Piglet's revenge, Whine Flu, Aporkalypse, Swineabifida, Snoutbreak, Hamdemic, Sowmanella, Hogwarts, and #1 is Hamthrax

Parmageddon

My grad school advisor and I were out walking once and went into a coffee shop. Ordered coffee, which they served in clear glass mugs. Added cream, which, being cold, sank.

Gently blowing on the top of the coffee set up convection currents, leading to a pattern of hexagonal cells, not so very unlike the solar photosphere, and for similar reasons.

Put fluid mechanics in the presence of hot coffee and they'll just watch it get cold.

Oh, and they sold us two sets of clear glass mugs before we left the shop.

the perfect cup ... and saucer

Apparently today is not a good day for tea.

with justice, and the kindness in me bred
by hungry years; and so i will commence.
Once more the effort brings with it much dread

of all the ancient horrors i have read
here in this room, at least there's no pretense
that there's much here that merits defense.
Once more the effort brings with it much dread.

Sock Dragon?

Ravyn @ 6:

I'm not even a fluid mechanic and that sounds incredibly cool. Looks like it might be experimenting time here.

Lila @ 8:

I guess that solves the milk in before/milk in after debate, at least if you have those mugs. I still think that those mugs look pretty, though. Pity about the cheapness.

This Pew Center Survey on approval of torture is disturbing on many levels. Among them:

a. Torture is a more-or-less 50/50 issue in the US, though with a slim majority (in this poll, anyway) approving use of torture either often or sometimes. (Slightly fewer people said it was acceptable rarely or never; I assume the "rarely" people were thinking in terms of ticking time bombs.)

b. More religious (I guess mostly Christian and maybe Jewish) people were more likely to approve the use of torture. (This wasn't a really huge effect, and I'm not 100% sure it was statistically significant, but it was noticable in their charts.)

Go look at the link for more details.

Dismayed professor
scrawling red marks on papers
grading season's here

If I recall the argument... the oofender had to suffer as both a purge to society, as well as increasing the odds of heaven; which their crimes had forfeited. It's hard to recall; in part because, while it had an internal logic, the ideas were so alien.

"For example, Mack H. Jones, a Political Scientist, articulates in his literature 'Responsibility of the Black Polecat Scientist to the Black Community' that the black Political Scientist should feel obliged to represent the African American community."

Good cold coffee recipe, adapted from the New York Times:

Use a ratio of 1:3 coffee to water. I make this in a 2 quart pitcher, so I use about 2 and 2/3 cup ground coffee.

Tie up the coffee in a double thickness of cheesecloth, using whatever string or twine you have that won't dissolve in water and won't add weird tastes.

Chuck the coffee into a pitcher or jar or other container. Fill it up with your required amount of water. Let it sit at least overnight; 12 hours is best.

Fish out the cheesecloth and dispose of the ground coffee. Put the infusion into the fridge.

To serve: Pour over ice; add milk or cream to taste.

The New York Times has you making a concentrate, with a 2:3 coffee/water ratio, which you then dilute with water to taste when serving. You could do this too. I don't because 5 and 1/3 cup ground coffee seems to be a ridiculous amount to put in a 2 quart pitcher.

The trouble with this is that you end up admiring the cup till the coffee's room temperature, which is much less refreshing in the heat. I get around this by putting the coffee in a see-through thermos mug.

I may have cried.

Their sampling methodology looks reasonable enough to me. I'm not sure about the conclusions they draw from their subsamples, though. It's been a while since I took statistics.

I am disappointed, but, sadly, not as surprised as I could be by these results.

Fragano Ledgister @ 19:

Sounds like a rather odoriferous paper.

Should I use the paid kind or the free kind? On the one hand I don't want to spend lots of money. On the other hand I need to learn some of the more advanced webmasterly skills, and perhaps only a paid host would have the backdoor DIY functions that help me do that.

By the way, did Yahoo get its money's worth when it bought Geocities if it paid 2.78 Bil for them and it's worth nothing to them now?

It looks like it's everything, although they claim they'll help people explore relocation options.

Apparently there's a group of people who want to mirror it for posterity before it goes away.

Yeah I move my lips when I read sometimes; also, when I edit.

I wonder how the student misspelled "polecat" that would lead to it being corrected to "political"?
I now need to research (i.e. Google) to discover other assumptions about Black Polecat Scientists. I, for one, have never met a black polecat that was a scientist.

The twisties for seals are all, apparently intact.

The internet needs all the Nero Wolfe fan sites it currently has.

Back when Geocities started, it was the ideal way for lots of people to put their own content up on the web. I think that the free blogging sites have taken over from that, but blogs aren't quite suited to freestanding things like that Nero Wolfe fansite.

I keep thinking about carving out some webspace for myself, but I really have no idea what I'd use it for.

So my wife emails me from midAtlantic that the cruise line's airport transfer is kind of pricey. I google for taxi reservation options and reserve a car for half the price. That's just ... I still can't get over that kind of stuff. I love this century, except for the political crap.

The concentrate lasts a long time, I've considered getting a flask and filling it so I always have "known tasty" iceable coffee at hand.

It's not yet warm enough here for my morning mug to go iced yet, and I haven't written down my mixture, but I tend to make it rather strong. A tip for those who have sturdy mugs (mine is an old all stainless Nissan vacuum mug) for commuting: Make a bit of your preferred mixture and put it in your mug overnight in the freezer, basically enough to get just under the fill line when the mug is laid over at a shallow angle from the shelf you balance it on. This gives you an ice-chunk of the same makeup as the mixture you'll be adding in the morning, so as the ice melts the coffee gets neither weaker nor stronger. I've also tried freezing little coffee ice cubes, again with the proper mix. They tend to separate out a bit as they freeze and the coffee oils make the tray messy, but it is workable.

Happy Free Comic Book Day everyone! My wife and daughter and I went to Uncle Sven's in St. Paul and they had age-appropriate bags for the kids, plus all the other stuff added back in for us "adults". My wife picked up Munchkin Quest for 20% off, too. We're only missing some Munchkin decks because they keep coming out with new ones...

Oh, and in case it messes up my post history, my website has changed. There will eventually be a link to Socrates Cafe MN on it, as I'm still running groups. Is there a preferred way to link to Making Light, or is a plain hyperlink fine? Don't expect much to show up fast - I'll be mining the web for my old rants first and my wife will be doing most of the upload work, etc. until she can teach me enough that it's less bothersome to fix what I break than to just do it for me.

grr, extra h in the http for my new URL...

Michael, #36: Me, too. When I had scary car trouble on the way back from a solo trip last year, my first call was to AAA. My second call was to my partner, and by the time the tow truck showed up, he had located a AAA-approved repair shop one exit away, and a hotel within walking distance of the shop. This turned the whole episode from Freakout City into a minor annoyance -- especially since the scary car trouble turned out to be a leaky oil seal that cost about $50 total in repairs.

My sweetie linked me to a post on a rationalist blog about online communities and comment moderation. It struck me as having some in common with ML's theory of comment moderation, specifically, that this community supports intelligent, well-reasoned, and/or kind comments and actively discourages those that take away from the conversation (or are just plain mean). I think that contributes greatly to this being a pleasant, fun, joyful community to lurk in and sometimes participate in.

(Note: the opinions presented in that post or that blog are not necessarily reflective of my own.)

Stout himself was a voracious reader; I'm pretty sure he had read every book he put into the Wolfe canon.

Generally, I'm not such a klutz, but in the space of about three weeks, I managed to break:

Two large soda-fountain-style glasses (one tipped over in the sink, the other I managed to knock over onto a glass end table)

One unopened bottle of one of my favorite salad dressings (Trader Joe's Romano Caesar)...which I didn't just knock off the kitchen counter, oh no--I knocked it off the counter into the relatively narrow (~6 inches) space between the stove and the cupboard...

And my favorite coffee mug, the start of the bout of clumsiness.

The mug was 24 or 25 years old, a gift from my good friend and ex-fiance on either the first or second Valentine's Day after we finally called it quits. It was emblazoned with three large hearts (dark pink, orange-pink, and red) on a pale-purple background and overwritten (or printed) with a disquisition on the meaning of love. Capacity-wise, it was probably 16 ounces--at least, it was big enough that the product of a four-cup coffeemaker would fill it twice with a little bit left for a warm-up. Or, in keeping with the title of this thread, about two cups' worth of good tea, sometimes allowed to cool while I read.

Said mug had survived numerous trips from tabletop or chair/sofa arm to the hardwood floor, most of which were set in motion by one or another of the cats in a fit of high-speed joie de vivre (or fear at the ringing of the doorbell). But a hardwood floor is one thing; a 3/4-inch-thick glass tabletop is quite another, and this time I managed to sweep the mug in exactly the wrong direction.

I suppose, in the great scheme of things, that breaking the mug was better than breaking the glass table, since it would cost rather more to replace the latter than the former...but I still mourned a little. Which may be silly, on my part.

After all, it was only a coffee mug.

Where did you see that they were absent from the sample? My quick read suggested that people in those groups were not separately reported, but were not excluded from the sample. Quoting from the linked Pew page: "Other religious groups are not reported due to small sample sizes."

Which makes sense to me. If the total sample size is ~750 adults, and Jews make up ~2% of the US population, then a random across-the-board poll of that size will only include about 15 Jews. That's too few to make any reasonable comparisons of the sort they're making. One person in a group that size changing their mind because of what they had for breakfast that morning could swing the reported results by a full 7%, enough to make relative comparisons look very different.

My mantra in such situations is "Here in the material world, everything has a beginning, and an end. Sometimes they are close together. Sometimes they are farther apart. But they are always connected."

You loved it while you had it. You are spared regret. You have decades of memories.

And, dammit, it's still a shame.

I got wood today[0], and in the process of playing with it[1], ended up in a remarkably sticky state[3], which was rather hard to clean up[4]...

Until the day (oh, about eighteen months after acquiring the mug) when the blorp was LOTS louder and sharper than before, and suddenly I was running for the roll of paper towels by the sink, and swearing at the hottish soup all over the nuke (and some on me, before I got it under control).

Just a reminder that even the most tried and true utensils can sometimes surprise, in a not very fun way.

And, digressing slightly, this is Open Thread 123, which reminds me of When Michael J Was Cool. ("A-B-C/Easy as 1-2-3/Simple as do-re-mi, A-B-C, 1-2-3...")

When we all came home that evening, the house was full of smoke, and on the stovetop was a pot full of bean-shaped charcoal bits. Fortunately, the worse thing that happened was that the beans were ruined and that area of the house smelled of disgusting bean-smoke for a long time after that. Could have been much worse, I'm sure.

I can't remember if we ever managed to get the pot completely clean, but it stayed structurally intact, at least.

We're only missing some Munchkin decks because they keep coming out with new ones...

Yeah, we've got this problem, too. Combined with having to pay for things like food, utilities, books, etc.

My first ceramics instructors told us that we could microwave anything we didn't care about, because sooner or later it was likely to break while cooking.

John, #44: You may be right. I re-read the article I linked to, and I can see that interpretation. I read it as, "We just didn't include any of those groups because we had such a small sample." But that doesn't change my feeling that the results can't be considered accurate for Americans as a whole because the sample size itself is too small; in fact, if there were small (and unreported) numbers of blacks, hispanics, and members of non-Christian faiths, that further reduces my confidence in the accuracy of the projection.

Angiportus, #47: I did that with a dish that was supposed to become chicken gravy. Fortunately, mine didn't explode quite that badly -- but there was gravy-glop all over the stove and the floor, and glass shards that we had to clean up very carefully. And then the friends for whom I was trying to make dinner gently but firmly kicked me out of the kitchen and finished the cooking themselves. :-)

Matthew, #50: Good point. In particular, I wonder if they controlled for "primary news source"...

Fan and filker John Caspell ("Dr. Filk") has died unexpectedly while recuperating from surgery resulting from a motor vehicle accident. (He was hit on a bike by a truck that ran a red light, IIRC.) He was scheduled, along with Brooke Lunderville, to be the Interfilk Guest at Concertino (the New England iteration of the Floating Northeast Filk Convention) this June. I'd met him twice or thrice, briefly, and was looking forward to hearing them again.

Less personally, but more widely notably, Congressman, would-be President, ex-quarterback, and old-time conservative Jack Kemp has died of cancer at age 73. I was never fond of him, but if he were in office now, I can't help but think that the party would hound him for actually considering what his constituents thought and felt.

One show was one of those oddball live-action items that turn up on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim program: "The Mighty Boosh."

Dang, was that strange. Its about two slackers who staff a curiosity shop somewhere in Britain. The store's owner is a shaman who hangs out with a talking gorilla. In one episode the guys have to deal with a sleazy anthropomorphic fox who steals a magic potion after knocking one of the guys out with a florescent pink fart. In another, a menacing cockney fellow dressed in a top hat decorated with mint Life Savers tries to extort protection money. He threatens the guy on duty with eels.

Of course, this could all be a Allergy Medication Overdose hallucination.

I've fixed your link.

One of my rules of life is "drink from the cup as though it is already broken."

We never miss the beautiful mug that someone gave us and which we then leave on the shelf. That which we love, we should use, even if we know it's mortal.

David Bell at 5 - oohh, I know several people who need to read about Henry

The various Mighty Boosh series are works of twisted genius that are either the best thing on telly ever ever or utterly impenetrable and I'm sorry I can't see why that's funny.

JH-R in former camp, obv.

YOUNG IKKYU, looking pensive, has been waiting for his master to come back.
- Master, why do people have to die?

MASTER.
- This is natural, everything has to die and has just so long to live.

IKKYU, revealing the shattered remnants of his master's favourite cup.
- It was time for your cup to die.

"drink from the cup as though it is already broken."

I have trouble explaining that to some of my relatives, from my friends going "You drink in a 400$ cup ?", to my mother, who won't use that Korean celadon set from fear of breaking it.

*sigh*

Also: I lost most of my cup/yunomi collection when my overzealous neighbour drilled so far inside our common wall he caused my shelf to fall (the joy of living in a flat).

Remember to use your cups, shelves are just too damn dangerous !

Microwaves can be bizarrely selective. Our youngest once nuked a package of shoelaces and a Duplo block; the laces were completely carbonized, while the Duplo (which was sitting under them) wasn't even slightly warm.

Some many years ago, I had four promo glass cups from Harvey's, the Canadian burger chain. They were made in Indonesia. Three of them exited this world in unpredictable and abrupt fractures relatively soon after acquisition; the fourth survived a number of years longer. Cheap glass often has a visible mold line, as these did. Fracturing on the mold line gives the "cleaved by an axe" effect.

I'd speculate that process control - temperature and contamination control, mostly, is both expensive and the determiner of lifespan of glass objects. I seem to recall that long slow cooling is (also expensive and) key to top-grade durable glass.

I also remember a set of bargain frosted-glass bowls and casseroles my mother had. They had a tendency to shatter for no good reason. The Wikipedia pages on Prince Rupert's Drop and Toughened Glass give some clues, though; it seems to be the same issue of skimping on the annealing to increase production and save energy.

Most of the items can be cleaned with bleach and water or run through the dishwasher, but I'm at a loss as to how to disinfect the electric griddle (as I can't use bleach on it) and google is giving me no love. Any suggestions?

Thanks! I agree on the 'sag' -- the door itself is made of 1.5" thick pine, and has no desire at all to bend about -- and the replacement screen that I'm making are starting out at 1 5/8" thick clear pine...

If these sag, it's going to be because I cut or glued them badly...

cajunfj40 @38:

I've fixed your link.

Thanks! I guess I missed more than one, as I can't see which one was fixed. There's also possibly caching issues, etc. that I know little about... The one I was grr-ing about was the URL that my name links to in Comment #37: it starts out as "hhttp" and FireFox says that that protocol doesn't make any sense...

Adam Lipkin @54
Yeah, we've got this problem, too. Combined with having to pay for things like food, utilities, books, etc.

Actually, since we limit ourselves to only a few games at a time for collecting purposes, the cost isn't as much of a problem, since they are classed with books under "necessary for life" and are budgeted for. The real problem is that since our gaming group all have lives as well, and they don't link up well, we game maybe once every few months - and usually end up playing LOTR Risk, rather than Munchkin, so we don't always buy the new expansion packs because we so rarely get a chance to use them. It's difficult enough to play single-deck Munchkin with only 2 people without vicious lopsided victories, much less multi-deck! I think we need a bigger gaming group to pull from...

More likely, it had to do with the resonant frequency of the Duplo plastic; I'm no physicist, but my understanding of nucleowavers is that the energy they provide is translated to heat by exciting resonances in the materials (particularly water) they strike. I suppose it's possible the Duplos were made of a plastic that didn't get excited by microwaves of commercial oven frequencies.

Then again, I could be utterly wrong (and would appreciate someone setting me straight).

There is a very rare "Black-Footed Ferret" in North America.

I can see there being a little confusion.

I just buy glasses in bulk and then if one breaks I have a bunch of others that look just like it. But possibly I read Cheaper by the Dozen at too young and impressionable an age.

... so I'm wondering if anybody here has suggestions for how I might go about finding a person to use it, rather than somebody that's just interested in reselling it, or sticking it in storage. I'd rather not go the eBay route (for multiple reasons), and craigslist/kijiji seem to have an extremely odd hit rate.

Honestly, I've never seen a pocket of significant size in a vessel failure, after glazing.

Re breaks. Sometimes I'll repair something with epoxy. I did that recently with the handle of a pot of no particular merit, save that Maia made it, and I liked it. Had I not been packing to move, the pieces (which had been set aside something like a year ago) would still be at risk of being lost.

For glassware: At a friends housewarming party he yelped when he saw me using a very nice water glass for my Guinness (it was the only one large enough). It was, he assured me, a "trick glass", or so said the instructions which came with it.

They said that on placing a cold drink in it, the glass's bottom would separate, with the base glued (from deposited condensation) to the table, the rest in your hand, and the drink everywhere else.

Examining the glass this seemed silly. Dennis told me I could take them if I liked. I did like, and they were fine glasses.

Until one of them did that trick (and a lot of Guinness when by the boards). When I examined the remains (two pieces of glass, one solid, one a tubular cylinder, with a belled shape), I saw the problem.

