Category: Is that the way it is?

赠品 is Simplified Chinese for free gift + GOOP really has CHAINGED!

  • December 12, 2018
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HerpDerp Is that the way it is? Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter
赠品 is Simplified Chinese for free gift. In Traditional Chinese, it’s 贈品. The same reasoning that comes into play in trying to reason out the sorts of merchandise that might hypothetically be traded over interstellar distances (assuming that the buyers don’t already have Star-Trek-style replicators) applies when choosing whether to order something from Taobao or […]

Double rainbow at dawn

  • June 10, 2017
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Is that the way it is? Personal Firsts The Diary of Lupin Pooter
How long did it take you to spot the rainbow? The rainbow faded from one second to the next and, even at the moment I took the above photo, S. had to point it out to me. The fainter second rainbow, above and to the left of the first, only became apparent when I opened […]

Maybe it’s “Democracy dies in the edits”: Does the The Washington Post have memory holes?

  • May 4, 2017
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Is that the way it is?
Tonight, I planned to write something complimentary about The Washington Post. WaPo published a brief but excellent piece of investigative reporting by Peter Whoriskey (@PeterWhoriskey) on the organic dairy industry, specifically scrutinizing a company called Aurora Organic Dairy: Why your ‘organic’ milk may not be organic. Update: As of Monday, May 8th, the image in […]

What it looks like when the wheels fall off; Or, Where’s the good-journalism bot?

  • May 1, 2017
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Is that the way it is?
A defunct Cooper Mini on the edge of a village in Hong Kong’s New Territories. The software tools mentioned in These are the bots powering Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post efforts to build a modern digital newspaper: Feels Bot Asks you to express your feelings about a news topic by selecting from a pre-chosen list of […]