Arc Tangent

Objective-​C sup­ports Array, Dic­tio­nary and Num­ber Lit­er­als in OS X 10.8

Pre­vi­ously:

array = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:a, b, c, nil];

Now:

array = @[ a, b, c ];

Ooooh, yes please. Long over­due. Obj-​C is prob­a­bly my favorite dialect of C so far, but some of its syn­tax is seri­ously eyeball-​smashing.

In other words, the frat boys drink­ing in a bar on a Fri­day night don’t have to be loud and rowdy. They are respond­ing to the sig­nals sent by their imme­di­ate environment—by the puls­ing music, by the crush of peo­ple, by the dimmed light, by the count­less movies and tele­vi­sion shows and gen­eral cul­tural expec­ta­tions that say that young men in a bar with puls­ing music on a Fri­day night have per­mis­sion to be loud and rowdy. “Per­sons learn about drunk­en­ness what their soci­eties import to them, and com­port­ing them­selves in con­so­nance with these under­stand­ings, they become liv­ing con­fir­ma­tions of their society’s teach­ings,” MacAn­drew and Edger­ton con­clude. “Since soci­eties, like indi­vid­u­als, get the sorts of drunken com­port­ment that they allow, they deserve what they get.”

Drink­ing Games at glad​well​.com

It would seem that alco­hol is not the prob­lem; cul­tural norms and expec­ta­tions of behav­iour whilst drunk are the prob­lem. Really inter­est­ing long-​form arti­cle and well worth the read.