The glass was very thin where the base joined it. On a warm enough day (or in this case, a working kitchen), the glass couldn't cope with a chilled drink, and "pop" went the cohesion.

A great pity, as they were pretty; but not safe enough to keep. Into the recycling bin they went.

Tony, #81: Depends on whether or not you like lemon in your tea. I can drink it either way -- although I'll note that if the tea is somewhat bitter to start with, adding lemon can correct for that. Our house blend just needs a little sugar, and in a pinch can be drunk straight.

That's some of the best advice I've heard. You can't enjoy something if it's locked away.

Bruce Adelsohn @ 79:

As far as I recall, the microwaves work by causing polar molecules to twist back and forth, which then essentially heats the item through friction. Microwaves work very well on water, as water is polar and can move freely. They don't work so well on ice because the water molecules are trapped in a crystalline structure.

Plastics are long, linked chains of hydrocarbons. They're not polar and they're meshed tightly together, so they won't twist and don't heat up. I'm not sure why the shoelaces would turn crispy, though.

And most sites that rely on ad revenue are taking a BAD hit with the economy. A lot of the better paying internet advertisers were banks and car companies and airlines ...

Lessons learned:
1. It's non-trivial to find the address of the nearest Urgent Care in a hurry (they aren't listed like that). The GPS on my Prius now has the Urgent Care address saved to preset #2.

2. Don't buy pretentious glasses.

3. Don't dust.

Under fictional references, they left out Elrod the Albino. How could they forget "I'm wearing a pointy hat! That's status, son! You can argue with me, but you can't argue with status."

ISTM that the information being reported by the poll is interesting and valuable, even if it doesn't give us everything we'd like. My own first question, on reading this, was how much of the answer to the torture question tracks with political party affiliation, and whether the same question would have gotten different answers before it became a Republican/Democrat issue. But what we seem to get from this is:

a. Torture is an issue that divides Americans. This is very bad news, but it's the result you can take away from this poll.

b. People who are religious appear to be noticeably more likely to support torture. Again, this is an awful thing to find out, but it is hard not to read the poll results in that way.

The implication of this is that a political fight on the acceptability of torture may come out very badly indeed. Now, maybe the poll is somehow flawed, but I don't think either your objections nor Lee's really call the big points of the results into question.

Is there other data that might give us more/better information about this stuff?

Any news (comeuppances) in the A&R (Australian bookseller putting the screws to small presses) debacle?

This may be the false confirmation of memory, but that's how I recall it. One of the arguments I've seen maps to the more OT flavor of the underlying belief structures of a lot of US Protestants (overlaid with a couple of very autocratic sayings from the NT), which has a lot of "This is they way it is, deviate at your peril", add the "eye for an eye", a sense that all who are not saved are less than completely deserving of decent treatment (yes, I am painting with broad strokes), and the latent "othering" which is attendant to every group, and stronger when one is "at war" and their is a potent inclination to that sort of thing.

If add some american exceptionalism, and the idea that such things will only happen 1: to the bad guys, and 2: the "bad guys" will never include anyone like them, we have a recipe for that sort of skew.

The folks who don't have so many of the mental buffers, to keep the idea of torture from affecting their lives, are much more likely to be ambivalent, if not downright hostile, on the subject.

I've fixed the other one now too.

I had it to hand because I got some argument in my post about this.

I didn't notice, when I looked at the page, the last time, the link to the .pdfs. I'll go look, but I already see some problems in the wording of the questions.

Do you think the use of torture against suspected terrorists in order to gain important information can

often be justified,
sometimes be justified,
rarely be justified,
or never be justified?

That's a bad question. It's wording implicitly states that 1: the subject has such information, 2; the information to be gained is, "important", 3: the use of torture will gain it.

There's a secondary implication that such tortures will only be used on "suspected terrorists", such "suspects" are terrorists in fact (elstwise how could they have the information?).

Which allows the respondents to isolate the idea of torture to the "ticking bomb", and "other people".

I suspect this greatly changes the reactions of "moderates". I know, from personal experience, that when people divorce the question from "extreme circumstances" and other people, to general principle, and everyone, the way they react is quite different.

"This symbol is often displayed
incorrectly," he said,
"The yin descends. Darkness
descends. But do not forget
that there is some light in the darkness
and some darkness in the light,
yin and yang. And far too often
we forget the value of darkness.
The Hebrews created the concept of the Sabbath,
a stroke of brilliance.
It is a natural rhythm;
when we rest, we step outside
and then we can see clearly."

"It is as though our lives are a stove.
We burn to warm; we burn for light.
But burning creates ashes which, unchecked,
will eventually fill the stove
and choke it out.
Some who burn too brightly will burn out
if they do not take the time to sweep the ashes clean.
And if you only clear enough to light the stove again
it is only a matter of time until
the fire goes out once more.
Deal with the ashes in your life;
scoop out the cinders, and sweep the flue clean.
Only then can a new fire be laid."

You can rise up high and fall down low;
We all must to ashes someday go.

The implication of the question is "yes, the guy may have important info," I agree. But if you ask it otherwise you might imply "torture everyone, whether info is there or not."

This poll has some more neutrally worded questions. Note the numbers:

29. Obama has ordered the release of previously secret records of Bush administration policies on the interrogation of terrorism suspects. Do you support or oppose Obama's decision to release these records? Do you support/oppose this strongly or somewhat?

(Result was 53/44 in favor of releasing information; see the link for more details.)

30. Obama has said that under his administration the United States will not use torture as part of the U.S. campaign against terrorism, no matter what the circumstance. Do you support this position not to use torture, or do you think there are cases in which the United States should consider torture against terrorism suspects?

The result here was almost evenly split--49% said it was never okay to use torture, 48% said there were cases to consider torture. Interestingly, the same question was asked in Januare--then, the answer was 58% saying it was never okay, and 40% saying there were cases for using torture. My guess is that the events of the last couple months have made this a more sharply partisan issue, and that people have shifted their opinions to support their preferred parties.

31. Do you think the Obama administration should or should not investigate whether any laws were broken in the way terrorism suspects were treated under the Bush administration?

(As of 4/24, it was 51/47 in favor of investigation; as of 1/16, it was 50/47. This was probably always a sharply partisan issue.)

If you're looking for more discussion of this, there's an article by Dan Froomkin with links to many quotes and polls. Very interesting.

Because the real application is pretty binary. There are no good rubrics by whic one can, "know" someone has information.

And (as I've said before) if one knows, then one need not torture. As a practical tool torture is used to get confessions. What it is the inquisitor wants confessed may change, but that's what the tool does.

albatross: WRT to, "we won't torture". The previous administration said that too. Until we have some definition of what we mean (and I've had people say that plea bargaining amounted to prohibited coercion under Geneva. He was doing it in bad faith, but he meant it; if that makes any sense) I don't know that we can have a poll which gives a credible answer.

It can't give a credible answer because when I say torture, and when Michael Savage says torture (or James Bybee, John Yoo, Steven Bradbury, David Addington, or Dick Cheney) we mean very different things, and the same answers from both of us, will have very different internal understanding, even with external congruence.

I hope I'm on record here as:

1) being an observant Protestant,
2) violently* opposing torture, and,
3) basing that opposition more on religious than on utilitarian grounds.

ISTM that polls of this sort do less to give an accurate picture of the political landscape than they serve to cast aspersions on a group of people who may share a common religious source but who are (to say the least!) are far from homogeneous. The frightening irony is that defending Christianity against "heathen" criticisms tends (in my practical experience) to increase the sense that Christians are being persecuted (yes, I know how ridiculous that sounds, but remember, you're speaking of people who are just beginning to recognize that the majority of U.S. citizens are not at least nominally Christian) -- and increases the desire of those who feel "persecuted" to huddle together with others who are like-minded.

In other words, the poll feels like a set-up.

* Pun intended (no matter how wrong it seems on a moral basis :-)).

Maybe. Anecdotally, I know a number of people who have been pretty-much on board with all kinds of abusive sh-t the previous administration was doing, on the theory that it was being done to scary Arab foreigners who had it coming and besides Those People Only Understand Terror and besides It's Them or Us. These are not stupid or uneducated people, nor are they evil people in other areas of their lives. And though they make up a smallish portion of my friends and family, they're not a negligible fraction. I don't think those folks are especially concerned with the question of whether the way in which we're beating answers out of someone[1] are technically torture or are technically just "harsh interrogation methods[2]".

My intuition is that a sizeable number of voters is just fine with doing absolutely anything to scary Arab terrorists, and even with people who kinda look like they might be scary Arab terrorists, if it promises to keep them safe. Not only polling data and my own acquaintances suggest this, but also the widespread use of torture by good guys in the movies and TV. A movie that makes the white good guy into an overt racist will almost certainly not do well, because that offends the sensibilities of too many viewers. A movie that has the good guy commit forcible rape will, similarly, not work out--few viewers will be able to think of the main character as a good guy after that. But a movie in which the good guy tortures a bad guy to get information can still do okay, as can a movie in which the good guy does the extrajudicial killing thing (aka murdering people he thinks need killing).

[1] This seems an appropriate term, given the concern that even people with no useful information will find answers to provide to stop the torture.

[2] There's a lovely irony in the fact that most of the people who insist on calling what we did "harsh interrogation methods" instead of "torture" have absolutely no tolerance for euphemisms in other contexts. They're mostly the same folks who ridicule the "differently abled" sort of euphemism.

Pew reports breakdown of 76 percent Christian, by self declaration. That is stable from 2001, and a drop from 86 in 1990.

They never ponder how it is the people whom we torture are selected. They also, as you say, tend to abstain (I say tend, because there are some who use the word, one who actually says we don't use torture enough; even if we use the word too often (mostly in decrying things he thinks aren't torture; or are justifiable).

Torture has a bad rap, and they don't like to be associated with it, even if they have no problem accepting it, in fact.

That may be factually correct, but the public discussion has changed dramatically in my lifetime. As a child, I remember different Christian denominations trying to recruit from other denominations. Just recently, I found a Youtube video of "Dear God" by XTC (yes, I realize the search dates me!) and found the contrapunctal words and images to be painfully poignant.

I suspect most of my fellow Christians would fail to see what (I think?) is a deeply spiritual point in the song, as Christianity itself has become radicalized.

Having outlived Christ -- and being prone to take up unpopular causes because he said we should be "no respecter of persons," -- I tend to have less fear of attack than I probably should (since I tend to get it on both sides). That does not stop me from understanding the bewilderment of nice, safe, law-abiding souls who can't understand how the world has changed around them.

Not only that, but the current official teaching of the Catholic Church, as summarized in the Catechism, explicitly condemns torture*. So seeing that white Catholics are reported to be slightly *more* likely than the average US citizen to condone torture is worrisome, to say the least, even taking this particular poll's limitations into account.

*CCC 2297. For those remembering the Inquisition, there's also a footnote in the catechism (CCC 2298) that acknowledges that Catholic thinking on this point has evolved since the Middle Ages.

Q: How is a Hummer like hemorrhoids?

A: They both surround an asshole.

How can I have forgotten to tell you how beautiful that was? And so apropos. If ashes choke out the fire, what is left?

I can't speak to anything other than my own experiences, so I might be completely off-base here. Someone please do correct me if I'm wrong.

It seems to me that there's often a bit of a disconnect between people saying that Jesus died for their sins and actually really thinking about all the aspects of that story. It usually mostly comes up around Easter, that I'm aware of, and that's it. We don't have crucifixions these days, and the cross has changed from being an uncomfortable execution device to a symbol of the faith.

Xopher @ 116:

Now, now. One of those things is ugly, annoying, and potential trouble. The other is a medical condition.

I'm sure it would be very appealing to some people.

I was wrong. Some people think about it at Christmas too. Probably not too hard, though.

There was a book (Richard ben Sapir, I believe), The Last Gladiator, which had, as its hero, a gladiator who was, freakishly, cryogenically suspended.

A nurse cozies up to him, and he'd more than willing, until her crucifix comes into view. He is appalled, disgusted; knocked not just out of the mood, but repulsed that anyone would wear a symbol of something so perverse.

But we do our public killing in private. They did it in the open. One of the things he does is complain to the nun taking care of him (she speaks latin), about how sick and twisted it as, as well as wondering when they stopped using the fish.

That's the reason I eat lamb for Easter. There's nothing like sustaining your body by commemorating Christ's last meal, knowing that he called himself "the Lamb of God," to shock you out of passive Christianity.

Even clean living creates some detritus. :)

(P.S. This one's Iron John. Previous two were Snow White and Little Red Riding Hood.)

You're looking at it the wrong way. Look at the wording of the Nicene Creed, particularly the part that runs:
and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered, died, and was buried;
and the third day he rose again
according to the Scriptures,
and ascended into heaven,
and sitteth on the right hand of the Father;
and he shall come again, with glory,
to judge both the quick and the dead

The Crucifixion is a necessary part of the story -- without it, you could not have the Resurrection. From that POV, it's much closer to being like the "ticking time bomb" scenario emotionally, and the torture is viewed, because of the ultimate outcome, as nearly celebratory. Listening to any musical setting of the Nicene Creed will illustrate this.

The other thing that differentiates this from garden-variety torture is that Jesus underwent his trials willingly (well, barring a few qualms in the Garden of Gethsemane). That is not something which can be said about any current torture victim.

Yes, I take all of the stories in the Bible seriously, just as I take most fiction to be more truthful than most works of history. What, you expected Christians to be predictable?

I also view soy-based "meats" as comfort food and generally don't like red meat. Go figure,

I allowed as I did (and did not mention WCW).

I even went so far as to retranslate one of my favorite Russian poems. So, I offer the pair I sent her to you.

Two poems

To pluck it is a pity
To leave it is a pity
Ah!, this violet

Issa

Я вас любил

Я вас любил: любовь еще, быть может
В душе моей угасла не совсем;
Но пусть она вас больше не тревожит;
Я не хочу печалить вас ничем.
Я вас любил безмолвно, безнадежно,
То робостью, то ревностью томим;
Я вас любил так искренно, так нежно,
Как дай вам бог любимой быть другим.

I loved you, perhaps I love you still
but forget this love which pressed on you
no tears, only laughter. I do not wish to grieve you.
I loved you quietly, hopelessly, jealously; afraid
I loved you with tenderness, and sincerly
May God grant you love like this again.

Aleksandr Sergeyivich Puskin
(trans. T. Karney 1995/2009)

It's not the best translation. It's hard to translate; because there are so many passive structures, whch are active thoughts.

I also was reconstructing the translation. I don't have my dictionaries here, and some of it may have suffered as a result.

I'd like to think that catches the gist of it, in any case.

(FYI to others: The Youtube video is a musical number; the actual sequence ends with the cockney's hat opening up and a little lady peering out and the shop keeper dancing with her in the hat and EEELSSS!)

I think it's important to distinguish Christ's willingness to suffer from any "kinky" desire for pain. The Gospels clearly depict someone who did not desire the outcome of human sin, but who (to my knowledge) originated the full and complete concept of "passive resistance."

I think our democracy would be in better shape if more Christians were willing to suffer for their beliefs and less willing to cause suffering for the same (but I've said that before).

B. Durbin @ 125:

A stirring paraphrase may reach spaces in the heart that even an original idea cannot. You got me going. Take the compliment.

It's a necessary part of the story, yes, however Jesus was supposed to take the place of us for our sins. Couple that with Jesus teaching do unto others as you would have done to you and I think that's a pretty good indictment of torture right there.

Terry Karney @ 128:

I don't understand Russian, but judging by your translation it's a lovely poem.

I think you'll find that "passive resistance" is rather older than Christianity :)

And that poem (Ya vas lyubil/Я вас любил may be the best poem written in Russian.

I think, honestly, it's one of the best poems ever written, and nearly think it's my personal favorite.

Puskin is amazing. That poem is amazing, in a body of work which is amazing. There is a tension, a passion, a resignation and a faint blossom of hope, which I lack the power to translate.

My translation is a pathetic thing. The best I can say for it (for it breaks a host of conventions) is that I have caught some hint of the essence. I have trashed ryhme, ignored meter; chucked some of the parity and changed a verb.

All to try and catch the meat of it.

The speaker loves the object. Loves the object so much that even the loss of that love involves love. There is a sense, in the last line, that maybe the fire will rekindle, and a complete satisfaction that if it doesn't, it will not matter, if love is vouchafed the subject again.

One cannot do it justice in translation; it as through a glass, darkly, I present it.

Perhaps it's my odd path to becoming Catholic, but I've never been able to see the crucifixion as anything but horrible. Jesus is going willingly in the sense of "okay, if the only way to do Your will is to be tortured to death, even then I won't run away from it," but certainly not approaching it as something joyous. According to (plausible) legend, several of the disciples were also crucified, and the early church certainly would have seen such a death for the horror it was.

I suspect this is just one of those places where people compartmentalize their beliefs. According to the poll I quoted, as of three months ago, the numbers were 58/40 against ever using torture; now, they've shifted to 49/48 against ever using torture.

Some of that may be sampling error, but the most sensible explanation I can come up with is that many people, upon finding that their "side" of the political argument is embracing torture, have changed their position on it. It may be that before, most people hadn't thought it through at all, and now, many more have thought it through because it's been in the headlines--and here are their favorite talking heads/commentators explaining the pro-torture side of the case. But I'll admit I'm guessing here--the fact that people who self-identify as Christian are more likely to vote Republican suggests this connection to me. There was a similar shift in beliefs shown in a previous Pew Center poll, w.r.t. wiretapping without a warrant--before the wiretapping was a political issue, far more Republicans thought wiretapping without a warrant was wrong. After it became an us/them issue, many Republicans appear to have changed their beliefs on that issue.

I believe this same phenomenon happens on the Democratic/liberal side, too, but I don't have such striking examples available to demonstrate it; perhaps I'm wrong.

What I haven't encountered is such a full and complete account (four versions in the New Testament and multiple "prophetic" accounts in the Old Testament) of a hero who walked into a trap, knowing it was a fatal trap, urged his followers not to protect him, then suffered torture and death without ever asking for human intervention.

But I'm willing to be taught.

The other half of that is the "prophecies" are all being explained ex post facto, and through a cultural lens which has the New Testament as its filter.

