(Also here.)

This reminds me of another ube, or purple yam. Ube ice cream was my favorite flavor as a kid. No, it does not stain your tongue purple. Yes, it is delicious.

Oh, and 129 is a happy number, and it seems to work because I'm happy I learned something new today.

I'm sure that Dave Barry would point out that Spontaneous Testicular Teratomas would be a helluva good name for a rock band.

Tuesday afternoon, my wife Hilde and I sat by the hospital bedside of our friend and neighbor Anne Braude while Anne passed away.

(I'll have more to say about Anne later. She was a pretty extraordinary person.)

Wednesday morning, about 4:00 AM, I had to call an ambulance for Hilde, who was having stroke-like symptoms. This appears to have been a repeat of the incident in May, when a UTI infection went septic and produced similar symptoms.

So, not a stroke. After a few hours on IV antibiotics at the hospital, Hilde went from barely-aware, one-word vocabulary, with jerking arms and legs, to almost normal. Just like last time.

More-than-normal scary things about this time: She hadn't had any symptoms of a UTI, and it was only after the hospital ran tests that a high bacterial count was found. Also scary: She went from normal at 1:30, when we went to bed, to "Call 911!" at 4:00.

She's still in hospital, probably for a few more days, while they run loads of tests and MRI's on her. But she feels back to normal. ("More books! Bring me more books!")

I'm coming to really hate the phrase "Golden Years". Yeah, right. Your friends get old, they get sick, and they die. Your family gets old, they get sick, and they die. And finally, you get old, you get sick, and you die. "Golden Years", my rosy pink ass.

Its repertoire would include chansons de teste rather than chansons de geste, I presume.

Cadbury.

I'm glad that Hilde seems to be all right, and I hope that they figure out what's causing the problem and can prevent future recurrences.

Bruce Arthurs @ 7:

I'm sorry to hear all that, but I'm glad that Hilde has recovered so quickly. I hope that the doctors can figure out something to stop this from happening again. There are some kinds of excitement that I think we could all do without.

And thoughts go out to police dog Bosco as well (carrying over from Open Thread 128), and to anyone else going through one of life's dips.

Glad to hear she's back to clamoring for them.

Indeed! The scientific l33t have high hopes that this will be the most uber element yet.

Something I thought of while reading the Kennedy post, but decided to ask here, instead:

Is there some sort of ML equivalent to Godwin's Law that states that the longer a ML comment thread goes on the likelihood that someone will start punning approaches certainty? Not that I think discussion should be over at that point, as I love good puns, and even bad puns, but I was just wondering.

It endured for a thousand years.
Toes broken, arch bent,
tied with strips soaked in blood,
the young girls forced to walk on crippled limbs
to force the bindings ever tighter.
The death toll was unmarked, but high;
infection being most common in the young,
falls in the old.
The goal was a foot of three inches long.
Most women have ankles longer than that.

China had an Ash Girl,
one who saved a golden carp
and kept it, like a pet, in a secret pool.
Her jealous sisters killed and ate it;
she planted the bones,
which grew into a tree,
which granted wishes— does this sound familiar?
and gained her the love of a prince.

The dramatic necessity of the tiny shoe
is obvious; the unmistakeable signal
that the prince has found the correct partner.
The mother chopping off a heel or a toe
("a mother cannot love a daughter and her daughter's feet")
is a symbol of how ruthless one can be
when in pursuit of power.

And yet, one wonders how much travelled along the Silk Road,
if a Frenchman, perhaps, heard the tales of the tiny feet,
the grace of the Lotus Walk,
the delicately embroidered shoes,
and it sparked a tale of fortune's turn about,
the dispossessed coming back into her own.
He wouldn't have heard the details;
three-year-olds handed over to foot-binders
to break them for beauty.

We have a knack for finding those things beautiful
which are harmful in the end.
Arsenic complexions
belladonna eyes
compressed and corseted waists—
perhaps the only surprising thing is that it ended.
It endured for a thousand years.

first book, second canto, ninth stanza of the Faerie Qveene

The only known supply is in the mountainous nation of Nonfindonia.

