error message
This is a genuine error message, from Windows 2000.
Error Message: Your Password Must Be at Least 18770 Characters and Cannot Repeat Any of Your Previous 30689 Passwords
Seriously. Go read all about it.
Also,
Note that the number of required characters changes from 17,145 to 18,770 with the installation of SP1.
arctic air
Our weather forecast for the next few days:
Accumulating snow expected Sunday and Sunday night.
Brutally cold wind chill to follow Monday into Tuesday.
A winter storm will move across the Ohio Valley Sunday and Sunday night. Arctic air moving in behind the storm will usher in the coldest weather in 20 years.
Timing: snow will develop Sunday morning. The heaviest snow will occur Sunday late afternoon through evening. Some small amounts of rain may mix in during the afternoon hours. Snow will taper off after midnight, but winds and rapidly falling temperatures will lead to hazardous conditions through early Monday morning. Arctic air will spread into the region from Monday morning through Tuesday.
Impacts: hazardous travel conditions are expected due to reduced visibilities and snow accumulations. The frigid conditions will be dangerous to those venturing outside. Prolonged exposure may cause frostbite.
Winds: winds from Monday through Tuesday will be westerly at 10 to 20 mph, with gusts up to 30 mph.
Temperatures: temperatures will drop below zero on Monday, reaching values of 10 to 20 below zero on Monday night. Temperatures on Tuesday will be near zero to 10 below zero.
Wind Chill readings: wind chills will be between 5 and 15 below zero on Monday morning, falling to 30 to 40 below zero from Monday afternoon through Tuesday afternoon.
30 to 40 below zero.
I can't hardly wait.
critique
From Michael Dirda's review of John Batchelor's biography of Alfred, Lord Tennyson:
Both shy and incredibly self-centered, he would alternately thrill and bore the other guests at dinner parties by reading aloud his latest long poem. Once he did this with his friend the classicist Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol, who listened gravely and then said, “I think I wouldn’t publish that, if I were you, Tennyson.” As Batchelor writes, after a moment of frigid silence, Tennyson answered, “If it comes to that, Master, the sherry you gave us at luncheon was beastly.”
Such a truly human moment, no?
dialectic
From n+1:
Where, then, is universal history to be found? In a talk in Shanghai in 2010 about “the West” and what it has meant to modern India, Chakrabarty ended on a surprising note. He conceded that while holding India in “the vise grip of power,” Europe had also “created a room for dialogical maneuvers” by exhibiting “enough contradictions within herself to provide the colonized with terms with which to criticize her doings.” Then he wondered aloud whether “the prospect of China and India taking their place among the dominant nations of the world,” which he welcomed, would “help create new visions of humanity and help humans achieve justice and fairness in a world racked by problems of planetary proportions.” His Chinese hosts would have been correct, I think, in perceiving in this a diplomatic hint: that their coming hegemony, while good news in a sense, would not be good news in every sense and thus would require tools of self-critique, as European hegemony had.
This is insightful.
The entire article isn't worth the effort, but this paragraph is worth marking for reflection.