There is a talmudic tradition which says Abraham failed the test of Issac. He ought have told God to stick it (just as he bartered for the lives of Sodom and Gomorrah). We don't tend to see it that way, because we have the later, "recapitulation to salvation" of Jesus.

But the meanings of those prophecies are open to lots of interpretations.

If prose translation is a careful balancing act between real and figurative, literal and idiomatic, naturalized and foreign, then translating poetry has to be all that while unicycling down the side of a steep mountain while juggling flaming chainsaws. I think you probably did just fine.

One of these days I should at least learn to read Russian. I can read about half the characters, but that's only half helpful.

LLA @ 136:

I'm not sure I'd describe Isaac as willing, although I wouldn't say he's unwilling either. He doesn't protest. He lets Abraham bind him and put him on the altar. His only speaking part in the whole story is to ask his father where the sheep for the offering is. He's otherwise a perfect blank. In fact, Isaac doesn't appear in the story after Abraham sees the ram, leading to some speculation that Isaac may have been killed after all. (He got better.)

I was simply speaking to the issue of earlier examples of passive resistance -- not to the validity of the stories.

My impression of Theseus was of an active, combative hero, but I may have read the wrong version. For instance, I know, and am moved by the story of Prometheus, whether I believe he existed or not. I find Isaac's willingness to let his father come at him with a knife extraordinary -- especially given later accounts of his personality. These stories are powerful even without a religious context.

Despite my Aryan roots, I know of no Norse mythology that celebrates the martyr until the coming of Christianity.

I don't know Eastern Mythology as well as I would like (too many interests...). I know Ghandi famously said, "I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians."

As I said, I am willing to learn.

Your examples lead me ever closer to the idea that this was an example of push-polling: finding a sample that will tell you what you want to convince people it is acceptable to believe.

Statistics was my worst course in college, but even I can recognize lies, d#&^ lies, and statistics.

I wonder if there's anything wrong (equally, he could just be on vacation). I've emailed him but gotten no reply.

Jura gurl oevat Qbzvavp onpx (va Ivpgbe'f obql) gb dhrfgvba uvz nobhg gur synfuqevir, evtug nsgre orvat qehttrq ur ybbxf ng Qe, Fnhaqref naq fnlf, "Juvfxrl..." Fur vagrecergf guvf nf n erdhrfg sbe n qevax, naq Qrjvgg pbaphef grcvqyl. Gura yngre, jura Nycun* unf ure, ur nfxf, "Unir lbh nyjnlf jnagrq gb or n qbpgbe?" Jura fur fnlf lrf, ur ercyvrf "Gung vf n yvr." Gura ur nfxf ure nobhg jura ur svefg pnzr va, naq fur tvirf n cerggl obevat nppbhag, juvpu ur abarguryrff svaqf snfpvangvat. "V jvfu jr unq zber gvzr," ur fnlf. Jul nyy guvf vagrerfg?

V oryvrir gung Qe. Fnhaqref jnf sbezyl n qbyy, pbqr-anzrq Juvfxrl. Qhevat Nycun'f rfpncr, ur xvyyrq gurve qbpgbe (cbffvoyl gur bevtvany Fnhaqref) naq fynfurq hc Juvfxrl'f snpr. Gur Qbyyubhfr jnf va qrfcrengr arrq bs n qbpgbe gb qrny jvgu gur jbhaqrq, fb gurl znqr bar bhg bs Juvfxrl--cbffvoyl ol fvzcyl pbclvat gur cerivbhf qbpgbe'f crefbanyvgl jubyrfnyr. Ubjrire, jvgu n fynfurq-hc snpr Juvfxrl jnf ab ybatre hfrshy nf n qbyy, naq fb gurl qrpvqrq gb yrnir ure va cynpr nf gur snpvyvgl zrqvp.

/penml gurbel

*BZT NYNA GHQLX FB SERNXL NAQ NJRFBZR!!!

Theseus was an active resister, once he got to Minos, but he went to the place of sacrifice willingly. He may have been active, but he didn't expect to come back. Sort of like the 300 at Thermypolae.

Odin springs immediately to mind. Losing an Eye to gain wisdom and hanged himself from Yggdrasil (the world tree), as a "sacrifice to himself". It's not clear to me that he didn't die, and recover, but nine days of agony, upside down, to get the secret of the runes.

D'oh. Fell asleep, woke up -- I forgot about Daniel.

Terry Karney @ 147:

Must reread those stories. Me likes a good story :-).

And then it struck me. Barack Obama is the first President young enough to have played Dungeons & Dragons as a teenager. Not that he needs to have, but we have a US President who might get the joke about the Head of Vecna.

Does it matter? Maybe not, but think of the cultural changes for that generation. Not just Gygax and Arneson, but the appearance of domestic video recorders.

And think of the new interactions between culture and technology that will be commonplaces for the people who will follow him.

Heck, how old was Bush when Star Wars came out?

You too? I haven't emailed, but he's seldom-to-never this silent...

Except that when I was a kid there was a radio station in the Bay Area that played old radio shows, and I have a distinct memory of Gracie Allen saying exactly that.

Can anyone validate me here? A hyperlink to a short clip of Gracie Allen saying it, suitable for sending to the webcomic author, would be ideal, but just saying "Yes I remember hearing that" or "No, your memory is playing tricks on you" would help.

A: They both surround an asshole.

What's the diffence between a Hummer and hemorrhoids ?

The Hummer's a pain to everything but assholes.

Almost there... I remember my first try was better but I can't find back the exact way I formulated it.

This just in: Neil Gaiman signing near me this afternoon... how ridiculous would it be to go queue up just to say "thank you for being awesome" in horribly bad sounding english ? (I really don't care anymore for autographs.)

Or nailed. (Warning: potentially NSFW, lots of squick.) This is a two-hour drive from where I lived for a while, but I could never bring myself to go.

Some days I think that the prevalence of extrajudicial killings, torture and oppression in the Philippines is a result of the equanimity and resignation with which the downtrodden face adversity. Other days I think the former begets the latter. I'm certain both (of many factors) are involved.

Terry, lovely poem.

In his book Gracie, George Burns states that she never actually said 'Good night, Gracie' but that he wished he'd thought of it because it was a great gag.

I think the wording of the Pew Center question does track reasonably well with the moral/legal argument, which is the only one for which polls offer any useful information. Polling people on whether or not torture provides useful intelligence is useless, since hardly anyone has any experience or training that would let them have an informed opinion. As well ask people whether regulating CDS as an insurance instrument would have headed off the financial meltdown--hardly anyone's opinion is worth having on such a question. The moral question is whether it would be okay to use torture to get answers out of people, assuming we could do it in a way that worked.

There's no inherent reason the answer to the moral and practical questions must track together, though given the way human minds work, they usually seem to. You might be convinced that torture works in some circumstances, but still oppose a formal policy of torture because you think it will be used inappropriately leading to worse intelligence overall, or will lead to too much backlash among the public or the world, or will be expanded until all sorts of American citizens are being tortured routinely. A fair number of people have more-or-less this position w.r.t. capital punishment, for example--thinking it's morally acceptable in some circumstances, but that practical considerations of cost and error rate of the criminal justice system make it a bad policy.

Ah well... he was lost... but now is found ;)

[0] Say... anybody know the correct/best way to keep a cover that's hanging on by a few threads with the attached book of common prayer?

Fb jub ryfr guvaxf gung Wbff jnf cynlvat ba hf nyy erzrzorevat Ghqlx nf Jnfu gb znxr hf oryvrir Nycun jnf unezyrff?

Tempering of glass is deliberately creating stress between the surface and the center of the glass to strengthen it (and give it a safer failure mode of breaking into very small pieces).

Visions cookware is strengthened by letting the glass start to crystallize in a very controlled way.

Prince Rupert's Drops/Tears are an example of tempering the outside of unannealed glass with the tail being a deliberate stress focus/trigger. Unfortunately I don't have access currently to glassworking equipment to make some.
/pedant

Oh, and Happy Star Wars Day, everyone!

As to the equanimity thing, the book I was referring to above put it in the "suffering was so everpresent, that a layer of judicial suffering was needful." It's not as if Henry VIII was against some public torture. Some of it, "witty". He promised one rebel he wouldn't have him cut down for the final acts of "hanged, drawn and quartered" until he was dead. Then he hanged him in chains... so the hanging wasn't what killed him, but rather death by exposure.

albatross: "The moral question is whether it would be okay to use torture to get answers out of people, assuming we could do it in a way that worked." I think that raises a different moral question. It's the implicit assumption that torture does work which drives the "buried baby/ticking bomb" scenarios.

I'd expect a lot higher response rate in the affirmative, when the hypothetical explicitly states torture works. The question I think matters more is how many people would be willing to use it,if they knew it didn't work. That's a moral question with meat on its bones.

If torture does work, then the thing being questioned is if not torturing one person is worth the harms to be avoided by the information to be gained (which is almost always presented as pain in the present; for one, against death for many: a tolerably easy calculus for most people to make. Greatest good for the greatest number). I've even had people tell me, "if I new how to stop a bomb, and wasn't talking, I'd want them to torture me." Mind you they are certain it could never happen they would have such information; they are unaware of the downward creep of, "exigent circumstances."

I think the reasons for my concern are the way the poll seems to be being used (going solely on the sources cited in this thread, ugly conclusions are the only ones that can be drawn from the polls) and my virtual certainty that few of the people in that sample group would know if they know anyone who has been tortured (I believe most actual victims of torture go to great pains to hide their pain, although I am not an expert).

I also bet you would get an entirely different answer if you asked them if it was okay for someone to torture their child -- or even their neighbor (even if they believed such torture would save a baby or stop a bomb from going off). They're living in the fictional world, where people are briefly tortured and are fine by the next scene. Phrasing the question in such an abstract fashion encourages this kind of fictional thinking.

The media has certainly made this fantasy universe seem appealing -- a high potential upside for very little downside. My moral (and practical) problem with this fantasy is that it doesn't reflect reality.

Tvatre, V jbhyqa'g chg vg cnfg Wbfu gb unir qbar rknpgyl gung. Pna'g gryy vs vg jbhyq unir jbexrq ba zr gubhtu, orpnhfr fbzr wnpxubyr ba nabgure fvgr fnvq "url, Nyna Ghqlx vf tbaan cynl Nycun! Vf gung pbby be jung" n pbhcyr bs jrrxf ntb. Crbcyr nera'g frafvgvir nobhg fcbvyref ryfrjurer nf jr ner urer. V gevrq ernyyl uneq gb guvax "ur tbg vg jebat, Ghqlx vf ba Qbyyubhfr, ohg ur'f pyrneyl abg Nycun..." ohg vg qvqa'g jbex, naq gur fhecevfr jnf pbzcyrgryl fcbvyrq.

Pffff... would have been nice. Instead I spent my end afternoon mad rushing into a fight with the great polycephaled admistrative monster. The civil servant in charge of my father's retirement files went on vacation without finishing her work on it. He'll start being paid three months late, among other troubles, and, since he's in Africa, can't do anything to correct things himself.

I just love how casualy they dismissed my complaints/fears with a "No need to get upset, he'll get paid eventually"... I mean, he will manage all right (and at worst we're here), but just thinking how quickly the situation could turn desperate for someone else, while wondering how many other files still are in limbo left me irate.
Worst is they wouldn't understand why.

Bah... he knows he's awesome anyway.

I'm glad to hear it and hope he and she are having a good time. I do think it was irresponsible of him not to designate someone to cover for his job as punster.

For shame.

A contrapuntative discussion, in all its discursive manners ought to spring forth, in honor of our absent friend, why should we punish ourselves with lack of wordplay? Sing your wyrd, and let the punches fly.

Old business:

Velma @ previous open thread
Yay for Scraps! You just can't keep a good man down.

KeithS @ 13
Snork! No coffee in mouth == dry laptop. That drawing is by Ursula Vernon, who does the Digger comic online. There's a picture of Digger up at the top of the sock puppet page. I've been reading the Digger archives for a couple of weeks now (interrupted by the surgery), and I'm almost up to the present. The best description I've seen is the tagline on the comic page: "A wombat. A dead god. A very peculiar epic." Great fun, good jokes, terrific drawing, adventure and pathos (two-hankie minimum) galore. And a not-so-subtle examination of gender roles in cultures ranging from hyenas to wombats, with a side order of humans.

Re link editing problems: I've been typing html links for years, and I screw them up often enough to be really annoyed with myself. Nowadays I use the "BBCode" extension for Firefox. It inserts various BBCode or HTML code fragments around the current selection, so to put in a valid link, you type the link text you want in the text area, select it, and then right-click/control-click, select BBCode->HTMLCode->Make URL. You get <a href="">Your Text Here</a>. Then type or paste the url itself between the quotes.

Re: annealing
It's a fascinating topic; one of the few techniques that spans so large a number of different fields: from ceramics, glass-making, and metal-working to computational physics and evolutionary computing. It may turn out to be one of the fundamental operations of the physical universe.

Dollhouse:
I like heresiarch's theory. V abgvprq gur zragvba bs "Juvfxrl", naq pbhyqa'g erzrzore nal cerivbhf zragvba bs gung qbyy. Gur vqrn gung Nycun vf phggvat gurz gb znxr gurz hahfnoyr nf qbyyf znxrf n ybg bs frafr. V'z fbeel gb urne gung fbzrbar fcbvyrq gung fhecevfr sbe lbh, Kbcure; vg jerapurq zl urnq nebhaq jura V fnj vg. V jnf guvaxvat, "Avpr gb frr Ghqlx ntnva, funzr gur ebyr vf fb zhpu yvxr Jnfu, fb ur qbrfa'g trg n punapr gb fubj uvf ena- ... BZST, V fb qvqa'g frr gung pbzvat!"

When did street food carts first start appearing in NYC?

This brought on by wondering why Archie Goodwin never grabbed a hot dog or pretzel while out and about performing his duties for Nero Wolfe.

Selecting a designated punster? You'd have fights! The Punic Wars would never end!

I think it would be far easier to have a designated non-punster to keep the conversations from degenerating into absolute melees. Sort of a contrapuntal* POV, to balance everything out nicely.

*Not to be confused with Iran-contra or the conga.

For a long time it was considered incredibly rude to eat on the street. I believe that, with minor exceptions, it's still considered rather vulgar in Japan.

I'd expect that the appearance of one practice probably coincides/overlaps with the fading of the other.

I'm glad you're recovering well. What sorts of finger exercises do you have to do? I assume typing on a modern keyboard doesn't really count as exercise.

I've been following Digger for a few years now. It's every bit as wonderful as you say, and then some.

In university we had a class where we took pieces of steel and did various heat treatments to them. We then had to compare ductility, brittleness, and so on. One of the students took trying to bend or break one of the hardened tokens as a personal challenge, so he cranked it down in a vice and went at it with a sledgehammer. Good times.

Really? When I was stationed in Yokosuka in 1972-1974 there were lots of yakitori open-fire grills and walk-up burger joints. They were right outside the base's main gate, though, so maybe the practice wasn't so widespread away from American influence.

I first learned the joys of fried rice and gyoza while pub-crawling there, but those were indeed sit-down places.

No...no, really. I'm recovering from bronchitis and didn't sleep at all last night. Not a wink. I'm sick and tired.

And bored. I beat the internets.

So...any Fluorospherians on Facebook that I haven't pestered yet? What's the local feel on Ye Olde Booke o' Faces, anyway?

I do think that the class issue may have factored in to hot dog carts not being a part of the Nero Wolfe landscape.

I am sorry about the bronchitis. I recommend tea.

If the punches in question are Hawaiian, do they do so in a lei'd-back manner? Or would that not be a fruitful line of enquiry?

And Archie was from Chillicothe, OH; surely he'd have had hot dogs at state fairs there.

One of the things I found disquieting while there is how inhospitable (however clean) the streets were made to be in some areas, and how different our conceptions of space could get. Streets were meant to be walked across, not lived on, apart from specified times and places (the difference being, I don't think I remember people taking possession of the streets, they had designated place they could use, if I make sense). No bench or trash cans for miles, and when you did find some they were designed specificaly to drive users away. Phony "Modern art" placed in such a way as to actively prevent the use of space (my guess is: to drive the homeless away in most cases).

Eating on the streets though ? Vulgar ? Probably. Rude ? I don't think so, not as such.

Now I'll need to enquire... Would eating directly in those half-open-on-the-street food shops (and I'm not talking about the carts) they had in edo-architectured japan have been considered "proper" behavior or were most people indifferent to it, and the idea that it wasn't something to do crept from (my guess) upper classes ?

I'm pretty sure from my period readings people did happen to eat on the streets... I never wondered about the cultural values associated with doing so (for shame).

Thanks. Quite the Serge in inquiries, though, huh?

More to the point, his great uwillingness to leave the brownstone makes it less likely he will encounter them in their element. He might be willing to grant them flavor, but as with his specially grown and delivered, corn, he might think they fail to meet that hieght if not eaten right then.

Also, NYC pretzel vendors in 1896 and a Japanese food stand in the 1870s.

Why does Archie Goodwin never buy a hot dog from a street vendor?

If he were a movie character, the answer would be "because then you'd have to hire an actor to play the street vendor, with associated costs."

But he's a book character, so that's not the answer.

I say good diners because he gets them with anchovies.

As to the pay an actor, Stout would have needed to have a reason to use the cart. He used the diner as a place to meet. I don't know how peripatetic the carts are, and I don't know how seamlessly Stout would have used them. Easy to have the characters in a booth, with some semblanc of privacy, not quite the same on a street-corner, where anyone could see them (which was often not in Archie's interests).

As for Japanese culture, at least nowadays the way it was explained to me (in college Japanese class -- take it for what it's worth) was that eating while walking is considered rude.

Yeah, although Wolfe was quite willing to take Archie's recommendations. Remember the chicken and dumplings made by the Methodists in Some Buried Caesar?

Okay, I'm willing to conclude that carts existed (particularly after that wonderful photo that Tracie found) during the time Stout was writing the stories, that he knew about them, and that he just decided they didn't fit in the universe he was creating. I think he might have missed a bet; I can see Fred Durkin described as "wiping mustard from his mouth" as he waved Archie over on a stakeout.

I can see it, sort of, but I happen to enjoy a bastourma and cheese pie (from the Sassoon Bakery) while taking in the fresh air and flowers of North Allen, in Pasadena.

