would certainly buy one if someone did.
The idea is simple. Slot two adapters to the back and front, and the center bit is a liquid correction lens. viscous fluid on the front and back of a glass plate, with optical plastic lenses containing it, which can "bulge" to correct for divergence/convergence so that the image plane can be projected onto the real image plane.