As I was cycling on a street near my home I noticed some plumbing work going on in a house. The plumbing company van was parked outside. Of course, this mundane affair doesn't merit notice. What was of some linguistic interest was the name of the plumbing company. "Pipe Dreams" . That's right. "Pipe Dreams"! Surely, the proprietor of the plumbing company is out to prove the linguistic wisdom of the smoking crowd wrong. My hearty wishes to their indomitable naming spirit. They are taking Pipe Dreams to a place it has never been.
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One day, I want to compile a collection of all the metaphors that have shaped modern science. The sciences of the mind, perhaps because we know so little about the mind, have been particularly vulnerable to the lure of facile analogy.
I'm going to be spending a good chunk of the rest of my day scrounging up adapters to connect two different classes of plumbing fittings. In honor of that, here's a poll question based on something that one research group used to do:
Huffington Post has the details:
Who is Joe the Plumber?