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Sqlite ‘database table is locked’ error

Having even one query in-progress prevents you from dropping even a temp table in sqlite. Have a nice day.

Vaguely Paranoid Musings

What if Kim Jong Il wanted to go out with a bang? Plus: how Obama could get another Peace Prize.

Badge Care

Do not use for any other purpose other than for access control or identification. Do not leave in direct sun light, for example on the dash of your car. Do not expose to extreme heat or open flame. For example, clothes dryers or clothes irons. Do not expose to organic solvents, thinners, mineral spirits, etc. [...]

Little-Known Fact

Before Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook (with the motto “move fast and break things”) he was involved in a previous venture. This startup — promoting Kellog’s All-Bran cereal — had the motto “breakfast and move things”.

If We Took Michael Moore’s Advice

Michael Moore says the US is not broke: all “we the people” need to do is take the money back from the fat cat billionaires. What if we took this advice? Let’s imagine expropriating some of the wealth of the richest man in America, William Gates III. Forbes says he’s worth about $54 billion, of [...]

Lent 2011

Let’s get Lenten! Woo! I’m pumped for self-denial! Yahoo!

New Kinds of Taxes

Kling: “One point about the Great Substitution of leisure for work is that leisure escapes taxation. That raises all sorts of issues. ” Non-consumption tax. Video game tax. Sitting around tax. Doing nothing tax. Mental activity tax. Oh wait, that last one is basically thoughtcrime. What, did the US suddenly get Canada envy?

New (to me) Language Typology Distinction

I hadn’t encountered this before: Place-Manner-Time vs. Time-Manner-Place languages, an attribute of the ordering of adpositional phrases. Examples from Wikipedia: English (PMT): I’m traveling to Munich by car today. German (TMP): Ich fahre heute mit dem Auto nach München. Japanese, which I’m trying to learn, is a TMP language like German. French and Finnish, which [...]

No Woman No Cry: You’re Parsing it Wrong

It doesn’t mean “If you don’t have a woman, you won’t have to cry”. Which really seemed like the most sensible reading to me.

In Case You Needed A New Time-Waster

At wals.info, compare linguistic features by geography (e.g.,: when do ordinal numbers become productive? first second three+th vs. first, two+th, three+th).