cymbeline's comments

cymbeline | 5 years ago | on: Drivers and pedestrians break rules to save time, cyclists do it for safety

Yes, let's mock the cyclists for their bicycles and not those folks driving $30,000+ condo-sized pollution machines (and the leading cause of death for people under 30) so they can save 20 minutes on their commute and go to Costco once a month.

cymbeline | 5 years ago | on: Enemy in the Mirror: Heiner Müller–poet, playwright, and informant

A modern, German, Christopher Marlowe!

cymbeline | 5 years ago | on: American Air’s $1 Price Target at Evercore Implies 92% Collapse

Yes! Tolls are making traffic in a lot of European cities a lot more manageable, and vastly improving air quality. Correctly pricing automobile travel is the only way we can offboard our cities from the insane externalities of single-occupant vehicles (not just air pollution, but all that valuable urban real estate wasted on parking spots and roads [0]).

[0] In normal times, 80% of commuters get to Manhattan via transit. ~1,500 rail passengers enter Manhattan’s central business district every six seconds between 8–9AM.

Trying to cram all those Manhattan-bound train riders into cars (or AVs) would be impossible. You’d need 324,000 more vehicles to accommodate them, and 100 new bridges or tunnels. [1]

[1] https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2009/08/10/what-if-everyone-drov...

cymbeline | 5 years ago | on: American Air’s $1 Price Target at Evercore Implies 92% Collapse

IMO: transportation bailouts should be focused on essential everyday services (e.g. public transit, which is currently hemorrhaging money) and not for a mode whose purpose is to facilitate business trips and vacations

cymbeline | 6 years ago | on: Any examples of writing/authors who write with algorithmic style – like code?

Not algorithms — but you can detect linguistic structures that writers use like crutches. Some examples:

-Shakespeare and hendiadys (e.g. "sound and fury", "quick and dead"). Hendiadys are obliquely related words joined by "and" to reinforce one another. They often sound better than the adjective-ized versions, like "furious sound" or "quickly dead".

-Shakespeare and the personification of abstract nouns (e.g. "The better part of valour is discretion" or "the very heart of loss") With this technique, you attribute properties to the word itself — giving valour "parts" or loss a "heart". Another example: "Give me that man / That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him." — that abstract noun "passion" becomes a slaveowner. A lot of Shakespeare's quotable quotes are set up like this. Which makes sense — "John's passion" doesn't lend to universal soundbites, while capital-P "passion" doing the action, is something everyone can identify with.

-At a simpler level, you can look at someone like Mary Karr, who heavily relies on similes ("she had a butt like two bulldogs in a bag"). The "algorithm" here is basically powering-up any description, with a comparison joined by like/as/than