Here's what my F-list's userpics used to look like. spiritualmonkey The LJ friendsCollage . Original by teemus . Modifications by whitez .

I am grateful to Bill Poser at Language Log and merle_ at The Book of Merle for bringing to my attention the Lulu Book Title Analyzer . The LBTA purports to estimate the chances that a given title belongs to a (potential or actual) best-selling novel by comparing some of its formal properties with those of known bestsellers from the New York Times' lists for the years 1955–2004. It...

That stands for "Friends(list) of Pirate", as seen through their icons. spiritualmonkey The LJ friendsCollage . Original by teemus . Modifications...

http://www.livejournal.com/community/fa nthropology/143841.html talks about the tendency to make evil into good, to "justify" the preference for the evil characters. http://www.livejournal.com/users/mimese re/507538.html talks about why good is usually boring to the point where only "bad boys" can be heroes. ( thanks merle_ ) What I found interesting about the juxtaposition of...

Dear G o o g l e : Please trust me to specify all all the terms I want you to search for. I have many years' experience dealing with computer programs that do exactly what I tell them to, and I'm pretty good at formulating search queries that will return the results I want. I don't need you to try to extrapolate other search terms I might be interested in; I just want you to perform the...

Schism by Catherine Asaro. [I liked it.] [It was OK.] [Sorry to have read it.] [Need a brain rinse.] This is a prequel to the entire Skolian collection of books. It's partially a prequel to Primary Inversion , the first of them and most definitely my favorite. However this book jumps around through multiple plots and the timeline is difficult to follow. Unfortunately the characters in this...