Cadbury.

Bruce, I'm sorry about your friend and I sympathize with your rant; it is indeed so, damn it. I'm glad Hilde is improving and I hope they figure out some kind of reasonable treatment for her recurrent UTIs. I assume the urologists are on the case.

As for the LDS doctrine, let me make sure I understand this. If someone claims to be from God, you should ask to shake his hand. If he shakes your hand and you feel his hand in yours, he's an angel, so believe what he says. If he refuses to shake, he's "a just man made perfect" (whatever the frack that is), so believe what he says. If he shakes your hand but you can't feel his fingers in yours -- woo -- he's a devil! Hit him over the head with your shoe, or something, and don't believe anything he tells you.

Uh, sure. Okay.

The opposite of extremism is not the opposite extreme.

This one slow test non-result is responsible for at least night of inpatient care, and maybe two if the lab is slow while the little guy is just on an IV every 8 hours and getting checked to see that all is normal every 4.

This can't actually be a cost effective way to do this. While I have no idea yet as to the cost, I have my suspicions, and pre-insurance, it's probably in the 'nice new car' range.

I'm soooo done with this.

When I was an undergraduate the most advanced of Yale's three first-year English courses was English 129, the first semester of whicyh was affectionately (at least, usually affectionately) known as the book-of-the-week club, for the amount of reading it involved. That was the course that made me realize that yes, all the reading I had done in high school (when we also went through quite a few books in English class) had in fact taken time. As a freshman, I lived on campus, about three minutes' walk from the room where I had English class. In high school, I had an hour's commute each way by subway, which allowed for a lot of reading that I didn't consciously allocate time for, because the time was counting as travel time.

That was also the course where "Word" was a major theme in something we read, and the instructor asked the class about it, and after a minute I looked around at all my classmates, most of whom had been raised at least nominally Christian, and raised my hand, and recited the beginning of the gospel according to John so the instructor could go on. (Apparently, one of the Rules is that once you ask the class "Does anyone know what this means?" you're not allowed to tell them without waiting a really annoyingly long time.)

The founders of the university would not have been pleased.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_Words_are_Squeamish_Ossifrage

Maybe we can call it Serge's law... :-)

I'm looking for some online education courses in English and programming. Here's a little background.

I'm on the job hunt again, and find I'm missing a few key pieces in my education. Most notably, I'm a professional writer without an English or Communications degree, and a game designer who is severely lacking in direct programming skills. I do have a BS in Psychology, and I have about five years of experience in writing, development and customer service.

The obvious solution is to take some classes. Some of this stuff I can learn from books or online tutorials, but some things stick better for me with formal instruction. I figure more coursework will help my resume and my confidence, too. There are a few community and state colleges near where I live, but in the next few months I'm going to be out of town a lot - at conferences, workshops and at interviews. This doesn't mesh well with a standard or night school schedule. There's also the chance I'll get a new job even without extra training and move across the country before a standard semester would be over - given all that, I'm really hesitant to try to start normal schooling locally.

Overall, I'm wondering how I can tell if an online program is legitimate and likely to be helpful. There seems to be very little available online for English or creative writing, and I'd really prefer programs that offer some form of useful certification or college credit. I'd like to eventually get some sort of degree in a writing-related discipline, and if I don't get a good job in my field in the next six months I'll likely go back to school and work part time. I'm trying to figure out if I can make any noticeable progress online in the meantime. For programming I'm less focused on getting a degree. Very few jobs I'm looking at require anything beyond basic competency in one or two languages, so I'm mostly looking to just familiarize myself with python, lua, C++ or flash.

I'd be interested in hearing any other thoughts on my situation. Are online degrees generally looked down on? Are non-degree certificates considered worthwhile?

I've asked all my real life friends and googled my heart out, but I haven't been able to find any real answers. Can anyone here shed some light?

