Essay: There's No Such Thing as the Trace in Harry Potter
Much is made in Harry Potter about “the Trace”, the charm on underage witches and wizards that is used by the Ministry to detect illegal spellwork. The problem is that there is no such thing.
Much is made in Harry Potter about “the Trace”, the charm on underage witches and wizards that is used by the Ministry to detect illegal spellwork. The problem is that there is no such thing.
I am delighted to announce the launch of The Daily Nonsense, the only campus publication at UCSB with any moral compass at all. Upon learning of our existence, a group of campus Republicans went back in time and started something called “The Daily Nexus” in an attempt to undermine our credibility. Support the Nonsense and recognize the Nexus for the cabal of hacks they are!
(Please direct all complaints to our social media intern.)
Santa Barbara-based Lucidity Festival has a problem with cultural appropriation. Unfortunately, the organizers don’t seem to have a firm grasp on what ‘cultural appropriation’ means, and so they don’t see what the big deal is or why they should make changes to their festival.
Until Deathly Hallows, we all thought Expelliarmus was just a nifty spell that causes people to drop their wands and sometimes knocks them over (which is why we had all those Tower Truthers saying that Dumbledore wasn’t dead). But then it turns out that it’s totally bonkers. Apparently disarming someone actually transfers their wand’s loyalty to you.
This is totally bonkers because everybody disarms everybody at some point. So to figure out whose wand is whose and what really happened, let’s catalog every instance of disarming ever!
Reading.js is a crummy bit of CSS and JavaScript that’s supposed to make it easier to read long documents online. (Like this one!)
Include two lines in the <head> of a plain HTML file—the kind produced by pandoc or by most Markdown-to-HTML converters—and gain nifty features like keyboard shortcuts, section folding, and color scheme switching:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://baruffio.com/reading.js/stylesheets/reading.css">
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://baruffio.com/reading.js/scripts/reading.min.js"></script>The Berkeley chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine is “a group of students, faculty, and community members working together at the University of California, Berkeley, in solidarity with the struggle of the indigenous Palestinian people against apartheid and occupation.”
In July of 2012, I redesigned their website, http://calsjp.org, making it more accessible (especially for mobile devices) and more maintainable.
Codeless Language Modules (CLMs) are plugins for TextWrangler and BBEdit that add syntax highlighting, code folding, and other capabilities for languages not natively supported by these programs.
Fountain is a plain-text syntax for writing screenplays. (The Fountain syntax is similar to that of Markdown, a general-purpose syntax.) Fountain files are designed to be very readable, but they can be easily converted to other formats (like PDF and FDX) using Fountain-compatible applications.
Modern Philosophy is a free textbook created by Walter Ott. It combines public-domain primary sources with supplementary material and study questions. Everything not in the public domain is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.
This modified version of the text is written in Markdown. Markdown is a plain-text syntax that allows for easy conversion to other file formats. Using pandoc, Modern Philosophy can be easily converted to HTML, PDF, EPUB, and many other formats.
This version of Modern Philosophy is kept in a public repository on GitHub.
A hip new version of Judith Jarvis Thomson’s violinist thought experiment. Maybe a little more realistic. But probably no more convincing.
A super sad story about Bernard Williams and utilitarianism. The moral is that you really just shouldn’t bother visiting your friend in the hospital.