Recent content by Bertrand

I think it is now used as a nicer word than superstitious. It came into English pretty early to mean 'to do with the spirit', in reference to the Christian "Holy Spirit." People who now call themselves this rarely want to associate with the Christian churches though.

You get Chinese new year though. We don't get to blow up firecrackers at xmas.

I use an all metal cartridge medium and you still get a burnt taste if you hold down the switch for a while.

Back to front. All religions are superstitions, but not all superstitions are religions.

That reminds me of the worst mouse ever designed: the apple puck mouse. ONE button, incredibly uncomfortable to hold. Just awful.

ime some work well on some surfaces and some don't, irrespective of whether they are optical or laser. I've found the laser ones a bit more finicky, though. Changing the mouse surface fixes the twitching, etc. For $2, the old wetsuit style ones don't seem to cause these problems on any mouse...

That's quite funny. I wonder how many murders are prevented by a game of Hitman.

Actually the bulk of the wireless devices are non-bluetooth proprietary standards. I'm not sure why this is, afaik the bluetooth license is free (you do need to get one so that they can assign it a MAC address). I haven't heard of a wifi one and this does sound like overkill, but they may exist.

The sellers of overpriced bags and other junk seem to jump up and down the most, but I think the real problem with counterfeiting is in medicines, safety and test equipment, etc. Pharmacists have unknowingly put these fakes up for sale, and customs have seized fake cancer medications, etc.

Not a great definition from Wikipedia there. Humanists are just people who think that values and ethics are created by people rather than magical spirits or superstitious "spirituality". It was a response to the nihilism of "But if there is no God, there cannot be Good and Evil". There are a...

Laser works better than optical as long as you have a reasonable mousepad. They do get confused by some surfaces more than the optical ones. Some laser mice are measurably better than others: they have a higher resolution, so that moving the mouse a very small distance gets recognized...

Nah. The worst bit is when he dies and realizes the Catholics were right. (Recalling the old Rowan Atkinson sketch, although I think the Jews were right in that one.) EDIT: mpaa hasn't gotten to this one yet: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFGrQMD6Uqc

Does to a certain extent, but I think the role of accent is more important here. (Don't have a citation, but....) There was an experiment using an "educated" and an "uneducated" accent reading exactly the same script to two audiences. "Educated" accent got lots of "well reasoned" whereas the...

Smoke, in terms of "index", means "there is a fire - you probably want to run away." In terms of "symbol", it means whatever the media make it mean. It became sexy simply because smoke just happens to look really great in a black and white film, and they needed something to symbolize sex back...

My impression is that the British prefer slow service because it gives them an excuse to form a queue. I could be wrong.