Uncommon Uses of Common Phrasal Verbs – 2
1. go on something: to base an opinion or decision on something. Since there were no witnesses, the police had little to go on. 2. Go on/ go on about/ go on and on (about something): to talk so much that people become bored or annoyed. You do go on, don't you? Oh how he can go on and on about how smart he is. My mother can go on and on about how my generation is lost. 3. Go on: to go to a place before someone else who you are with. Why don’t you go on without me? 4. Go on: to walk onto a stage to begin your part in a performance. I go on in the middle of the final act. 5. going on (for) something: almost a particular age, time, or amount. It’s eight, going on nine.
Uncommon Uses of Common Phrasal Verbs – 1
1. Add up: to make sense : to seem to be logical or true. Her story didn’t add up, at least some parts of it. I think she was lying. 2. Blow up: To lose one’s temper He blew up on hearing that his son was beaten up by the teacher. 3. Carry on: to behave in an excited, agitated, or foolish manner. I don’t like kids who keep carrying on, shouting and yelling all day long. 4. Get along: to go away; leave I’d really like to stay, but I have to get along as I have a meeting. 5. Get along: to grow old Her grandma is getting along; she’s almost 99.
Food For Thought 25
Top vets urge dog lovers to stop buying pugs and bulldogs Pugs, Frenchies, boxers, shih-tzus and other flat-faced dog breeds have been trending for at least the last decade, thanks to higher visibility (usually in a celebrity’s handbag), an increase in city living (smaller dogs for smaller homes), and possibly even the fine acting of Frank the Pug in 1997’s Men in Black. We’re not ruling it out. These small, specialty pure breeds are seen as the pinnacle of cuteness – they have friendly personalities, endearing odd looks, and are perfect for Stranger Things video montages. So what’s their cutest feature? Is it their squashy little faces? Their grunting pants (like tiny little obese people!)? Their double-curled tails?
Food For Thought 24
In 1973, an MIT computer predicted the end of civilization. So far, it's on target. In 1973, a computer program was developed at MIT to model global sustainability. Instead, it predicted that by 2040 our civilization would end. While many in history have made apocalyptic predictions that have so far failed to materialize, what the computer envisioned in the 1970s has by and large been coming true. Could the machine be right? Why the program was created The prediction, which recently re-appeared in Australian media, was made by a program dubbed World One. It was originally created by the computer pioneer Jay Forrester, who was commissioned by the Club of Rome to model how well the world could sustain its growth. The Club of Rome is an organization comprised of thinkers, former world heads of states, scientists, and UN bureaucrats with the mission to “promote understanding of the global challenges [...]
Food For Thought 23
Programming My Child DAVID AUERBACH Adapted from BITWISE by David Auerbach. Copyright © 2018 by David Auerbach. Published by arrangement with Pantheon Books, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. and errors can happen to you and computers ’cause you are . . . a computer! go and do it! program yourself! just do it! explore your toes, explore your nose, explore everything you have goes and if you don’t want to do that you can’t even live not even houses, ’cause houses are us —Eleanor Auerbach (age four), “The Blah Blah Blah Song” A few years after leaving Google, I had a daughter, and thus began another long-term engineering project—one that is still ongoing. Parents program their children, after all—and vice versa—and it was in those early months of parenting that my child—unable to make a facial expression, unable to express anything but [...]
Food For Thought 22
This one is genuinely Food For Thought: Think Different ROBERT HOMAN Apple recently became the first publicly traded American company to be valued at $1 trillion. It is also the world’s single greatest direct cause of inequality. This claim is not polemical, but statistical: Apple redistributes more wealth upward than any corporation or country on the planet. Apple redistributes more wealth upward than any corporation or country on the planet. In fiscal year 2017, Apple counted $229 billion in revenue. That means it brought in more money in sales than all but nineteen countries did in tax revenues last year. While governments then pump most of their revenues back into their own militaries, welfare systems, and infrastructure, Apple pays its suppliers and its workers market rates and then counts billions leftover—$48 billion in profit last year alone. No country comes even close to running such a surplus, and no corporation’s is within $20 [...]
Food For Thought 21
God’s Oppressed Children Pankaj MishraDecember 21, 2017 Issue Many Indian houses still have a simple pit toilet, which consists of a large hole in the floor. The feces are collected at night by “manual scavengers,” who, Sujatha Gidla writes in Ants Among Elephants, “carry away human shit” and whose “tools are nothing but a small broom and a tin plate.” Most are women. In the past, they would “fill their palm-leaf baskets with excrement and carry it off on their heads five, six miles to some place on the outskirts of town where they’re allowed to dispose of it.” In many places today, baskets have been replaced with buckets and carts, but the disease-ridden job of cleaning toilets, septic tanks, gutters, and sewers still falls on Dalits, formerly “untouchable” Hindus.1 One out of six Indians is a Dalit, but for years I neither witnessed nor imagined the life of one, [...]
Food For Thought 20
Gospels of Giving for the New Gilded Age Are today’s donor classes solving problems—or creating new ones? Elizabeth KolbertAugust 27, 2018 Issue Skeptics fear philanthropies have gained undue influence on public policy. In the spring of 1889, Andrew Carnegie published an essay on money. If possession confers knowledge, then there was no greater expert on the subject: Carnegie was possibly the richest American who ever lived. The essay, which was printed first in the North American Review, then in Britain’s Pall Mall Gazette, and later reissued in a pamphlet, became known as “The Gospel of Wealth.” The “Gospel” opened with a discussion of inequity. This was the Gilded Age, and, even as most Americans were struggling to get by, the one-per-centers were putting up “cottages” in Newport. The disparity was, in Carnegie’s view, unavoidable. It was the price of progress, and progress, ultimately, benefitted everyone. “The ‘good old times’ were [...]
Food For Thought 19
How the Modern World Makes Us Mentally Ill The modern world is wonderful in many ways (dentistry is good, cars are reliable, we can so easily keep in touch from Mexico with our grandmother in Scotland) – but it’s also powerfully and tragically geared to causing a high background level of anxiety and widespread low-level depression. (More here)