Being the philosophical type, and not just philosophical in the academic sense, or in the sense of a dilletante, but as actually philos-Sophia. For love of wisdom. I spend quite some time marvelling at the masses of people, and hte masses of planets and things like this. And in so doing I approach an orgiastic state, that is a state of heightened appreciation and awe with respect to 'nature'. A state well-known to our class of persons.

Then there is this pile of rice.

They should call it Vitruvian Penguin and hang it next to Da Vinci

So he was the one hiding in Nicolas' book.

Cool, I like Trudeau's. Dr. Seuss was a genius you know. Read Dr. Seuss, but also read Kierkegaard. That's the advice of your good friend, Ryan S.

It has been reported elsewhere that the site is bogged down and takes a while to load. When it comes up with "Try again" it is apparently still loading and you just need to be patient. But when I tried to access the site I got "502 Bad Gateway".

@KD

Well why didn't you say so sooner. You know how much time I've wasted wondering if nothing was really something, when all the while I just needed to hear you say how it is.

"Won't you sign up your name, we'd like to feel you're
acceptable, respectable, oh presentable, a vegetable!" - Supertramp, The Logical Song

"Who are these men of lust, greed, and glory?
Rip off the masks and let's see.
But that's not right - oh no, what's the story?
There's you and there's me
That can't be right" - Supertramp, Crime of the Century

One of the hands-on projects for CompTIA A+

A guy came into my computer store once that did visual mods for PCs. He'd take the harddrive and cut the top off to replace it with plexiglass. He did it all in a sterilized environment to protect the drive. In the end you could watch the plates spin and the read-arm move across, pretty neat.

Nothing is something. Our minds creating their relative phenomenal constructs create an image of nothing as opposed to something, but that 'nothing' is actually a something. We just don't experience it as something. There is no nothing, nothing cannot exist, if nothing existed it would be something. This is a very hard realization, even when you imagine nothing you are imagining something that is a nothing. This is one of those phenomenally transparent neuropsychological facts that account for how we experience the world as a something, mainly by imposing an imaginary sense of nothing. And this is such an inescapable fact that scientists who are generally bright thinkers will look at the space surrounding an atom and claim it is nothing. Later on they find that particles blip in and out of existence in that nothing, but ask them what is between the particles that blip in and out and they will say nothing. As conscious beings the sense of nothing is a requirement to contrast the sense of something, and so we will always experience and imagine it to be the real world.

When scientists put bonobos (one of the words from the spelling bee) or macaques into a room that is alight with a tint, be it green or red, they see habituation occur in the occipital lobes of the apes. Eventually their brains stop reacting to the colored-light, it merely becomes as if it was white light. The brain habituates to the most common features in it's environment. White-light is defined by the contrast with incidental light. So it is with us, that which is most common in our environment and our experience is made transparent, invisible, undetectable. The old saying goes; we are like fish trying to find water. Because we spend our entire lives in water, and because to see water clearly would seriously impede our lives, we never experience the water except as negation.

@abdulhamid

Sir. Alhamdulilah!

@Miss Cellania

Despite wanting to be many things I've spent most of my adult life working in customer service. I worked for two major customer service corporations which go by the names Teletech and Stream International. They are both call centres providing customer support for various large corporations like Nextel, AT&T Mobile, Sony Ericson, Hewlett Packard, Compaq Presario, Roadrunner and Telus. Those are the contracts they had when I worked with them, but I mainly worked with HP, Compaq and Nextel. To say the least; the way the Alamo Drafthouse handled this customer was compeltely unacceptable customer service. As an employee for either Teletech or Nextel you'd be promptly fired. Nothing you or your client say to each other on a call are for anyone else's ears. You don't divulge information about clients to others, especially other clients. You give a minimum of three attempts to explain to the customer before hanging up on them and all three of those attempts are your direct speech, it doesn't matter if it says it in their contract or if the IVR told them, as a matter of good policy you tell them at minimum three times on the phone. You don't just say "Well, that's what it says in the contract, you shoulda read it." then delete their account and hang up on them.

Maybe it is just me, or because I don't care to go to the cinema, but I see a certain inhumanity in the manner of customer service provided by the Alamo Drafthouse. I don't understand why a full refund was not provided. Sometimes as a business you take these losses in order to preserve good customer relations. She may have returned to the cinema and respected the rules, who knows, she may even have worked their and proven to be a great asset at some future time, but with their way of addressing her, positive relation between them seems unlikely.

I also use to operate my own Internet Cafe which was met with a lot of conflicts between customers and most of our customers were teenagers with insecure little egos that needed to be reassured. Our customers came, not because they didn't have computers, but because they could sit beside their friends. We also had a number of game servers they could access from our store or from home. Once I permabanned a customer's home computer from our Counter-Strike server for cheating and never again saw him or any of his friends or their money around my store. Had I dealt with it the same way I always did which was to issue a warning, then kick him, then a temporary 1-hour ban, he probably would have wised up and came back. But instead we were in battle, you see, ego-battle. He hated me as a consequence, and though he never came back to my store, he did threaten me when I ran into him on the street. I wouldn't be surprised that he still hates me to this very day and to my deathbed. It was a big deal for him, perhaps much bigger than it was for me. He may be wrong and I may have been right, but is it really worth being right over? We had disclaimers stating cheating would be punished by ban, but customer relations is not about being right, a lesson I seemed to have learned the hard way when my business plummeted after two years due to lack of popularity. I think it became less about the service I provided and more about the kind of jerk I was. Anyway, the Alamo can do whatever it wants. But it may suffer the same fate I did.

Well, flying an airplane through volcanic ash generates an electric glow around the airplane and can cause engine failure. This phenomena is known as St. Elmo's Fire. Just speculation, but the plethora of electrical arcs in the photo may be the discharge conducted on the volcanic ash. I wonder if the ash makes it more likely that the stormcloud will discharge.

Failures of realization are quite common, good to know that public ridicule and ostracization are the most effective means of facilitating realization. Here I would have thought things like school, instruction, information, a heads-up, notification, an alert, a warning, or something along these lines would be more ammenable to realization and the former would be more effective in generating hostilities. Which leads to my confusion, as to why we don't just smack kids when they are 5 years old, tell them to smarten the f- up and send them off to the workforce.

But why would you want to be another of his possessions?

I only got 21. Pfft, and I used to play Merriam-Webster's Spell Jam a lot.

Are the questions pulled by Google Analytics at all? I got "kafkaesque" as one of my words and I've been googling Kafka.

As a last criticism, are they trying to find really obscure words? I thought enantiodromia was an obscure word but at least it has its roots in Latin and isn't some catch-phrase made up in the 90s to affectionately refer to the internet, like "infobahn". Then again, like I say "normativity" is a word that has been in use in philosophy for centuries but makes no appearance in the world's dictionaries. Something like "irregardless" despite it being nonsensical is more likely to be printed in the pages of Merriam-Webster or Oxford.

But it's like this: m-w.com/medical Merriam Webster's online medical dictionary contains an entry for the word Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconsiosis which is little more than an instance of a really long word used to refer to something with a much shorter synonym, but m-w's medical dictionary does not contain simultanagnosia, intermetamorphosis or proposagnosia, all of which are quite common medical terms compared to pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconsiosis. I suspect these words were chosen to be in the bee and in the dictionary because of their popularity, they may not even conform to the rules governing english, as in the case of 'irregardless' - which is in Merriam-Webster's online dictionary and claims it is a real word in use since the early 20th century.