The positive side is that in my experience, for most programming languages, once you learn it you stick it on your resume and nobody asks much about how you learned it. You might get asked to demonstrate some basic competence or quizzed about what kinds of projects or software you've written in the language, but it's what you know and how well you know it that counts, not how or where you learned it. Of the languages you mention, C++ is pretty much the only one that you might formally learn or do significant coursework in as part of a degree program. Python and Lua are more in the "just pick it up" category, IMHO. At most you might get them for a week in a programming languages survey course, so if you buy a book, do some online tutorials, and teach yourself the language you're not far behind someone with academic credentials. ("Why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby" is reputedly how a lot of programmers get started in the Ruby language, for example.)

If you want credibility in a programming language, the best way is to really get to know it well and then do something real in that language. Obviously getting hired to write something commercial is a chicken-and-egg problem, but if you find an open source project that's interesting to you to work on and get to the point that you can contribute bug fixes or features, you can certainly list that on a resume, and I think it would weigh more with most managers than online coursework would. That doesn't have to be Linux; there are lots of open source Windows and Mac projects these days, and Python, for example, has reportedly gotten quite popular with Windows sysadmin types. That same approach could also give you the opportunity to pick up some writing credits, given that the typical documentation for most open source software is at around the "stab yourself in the eyes with a pencil" quality level.

A side point: the languages you list are at wildly different places on the spectrum. C++ is a very "big" language, with exceedingly intricate syntax and a lot to know about how to use it. Python and Lua have a much smaller and simpler core syntax. Learning C++ well enough to do complex programming in it is a very different undertaking, particularly if you're not already versed in C. If you want to learn a more commercially-oriented language also used in academia, Java might be a easier starting point. (OTOH if you really master C++, that will certainly open doors for you.)

Disclaimer - again this is all based on my personal biases as to what I would weigh when hiring someone. Others' biases may vary.

Works for me using Win Vista and Firefox. Be aware that it's photos.

There are also (as TexAnne points out) online courses available that are offered by traditional brick-and-mortar institutions. That would mean (again as TexAnne says) registering at those institutions in some fashion, but at least you wouldn't have to abandon the course if you wound up moving away from the area.

Gods, I love/hate this show.

Once upon a midnight dreary
as I pondered, weak and weary
over many a weblog comment cov'ring topics quite obscure

presently I read a whinging
which somehow began impinging
upon the conversation, tinging
it with rudnenss, snark and bore

what strange troll, i asked, is straying
into all our threads and saying
all these sentiments betraying
attiudes of some mere boor

I will tell the moderator
who will then say "see you later"
block them by address locator
then they'll bug us nevermore

But would a stream of coherent phonons destabilize organic matter on a subatomic level? That's what they said, and frankly I don't see how destabilization on a subatomic level can be dependent on the matter being organic.

Joel, in Stratificational Linguistics a phoneme is spelled out in phonons. For example, in English the phoneme /n/ is composed of the simultaneous phonons (Ap), (Ns). It doesn't need to be specified more than that because there's only one apical (articulated with the tip of the tongue) nasal (letting air come out the nose) in English. And (Vc) is never specified with (Ns) because in English all nasals are voiced. In a language with voiceless nasals you'd have to include (Vc) to specify /n/ fully.

But, yeah, I love/hate that show, myself.

It's goofytech but it's hung off of a real idea, which Eureka does pretty consistently.

[* And I have a friend who worked in a laser-physics lab who's been there. And can show you the hole burned in his lab coat.]

Oddly enough, even worse science hasn't turned me off of Warehouse 13 . . . yet. Perhaps because it is a fantasy.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ibm_research_zurich/3852446773/in/set-72157622092395070/

http://www.zurich.ibm.com/news/09/pentacene.html

It's a molecule of pentacene (C22H14), imaged with an atomic force microscope. You can see the carbon rings. YOU CAN SEE THE CARBON RINGS.