At the upcoming BoucherCon the Friday night meal will be a recreation of the one from Too Many Cooks that Wolfe had been invited to explicate:

"Mr. Servan has invited me to speak on--as he stated the subject--Contributions Americaines a la Haute Cuisine."

But I'm with Fritz, add the extra juniper berries.

Wolfe, hiding out at her apartment in The Mother Hunt, says to Lucy Valdon that she should tell him twenty minutes before she wants her scrambled eggs. She expresses shock; he says Americans (or American women; not sure which) don't know how to cook eggs.

I've done the eggs coddled in heavy cream. Not bad, but not the best. I've done the eggs poached in wine and demi-glace. Oi!... That was a breakfast. Served with some good sausage, or a really good streaky bacon and a nice piece of toast (have to have the toast, to sop up the sauce); divine.

But the serious dishes, the roasts, and stews and the like... those need company, and something of a budget.

The two most common ingredients seem to be butter,and cream. I like to eat, but there is no way I see those as meals for four.

That was a Twilight Zone moment! There used to be someone in one of my other online communities who went by the abbreviation STM, although the expansion was different. He is now deceased. But when I read that sentence, my brain automatically supplied the older association -- and for just a moment I was thinking, "OMG, he's a zombie!"

Oh. That person, as a zombie? Now that is a truly scary thought.

But that's just me. Do you at least incandesce by running current through hot rare spare gases?

But that's good. I am a lefty lawyer, and a liberal liar. About the response I expected. I don't expect they will release it, if at all, until tomorrow. Happily I have the original text, so I can do a workaround, if I have to.

Lefty lawyer. That's oddly satisfying.

It's Managers, not Minerals.

Carrie S. @ 162: "Fb jub ryfr guvaxf gung Wbff jnf cynlvat ba hf nyy erzrzorevat Ghqlx nf Jnfu gb znxr hf oryvrir Nycun jnf unezyrff?"

Bu lrnu, ab qbhog. Vg jbexrq ba zr--V qvqa'g frr vg pbzvat abg rira n yvggyr. Npghnyyl, whfg guvaxvat nobhg gung jubyr fprar fraqf zr vagb snafdhrrrrrrrrr!

Xopher @ 168: "Pna'g gryy vs vg jbhyq unir jbexrq ba zr gubhtu, orpnhfr fbzr wnpxubyr ba nabgure fvgr fnvq "url, Nyna Ghqlx vf tbaan cynl Nycun! Vf gung pbby be jung" n pbhcyr bs jrrxf ntb."

Gung vf frevbhfyl ynzr--zl flzcnguvrf!

Ol gur jnl, jung qvq lbh guvax nobhg gur qrzbafgengvba bs Gbcure-vp oraribyrapr rneyvre va gur rcvfbqr? Vg jnf pyrneyl vagraqrq gb znxr crbcyr tb, "bu gung Gbcure, V thrff ur'f nyevtug." Zr, V guvax vg'yy gnxr n ovg zber guna n enaqbz npg bs xvaqarff urer be gurer gb onynapr bhg jung ur qbrf rirelqnl.

Bruce Cohen @ 173: Zl svefg gurbel er: Juvfxrl jnf gung Fnhaqref jnf nyfb jbexvat sbe gur AFN naq gung jnf ure pbqranzr--gura V erzrzorerq gung Juvfxrl jnf cneg bs gur vagreangvbany yrggre pbqr.

He also teaches in parables, and is the only person I've ever met who pulls it off.

I like that web site's logo.

Zl ernpgvba gb Gbcure'f "cuvynaguebcl" jnf "Uzz ... nal punapr ur nppvqragnyyl ybbxrq va n xnezvp zveebe, npghnyyl fnj uvzfrys, naq svtherq ur'q orggre qb n tbbq qrrq gb pbhagre gur rivy gurer?" Naq ba ersyrpgvba zl nafjre jnf, "Anu, ab jnl ur pbhyq frr n gehgushy vzntr bs uvzfrys; ur'f whfg gelvat gb pheel snibe jvgu Nqryyr, jub'f nyjnlf ba nobhg gur tbbq gur qbyyubhfr qbrf."

Yrg'f snpr vg guvf zna vf abg pncnoyr bs guvaxvat orlbaq uvf bja fxva; ybbx ng uvf yvggyr oveguqnl cnegl cerfrag gb uvzfrys: uvzfrys cbherq vagb Fvreen, cynlvat tnzrf jvgu uvzfrys.

Some people deserve to have the ghosts of Enver Hoxha, Leon Trotsky, Lenin, Madame Mao, and Pol Pot haunt them to show them what true "leftists" really were like. Claiming David Souter a liberal is like claiming Abraham Lincoln was a Democrat....

I hope the management of NBC, ABC, CBS, Fux, and the NPR types who keep bringing in the Heritage Foundation and other rightwing masquerade-as-disinterested-research-institutions ideological abosolutists sinkholes as supposed balanced reporting information sources, get haunted by those mentioned above, and not with pleasant dreams, either...for lies, for omissions, for bias in reporting, for slanting the reporting, for imbalance in reporting and providing all the weighting to the rightwing ideological screed for air time, for quoting the Heritage Foundation but not giving air time to opposing viewpoints with an equal tilt in the other direction, claiming that anyone to the left of Attila the Hun is a left wing radical, etc.

Ybbxvat onpx ba vg, npghnyyl: V qba'g erpnyy, ubj qvq Cnhy Onyyneq svaq Fgrcura Xrcyre? Ubj ernfbanoyr jnf vg sbe Nycun gb xabj gung Onyyneq jnf pbzvat?

Er: Juvfxrl. Bire ba gryrivfvbajvgubhgcvgl.pbz, guvf vf cerggl zhpu gur npprcgrq gurbel. Jbhyq or fhecevfrq vs vg jnf nalguvat ryfr. (Gung fvgr vf TERNG sbe znq fcrphyngvba naq qba'g lbh whfg ybir ENAQBZYL pncvgnyvmvat jbeqf va cynvagrkg gung lbh ner tbvat gb RAPELCG jvgu ebg13 fb gung gur plcure grkg jvyy ybbx GNAGNYVMVATYL rkcerffvir?)

Er: Gbcure'f zbenyvgl. Gur ornhgvshy guvat nobhg guvf frevrf vf gung gurl'er nyy bs gurz rivy onfgneqf va fbzr jnl. Gbcure npghnyyl chg vg irel avpryl: "Rirelbar jnagf gb or evtugrbhf jura gurl pna nssbeq vg." V guvax gur ovg jvgu gur becuna tvey jnf n yvggyr... bss va gung vg jnf ehfurq, dhvgr yvxr gur rcvybthr va gur Evpu Byq Ynql Sebz Orlbaq Gur Tenir rcvfbqr ("Fb V jvyy jevgr n yrggre... fnlvat jub jvyy xvyy zr... jura gurl jvyy qb vg... naq ubj... naq V'yy nggnpu n arj grfgnzrag gb gung yrggre, terngyl snibhevat fbzr bs zl fheivivat snzvyl! Lrf, gung'yy jbex, ab jnl nalbar'q or fhfcvpvbhf nobhg gung!"). Hayvxr zbfg pbzzragngbef ba GIJbC V qvqa'g guvax gur Oevne Ebfr zrgncube jnf bireqbar be urnil unaqrq. Vg jnf n avpr pbzzragnel genpx, naq vg jnf ornhgvshyyl fhoiregrq ol gur eriryngvba gung *Nycun* jnf gur cevapr naq Fyrrcvat Ornhgl jnf, jryy, abg-Rpub.

Er: Nycun naq Onyyneq. Onyyneq sbhaq gur raivebazragf flfgrz fcrpvnyvfg guebhtu gur SOV. Ur tbg gur nqqerff sbe gur Qbyyubhfr ol genvyvat Zryyvr cbfg-erwrpgvba (naq jung n pbyq-urnegrq cynl gung jnf, ohg lnl sbe Onyyneq svanyyl orvat ba gur tvivat raq bs n pbyq-urnegrq znavchyngvba) naq gura tnir gung nqqerff gb uvf nyyl ng gur SOV jub zntvpnyyl chyyrq bhg gur anzr bs guvf thl jub znxrf ohvyqvatf qvfnccrne. V pna xvaq bs ohl gung Nycun jbhyq unir guvf thl'f anzr naq nqqerff, naq V pna nyfb xvvvvaq bs ohl gung ur jnf sbyybjvat Onyyneq pybfryl naq xarj jung Onyyneq jnf hc gb, ohg gur rknpg gvzvat, gung ur'q gnxr bhg Fgrcura jungfuvfanzr naq nffhzr uvf cynpr WHFG va gvzr sbe Onyyneq gb pbzr xabpxvat, gung erdhverq n jubyr gehpxybnq bs oraribyrag fhfcrafvba bs bu-ybbx-n-oveq!

Ohg V'z ybivat vg naljnl. Cyrnfr or erarjrq, fubj.

(I just love it that Re: becomes Er: in ROT13)

I always mean to get into quilting so I can do the same with beloved old clothes. Maybe someday I will.

But I used to watch reruns of the show all the time, and listened for it; she always said just 'Good night.'

That would be Patrick and Teresa.

One of her illustrations shows a booth that can be carried across one person's shoulders. It's a combination kitchen (with hibachi) and serving counter. Ingenious.

(Oh look!)

Va zl ubhfr gurer'f n gurbel gung vg jnf n fvoyvat be orfg sevraq jub vf qrnq be bgurejvfr bhg bs gur npgvba.

Ubj ernfbanoyr jnf vg sbe Nycun gb xabj gung Onyyneq jnf pbzvat?

Nycun'f orra xrrcvat genpx bs Onyyneq, erzrzore--frag uvz cvpgherf bs Pnebyvar naq fb ba.

I suspected as much and I'd love to try it, but I live in a condo with a no grills unless they're electric rule. (As I feel electric grills are heresy, I've never bothered to buy one.)

Another thing that encourages this practice is that trash cans are usually located immediately near the place where you buy the food and nowhere else anywhere around. I remember walking six blocks looking for a recycling bin once when I was in a hurry and hadn't yet gotten into the habit of buying resealable bottles.

(Context: Hoagie has been sent back in time in a Chron-o-John, to the year uh well 17 something, and he just entered the house where John Hancock and Thomas Jefferson are writing the Constitution. Well, so far it's only A constitution because they hit writer's block after the preamble. They have a suggestion box, in case you have an idea... but that's a different story. At the reception desk of the... hotel they're writing in stands an unmoving, unspeaking mummy wearing a Tricorne. Hoagie is supposed to find out the whereabouts of one Red Edison, but has the option to, uh, digress and talk about hats instead. Let's make him do that.)

(This is a dialogue tree. Every possible choice opens up a new layer of choices, represented by the amount of dashes preceding a line. It is finite, of course, so usually at four or five choices deep you run out of stuff to say. This is because while Tim Schafer's genius is infinite, time is not, so he had to stop at some point.)

(Also note that the mummy never says ANYTHING. At ALL. Hoagie doesn't mind and neither should you.)

(I omitted repetitions)

Great hat, man.

- I dig the three-corner idea.

-- It's like the pyramids, you know?
--- I heard pyramids are supposed to have weird energies.
---- Far out.
---- Whoa.
--- My friend Eddie told me the pyramids were built by aliens.
---- As if.
---- Way.
--- Hey, are you REALLY a mummy?
---- Gnarly.
---- Awesome.

-- It's so piratey, you know?
--- All's you need is an eyepatch and a hook.
--- Ever see the movie "The Secret of Monkey Island"?
---- Totally rad!
---- Wendell Finwinkle is awesome as the Guybrush dude.
---- Killer three-headed monkey effect, man.
--- Avast, me matey! Heh heh Heh.
---- Yo ho ho, dude.
---- Prepare to walk the plank, me bucko.
---- Stand back, ye scurvy sea dog.
----- Stop yer starin' and pass the grog.
----- Have at ye, o bilge rat.
----- Make haste, three sheets to the wind.

-- How do you know which side's the front?
--- Does a point always go forwards, or a flat side?
---- Personally, I'd wear the point forwards... that way, you never forget which direction you're walking.
---- Personally, I'd wear the flat part forwards... that way, if you bang your head on a wall, you don't ruin the hat.
--- Is there a tag in it, or what?
--- Or are there competing fashions of tri-corner wear?
---- Are there several manufacturers?
----- I'm interested in quality. (beat) I don't suppose you'd consider parting with yours, would you? (beat) Well, let me know if you change your mind.
----- Could I get a band logo printed on one?
----- Does anyone make them with propellers on top?
---- Would I need to go to a specialty store?
---- Do they come in a variety of designer colors?

- I know some dudes in a band who'd eat roaches for hats like that.
-- Of course, they'd probably eat roaches anyhow.
--- They're like that.
--- Maybe with a little chocolate sauce.
--- I once saw them play a whole set with grasshoppers in their nostrils.

-- They're called "Insensitive Spittoon."
--- Ever hear of them?
---- No, I guess you wouldn't have.
---- If you ever get to the 1990's, check them out.
---- They play at the Black and Blue Sound Pitt in the city a lot.
--- They play funk punk folk polka house grunge rock.
---- That's a new movement based in Tucson.
---- They're heavily influenced by bands like Limpid Harmonica and Howling Moon Rocket Limbo.
--- I helped name the band!
---- I thought of the "Spittoon" part.
---- They might sign with VGA soon.
---- I worked with them before I hooked up with Megabreth.

(none of this is relevant to the game at all)

In case you're still not convinced Tim Schafer's a freaking genius, I present to you: Brütal Legend Story Trailer

heresiarch 216: V pbzcyrgryl nterr nobhg Gbcure. Ohg V nyfb guvax ur'f nabgure pnfr bs jung jr'ir orra gnyxvat nobhg jeg Fnhaqref; V guvax ur'f n fcrpvnyyl pbafgehpgrq trrx-zvahf-rguvpf, gnxvat whfg rabhtu gb yrg uvz qb jung ur qbrf rirel qnl.

Bruce 220: V nterr jvgu Pneevr F. ng 232; V jnfa'g pbzcyrgryl fher gung jnf uvzfrys. V gubhtug vg zvtug or na byq sevraq bs uvf, abj qrnq (be bgurejvfr ybfg). Lbhe rkcynangvba vf pregnvayl va punenpgre, naq vf cebonoyl evtug, ohg V yvxrq zvar orpnhfr vg'f xvaq bs gbhpuvat. Npghnyyl rira vs vg jnf uvzfrys...vzntvar orvat fbzrbar gung oevtug naq perngvir. Jub pbhyq lbh rire gnyx gb be cynl jvgu ba lbhe bja yriry? Npghnyyl gurer ner crbcyr ba guvf fvgr V'ir jbaqrerq gung nobhg; ubj gurl pbcr, qnl gb qnl, jvgu univat nyzbfg ab bar gurl pna gnyx gb jub vf pncnoyr bs haqrefgnaqvat gurve gubhtugf.

They do have tasks that you can do ethically--image labeling, data extraction from forms, that kind of thing. I use it as pin money to buy books. :)

Hilary, that's horrible. Perhaps there is a park with public grills?

I'm not sure if DOTT and the other LucasArts games are abandonware or not. I think they might still available in places, although I haven't looked recently and I can't check LucasArts's webpage from where I am right now.

Here's a link to ScummVM for convenience. I have a stack of some of the old LucasArts adventure games, and they definitely get replayed every now and again. There's also a free download of Beneath a Steel Sky on the ScummVM downloads page, which I would heartily recommend.

And nevermind the trivial little detail that cookies would undoubtedly work better?

We need to be spending more time asking people if, knowing that torture is completely unfit for purpose and has been shown to have long term consequences including but not limited to a) the irreversible corruption of data vital to national security, b) the creation of new generations of implacable enemies, c) increased danger for such members of our own forces as fall into the hands of those we have tortured and their comrades, do they feel that allowing the foolish, fearful, evil, and sadistic among us to play out their revenge and toughness fantasies on the bodies of the helpless in clear violation of international law can:

1) Always be justified?
2) Usually be justified?
3) Sometimes be justified?
4) Rarely be justified?
or
5) Never be justified?

Because I want to see the results of THAT poll. Probably after someone edits the question; I feel I have not yet quite achieved mastery of the push-poll genre.

The problem (as I keep finding) is a mix of denial, exceptionalism, compartmentalization, narrative, and a lack of critical thinking.

The best tool (and it's pretty poor, just look at the non-response to it in that thread in New Jersey) is to ask people how they'd feel if:

Given:

Torture is legal (as so many seem to want), or at least allowed.

Someone denounces one of their relatives for knowing where bombs had been planted.

Said relative dpesn't know.

How long will the interrogator wait? How long will the answers of, "I don't know," be allowed to go on before the "attention slaps", the bouncing off of walls, the sleep dep (not for more than eleven days), the controlled hypothermia and the waterboard are brought to bear.

How much of that should they expect their father, mother, son, cousin, niece, daughter, wife, husband, what have, to endure? When will that person (who knows nothing) give in and make something up.

Conversely, how long do they think the interrogators will continue, if their relative should cling to innocence?

Because that's the real moral question. Even if we accept, arguendo that torture can produce results, how many innocents are to suffer that one knowledgeable person be exploited?

Worse, we know the results of that situation. Algeria, in the 1960s. What you get is a wider war, and denunciations for strategic gain. Better than the VC killing the supporters of the gov't, the FLN ignored the really loyal, and laid an information on the someone in a family/village which was sitting on the fence, and then let the French do the work.

The rest, as they say, is history.

You know, now that I really start to think about it, the Pew torture poll seems a bit incomplete, although it doesn't seem unreasonable to me. Other people have critiqued the question, which is an important part of the way the responses fall, but their sampling methodology itself seems sound enough. It's not a push-poll, it's just trying to find out information.

Perhaps they should do a second poll to try to understand what people think that torture actually is and the results it obtains. That alone might help put the poll results into perspective. If most people's idea of torture is maybe slapping the guy a couple times and doing a bad-cop routine, then it's far more likely to be accepted.

I will grant that there are bloodthirsty types out there who think that all the <epithet>s understand is force, but they can't be in the majority. The rest could just plain not know. I know I really don't know what's involved, but I also know that it can be horrible stuff. I know that people will admit to anything just to make the pain stop.

