Loved his points about how you can hear punctuation in speech:
"Morgan Freeman is liberal with the commas, and Jon Stewart is a master of parentheses. Lewis Black made a career out of the exclamation point while Dennis Leary barely uses any punctuation at all."
This was also my favorite sentence of the piece. People sometimes criticize my writing as having to many parentheses. From now on I will just tell them to read it in the voice of Jon Stewart. Because that's exactly how I want all my texts to be read.
You go: "What time is dinner?". "8 PM". "OK" (shows up 8:30-9)
You go: "What time is dinner?". "8 PM. Please try to be punctual I have stuff to do in the morning". "OK" (shows up 8:15-8:30)
More or less the same thing happens at universities (at least that I know). Lectures are at full hours, but start at 15 past and last 45 minutes. That means that you have time to move from building to building and/or take a break.
Sometimes you'll see graduate seminars with the mention (sharp!!) next to the time, it means that since PhD students don't have many lectures, the seminar can start at full hours, because they probably have nothing to do just before that.
Obviously punctuality depends on the context, ranging from 15 minutes late for university, to 30-60 for concerts or dinners, to some crazy stuff for clubbing (free entry before midnight to try to get someone in early, even though the DJ is supposed to start at 10PM).
The universities thing is interesting, I've attended and seen several in the Pacific Northwest, USA. They universally ran at exact times, and ended with a buffer, such as 10 minutes until the next timeslot. e.g. 10:00 am - 11:50 am for a 'two hour' lecture, 3:00 pm - 4:20 pm for a twice a week '3 hours per week' lecture and similar. They would typically start on time or shortly after, and tardiness was frowned upon.
Hilariously, when classes were right after one another this sometimes meant down the hall or the building across the street and plenty of leisure time, or it could mean corner to corner on a huge campus and having to leave early, arrive late, or run. In this sense the buffer times didn't solve the problem either.
"In the future search will be a discovery tool" ... I think this sentence needs some work. It feels empty of meaning. Am I missing something? Or does the sentence really simply mean: "in the future search will be a way to discover things"?
Because in that case the future may already be here :)
It may possibly be that search today is used to find a particular thing that you are looking for (directions, a way to fix code, a specific book). Whereas in the future, search will lead you to new things that you didn't specifically know you needed to find. More like browsing random sections of a book store.
But yes, it definitely sounds like it's saying that search will be a tool to search for things.
Awesome. An easy interface explaining each goodie.
Such a simple idea- and yet I've never seen Google figure something like this out. I mean I'm sure it's buried somewhere in Google's technical docs, but those docs don't qualify as easy interfaces.
