Rapid travel fascinates me. Maybe it's just the novelty of it, but I have yet to not be amazed when I get off of a regional bus or an airplane and I'm somewhere else! I was hard to keep from grinning like an idiot the last time I took a flight to San Francisco because I was just so tickled that just a week before I'd decided to take the vacation there at all, and then there I was, playing with my Nintendo DS and shooting through the sky at 500 miles an hour. Buses and railways are the same way. I just can't wrap my head around rapid mass transit.
Something I want to see, although I couldn't program it myself: An "association-bot" which, using some corpus, 'speaks' about some topic until some random chance for a topic change (or a request for one). It then pulls a random related topic from the corpus, and then strings a second related link onto that, mimicking the human tendency to free-associate.
Word got around the factory floor quickly, in hushed tones, as to not alert the Supervisors.
"Did you hear?"
"Jones was fired!"
A collective shudder passed through the Employees. "Fired!" That was the only word they knew worse than "retired," and it was worse only because it meant that he wouldn't be able to fulfill his entire 65-year usefulness to the Company before it sent him Away.
There's a fundamental difference in how liberals and conservatives in America refer to each other pejoratively. Liberals on conservatives: "nutjob", "wacko", "paranoid", "big fat idiot". Conservatives on liberals: "LIEberal", "weasel", "hates America".
The difference here is nuanced, even if the language is not: whereas liberal slurs on conservatives criticize the content of the conservative mindset as idiotic, paranoid, or nuts, there is an implicit acceptance that yes, that is actually what these people believe, and have reasons for believing it. The liberal may think they're bad reasons, of course, but there's an assumption of some bedrock claim about the other person's intellectual honesty.
The conservative insults about liberals, however, assume something different: they assert that a liberal only superficially holds the offending beliefs; words like "LIEberal" and "weasel", as well as the constant assertion that politicians are part of the "homo agenda", implies an illicit, deeper motive; there is some duplicity at stake. Liberals could not possibly actually believe what they say, and therefore must be either constantly lying for some ulterior benefit to themselves, or under the way of some malignant force.
todo: find good links for those "specific" words.
There are rivers beneath the world. In the western world, streets might have replaced waterways as our primary navigational medium, but the streams and rivers of yesterday refused to leave; they simply moved underground.
Indoor plumbing might have been invented in 1596, but sewage disposal is as old as humanity. Joseph Bazalgette is credited with saving London from its own waste in the late 1800s, with his implementation of a vast sewage system.
Anarchism will never work in our lifetimes-- but we need it anyway.
Just after I met her, she started smoking cigarettes. She kept one behind her left ear at all times - even in school - and when we hung out she would light it and smoke it very slowly, practicing blowing smoke rings in my face because she'd seen it in a movie once.
"Christ," the overseeing detective said, letting his normally unflappable demeanor billow wildly in the wind.
They called it "The Writer's Block" mockingly, because of the abundance of poor English majors living there, stuffing the mailboxes with miserable stories to send to tiny literary magazines halfway across the country.