Abstruse Goose

You must have only seen this phrase in places where it was used in the bright, sparkling, professorial manner assumed by your comment. I take no offense when it appears in a textbook, where the intent is to have me practice a skill. I do object to its appearance in a journal article, however; that is a context where you are supposed to communicate findings as clearly and concisely as possible. In particular, I've come across its use more and more often where one of the following likely applies:

1. it is doubtful that the author has actually done the work to prove his own assertion, and uses the phrase to cast his own burden on the reader,

2. the author has possibly done the work, but can't be bothered to condense it to the quality required for publication,

3. showing the work would clearly be useful for the target audience, but the author is more concerned with making the material appear difficult, or

4. the author is being ironic, because the assertion is either superfluous, outright incorrect, or known to be unprovable.

In fact, all these bad use-cases are common sources of humor among math nerds (http://www.jargon.net/jargonfile/e/exerciseleftasan.html), (http://abstrusegoose.com/12), (http://fasterdonuts.tumblr.com/post/4516834904/the-proof-is-left-as-an-exercise-for-the) ... so I think I'm being fair in calling this phrase a trope. As in, its overuse is well-known, tolerated, and occasionally ridiculed.

tldr: I am indeed complaining about bad writing, not the…

There are a couple more poems I know and love on a similar theme, but they're probably not of interest to this audience as they're in Sanskrit :-) (“सा रम्या नगरी…” by Bhartṛhari, “ मान्धाता स महीपतिः…” by Bhoja, and “…शान्त्यै मनो दीयताम्” by Kṣemendra)

Not another poem on that theme, but something cool I remembered related to Ozymandias: Gilbert Adair, somewhere in his amazing translation (A Void) of Georges Perec's work La Disparition — written entirely without a single instance of the letter 'e' — has this rewrite of Ozymandias that maintains the lipogram constraint (and rhyme):

Ozymandias

I know a pilgrim from a distant land

Who said: Two vast and sawn-off limbs of quartz

Stand on an arid plain. Not far, in sand

Half sunk, I found a facial stump, drawn warts

And all; its curling lips of cold command

Show that its sculptor passions could portray

Which still outlast, stamp’d on unliving things,

A mocking hand that no constraint would sway:

And on its plinth this lordly boast is shown:

“Lo, I am Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, O Mighty, and bow down!”

‘Tis all that is intact. Around that crust

Of a colossal ruin, now windblown,

A sandstorm swirls and grinds it into dust.

— PBS

He does similar things in some places in the book with other works, such as Poe's The Raven: http://whatwouldpuskasdo.blogspot.com/2004/07/dropping-e.html

And on the original theme, see also https://abstrusegoose.com/89

http://abstrusegoose.com/249

Seriously tho,
If you want to get started doing some fun things, you could try processing (http://processing.org/learning/)
Its really easy to get started, and I would say its similar to java, it might be easy to get started because you can visually see what you are doing and there are lots of examples, it also works with ardrino boards so you can easily start playing with hardware.

If you want to learn Ruby, there are lots of web resources around, this ruby on rails web development resource was recommended to me by a friend, but I have not yet had the chance to try it yet (http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ruby-on-rails-tutorial-book).

If you want to learn Java I would just search on amazon for a beginner java book, I learned it in university so this is the only way I know. I would not really recommend c++ for a beginner / hobby enthusiast.

If you are more serious about learning programming for a profession, you could start with some edX or other online university coarse (https://www.edx.org/courses/MITx/6.00x/2012_Fall/about)

>Half of them seem like products/companies.

So? Products/companies can have profound impact, societal and cultural, be taken for granted, and it can be unimaginable that they didn't exist just 10 or 20 or 25 years ago.

For example: Wikipedia, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Uber, Spotify, iOS and Android, didn't exist 20 years ago.

Today they're a huge part of western (if not global) everyday life. That's part of the purpose of the list - to note how common everyday words/things we have almost forgotten ever being without are quite recent additions to our lives.

(Eno's list is not even about words not existing entirely. It's about them not being the focus of some much attention, in the media, the news, politics, everyday life etc).

This is one of my favorite webcomics on the subject:

https://abstrusegoose.com/572

The brain absolutely is a machine. Just like everything biological in general: life is nanotech. We know that, because we can literally look through our microscopes and see how it ticks, at the atomic level.

So we looked and saw that life is just molecular nanotech, but what we didn't see was any tags attached to carbon chains that would say, "this molecule's natural function is to think", or "that molecule's natural function is to be a part of an organ that pumps blood", etc. Because there is no such thing like a "natural function" in the sense used by your quote, the distinction between "natural" and "artificial" is itself artificial[0], and that whole quote represents a piece of magical thinking philosophy you'd think humanity abandoned at least a century ago.

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[0] - https://abstrusegoose.com/215

More and more often recently, I find downvoted comments that I thought are all perfectly useful and reasonable to the discussion. I in fact thought the downvotes were neither "useful" nor "contributing to the discussion". I would rather like to downvote the downvoters to reduce their karma and their power to perform these downvotes, but the only mechanic I have on HN to express my preference is to re-upvote the comment, which is not in fact its original intended purpose.

Rather, I would like to ignore all downvotes made by particular downvoters because I believe their judgements are highly flawed, independent of the quality of the original comment that was downvoted.

https://abstrusegoose.com/527 is highly relevant.