Maybe it's a lack of empathy. Maybe it's a lack of thought. Maybe they didn't have my history teacher who took great glee in describing to impressionable young boys how one can extract confessions of being a witch.

Also, oatmeal rasin cookies are good, but you want to have chocolate chip and peanut butter cookies as well. All still nice and warm, of course.

Depends. If you want my entire autobiography, I'm holding out for a five course dinner. With wine, or is that forbidden by Geneva as administering mind altering substances?

And, yeah. I just find myself wondering if we play too nicely. People have reasons for torturing and for authorising torture, and those reasons can't be 'to extract information', because it doesn't.

So why do they do it, and how can we make the ones who sort of go along with it stare at that 'til they vomit?

Education is good, but basically reactive. How do we go on the attack, and how far is it fruitful to go? Because I have no actual problem with reacting to stuff like this by saying "yeah, that's cause cookies would work better", but it's not enough, because it's still fighting on their turf.

How do we kill that image of torture as stark and noble and make it look like the vile and creeping infection of the imagination that it is?

"It wasn't George Bush that favoured torture, it was Dick Cheney".

Mostly a lie, of course, but hey.

If you don't follow her LiveJournal, you may not be aware that (1) Suzette doesn't drive, hasn't done so for decades, has been trying to regain that skill but has had little success to date; (2) they live out in the backside of beyond, in an area where driving is an absolute necessity just to get to the grocery store; and (3) Suzette's son Michael died unexpectedly just a few weeks ago.

I am terrified that the double load of stress may do serious damage to her health as well. Even if she copes, it is likely that she and George will have to move, or at the very least that she will have to find temporary lodging somewhere more walkable until he is recovered enough to drive again. GoodThoughts and positive energy in that direction would be a mitzvah.

You just shook loose something I've been thinking about for a while. People tend to have an in-group/out-group mentality, and don't identify with the out-group. I find this wrong, and yet I know I still fall into that trap. People are still people whoever they are, but as soon as you make them other, you can justify doing practically anything to them. It seems to be one of the constants of history.

Going by the results of a Google search (the US Department of State's website not being entirely helpful on the subject that I could see), maybe up to 30% of US citizens have passports. That means that the majority have never left the country. It's true that the US is a very large country with its own distinct cultural regions, but it's still the US. A lot of people have never been exposed to a foreign culture in any meaningful way. Without that, there can be a lack of understanding and a lack of empathy. There's no grasp that the way we do things here isn't necessarily the only way or the best way, or even an understanding of why not everyone likes the US.

I'm aware that being able to up and travel is a mark of privilege. It's not a practical solution to be able to suggest that everyone should experience traveling abroad without the bubble of a comfortable little tour group, but I think it would help all the same. Some people manifestly Would Not Get It, but then there's always some obnoxious English or American tourist who thinks that all French waiters speak English, really. Others, I think, would have their eyes opened.

There's a certain insularity at work here that needs to be addressed. It happens in a lot of different countries, but the US seems to have picked up a good dose of it.

I'm still not sure that my thought's been completely knocked free, so take this for what it's worth.

Mine is still expired. I think the fee has gone up from the $55 I quoted there.

(~30% of Americans with passports)

One minor complication (which I don't think changes the calculation THAT much) is that until recently one did not need a passport to visit Canada or Mexico.

Xopher: I've never put it that way, but I have said that, given enough time; and no retraints, I can get anyone,to confess; to anything. A couple of suicide bombings? Trvial.

Self decapitation... no problem. Those are both actually pretty easy; because they are blatantly false. The subject will wonder why you want such a fib, but hey... you're the one with the rubber hose.

Where it gets harder is the more sublte ones, the fingertip you cut off when you were with the yakuza. Those give the source cognitive dissonance, because they might have happened (because the source needent die from it), but the fingertip is still there.

Do it right and they will believe they did it, and it was replaced (they will see a scar in the wrinkles of the knuckle).

But you can't convince the believers in torture of that. They are so certain of so many contradictory things they have no problem believing no one will confess to "important" things they didn't do.

So the trick is to torture people so they will give up the little things, (so they know lying is bad), then when you get to the big ones, they will, "give it up", and you know it's true because no one would confess to crimes they didn't commit; that would be stupid, they'd end up in prison for nothing.

Never mind they might already be in hell for nothing.

When I renewed my passport in 2002 it was a whopping $75. Looks like it still is. I'm kind of looking forward to a new passport, though, as the overly cheerful person who took my photo wouldn't let me go until I'd smiled for the camera.

According to the US Department of State, there were 101 million passports issued in the last ten years. Assuming they were all for adults, that means that about 33% of the US population has a valid passport. The percentage must be lower, because some of those are undoubtably for children's passports which expire in five years rather than ten. Taking the data for the last five years gives a lower bound of 22%.

Until recently Americans didn't need a passport to visit Canada, Mexico, or the Caribbean. Since Mexico has been the single largest international tourism country for Americans, it changes the correlation between passports and international travel.

There are at least 30 million people who live within 100 miles of Canada, and 20 million or so within 100 miles of Mexico*.

Here are statistics on where U.S. residents went for international travel, and here are statistics on day-trips and overnight travel between the US, Mexico, and Canada.

Mixing those two sources, and really roughly, in the 1990's and 2000's
* 50 million U.S. residents traveled overseas each year (20 million excluding Canada and Mexico).

* 12-13 million U.S. residents traveled to Canada each year. This was done via 25 million day-trips and 13 million at-least-overnight trips. 25% of the overnight trips were by plane.

* 18-20 million U.S. residents traveled to Mexico each year. This was done via 70 million day-trips and 20 million at-least-overnight trips. 25% of the overnight trips were by plane.

In 2005, the last year before the passport rule changed, Mexico and Canada had 20 million and 14 million American travelers respectively. Canada's tourism agency estimated that 34 percent of Americans had passports in 2005.

This data doesn't say how many Americans visited foreign countries without a passport, but it suggests a non-trivial number.

----------------
* no source, just me looking at a population map.

I couldn't find travel statistics when I initially looked, so I went for passport statistics instead. The passport statistics show that there was an uptick of passports issued around the same time they became a requirement to go to Mexico and Canada, so the number of US citizens with passports now must more closely track the number of US citizens who have traveled out of the country. Still, having better data is always good, and what you dug up is better than what I found.

I'm aware that I'm going to sound like I'm No-True-Scotsmaning, but I'm not sure that boozing it up in Tijuana really counts all that much as seeing another country. Everything else, though, is good if it exposes people to differing cultures and viewpoints.

It's possible that it doesn't work on balance, but that the people doing the torture remain convinced that it does. That could easily happen--even very smart and careful people are susceptible to confirmation bias, availability bias, and many other systematic ways your mind has of fooling you. This is why people trying to evaluate a new drug do randomized double-blind studies.

That's how I'd parse the comments by ex-administration people who are claiming torture worked--they're remembering the occasional guys who gave up good information under torture, and not remembering all the guys who gave them lies to get the pain to stop.

I'm not sure that it counts as a cultural exchange, but it's still international travel by any measure.

Plenty of people in the Euro statistics only went abroad to buy a tulip bulb, or a bottle of Abbey beer, or cheaper diesel.

Really? My interpretation is that they are like other war criminals: they'll say or do anything to avoid a trial for their crimes against humanity.

1,483,562,971.2854763

Hint: ep'o w heianeyg.

Yum. Thanks for the reference. More goodness to read!

The pastor who made my brain* was a Texan who also tended to use parables to say what could not be said in any linear fashion. He gifted me tremendously by showing the power of short, complex examples of seemingly ordinary ideas.

* Yes, this is my proof of both the power of religious figures and of the danger that this power will be abused by false prophets. I was one of the lucky ones, and got what I needed to have compassion for others, respect for my sense of self, and courage to face adversity. I am sadly aware that others are not so blessed.

Fair enough. I suppose I should really amend my suggestion to, as you put it, cultural exchange, or, at least, a proper trip abroad with a good eye for observation and culture, which is what I was really going for anyway.

Why did Abi's post remind me of that lunch? Because when I suggested we ask the waiter to split the check, I was stared at like I had just suggested we sign our checks by licking them.

I had heard this was something that was accepted differently in different regions, but it was my first experience with it. Here, it is so commonplace that more often than not a waitron will ask a clearly-non-couple party (either before taking orders or at the conclusion of the meal) if that is what is desired.

So my Open Thread question to the Fluorosphere: is splitting the check something you expect from your waitstaff when dining in a group where you live? And, self-interestedly, what should I expect in this regard on my upcoming trip to Montreal?

Even in Tijuana [1], it's not that difficult to stroll a few blocks away from the most highly commercialized "tourist trap" sections, into areas where locals actually live and work.

Sure, it's a very brief and shallow exposure to "what the country is really like", but an approach that can be surprisingly informative for those who are willing to pay attention to details. Stopping in to buy a few items in one of the local grocery stores, with the local currency [2], can also provide some additional -- though of course limited -- insight into how the folks there live their daily lives, when not on display in the more touristy sections of town.

(For those who live in nations with notably non-homogenous cultures, especially those with substantial geographical variations, the same principles can apply to a great many types of travels, closer to home. In some cases, you don't even have to leave your own metropolitan area.)

[1] The last time I visited there, at least. Which was, admittedly, a few years ago.
[2] Especially if you already have a reasonably firm mental grasp of the approximate exchange ratio between your home currency and the local one, and can do the math in your head quickly enough to make meaningful comparisons of prices and values.

My greatest concern about the poll truly is its abstract nature. It's easy to have one opinion when faceless victims are involved, but it's hard to hold to those ideals when the victim has a face and name, and you have personal feelings about the people involved.

Here's a thought experiment I've been contemplating that might be illuminating to both sides of the political spectrum:

Imagine that British Intelligence has what they believe to be actionable intelligence that al Queda intends to bomb the White House, but lacks the necessary details to give the U.S. a useful warning of the time and exact location that will be bombed.

Imagine further that former president G. W. Bush happens to be in England at the time. As an obvious source of information about both the secret security systems protecting U.S. presidents and as someone who has been recently briefed at the highest level on U.S. intel, he is asked to confirm certain pieces of the picture and to give other information that might prevent the attack.

Imagine even further that, even though British Intelligence believes the attack is so immanent that usual diplomatic channels will be insufficient to prevent the attack, Bush refuses to give up the requested information, stating that there are some secrets that even our closest allies must not know, for fear of weakening America.

Would the Brits be justified in using torture on the former president to obtain the information necessary to complete the holes in their intelligence and to prevent the attack?

One of the bases in Southern California was fun for visitors- leave the base on the ocean or high rent side and McDonalds/Burger King was a lot more money than the same food on the desert or poor side.

You are right that a part of the problem is its abstract nature. As long as it's something that might happen to that guy over there, who you don't know and who's probably bad (maybe), you don't care so much. It's part of the human condition.

Even though I tend to operate along Utilitarian principles in daily life, I really have a hard time arguing against torture on Utilitarian grounds. It doesn't matter to me that it's often applied to the wrong people for the wrong reasons, or that it will be used by our enemies to point and say how bad we are, or even that it doesn't get useful information. Torture is Just Wrong.

I dislike arguing based on morals because everyone has different but usually overlapping sets of morals, but, in this case, I think that the Utilitarian approach is worse. It encourages people to start counterarguments by positing that torture works, or coming up with elaborate ticking-time-bomb situations, while ignoring the point that it's about inflicting immense amounts of pain on another human being to get them to say what you want to hear.

Do I occasionally wish that Bush would be personally subjected to the wrongs that he inflicted on the world? Yes. Should it happen? No.

Hint #2: ernq vg bhg ybhq - that one I checked. I'll give the smarter people than I a bit more of a chance before giving it completely away...

So you would let Obama, his family, and all of the people who work in the White House die, knowing the havoc it would wreak on the United States to have much of the Executive Branch extinguished at once, and knowing the harm the resultant chaos would cause to the world?

For splitting checks, sometimes waiterfolks don't even ask when we're out to lab lunch. There are some restaurants that automatically split by seat, even for families. I think it's polite to ask for the check to be split upon ordering because that gives the waiterbeing flexibility.

How does a table split appetizers, though? Usually, we just consider them a gift from whoever orders. It evens out in the end.

I'll do one better than that. I would still be against torture even if it meant that I would die.

To put it mildly, though, your situation is so far-fetched as to really be unthinkable. Every single ticking-time-bomb scenario ever posited assumes not only that torture works but also that they have the right person to torture. Now, sure, Bush would probably cave in less time than the half life of N-16 (7 seconds), and, if he was at all paying attention during the last eight years, might even knows some useful information, but that doesn't mean it's right.

Now, imagine some horribly convoluted situation where you know there's a bomb on a bus full of nuns and kindergardeners, and you have to find out which one it is (there were lots of nuns and kindergardeners out that day, you see) to stop them from being reduced to a pile of meat. Do you grab that swarthy-looking guy who was talking about how he didn't like America's foreign policy and take frayed cables to his feet, or do you get the police and intelligence services to do their job? Please explain how this situation is different from the one you gave.

You can extend the example to whatever "bad guys turning trillions of cute little babies into pate and gobbling them raw" extreme you like, but a society that tortures does not deserve to survive; a society that does not act to stop torture does not deserve to survive unless it decides to act to stop torture; a society that accepts total annihilation to avoid torture is morally superior to a society that rationalizes torture.

Then they don't have actionable intelligence.

Look, I'm sure you're a nice person, but that's a really ludicrous hypothetical.

It's fantasyland and movie plots. And not good movie plots. Not even up to the do-I-cut-the-red-wire-or-the-blue-wire movie plots.

Far-fetched? Probably. It wasn't meant to be realistic -- just a measure of my own internal fortitude.

I would like to believe I would resist the urge to torture if convinced that such a situation gave me only a single choice. The fact that it was so easy for me to come up with a hypothetical situation that would, if true, be so morally agonizing is the reason for my belief that knowing fictional thinking occurs makes pollsters who ask abstract questions about complex questions so morally problematic.

It's also the reason I am grateful that, under the U.S. Constitution, I would have an emotional "out", by pointing to a set of higher values that would make the decision for me

This is why I don't like arguing from morals, though. I know it's wrong, but I can't really explain why. Saying that a society that tortures is less moral than one that doesn't means that there has to be some way of comparing it. I expect it would come down to the Golden Rule. I don't want people torturing me, and therefore I shouldn't be doing it to others.

Still, that's not an entirely satisfactory explanation to me. For example, I accept that wars—real wars—will happen, which involves killing other people. I don't particularly want to be killed, but it's a necessary evil.

The Utilitarian argument says that torture is bad because it causes harm for no benefit. Even if you have the right person, which is not a given no matter how the fantasy goes, you still don't necessarily get correct information or useful information in a timely manner. But, once you go down that path you wind up with people popping up and saying that they've guaranteed that they have the right guy, that the weight of this one person's life is insignificant compared to the number of lives that getting the information out of him will save, and he doesn't want to talk so here's the rubber hose.

I'm not arguing with you. I'm just frustrated that I don't have an explanation that I'm happy with.

James D. Macdonald @ 283:

I wasn't going to mention that part of it, but, yeah.

Far-fetched? Probably. It wasn't meant to be realistic -- just a measure of my own internal fortitude.

I would like to believe I would resist the urge to torture if convinced that such a situation gave me only a single choice. The fact that it was so easy for me to come up with a hypothetical situation that would, if true, be so morally agonizing is the reason for my belief that knowing fictional thinking occurs makes pollsters who ask abstract questions about complex questions so morally problematic.

It's also the reason I am grateful that, under the U.S. Constitution, I would have an emotional "out", by pointing to a set of higher values that sets a bright enough line to make the decision for me.

'Cause I like to torture myself by questioning my own deeply held moral beliefs ;-).

Sorry.

As for your puzzle poem, though, let me be the first to say DUH. I don't get it. Naq gung'f gehr jurgure V ernq vg nf "bar ovyyvba, sbhe uhaqerq rvtugl-guerr zvyyvba..." be nf "bar sbhe rvtug guerr svir fvk gjb..."

I guess I'm not one of the smart people here. Or maybe I'm just having a duh-head couple of hours.

On check-splitting: I assume you mean asking the waitron for separate checks, right? While I know very well that Skwid and the others here who do that don't mean it this way, to me it means either a) "I don't trust you to pay your fair share," or b) "We may be eating at the same table, but we're not actually eating together, not like we're sharing food or anything."

It kind of negates the bond of eating together. I don't know why I have this response. The food is the food and the check is the check; but it feels like not-sharing. And sharing (even if you eat meat and I eat veggie-wacko food that you won't touch) is the point of eating together...to me.

Wish list for the project: somewhere between five and eight time quanta worth of omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence.

Saw it in an article a few days ago, and I'm not sure it means what I think it means...

Besides, every time my family does the pile-o-cash thing, we come out short on the tip.

Some reasons why people in my usual social groups might prefer to have separate checks:

- It transfers the work of calculating "who had what" from us to the restaurant. (This is the most common case.)

- It relieves me, personally, from wondering if I've miscalculated and stuck someone else with more than their share and they're just being too polite to mention it. (Obviously, I don't know how much that applies to anyone else.)

- It means that someone who needs to leave early can do so without having to wait for the group check and calculation process. (Bad Memories from a dinner gathering at TorCon that nearly trashed the rest of our evening...)

- Specifically at a con, some of us may need a separate receipt because it's a business expense.

- Gender rituals and associated sexual implications. (Not so much me, but some of my friends are still very much in the dating scene, and "going Dutch" removes one of the most common quid pro quo scenarios.)

Things like shared appetizers and split desserts are either negotiated or somebody just says, "Put that on mine."

It fails, in the same way most ticking bombs do. If it's going off so quickly they can't call the White House and say, "Dude, there's going to be a huge problem, get on the plane and leave for awhile" then torturing Bush ain't gonna help.

That's problem the first. Problem the second... you don't know, even in the set you describe, that Bush knows the specific details needed to foil the plot. (the subject of a security system as complex as those at the White House is never going to know all of them). When he says he doesn't know the one you need to know, how do you know he's hiding it?

