November 1, 2011
Gate-crashing, gatecrashing or party crashing is the act of attending an invite-only event without invitation. The person doing the gate-crashing is known as a gate-crasher. Gate crashing is also the act of tracing a signal through logic gates in electronics. Reasons for gate-crashing include avoiding entry fees, gaining access to free food and beverages (often alcoholic) , gaining access to a party that they wanted to be invited to, taking pictures of famous people, having pictures taken with famous people, and more serious crimes like stalking, kidnapping, murder, theft, fraud, and causing general disruptions.
Various techniques that involve blending in with the crowd can be used to gain access to some events. Various measures can be taken to prevent gate-crashers from gaining access such as collecting invitations at the door and employing staff to identify potential uninvited guests, but such measures can still be thwarted by a skilled gate-crasher. The 2009 U.S. state dinner security breaches occurred when Michaele and Tareq Salahi, from Virginia, allegedly gate-crashed the state dinner between President Barack Obama and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
Posted in Language, Politics, Technology |
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November 1, 2011
Developmental Topographical Disorientation, also known as DTD, is caused by the inability to segregate landmarks and derive navigational information from them, navigate through a non-verbal process, or generate cognitive maps. This is a newly discovered cognitive disorder in which patients who do not have brain structural abnormalities, such as lesions, and exhibit symptoms since childhood. Not to be confused with healthy individuals who have a poor sense of direction, DTD patients get lost in very familiar surroundings, such as their house or neighborhood, daily. This disorder could stem from a lack of experience in navigation during development and could present in different degrees of severity.
A woman in Vancouver, referred to as Pt1, presented with topographical disorientation in absence of any structural lesions. Despite normal cognitive development, she has never been able to orient with in the environment. Further testing showed that she was able to follow route based, landmark based, and verbal directions to reach a destination in an urban environment. In map based testing, the patient was unable to determine the shortest path between two locations on a map, but was able to follow a route traced on a map. The patient was unable to draw a detailed schematic of her house. Although the number of rooms and their locations were accurate, the spatial scaling was distorted.
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November 1, 2011
The Fifth Beatle is an informal title that various commentators in the press and entertainment industry have applied to persons who were at one point a member of The Beatles, or who had a strong association with the ‘Fab Four.’ The ‘Fifth Beatle’ claims started appearing in the press immediately upon the band’s sensational rise to global fame in 1963 as the most famous quartet in pop culture. At The Beatles’ 1988 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, George Harrison at one point stated that there were only two ‘fifth Beatles’: Derek Taylor and Neil Aspinall (the Beatles’ public relations manager and road manager-turned-business-executive, respectively). In a 1997 BBC interview, Paul McCartney stated: ‘If anyone was the fifth Beatle, it was [Beatles’ manager] Brian Epstein.’
The term is not used to indicate the chronology of band members joining the group. Pete Best joined Lennon, McCartney, Stuart Sutcliffe and Harrison on the eve of their Hamburg sojourn, the five using the monikers, ‘The Silver Beetles’ and ‘The Silver Beatles’ (they would experiment with ‘The Beat Brothers’ and ultimately ‘The Beatles’ while in Hamburg with Best).
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October 31, 2011
A loophole is an ambiguity or inadequacy in a system, such as a law or security, which can be used to circumvent or otherwise avoid the intent, implied or explicitly stated, of the system. Loopholes are searched for and used strategically in a variety of circumstances, including taxes, elections, politics, the criminal justice system, or in breaches of security, or a response to one’s civil liberties.
Loopholes are distinct from ‘lacunae’ (situations where no law exists to address a particular issue), although the two terms are often used interchangeably. In a loophole, the law exists, but can be legally circumvented due to a technical defect.
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October 31, 2011
Straight edge is a subculture of hardcore punk whose adherents refrain from using alcohol, tobacco, and other recreational drugs. It was a direct reaction to the sexual revolution, hedonism, and excess associated with punk rock. For some, this extends to not engaging in promiscuous sex, following a vegetarian or vegan diet, and not using caffeine or prescription drugs.
The term was coined by the 1980s hardcore punk band Minor Threat in their song ‘Straight Edge.’ Since then, a wide variety of beliefs and ideas have been incorporated into straight edge including vegetarianism, animal rights, communism, and Hare Krishna beliefs. In many parts of the United States, straight edge is treated as a gang by law enforcement officials.
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October 31, 2011
Fag hag is a gay slang phrase referring to a woman who either associates mostly or exclusively with gay and bisexual men, or has gay and bisexual men as close friends. The phrase originated in gay male culture in the United States and was historically an insult.