Definitely not. They're essentially sound waves, so if you somehow packed enough energy into them, they could possibly damage tissue, but they're in the wrong regime to mess with the nucleus -- even ionization would be dubious. Also, AFAIK, phonons appear in restricted and slightly odd conditions -- in the "general world", they'd just decay into ordinary sound waves.

On the other hand, I could believe phonons building up inside some exotic gadget*, and perhaps damaging it (or at least forcing a shutdown).

*: drive matrix, blaster crystal, even a nanotech factory....

Not a chance. It would disrupt matter on an interatomic (i.e. chemical) level -- ending the possibility of energy transmission by vibrations, i.e., phonons -- long, long before anything could happen on a subatomic level. Organic is irrelevant.

I didn't know about the use of the term in linguistics. I suppose the two usages don't conflict often.

Holy... You can see the carbon rings! Cool!

Stefan Jones @ 63:

I feel vaguely disoriented watching that, as I know I don't have a snout, but that's really fun.

If Any of You are near a beach, maybe you'd participate, remotely, and in spirit at least.

Vasu hated long goodbyes, so in respect of this we have decided not to have a memorial with all the weeping and sad faces. Instead we are going to do what he would have liked to do. We are going to the beach. Vasu’s memorial will be held this Saturday at Double Bluff beach in Freeland. We will build the biggest sand castle that beach has ever seen. We begin building at 10 a.m. and don’t stop until it’s finished. Then we jump on it.

So, I turn to you. I know there are other handspinners here, and fiberarts mesh nicely with dye-arts. Can anyone help?

Eric at 68, I like the 'then we jump on it'. It avoids the tide metaphor nicely.

I do know that if you're using real powdered indigo, these 'feel' right.

I'm sorry to hear that. I'll stop by the beach (next to the lake, but sand + water) today.

Comfort to the family. Must be tough for you, coming hard on the heels of your baby's (thankfully finished, you say) illness.

Best wishes, eric.

I'm glad that your neighbor had you there for her.

Best wishes with finding a way to prevent any more frightening incidents with Hilde.

("Golden years?" That sounds awfully like "the best years of your life." I remember high school far too well to fall for that kind of description again.)

If you put a link in your post, and when you preview the post the link is greyed-out like this, your post will be held for moderation because of the broken link. And if I can't figure out what you meant to link to, I'm not going to release it.

The most common reason a link breaks is because you forgot to include the quote marks around the URL inside the tag. What MT does then is remove the entire URL so that I don't have a clue what was meant to be there, and the spam filters catch it because that kind of broken link is Really Really common in spam.

There's a reason for the mandatory preview.

I was thinking of something similar, but for riffs on the plums poem.

*Now I want to find a thread where the first comment contained a pun.

A thread guaranteed to clothe before it starts.

Conversely, the program is making me feel better about my clutter, in that I'm not in danger of losing sight of my floors.

See carbon dancing
And sharing its pairs
Electrons in motion
Organic's all fares.

Rings to make lifeforms
And rings 'round the world
Rings hid in nanotubes
Balls, spirals furled.

Rings at the bottom
And rings at the top,
Rings in the middle
The rings do not stop.

Rings that are basic
To this world we know
Rings all of carbon
Go on with the show!

[*: This grouping seems somewhat odd, since silk and wool are both animal protein fibers instead of plant cellulose bast, but what the hey. Also, all of the above recipes seem to call for the hydrosulfite process rather than the zinc-lime one; suppsedly the latter solution can be maintained for an arbitrary amount of time and creates darker blues while the former has to be used within a few days and results in paler colors, but I've never personally tried either so have no direct anecdotes.]

One source on that page says "preferably of those who drink strong drinks", but another says "boy-child gathered in the morning" is best. We avoided Vitamin B supplements for the time we were collecting.

Indigo dyebaths are fascinating - the soluble forms aren't blue, so the fibre comes out yellow-green, then turns blue as the indigo oxidizes. Wear good rubber gloves - indigo will dye your skin and fingernails quite effectively. One friend was careless, and said she had to wear dark brown nail polish for weeks. Blue nails weren't in fashion then :-)

Sodium hydrosulfite/dithoinite carries interesting warning labels - observe them.