And no, they would not be justified in using torture. As to your later question of harm to the rest of the world... I think it's in Trust me Mister President, that a lot of us described what we wanted on our gravestones if a terrorist killed us; even if torture might have saved us.

What I am curious about is why this is so agonising (and without being as harsh as Jim... the sheer lack of realism in the model is a problem. When something so outlandish is a trial of your beliefs, either the model, or the beliefs has a problem).

The meat of the matter (and something I had to wrestle with, for years) is that torture is so seductive. It ought to work.

What it lacks is negative feedback. In the thread at the New Jersey blog the second fool to step up to the plate tried to say we had corroboration from the number of people giving the same answers. If I'd not washed my hands of him (I didn't flounce, I just made a point that further discussion was fruitless, as he' made up his mind).

It doesn't work that way. Interrogators question until we get a negative response (i.e. the subject claims ignorance). Torture doesn't allow for that. There is no way to know when the subject is no longer able to provide information.

Different hypothetical: You are a prisoner. You are a co-operative prisoner. I ask you a question to which you don't know the answer.

I hit you, and repeat the question. You still don't know anything. I hit you again.

Then I strap your hand to the table. When you continue to trust in your honest ignorance, I whip out a hammer and break a finger.

How many fingers are you willing to have broken before you start to, "admit" you know something?

You might try looking at the urban dictionary (skipping the link here, since it's both easy to find via any search engine, and prone to startling language and phrases that could be considered (at best) NSFW and offensive to many).

Wow, four pages on Woo Woo.

Apparently, it's "a slang term for your cooter." Which has seven pages, and is also a swamp turtle.

Among other things, indeed ;>

Perhaps that's part of why so many people find it easy to go along with the arguments for torture. Read a lot of history. The groups who'd avoid it were mostly wiped out by the groups who enjoyed impalement, burning villagers alive in barred buildings, etc, etc, etc, so it becomes part of an unacknowledged ground of society that we have to struggle knowingly against.

I think you've got what I meant to say. I tend to be confusing, even to myself.

V nterr. Npghnyyl, va n jnl vg'f irel pbaivapvat rivqrapr gung Gbcure vfa'g n anepvffvfg: gurer'f abguvat n anepvffvfg jbhyq ybngur zber guna n pbcl bs uvzfrys. Zbfgyl zl ernpgvba gb Gbcure'f cynl qngr jnf birejuryzvat cvgl. Jungrire'f tbvat ba, vg'f abg urnygul.

Vs vg vf n fvoyvat be sevraq, V'q chg rira zbarl ba rfgenatrq, abg qrnq. Vg'f rknpgyl gur fbeg bs guvat na bireornevat, frys-pragrerq crefbanyvgl yvxr Gbcure jbhyq qb: qevir njnl gur bar crefba gurl npghnyyl yvxr naq erfcrpg.

(Fvqrabgr: vfa'g vg vagrerfgvat ubj abg univat erny anzrf vf fb abaguerngravat naq ernffhevatyl qruhznavmvat jura gurl'er fzvyvat qbyyf, naq fb vaperqvoyl perrcl jura gurl'er Nycun?)

I’m not a nice person. Nice people don’t entertain revenge fantasies. Nice people certainly don’t tell other people that they’ve entertained revenge fantasies.

Terry Karney @ 296 and others:

I confess that, rather than trying to create a realistic scenario, I was trying to seduce myself – and others on this site – with some of the factors I believe to be the most dangerous inducements to torture: revenge fantasies, triumphalism (the belief that, as victors, we get to write the history books), and the sense that normative values don’t apply to the other (which, IMHO is just a description of the urge that causes people to choose partisanship over peace).

I was taking a calculated risk, given a carefully chosen sample audience, but I am delighted by the horror and revulsion that greeted my hypothetical scenario. Despite having cherry-picked my sample, and having a response level that is merely anecdotal, I think your response, and that of others since I posted my monstrous scenario, serves to rebuff the most powerful arguments that will be used against prosecutions for torture.

As I said, I’m not a nice person. I apologize for the ploy, but am heartened by the response.

Local Hero: They're using 3DM Analyst from a company in Perth, Western Australia, to generate high-resolution 3D photo models. It sounds like great fun: "the same camera and software can be used for the smallest projects, in the order of 30 microns (over 1,000 points per square millimetre) … up to large projects spanning several kilometres." My optimist senses wonderful and amazing possibilities; my cynic sees baby-sized Hello Kitty dolls personalized with your daughter's face; my pessimist foresees darker and dirtier uses. All may occur, or none.

Dollhouse discussion suggestion: I suggest all of the ROT-13 posts in this have 'Dollhouse' in clear in them, or some such identification.

Sent by a friend this morning, made me smile to no end. The crowd here probably knows it already, but passing the love anyway.

Daniel Klein@241: Not that I'd encourage borderline illegal activities, but there is such a thing as abandonware.

Well, no, not really if you happen to listen to some people in the industry.
I personally don't find anything morally wrong with it as a whole if it allows people to experience some games that would not be available any other way (or who've become ridiculously overpriced), but the area (51?) sure becomes very grey very fast. For example, most Lucasart adventure games never actually fell in the abandonware zone, as they were re-edited numerous times (a batch of them made it to the shop next to my place around january this year for around 10€). A pain to get ? Yes, definitely depending on where you live. Abandonware ? Not stricto sensu.

(On a semi-related notice, since there was that whole Amazon talk recently, I must confess I just hate they just won't export video-games. No matter if the game was never released in your country, or you want the original text rather than a translation. Not that there aren't other sources, but still. Can you believe the DS version of Chrono Trigger, a 1995 game, and a major one, was the first to be officialy released, this year, for most of Europe ?)

Check-splitting: Considered perfectly fine here in Paris. Be warned though, some restaurants won't allow to add the tip to a credit card payment.

Lee@252: "Tout-plein-de-bonnes-ondes" for them.

Nf sbe jub Gbcure chg vagb Fvreen, gung'f n ernyyl vagrerfgvat dhrfgvba, naq V'q yvxr gb nccebnpu vg sebz n fbzrjung zrgn cbvag bs ivrj.

Svefg bs nyy, erzrzore gung gur rcvfbqr vgfrys jnf nobhg n qrnq crefba "ergheavat sebz gur tenir" ol orvat chg vagb n qbyy. Vs guvf jnf jung Gbcure unq qbar nf jryy, V jbhyq unir rkcrpgrq vg gb or zragvbarq ng yrnfg vs abg qrirybcrq vagb n cnenyyry cybg.

Frpbaq, zl svefg vafgvapg juvyr jngpuvat gung rcvfbqr jnf gung ur unq perngrq sbe uvzfrys gur cresrpg tvey, hagvy V ernyvmrq gjb guvatf: n) ur pbhyqa'g unir xabja orsber-unaq jung qbyy jbhyq or tvira gb uvz, naq o) gung vs guvf jnf jung gur jevgref unq va zvaq, gurl jbhyqa'g unir hfrq Fvreen hayrff gurl ernyyl jnagrq gb znxr Gbcure vagb n qvfthfgvat ivyynva. Vg ghearq bhg gb or ragveryl aba-ebznagvp naljnl.

Guveq, gur gurbel bs Gbcure univat pbcvrq uvzfrys. V'z abg fher nobhg guvf bar rvgure. Ntnva, vg jbhyq or fhpu n fcrpvsvp pnfr bs vzcevagvat gung V'z fher gurl jbhyq unir mbbzrq va ba vg, aneengviryl fcrnxvat, n yvggyr zber. Unir gurz obgu fnl gur fnzr guvat ng gur fnzr gvzr be fbzrguvat znlor yrff purrfl guna jung V pna pbzr hc jvgu urer bss gur gbc bs zl urnq. Ng nal engr V qbhog gurl jbhyq unir yrg vg unccra jvgubhg fcrpvsvp pbzzrag.

Jung V oryvrir npghnyyl unccrarq naq jung frrzf gb or gur fvzcyrfg rkcynangvba vf gung Gbcure znqr n sevraq sbe uvzfrys, pbafgehpgvat guvf sevraq bhg bs favccrgf bs bgure crbcyr be rira jevgvat uvz sebz fpengpu. Gung guvf sevraq vf chg vagb n srznyr obql frrzf gb or veeryrinag gb uvz.

Ohg V jbhyqa'g zvaq gurz ergheavat gb guvf cybg cbvag, znlor va gur ynfg rcvfbqr be va gur arkg frnfba. Nyfb, ba gur gbcvp bs gur arkg frnfba, V jbhyq nyfb yvxr gb frr pbyq shfvba qvfpbirerq va zl yvsrgvzr, jbeyq uhatre fbyirq, naq ab zber jne. V'z whfg na bcgvzvfg yvxr gung.

My favorite restaurant recently upgraded their POS thingy, so now it's really easy for them to split checks after the fact. Since I usually wind up being the one to put in $50 on a $15 bill (I don't drink, and after a few rounds none of my drinking friends understands why they need to put in more than $10 for a $10.95 entree), I really appreciate it. Of course, I'd prefer to be able to just pay for everyone, but I don't see that kind of income in my future any time soon.

a. Two people can pay by credit card without undue hassle.

b. The lady who always orders a salad and a water for lunch doesn't get stuck with the bill for the guy who always orders the entree, soup, salad, and appetizer.

c. In small mixed-sex groups, it diffuses the potential weirdness of having it seem like a date or something.

In a lot of our groups, (b) is a big issue. One of my coworkers really is inclined to order a salad and a diet coke for lunch, and she is (predictably) the one who has the least interest in just dividing the total bill by 6 or whatever, so she can subsidize everyone else's steaks and shrimp.

Depends on who I'm with, where we're eating, and what's likely to be ordered. With close friends/coworkers/family, we just split the check ourselves, dividing by the # of folks at the table. Most of us eat in the same price range anyway and if one person has dessert but another has an appetizer, it generally works out that everyone's paying their fair share . . . and if not, things will probably balance out the next time we eat together.

In groups where some member(s) drink alcohol and others don't, we sometimes split the bar tab only among those who drink while the food cost is shared by the entire party. Since I don't drink at all and often have little cash to spare, it can be hard to have to pony up extra bucks to cover other people's alcohol consumption, especially when the bar bill is as much as or more than the food bill.

I'm going through a version of this right now, arranging dd's bat mitzvah. We're not a big drinking crowd, especially at lunchtime. Some people may want a drink, but I don't feel like paying $20 per person extra so a handful of people can have a couple of glasses of wine each.

Sometimes one person eats a lot less than everyone else. Like just an appetizer when everyone else is eating a full meal. In those cases, I usually allow that person to pay for their meal directly (plus tip) and divvy the remaining bill among the remaining guests.

I'm usually the one who does the divvying, and I'm not above pulling out a calculator (well, my cell phone) to make sure that things work out and the waitstaff gets a decent tip. I'm teaching dd to do the same, and she's passing it along to her friends, many of whom have never been taught how to tip even though they are all 12-14 year-olds. Lots of them never seem to eat at real restaurants, just fast-food places.

No thesis. I promise. I just thought you might enjoy being able to quote yourself.

Thank you for seeing right through me.

It's my impression that in the UK, and probably the rest of Europe, a lot of older games are continually re-released on budget labels. Here in the US, that's not so common. I am not morally averse to obtaining content for free that is out of print anyway.

Regarding the bill-splitting discussion:

It makes perfect sense in a business context where you have to expense things separately, or in the case where you have a big group and people with different budgets or sizes of order. I hadn't really come across Xopher's objection to it before, so that's food for thought.

I'm rather fond of the mechanic of buying a round at the pub. Essentially, each member of the group takes a turn at buying the drinks for the group.

On a completely different topic: something for the editors in the audience.

To me, "let's split the check": Get a single check, add 20% tip, divide amount evenly by the number of diners, throw money on the table. Fast and simple.

Asking for separate checks: Ask the waitperson in advance to provide each person (or couple) with a check. I understand that some restaurants don't like to do this. Lots of people paying their bill at the end of the meal can be a slow process.

Or do some of you also mean by "splitting the check" to figure out the cost of each individual's order from the information on the single check.

Yes, I think there has. I think most of us are thinking of separate bills. This is especially true in the context of needing to do it for expense purposes, maybe less so in others.

- It makes it hard to stop at fewer drinks than the number of members in the party. This isn't so bad when you have 3 or 4 people, but if you've got a dozen... well, I hope to hell none of them are driving home!

- As (usually) the sole non-drinker who would be there for the social aspect only, it puts me in the same position as the diner who only gets a salad and water -- I'll end up paying a lot more than my share. Which I might not mind as a one-time deal, but if this gathering is a regular thing, it's going to get really old really fast.

Janet, #321: From the sound of the discussion, most of us are thinking of "split the check" in terms of calculating what everyone owes. And if you're going to do that anyhow, then asking for separate checks makes it easier and faster.

Forgot to mention in my previous comment that for my upcoming Birthday Dinner gather, I'm handling the problem by having it at a buffet-line place where each party pays as they order. This also provides maximum flexibility for people to arrive late or leave early if they need to.

I've often been the poorest in a group of my friends. In fact I ran up a lot of credit-card debt in the 80s due to that fact; we were splitting checks evenly at places where I could afford a salad at best. I finally blew up when a friend ordered ANOTHER bottle of hard cider (the fourth for the table) and I a) hadn't drunk any and b) was already worried about paying my share.

After that we divided by what people actually ate/drank, unless it was obviously pretty even. But we still didn't ask for separate checks. Like I said, it's a cultural thing.

I was once part of a support group for Wiccan coven leaders. We would meet to discuss interpersonal issues arising in our covens, and call on the collective wisdom of the group (adding up to decades of experience leading covens) to resolve them. Then we would go eat dinner together.

One time we went to an Indian restaurant. This presents additional difficulties, because you order appetizers and breads and sides and sauces (like raita) separately, and people share some but not others. Ordinarily it's a nightmare, expecially with something in the neighborhood of twelve people at the table.

Ten minutes from the time the (single) check arrived, it had gone around the table, everyone had put in their share, and there was enough to cover the check with a generous tip. Every single person there (being coven leaders) had been stuck "making up the difference" for poor or just-plain-clueless coven members!

In my own coven this was really kind of expected. There were a couple of us with lucrative jobs, and a few of us in economic hardship. I made it my job to calculate the check every time, and (having discussed this with the other relatively-well-off members) divided it more according to ability to pay than to what they ate. No one exploited that; no one complained about it. (Before having the discussion I just made up the difference myself; the other r-w-o members insisted on taking a piece of it.)

This would have been embarrassingly conspicuous with separate checks. As it was I just told people what they owed, they paid what I said, and the subsidy was hidden. We ate at affordable places, so it wasn't too obvious, though the poorer members certainly knew what was going on. I made it clear that I'm a socialist and I would have a socialist coven.

And when it comes to paying for a meal, the waitstaff are always at the forefront of my mind. I have been to far too many group meals where what Cat describes at #315 occurs, and in addition to being the person most likely to throw in more than I should have had to to cover someone who hasn't realized what they owe, I've had enough waitstaff as friends and family to know that this is where they most often get stiffed on their tip. Separate checks alleviates or eliminates a ton of pain, and just make more sense 99% of the time.

MD² @ #312, "some restaurants won't allow to add the tip to a credit card payment." ...WHA? Inexplicable!

The cute trick is that it's a (slightly) different poem in (1950's) England. Because there, it starts:

""bar gubhfnaq, sbhe uhaqerq naq rvtugl-/guerr zvyyvba..."

Welcome back. Sounds like you had a really slick holiday.

Skwid @ 327:

When you tip on a credit card, the waiter doesn't get the full tip amount because some of the credit card fee is skimmed off it.

However, regarding the original statement, isn't the gratuity typically already included in the bill in France?

I asked my wife and, apparently, the 'woman' side of the bed usually is the one she sleeps on. Thus my assumption. It may just be a statistical fluke. Anyway, when I saw that K-Y gel, I asked my wife if it meant we'd turn into trapeze artists while doing the deed.

Lee has pointed out some of the problems with this. It also encourages people to drink more, and to drink more expensively, than they otherwise might. Pub owners must love it. It seems tailored for people who think sobriety is a state to be extinguished thoroughly and quickly.

I think this hasn't caught on in the US in part because of our history of Prohibition. Drunkenness, especially in public, is widely considered a shameful state here (intrinsically: even if you don't barf or misbehave in any way). There are people here who will lose all respect for someone permanently, even sometimes cut off all ties, if they see them drunk on a single occasion (and no, I'm not exaggerating: I have friends who have told me it is their policy to cut off anyone they have seen in an intoxicated state).

That's not my objection, though I don't like to be around drunk people (let's just say it's because of my individual childhood experiences and leave it at that). It's economically exploitive of people who have less capacity for alcohol, even people who do drink. When I drank, I would be paying much more than my fair share if the group contained more than two people total, because two drinks was my limit (I don't like to be drunk, either). Note that there's a loose correlation to physical mass (modified heavily ¬π by experience) as well, so it's yet another way of disadvantaging those of us who are relatively small.

One relatively trivial objection: it completely squelches the rather nice (IMO) American custom of "I'll buy you a drink," which is used to mean "I approve of you/something you've just done/said." A bunch of us said that on Electrolite years ago, to an Australian man who'd just shown extraordinary character and intellectual honesty. He said "If we're ever drinking together I'll stand my round like a good Australian." Well, OK, so what do we do then? I kinda felt slapped down, in a way, even though I knew that wasn't his intention. It was sad and disappointing.

I think there you're talking about cultures which used torture deliberately as a means of oppression through fear, not as a means of extracting information. I doubt that Vlad the Impaler cared about any information his thousands of victims might have had.

Of course, there's no doubt in my mind that that was one of the motives for Bush & the Cheneymonster in allowing torture. Their problem was they wanted their cake ("Fear me, heathens, for I will hurt you!"), and wanted to eat it too ("The US does not use torture.").

mez @ 308

I read Kuttner's Mutant many years ago, and fell in love with a prop that appears in one scene: a globe that shows geopolitical boundaries and alliances for any year it's set to, and can run forward or back through a range of years, animating the changes in borders. I've lusted after that toy ever since, and I'm waiting for Google to give me at least a flat-map version. Google Geo? Google Realpolitik? Google Empire?