Some women who associate with gay men object to being called fag hags, while others embrace the term. The male counterpart, for men who have similar interpersonal relationships with gay and bisexual men is fag stag, part of hag-ism, the identification of a person with a group—usually united in terms of sexuality, gender identity, or shared sex—of which he or she is not officially a member.
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October 31, 2011
Beard is a slang term describing a person who is used, knowingly or unknowingly, as a date, romantic partner (Boyfriend or Girlfriend), or spouse either to conceal infidelity or to conceal one’s sexual orientation.
The term can be used in heterosexual and homosexual contexts, but with increasing acceptance of gay culture, references to beards are seen in mainstream television and movies as well as other entertainment.
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October 31, 2011
Lavender marriage is a type of male-female marriage of convenience in which the couple are not both heterosexual and conceal the homosexual or bisexual orientation of one or both spouses. In gay slang, the heterosexual spouse in a lavender marriage is referred to as a ‘beard’ for a wife.
Although there have been a number of prominent lavender marriages in history, the phrase itself came into colloquial use during the 1920s, when the imposition of morality clauses into the contracts of Hollywood actors caused some closeted stars to enter into marriages of convenience to protect their public reputations and preserve their careers.
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October 31, 2011
Stumbling on Happiness is a 2006 non-fiction book by Daniel Gilbert, the central thesis of which is that, through perception and cognitive biases, people imagine the future poorly, in particular what will make them happy. He argues that imagination fails in three ways: Imagination tends to add and remove details, but people do not realize that key details may be fabricated or missing from the imagined scenario. Imagined futures (and pasts) are more like the present than they actually will be (or were). And imagination fails to realize that things will feel differently once they actually happen — most notably, the psychological immune system will make bad things feel not so bad as they are imagined to feel.
The advice Gilbert offers is to use other people’s experiences to predict the future, instead of imagining it. It is surprising how similar people are in much of their experiences, he says. He does not expect too many people to heed this advice, as our culture, accompanied by various thinking tendencies, is against this method of decision making. Also, Gilbert covers the topic of ‘filling in’or the frequent use of patterns, by the mind, to connect events which we do actually recall with other events we expect or anticipate fit into the expected experience. This ‘filling in’ is also used by our eyes and optic nerves to remove our blind spot or scotoma, and instead substitute what our mind expects to be present in the blind spot.
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October 31, 2011
Although in the written English language there is no standard way to denote irony or sarcasm, several forms of punctuation have been proposed. Among the oldest and frequently attested are the ‘percontation point’ invented by English printer Henry Denham in the 1580s, and the irony mark, furthered by French poet Alcanter de Brahm in the 19th century. Both of these marks were represented visually by a backwards question mark.
These punctuation marks are primarily used to indicate that a sentence should be understood at a second level. A bracketed exclamation point and/or question mark are also sometimes used to express irony or sarcasm. Scare quotes are quotation marks placed around a word or phrase to indicate that it does not signify its literal or conventional meaning.
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October 31, 2011
The interrobang [in-ter-uh-bang], ‽ (often represented by ?! or !?), is a nonstandard punctuation mark used in various written languages and intended to combine the functions of the question mark (also called the ‘interrogative point’) and the exclamation mark or exclamation point (known in printers’ jargon as the ‘bang’). The glyph is a superimposition of these two marks. A sentence ending with an interrobang asks a question in an excited manner, expresses excitement or disbelief in the form of a question, or asks a rhetorical question.
Many writers, especially in informal writing, have used multiple punctuation marks to end a sentence expressing surprise and question. Like multiple exclamation marks and multiple question marks, such strings are poor style in formal writing. Writers had combined question marks and exclamation marks (along with using multiple punctuation marks) for decades before the ‘invention’ of the interrobang. They were prevalent in informal media such as print advertisements and comic books.
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October 28, 2011
The Obscene Bird of Night (El obsceno pájaro de la noche, 1970) is the most acclaimed novel by the Chilean writer José Donoso (1924-1996). Donoso was a member of the Latin American literary boom and the literary movement known as magical realism. The novel explores the cyclical nature of life and death, in that our fears and fantasies of childhood resurface in adulthood and old age. It is about the deconstruction of self – to the extreme of trying ‘to live’ in non-existence.
The Imbunche myth is a major theme in the novel. According to legend, the Imbunche was a male child kidnapped by, or sold by his parents to a sorcerer who turns the child into a monster to guard his lair. It symbolizes the process of implosion of the physical and/or intellectual self, turning the living being into a thing or object incapable of interacting with the outside world, and depriving it of its individuality and even of its name. This can either be self-inflicted or forced upon by others.
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