Yes, but silk is actually also a protein fiber of animal origin, as Julie L. @87 stated, and in the case of most dyes (for example, food coloring) acts pretty much like wool/alpaca/angora rabbit/etc, and very very different than the linen/cotton/other plant cellulosic fibers grouping.

Cotton and linen are cellulose fibre chains.

Silk is a two-protein (amino acid) fibre chain.

Rayon is a cellulose strand produced artificially using wood pulp as the feedstock. It's more absorbent than cotton.

I suspect that wool is much tougher to dye, given its different chemical makeup, and presumably silk is close to
viscose in characteristics (both produced using spinnerets) and have effectively the same response to dye as cotton/linen.

What do I know anyway, I'm a moose not a textile chemist!

This weekend and next, we plan to turn the front room of the apartment into a music room, with a Mac with Garage Band, an electric keyboard, and too many wires, so that Soren can get his musical concepts out of his head. Wish us luck.

In the UK, I'd go with the The Open University - widely recognised over here. Surely there must be some equivalent(s) in the USA, or reputable universities that offer online courses? I see that Stanford, for example, has writing courses and technical courses - including in C++ (see via their TechPort). Don't know what their online course costs are, or how their online courses are regarded - I did note there's a waiting list for the writing courses.

Avadaggio@69
#71 ::: sisuile

Yup, those processes work.

Gonzo science version of why indigo dyes cotton. The chunks of dye get stuck between the fibers rather than bonding to them. Prep involves softening and splitting the cotton strands so the dye will enbed better. This is why over many washings you can get the fabric back to almost its natural color. We had quite a discussion on this on a professional sewing list.

(first commenter)
Once the fabric is dry the indigo dye will "crock off" on anything it rubs
against. The way to prevent this is to paint the fabric with soy milk, then
let it dry for 3 to 6 months (one month at the least). Then wash it. Then
you won't have the blue crock off on you ever again. When I'm dying indigo
fabric, I usually dye it, dry it, paint it with soy milk, dry it, and then
just put it away for 3 or more months. I write on the calendar 3 months in
the future to remind me when to go get the fabric and wash it and do
something with it.

You don't have to buy expensive soy milk in cartons. Just buy dry soybeans,
soak then in water, grind them in a blender, and then strain the "milk"
through a strainer (pantyhose works great for this). You can even resoak
the ground soybeans for a second run through the strainer.

(me)
Animal milk contains casein, a natural polymer which forms a hard skin
when it dries. Soy milk has a comparable protein. In my theater days, we
used cheap water-based tempera for painting sets, but it would rub off
on the costumes. We'd dump sour milk in it. Fresh would have worked, but
there was usually some spoiled in the tech workshop refrigerator. Think
of how difficult it is to scrape up a puddle of dried milk. You've got
to chisel it off.

(another)
Shaker milk paint. We make it with skim milk, lime, etc., and use it to
stain/protect our deck. It keeps for a week in the fridge if you have large
project.

Remember: I do the research, so you won't have to.

Hurrah! this is excellent news.

May things continue to improve, and good fortune to all.

Cadbury.

That said, I am fond of painting my nails in non-uniform colors*, but I don't put all one color on one hand and all another color on the other. I generally use 3 colors**, and I have a specific pattern for their application. I think of this as making my nails into the equivalent of jewelry; I don't insist on all the beads in my necklace being the same color, so why should all my fingernails have to be the same color?

* When I bother to paint them at all, which is an entirely separate issue.

** Except when I'm doing a diversity rainbow. It would be nice to be Darkovan aristocracy and have 6 fingers on each hand, but I don't, so the color I usually leave off is orange.

eric, #36, I hope your baby gets checked out soon and that the cost is not too much.

Lee, #85, and those two officers are state officers. The city officers are still under investigation.