Daniel Klein @ 313
Dollhouse:
V guvax lbh'er evtug; gur zbfg yvxryl fpranevb vf gung Gbcure perngrq n cynlzngr ol fcyvpvat gbtrgure ovgf naq cvrprf, naq creuncf fbzr bs gur ovgf jrer sebz uvz. Ohg V ernyyl yvxr gur vqrn bs uvz cynlvat jvgu uvzfrys nf n qrzbafgengvba bs whfg ubj phg bss sebz gur erfg bs gur jbeyq ur vf. V nterr jvgu urerfvnepu gung ur'f abg n anepvffvfg; whfg na rkgerzryl ybaryl crefba jvgu cbbe fbpvny fxvyyf naq abg zhpu gb pbaarpg uvz jvgu gur crbcyr nebhaq uvz. Orra gurer, qbar gung.

Guvf fhowrpg yrnqf gb n gurzr bs Qbyyubhfr gung V ernyyl ybir: rivy vf hfhnyyl whfg n cneg bs n crefbanyvgl, abg n fvatyr qbzvanag punenpgrevfgvp. Naq rivy vf bsgra nffbpvngrq (jnivat zl unaqf ng pnhfngvba if. pbeeryngvba) jvgu fvtavsvpnag rzbgvbany qnzntr. Rira Onyyneq unf uvf qnex fvqr, naq rira Nqryyr be Gbcure pna fubj n fcnex bs qrprapl bppnfvbanyyl. Vg'f jura gurve qnzntr zrrgf gur jbeyq urnq-ba gung gur fcnexf syl.

Bar ovyyvba, sbhe uhaqerq naq rvtugl-
Guerr zvyyvba, svir uhaqerq naq fvkgl-
Gjb gubhfnaq, avar uhaqerq

I know there must be a way to make it work. But at this point I pretty much give up.

KeithS 329: However, regarding the original statement, isn't the gratuity typically already included in the bill in France?

But WorldCon isn't in France. It's in Canada, albeit a French-speaking part thereof.

Here in Austin, it's almost always humid as all hell. All that moisture being sucked up from the Gulf.

The LBJ Ranch, a few miles east of Frederickburg in Stonewall, which is the center of peach country [1], has a great if rather low-key pioneer farm thingy, complete with pigs. We like to go visit them once every year or two in bluebonnet season.

[1] No peaches this year, probably; they all got hailed upon. (Local pronunciation is "hell," and it's easy to see whay.)

True, the round system isn't perfect. It is my understanding, though, that the notion of whose round it is persists between pub visits. I was not a heavy pub-goer and not quite a native, so I may have missed some of the subtleties.

I am a little confused about the Australian commenter. In England, there's also the custom of "I'll buy you a drink" for those circumstances. Maybe it's not quite the same in Australia? Alternatively, it was his way of saying "thanks, but it's no big deal".

Xopher @ 334:

MD²'s original comment at 312, which Skwid was responding to, was talking about Paris, hence the confusion.

Serge @ 338:

A friend of mine bought a stuffed manatee that I thought should be named Hugh. She didn't take me up on it.

Give me the same tools, and no agenda, and I can get everything the subject knows. The only question is time. If the source will talk to me, I will get it.

I am not a nice person either. What I am is practical. On practical grounds your model fails. On moral grounds it's suspect. The hypothetical is morally suspect. It's designed to force an answer; torture one, or kill many. No matter what the answer, the respondent is being put in the position of making an evil choice.

But that choice is dependent on a lie... torture works.

None of which will rebuff (no matter how thoroughly it refutes) those who want to believe. I know this because I've been refuting them for more than 16 years. They don't listen, and the arguments they make are seductive. False, but seductive.

Diatryama: Ah. Perhaps it's too much that I spend time out in the wilds, where what you see as counterexamples are offered as valid arguments, that or more amazingly false ones are made (to sum one up, "OK hotshot, if it doesn't work, why have people done it for thousands of years).

I am, perhaps, too willing to take such things at face value. I suppose, in this regard, I am more baitable than others.

KiethS, I appreciate the round, but if the group is larger than four, I am not going to be taking a drink every round, not unless I go home in a bucket.

re checks: I'm mixed. I've spent 12 bucks on a cup of coffee (when I wasn't exactly flush, and 12 bucks was a fair bit more money than it is now). After that (because 12 bucks was far from what that bill was shorted, and it wasn't the first time, just the worst) we got separate checks.

Splitting is a little harder, because (IMO) when it isn't even one either needs someone to tally, or the tip ends up short,because people tend to forget what the total costs are

More and more places around here, even small neighborhood restaurants (especially small neighborhood restaurants?) have started putting a line on their menus to the effect that gratuity of a certain percentage will be added to the bill for groups of 6 or more.

Maybe up around your part of Texas, but not around here. Which is not where I'm from originally, so I'm at least partly a fresh ear. Leastwise, I say "hayl" and "hell", and lots of them say "hehl" and "hehll". The difference between those last two is in the prolonged "l" used in referring to the infernal regions.

Yes, humid as hell.

For me: hell. For a lot of people, it's drawn out to two syllables; more like hay-ul, but not that pronounced. Drawls tend to get more pronounced when you're telling a joke or making a point. Or within ten feet of someone from another state.

A letter-writer in the latest issue of Viz offers the following top tip: "Biro pen tops make authentic Battle of Hastings re-enactment helmets for stick insects."

You have seriously misjudged the amount of enjoyment people derive from being played.

Earl's right. Don't do that again.

No, I didn't expect you to enjoy it at all.

As part of my religious upbringing, I was pushed and taunted by people I trusted to scour my most deeply cherished beliefs. I didn't enjoy it then (and I don't enjoy it when I do it to myself now), but I have had occasions to be glad for the moral certitude that it built as a result.

The problem, I know, is that you have absolutely no reason to trust me, and this place can be a beacon for trolls.

The more you say, the less I am minded to grant you that charity which I attempt to extend to all who comment here.

You are not entitled to run us through exercises for our own spiritual development, nor indeed for yours. This is not your site or your community. No one consented to being gamed.

this place can be a beacon for trolls

Starting to wonder if I'm looking at one right now, to be honest.

An apology and a resolution to reform would not be out of order.

Point taken. I was trying to come up with a scenario that would put enough of a human face on the issue that it could simultaneously be used as a gut check by people who hate Bush and as an argument to try on fence-sitters who might be sympathetic to Bush.

Probably not the best such example -- and I didn't expect you to answer differently.

You are right. I apologize completely and without reservation.

Very well. Go thou and comment only in good faith henceforth, OK? These are matters for which the community has a long memory and a short temper.

No sport was intended nor will be attempted in the future.

One point for knowing that the word "whom" exists, I suppose. Minus several million for, well, everything else.

For your information, I dropped that quote into Word, turned on the grammar checker, as I don't use that abomination normally, and discovered that it found no grammatical errors at all.

*headdesk*

KeithS: Gaaaaaahhhhhhh!!!!

Xopher #357: Indeed.

Why yes, I have been playing a lot of Hearts on the computer recently, why do you ask? ;-)

I think there were at least two more errors possible in that um, not-exactly-a-sentence thingy you quoted.

Hearts is a weird inverted sort of game.

Abuse of "whom" and "Joe and I" are irritating in a very specific way. They are used by people who know nothing (consciously) about grammar but are afraid that they should. If these people weren't scared of grammar police, they would never say "whom" or "and I". Since they don't know what they're at, they almost always get it wrong.

If they just said "Fuck off!" to their internal grammar policeman, they'd be fine with "who" and "Me and Joe", as often as not.

If someone is bored, would they go please write a Wikipedia article on "woo" or "woo-woo" as it applies to genre fiction, so I can go look it up?

The blog Respectful Insolence often uses "woo" as a term for pseudoscience and other pseudointellectual buffoonery. If I came across the word in a genre fiction context I'd assume it implied something nutty in the book's worldview... bees escaping from the authorial bonnet into the text. The classic example would be Ayn Rand's thousand-page objectivist tracts.

If this theory is correct, then the term was probably inspired--knowingly or not--by a comedian named Hugh Herbert, once famous for his "woo-woo" noises, now remembered mostly because Mel Blanc apparently borrowed some of his vocal mannerisms for the earlier, crazier version of Daffy Duck.

I kind of got the pseudosciency feel from the material I could find, but like a lot of in-crowd terminology, I might be a little off in identifying it.

Somewhere, it linked it to the "wooooooooo" of the audience during a flashy magic trick, which I thought was cute, and now, goddammit, it's stuck. If I ever do find a more concrete definition, the ooohing and ahhhing yokels are going to shove it out every time.

I'm thinking along the lines of the "Aliens did it!" school of archeology. Yes? No?

If they just said "Fuck off!" to their internal grammar policeman, they'd be fine with "who" and "Me and Joe", as often as not.

Can I put this on cards and pass them out? Good advice.

Are you accusing the TARDIS of being locatively inaccurate, or do you decline to comment?

The US Navy's History Department has transcriptions of telegrams & wireless telegrams concerning disposition of the German Navy, starting at the Armistice (Nov 11 1918) and covering several weeks afterward.

http://www.history.navy.mil/library/manuscript/wwi_naval_communication.htm

I love primary documents, and these are as primary as they get, straight from the offices of senior British & German admirals & such.

My other thought, partway through my first reading of these, was "These look like liveblogging or tweets, don't they?" Then I smacked myself on the back of the head, because it was a very silly thought.

Still, go have a read. See what short-form communication looked like long before tweets!

I'm tempted to do a long, long blogpost with some basic annotations for those messages, actually. It would be a very long blogpost, though...

There's nothing like primary documents. As soon as I opened the cardboard jackets in which the pamphlets been mounted, I understood that I was looking at feudzines: topical, highly contextual, written quickly and run off in editions of a few hundred copies, and circulated to list of people who largely knew each other.

The internet is a huge change in the human condition, but the things it changes aren't always the ones people imagine they are.

Not silly in the slightest; in fact, you were rather perceptive.

A friend is getting married in 2 1/2 weeks, and the dress code for the first evening of the festivities is "Indian dress preferred." For this I'd need to get something for me and something for my guy.

The first two (local physical) stores I looked at today had some lovely stuff starting at about $140 for men's sherwani* and $120 for fancy salwar kameez sets, and about the same for lehnga cholis (fancy = shiny, lots of embroidery, nice colors. I'm avoiding sari or dhoti--those seem like they'd need practice).

As the (no longer active) salwar kameez thread showed, it's possible to buy these for much less online. However, is it possible to do this in under 18 days? And if yes, any recommendations as to where? Or is there an equivalent to the salwar thread I could ask this?

If you're in the S.F. Bay Area and can recommend a shop, I'd be interested in that too.

--------------
*would there be other types/names of men's formal wear I should look for?

Kathryn, #381: Another name for a men's garment that you can inquire about is "kurta".

If you know where the "Little India" area local to you is -- or the area where import wholesalers congregate -- that's where to look for hole-in-the-wall sari shops that will be cheaper.

I read your comment, got confused, looked at the comment you were replying to, got even more confused, then googled Red Cheever. Ah.

Mind you, this is the same person I've been playing telephone tag with for the past five months in attempting to set up my son's baptism. A wonderful person he, but horrible at getting in contact.

I hope your son's baptism is as much a blessing as it has been a thing-to-be-sought-after.

Meanwhile, I've read what Google granted me, been made hungry by the limited material on Mr. Cheever's website and others, and want more. Has he preached sermons that have been transcribed or published works that are not widely available?

*He died, relatively young. It's particularly poignant to me when wisdom occurs at an early age, and is as easily extinguished.

The (Quite Handsome) 10th Doctor: And, uh, you're my fiancée?
Emma, The Assistant: So you remember me then?
The (Quite Handsome) 10th Doctor: How could I possibly forget the only time-traveling companion I've ever had?
Emma, The Assistant: You've had lots of companions.
The (Quite Handsome) 10th Doctor: The only time-traveling companion I've ever... had.

Those are really interesting to look through. As others have already said, your thoughts about the resemblance to modern communication forms are not silly in the slightest. TNH is right that the internet has changed different things than what a lot of people imagine; the internet alters the speed of communication, not the human behavior behind it.

Serge @ 386:

Fade to black as the two lie supine?

The 9th Doctor: Without even knowing I was looking, I have found a woman I love. A woman more fascinating than all my travels through time and space. A girl more exciting than an escape up a ventilation shaft. A lover more thrilling than an army of cybernetic slugs.

Suddenly Eddie Izzard's Church of England Inquisition seems a lot less funny.

The slugs are for Captain Jack?

Xopher @ 392:

It's almost certainly supposed to be "were". That's a common error I see in a lot of online writing.

This is for fun, to clarify, not because I think it's a serious possibility that the student meant 'where' there. Or anywhere.

("They are NOT breasts. They are Dalek bumps.")

A book conservator would of course tell you to take it to a book conservator. I'm not a book conservator though.

The best thing is to carefully peel back the paper or cloth on the cover and the spine, insert a piece of strong tissue (like japanese kozo, ideally painted to match) or, if there's likely to be a lot of use, fine linen or bookcloth, and then paste everything back together. That should leave it looking pretty much the way it does now, but the cover won't be falling off.

That's a bit finicky. If you want something easier, just glue a piece of cloth over the broken joint. It will obviously look patched, but will hold up better and do less permanent damage than using any kind of tape, which is most people's natural instinct. (Meaning you can fix it again/better later.) Water soluble (washable) white glue or starch paste are the best things to use for this. You can also reinforce it by openning the cover completely and gluing a strip of paper over the gap from the inside.

I was just wanting to help you rack up the error count. Fragano's earlier example made me check if my brain was dribbling out of my ears, but this one is just so vastly wrong on many levels that I'm not quite sure what to make of it.

I have this little alarm pinging in the back of my mind that says, "Error: unterminated subordinate clause," which is actually more annoying than the gross error of fact.

"It has not been thought advisable to delete from the following pages the occasional references to the original appearance of these articles in a daily newspaper. The author, for example, sometimes indicated by arrows or a pointing finger his references to other contributions in the paper, either a leading article with which he disagreed or some contribution in the social column. He was for many years a committed newspaperman and it would distort the tone of this book if all indications that these articles were written against a deadline, or that his own column was part of a greater whole, were to be deleted."

Since I have the volume in question down from its shelf (well, the shelf it shares with other works by the same author and various books which somehow seem to me as if they belong with said works) I will, entirely in the spirit of fair use, transcribe a short extract:

HER FACE was radiant. She looked up, sensing the passion that was written in every line of the taut, lean face. Their eyes met.

"Mary!" he cried.

He bent down and took her in his arms. How strong he was, how masterful! How utterly he crushed her frail body against his pounding heart!

"Mary!" he cried again, huskily this time.
Their lips met. Heaven and earth seemed to-

The Plain People of Ireland: What in the name of goodness is all this about?

Myself: It is a scene from my new serial, which commences in this column next week.

The Plain People of Ireland: But surely that isn't the beginning of it? That's no way to begin a story.

Myself: No, it's not the beginning.

The Plain People of Ireland: Then what-

Myself: Were you never at the pictures? This is the trailer. The trailer shows the high spots of the story.

The Plain People of Ireland: (interested) O, a trailer? Well, go on.

Myself: In a minute, when you cool down.

Amicus Plato, amicus Socrates, sed quid est mihi veritas?
Magis amicus.
Bene qui latuit quomodo vixit?
Bene (Goodman).
Quis palmam ferat?
Qui meruit.
Ubi nemo me lacessit (inquit Ghandi*)?
In Poona.
Noli me quidere?
Tang.

Is this killing you?

*this mispelling in the original text!

[Trying very hard not to picture a gaggle of Tor copy-editors, drunk on a beach, wearing ... No, stop that.]

I am somewhat meter-impaired, so take this for what it's worth.

Scribbledy scribbledy
Communication with
Modern orthography
Is tried and true;

Students' respect for the
Language is suspect, and
Fathomability
Is lacking too.

This is going to sound weird, but a lot of belly dance shops (online and otherwise) sell salwar kameez and lengha sets. You might call around to your local belly dance outlets, or post on a bellydance forum for shopping recommendations.

One billion, four hundred and eighty-
three million, five hundred and sixty-
two thousand nine hun-
dred seventy one
point two eight five four seven six three.

I was in awe for at least a day when that one got explained to me. The only thing that came close was the M R DUCKS sequence.

In apology, I present three from The Mathematical Magπ (at least one of which you probably all know):

A mathematician decried
"Into space computers must fly!
Though it may be more sound
to keep them on the ground,
the people want π in the sky."

Needless to say, this is a very old book, back when computers were room-sized. And, a matching pair:

A mathematician confided
that a Möbius strip was one-sided.
"You'll get quite a laugh
if you cut one in half,
for it stays in one piece when divided!"

But a mathematician named Klein
said "A Möbius strip is quite fine.
Of course, if you glue
the edges of two,
you'll get a weird bottle like mine."

I posted a request for SF bay shop suggestions on a belly dance networking site. I'll check back later and see what they've suggested.

If it would be safe (which it could very easily not be) the Pakistani sari-equivalent is self-assemblable without practise.

I haven't been logged into Twitter for a week or two—just been busy—and now I can't log in.

It doesn't recognize my password (which was going to be, for many reasons, hard to guess), and the password reset links in the email address don't seem to be synchronizing with their systems. I get a message that Twitter doesn't think I've requested a reset when I click on them.

I am thinking Sinister and Worrisome Thoughts. I'm also getting somewhat peevish.

How this young woman who had grown up in rural PA had a) learned about saris and b) gotten her hands on one, I no longer recall. I do remember that she could put it on herself though she preferred to have another set of hands available to hold certain things at certain points; I was often her assistant dresser.

I've worn fancy Indian-tunic-and-pants outfits numerous times. Comfy and beautiful.

Thanks so much for the Sister Dottie S. Dixon link. I visited her website and listened to several "potcasts" and she's a hoot. I'm thinking of sending a link to my mom, but I'm not sure she'll get certain, ah, aspects of the performance.

Never thought I'd say this, but it's a shame I can't be in Utah on such short notice. I'd love to see her show!

Ah, and I would not be interested in dividing the single check evenly. Not only do I eat less and have less money, I can only have 30gr protein a day and that makes the meal I can eat much cheaper than everybody else's.

