Category Archives: Social Commentary

Praise Be To Jobs

I am completely unsurprised by this:

In a recently screened BBC documentary called ‘Secrets of the Superbrands’, UK neuroscientists found that the brains of Apple fans are stimulated by images of Apple products in the same areas as those triggered by religious imagery in a person of faith. According to the scientists, this suggests that the big tech brands have harnessed, or exploit, the brain areas that have evolved to process religion.

At least they’re not Scientologists. Well, OK, maybe some of them are.

The Semi-Colon

Do we need it?

I use it a lot less than I used to, but the main thing that I use it for is in sentences with a list after a colon, to delimit the list items, allowing them to then use commas.

For example, consider the following: item one; item two, with a comma; item three, also with a comma; item four.

Innie Or Outie?

Where should the commas and periods go?

I’ve been putting them outside for so long, it would be hard to change, but I agree that it’s not logical to do so (particularly as a sometime Unix programmer). As a colonial, though, I do resent doing it “British style.” Didn’t we fight a couple wars over that sort of thing? I think we even won at least one of them. Next they’ll demand that we add superfluous “u”s to words.