Bear in mind that the standards for putting on a sari for a wedding are not just higher than you realize, but possibly higher than you can realize. I liken it to knowing how to tie a tie, versus having a lot of experience getting the details right - only at least an order of magnitude more complicated.

I discovered this by wearing a sari that I thought I did a credible job of putting on. As soon as I stepped out of my room, the 'aunties' swooped on me, tut-tutting, and all but ripped the sari off to redo it properly. An example failing: at 5'6", I'm a little too tall by Indian standards for the standard-width sari, especially since it is really supposed to drag on the ground - and I had tucked too much fabric in at the waist (after the aunties were done with me, the sari was held up by safety pins and heartfelt prayer).

For my sister's wedding, two of my aunts spent god knows how long fussing over me to wrap a sari in a fancier style, in which the pullah (the decorated end) falls down the front and is therefore more prominent than the everyday, over-the-shoulder style.

For my brother's wedding, I wised up and wore a gorgeous lehenga, which looked fabulous without my needing a personal dressing-maid, and whose component pieces (a fitted embroidered silk top, and a flowing ankle-length) can be worn again as separates on other occasions (since I now have a whole bunch of saris that I never wear because, apparently, I can't put them on without expert help).

"King helped orcastrate numerous boycotts as well as the voter rights act of 1963."

"Americans believe that freedom of speech is a form of expression that everyone should be able to express how they feel without any restrictions or limitations on it."

"He showed the brutness of injustice, but it could be argued his lack of aggressiveness and rebelliousness made was a weakness."

"Their acts of courage as well as their willingness to be unselfish with their knowledge have whisked our world to a new domain."

"Barack Obama is the newest president of the United States of America, and all eyes are on him to take this nation to great lengths that they have never seen before."

"Bob Marley wanted equal rights for black people and he wanted blacks to free themselves form anti slavery."

I've only gotten a couple answers to my inquiry, but apparently University Avenue in Berkely has a whole string of sari shops. I don't know how helpful that will be, not knowing the area myself, but that's from two different posters.

Um, who's the he (or, name that antecedent!)? That might at least give a hint as to what the sentence is intended to mean.

I'm very sorry, Fragano, but I simply cannot castrate orcs. Nor can I castrate orcas.

(packs bags, heads home in disgrace)

"King helped orcastrate numerous boycotts as well as the voter rights act of 1963."
Somehow I suspect the problem isn't that your student changed "orchidectomy" to "castrate" halfway through the word.

"Americans believe that freedom of speech is a form of expression that everyone should be able to express how they feel without any restrictions or limitations on it."
Is this a Möbius strip?

"He showed the brutness of injustice, but it could be argued his lack of aggressiveness and rebelliousness made was a weakness."
Brut? Less sweet, as in champagne?

"Their acts of courage as well as their willingness to be unselfish with their knowledge have whisked our world to a new domain."
Our world is now a soufflé. Explains a lot.

"Barack Obama is the newest president of the United States of America, and all eyes are on him to take this nation to great lengths that they have never seen before."
So close!

"Bob Marley wanted equal rights for black people and he wanted blacks to free themselves form anti slavery."
Clearly a different Bob Marley that the one I'm familiar with.

Fragano, you are a better man than I. I hope that these snippets aren't representative of the whole class.

... and here I thought they were dancing around the topic

A snip here, a snip there?

That concentration of stores seems like the best for around the Bay Area, although I'm checking with a neighborhood group for their recommendations.

Debcha- that's why I'm avoiding Sarees, even though I have a lovely one that a relative had got 50 years ago. The other types seem just as lovely and less safetypin-worrisome*.

I'll look for 'lehenga' too- those will work for weddings? Looking around all the choices is feeling dangerous, now that I have a goal- there's such beautiful cloth and design around, but for now I should buy just one (and also my guy's sherwani).

What did the other men at your brother's wedding wear?

---------------
* The non-sari-wear also has more chances that I'd wear it elsewhere.

No, it was Dr. E. Freud, the one who studied heteroscedasticity and was so much nicer.

<>!*''#
^@`$$-.
!*'$_,
%*<>#4.
&)../
|{~~SEGMENTATION FAULT.

Read thus:

Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash
Caret at back-tick dollar dollar dash.
Bang splat tick dollar underscore,
Percent splat waka waka number four.
Ampersand, right-paren, dot dot slash
Vertical-bar curly-bracket tilde tilde CRASH.

Time-traveling causes the Doctor's plots to be quite tense. By the way, would you call travel to an alternate history a "subjunket"?

I suppose whether it's past tense or future tense depends on which direction he's travelling.

An Icelandic professor friend of mine reported just yesterday that in grading papers for her ethics in science class, she found two which were largely copied from web sources. The miscreants were both chemistry majors and were friends; one supposes that they knew of each other's misdeeds.

My friend turned them in immediately, of course. They've already been lectured by their doctoral advisor and next will face departmental disciplinary action. My friend reports that most of the time people who commit such acts are given second chances; given that this was an _ethics_ class and that the department chair is livid, that's not likely to happen this time.

One thing that tipped her off was that these papers were better written than these students' usual work.

I thought I'd spotted all the errors.

Nope.

What I spotted this time was ordinary typo stuff, not the horrors that Fragano reports.

Unless you count gratuitous Kipling as a horror.

What?

*Ouch*! Gee, did these students learn a lot from their ethics in science class? Maybe not....

I bloody hate California state propositions. I'm not a politician. I'm not an economist. I'm not a lawyer. I don't have the magical ability to see into the future. Why are they asking me, who's not an expert in these things, how to shape California's economic policies? Isn't that the legislature's job? I know they seem to be stuck doing penny-ante bullshit instead of figuring out how to run the state, but come on.

I'm almost tempted to just vote for the ones that all the no new taxes people oppose. Does anyone have any better ideas or pointers to websites that I can trust?

In an ideal world, it seems like it should be a good system. The legislature does its job, and people who have full and complete information about new proposals that the legislature doesn't want to be involved in get a direct vote. Democracy at its finest.

Unfortunately, in this best of all possible worlds, the legislature regularly punts things that it can't be bothered to figure out to the voters, and people hire signature collectors to get their own craziness added to the ballot as well. Then we get to see the texts of the proposed laws, which still is not full information even to a lawyer, and get slick, multi-million dollar advertising campaigns trying to persuade us to vote one way or another.

This go around it seems to be entirely regarding budgetary issues. I want them to make budgets on time, I want schools and universities to be funded, I want healthcare to be funded, but I have absolutely no clue whether these initiatives will actually do what they say they're supposed to do, because I'm not steeped in California state legislative minutae. Every single one of these propositions was put on the ballot by the legislature. All of them.

Sorry, I'm just annoyed right now. If this is democracy, I don't see why we should wish it on anyone.

ObThreadTangling: The instructions on my mail-in ballot start: "Please use a black or blue ink pen to mark your choices on the ballot." California doesn't have the pen/pin sound issue, and it doesn't have the British differentiation between a ball-point and a fountain pen. And it's written, not spoken. Ink pen seems wonderfully redundant.

I think they meant "black- or blue-ink pen"; that is, a pen with black or blue ink, not an ink pen that is black or blue. But yes, confusing!

For those following at home, I suspect she's had another stroke, and again, it sounds as though she is getting essentially no care or treatment from the local health clinic or hospital. My brother's moved her into his house so he can care for her better, but he sounds at wits' end.

Hyphens make all the difference. You might be right.

Clifton Royston @ 457:

I wish you well with that. Dealing with those sorts of situations is never fun.

My Renaissance and Reformation professor accused me of cheating on a final, and nearly failed me, not because my comprehension for the essay seemed to have taken a giant leap over the previous offerings, but because my writing was too "flowery" for a person "of my level." He used to just give us the question, then go back to his office to watch basketball, which gave anyone who felt like it ample opportunity to pull an already filled bluebook out of their backpack and leave. I didn't. I've never been able to stay awake for lecture classes, but we were studying Martin Luther, and I felt like I understood him. All I could say was, "I actually read the material this time." He grilled me for about an hour, then changed my "F" to a "B-". (!)

I'm dying to dedicate my first novel to him, but I don't think my karma could stand it.

Sure. Another favourite was when I found that parts of a lab report were written (by hand) with much wider margins than the rest, and words hyphenated or otherwise split up unnecessarily. See, when a student does a word-for-word copy from a piece of text written with a larger font or handwriting, and isn't even thinking about it enough to "reformat" to fit the page...

Now, on to the spoilers!

Fb, Fcbpx/Huhen. Ubj pna jr svg guvf vagb n fgehpgher gung vf oryvrinoyr sbe gur punenpgref jr xabj va fhpu n zvabe nygrengvba bs gur gvzryvar? Zl orfg fubg: Gur qrfgehpgvba bs gur Xryiva yrnqf gur Npnqrzl gb er-rinyhngr gur rzbgvbany erfbanapr gurl ner gelvat gb grfg jvgu gur Xbovlnfuv Zneh fvzhyngvba, na vavgvngvir gung pbzrf gb n urnq juvyr Fcbpx vf pbzcyrgvat uvf nqinaprq genvavat (v.r., ur orpbzrf gur fvzhyngvba urnq'f tehag-jbex tenq fghqrag). Uvf jbex ba gur fvzhyngvba vf fb vzcerffvir gung ur'f nffvtarq gb urnq hc cebtenzzvat sbe gur grfg vafgrnq bs gur oregu ba n fpvrapr zvffvba gung jbhyq unir bpphcvrq GBF Fcbpx. Guvf vf tbbq jbex, ohg abg gur punyyratr lbhat Fcbpx arrqf gb or shyyl ratntrq, naq fb n oberq naq sehfgengrq lbhat unys-Ihypna vf zber vagrerfgrq va rkcybevat uvf frkhnyvgl guna n shysvyyrq naq jbex-vzzrefrq bar jbhyq or.

"http://letmegooglethatforyou.com/?q=%22King+became+the+youngest+person+to+receive+the+Nobel+Peace+Prize%22"

And it's been that way for ever. My mother, when marking essays back when she was in university would label sections with "cite?" She was once asked by the person who had done it how she could tell; did she know everything anyone had ever written about the subject? "Well, the writing got much better about , and went back to normal ." Which would be the pre-ARPANET equivalent of lmgtfy.com, I guess...

Why is it that young people seem to think that Google is a secret unpenetrable to people over thirty? Or, for that matter, why they seem so shocked when they discover that their professors are on Facebook?

Sorry all.

ISTM that not everyone realizes that a bunch of common file types are now being used (carried by email) to take over your computer. This article on the fsecure blog shows the breakdown of file type targeted attacks. Although I don't know of any current exploits based on this, a couple years back, someone was using zip files to do this. Also, many years ago, people started writing macro viruses for Word and Excel. However, I believe the weaknesses these attacks are exploiting are not just about macros.

It might not be a bad idea to download Open Office and use it to open .doc, .ppt, and .xls files from the net, though there's no reason attackers can't find holes in Open Office as well. This article recommends replacing Adobe with some other PDF viewer, and links to a list of other known PDF viewers.

An alternative is to use an online viewer for untrusted files--obviously, that raises some problems when the file might have confidential data, but Google Docs will open Word, Powerpoint, and Excel files. There are various online PDF viewers out there, but I don't know anything about the folks who offer the services and what they do with the content or information they get from you. I think you can get all these file types to open on scribd, too, but I haven't used it.

One thing that I find really interesting about all this is that a lot of these file types are being used in tightly targeted attacks--I send you, personally, a PDF file with some relevant-to-you-looking information in it, in order to take over your computer. That's rather different than the more common case of my virus sending out a gazillion of these files to everyone as attachments.

I hope this is helpful.

My wife and I saw the movie last night as well (and if you have an Imax version playing nearby, it's worth the extra few bucks), and we both thoroughly enjoyed it.

I welcomed the changes they made -- the desire to adhere to old established timelines and canon had made Trek start to feel a bit creaky, and a reboot was definitely in order. The young actors took the best of classic Trek and freshened it with contemporary interpretations. And that ship is gorgeous!

Ignoring the social issues, the real problem is the tax issues, and those stem from Prop. 13.The problem with Prop. 13 isn't the 1 percent cap on property taxes; or the restrictions on reappraisal. Those were, and are, limited in effect. They have other pernicious effects, which are part and parcel of the real problem.

Prop. 13 requires a 2/3rds approval for increasing any tax. Be it by legislation, or referendum. That's an almost impossible burden. The trouble is getting the legislature to pass a tax is (esp. in this climate, almost impossible. There are enough "no taxes, ever" people in the gov't, to prevent pretty much anything from passing.

Which leaves things to the public; who are, as you say, less than completely informed.

Now comes problem the second. Bonds. Bonds are presented as, "free" money. No increase in taxes, and the money comes rolling in from the people who by them. But the problem is they have to be paid back, and the profit the buyers get isn't taxed by the state. Bonds cost about twice what they bring in, when the repayment is done. They also move a fair bit of money into the hands of the companies which issue them, on behalf of the state.

The money to repay the bonds comes out of the general fund (there is one exception, CalVet bonds are let against property. It's the California equivalent of the VA Loan, and has never lost money). So the taxpayer has to pay. Which makes the bonds, effectively, a special tax.

Worse, it's a tax which pulls money from other uses to cover the special case.

Bonds only require 50 percent of the vote to pass.

Historically bonds have passed with about 53 percent in favor.

Taxes have, historically, failed with about 57 percent of the vote. In short, more people are willing to pay an open tax (this is probably because Calif. has been very good about building sunsets clauses into referenda taxes).

If we changed the law, so that bonds and taxes both required 55 percent to pass, a lot of that would change.

____

Regarding the present batch of initiatives: They are poison pills, designed by the Grover Norquist crowd, to make gov't more drownable. It's two pronged. The first part is to lock up money. The, "rainy day" requirements are a way to shrink the available funds. Which means services will have to be cut. When the economy shrinks, the rainy day fund will put a brake on the ability of the gov't to engage in any sort of Keynsian policies (decrease in revenue stream, and need to keep the percentage up).

The second thing they hope for (I think) is to make it seem gov't can't do anything; and so degrade confidence. Reagan strikes again.

To get some good press (which thankfully seems to be going nowhere) they wrote 1B, which makes it seem they care about teachers. But the education money only comes if 1B passes. What it does (if I understand it) is to divert some of the "rainy day" fund to the teachers, which means it takes longer to fill it, which means more time with the income to the general fund reduced, and so a longer time when taxes have stayed the same, but gov't services have to be reduced.

So 1B is doing double duty too.

The rest are all window dressing and pie in the sky things (how is the lottery going to be more profitable? What's going to suddenly cause it to pump the schools full of more money..? Nothing, but there will be tax-dollars spent to try, etc.).

The reason we don't get budgets passed on time is the same 2/3rds requirement. A handful of assembley member can (and do) hold it up, every year, until they get some piece of special consideration they want (often enough, a bit of pork).

Now I think I have the meat of the post I've been meaning to write on this, thanks.

Oh, I wasn't saying anything about your grading methods!--I get "disjuncture"--just that a much larger break in pattern nearly got me failed in a class it was much too late to drop. I turned in one competent essay and my professor thought it had to mean I was cheating. Doesn't say much for my first crack at college, does it?

I'm the slow kitty in my family anyway; I can't hold on to structured information in a meaningful pattern for very long. My poor Gran, who had revealed to thirty years' worth of students that they were not, in fact, stupid, finally had to give up on me when we had to start over at sentence diagramming every day. I can make good sentences, I just can't tell you why. She never said I was stupid, though, she just teased that I was smart in unmarketable ways.

I had the same problem with knitting, coincidentally. I spent a whole summer trying to learn how, but I had to start over with basic "knit and perl" every day. By the end of the summer, everyone else had gone through a scarf, an afghan, a sweater, and a purse. I still had the same trapezoidal swatch of lilac yarn.

Clifton: GoodThoughts being sent for you and your mother & brother -- sounds like you all need them!

May I suggest that a Star Trek movie discussion thread might be appropriate, to avoid people having to ROT13 spoilers?

On the subject of student writing . . . dd is not brilliant at punctuation (drat it, but they don't actually teach that in NYC anymore), but her _thinking_, especially in certain areas, is pretty darn sharp.

Her literacy teacher (7th grade now) argued with her quite a bit during the Poe unit, claiming that dd "couldn't understand" Poe's themes and that someone must have helped her with her essay on "strange illness in Poe." DD, who had read not just the assigned three stories but everything else she had time for, proceeded to pull additional examples out of the rest of the material and was able to prove her case and get her 4 (top grade). But she came home with steam coming out of her ears.

Sorry, in literacy, the kid knows what she's talking about. And in social studies, they only let her debate in about every third debate, because she tends to mop the floor with her opponent even when arguing the "bad" side (she won the slavery debate, arguing "for"--the teacher put her on that side hoping it would slow her down).

Her writing skills haven't caught up yet, but when they do, she's going to be scary.

Gur guvat V qvqa'g dhvgr tenfc vf jul gur cnvevat bs Huhen jvgu Fcbpx? VVEP, gur BF punenpgre jub unq gur ovttrfg pehfu ba uvz jnf Puevfgvar Puncry. Zl zrzbel znl or (cebonoyl vf) snhygl, ohg V whfg qba'g erpnyy n ovt ebznagvp cbgragvny orgjrra Fcbpx naq Huhen.

Nyfb, jung qbrf guvf fnl nobhg gur bevtvany pnaba Ihypnaf' eryrtngvba bs frkhny npgvivgl ynetryl gb gur gvzr bs cba snee? Unf Noenzf jevggra gung bhg bs gur arj Gerx-irefr, naq vs fb, ol jung zrpunavfz?

I got called into the principal's office in 8th grade for allegedly plagiarizing a paper on WWII. Some rather disgruntled sarcasm from me and an emergency conference with my Language Arts teacher (who confirmed that yes, I was a lazy thing who rarely did homework, but also, I was able to write a passable 8th grade level essay on the fly) got me off the hook.

I'm hoping it will turn out not to be as bad as I made it sound, but my brother is usually the one who minimizes everything, so.... I don't know. I'm just trying to stay unsure and open my heart and mind to whatever situation I find.