As to the M&M story in the sidebar, the arenas don't need to worry about taking out brown M&Ms anymore because you can buy M&Ms online in specific colors and just not buy brown.

abi, that there were firings is progress. Now I'm waiting for prosecutions. I'm also waiting for chocolate air.

Velma, that's terrific news! Good luck on the music room.

I just heard a Katrina survivor on the radio talk about the time he spent living in a "Kwanzaa hut."

My experience with natural dyestuffs is less extensive. I can say that turmeric dyes polyester chiffon more strongly than you'd guess from the color of the dyebath.

Rikibeth @110: Sometimes the differences between silk and cotton are just odd: I put a silk shirt and a cotton sports bra/exercise top into the same dye bath a couple of months ago, working for a two-color effect. They both came out two-color. However, the silk shirt is a sort of olive green and bright purple, and the cotton bra is a leaf green and bright blue. (I was hoping for leaf green and purple.) If anyone is curious, I put photos up on Flickr; I'm rosvicl there, and they aren't very far back in my not-exactly-huge photostream.

Michael, 41 -- I think Serge's Law works for me. It was a tossup as far as I was concerned between him and Xopher.

Velma (#93) Wonderful! (Update in another thread on my friend's aneurysm. Soren gives me hope; a path.)

Silk's vibrant colours with old natural dyes was a part of its lasting popularity and value.

Silk
Wool
Cotton
Rayon
Linen
Dinosaur

This is an unofficial list and comes from an experiment I did at one point. Protein fibers tend to take dye better than cellulose fibers, even when you use appropriate fixatives and types of dye for your type. Silk tends to do better than wool because of it's regularity, iirc, but I might not. I just know it works better.(experiment dyed in the cloth using Cushings dyes)

Tumeric is one of my favorite yellow dyes - It's cheap, easy, does animal fiber, plant fiber, and leather well, and I can buy it in bulk from the local international grocery/ middle eastern grocery. If only I could wear yellows!

That sounds like a fantastic evening under any circumstances, and doubly so now! Good idea about the music room, too.

An excerpt from the title story:

(Setup: A young poet has collapsed onto the floor. An emergency crew, Bob and Mike, have responded.)

The boy ripped the page free to examine it. "Is this the last thing you were working on?" [...] His eyes rode the toppled column of my lines.

"This is awful," Mike said.

I groaned and my head hit the floor, perhaps for the second time.

"Watch that C-spine, Mike!" Bob said. "You can't be held liable for disliking the work of a bad poet, but you are responsible for insufficient care. Granted, we're not dealing with the penetrating trauma of a slam poet or gangsta rapper here, but even a standard verse emergency runs cicles around your typical diabetic episode. This is a poet! And poets can go south fast. Look the wrong way and even Wordsworth will take the big six-foot dirt nap. Poets have feelings up the ass."

[...]

"Ho there, cowboy!" Bob said, lunging forward to steady my shoulders. "Think about what you're doing. You could have writer's block. You might even have a clot. Stand up and you're talking ischemic stroke. You could have an aneurysm in your language center. It goes pop, you'll never even think verse again." He lodged his hands against his hips, decisively. "We've got to take you to the hospital for bad poets."

"No," I said. "God, no."

For some reason, in my mind I find myself casting Jim MacDonald and Fragano Ledgister as Bob and Mike.

To the Rhymergency Room?

The first thing to note is your suggested list of languages goes from one extreme of the spectrum to the other, Lua being a simple language with a very specific purpose, while C++ is an extremely complex language that is suited for almost all purposes. I'd aim for some middle ground, and given your background I'd suggest Python is probably the most useful of these languages; AIUI, most modern game engines are using Python as their story scripting language these days (LUA being used more for user interface scripting, C++ for back-end engine implementation). I'd suggest staying away from Flash as a beginner; you need an entirely different mindset to work with it that won't help with the others.

As to what kind of qualifications are accepted, my experience has been that most software development recruiters expect their candidates to be graduates, but don't care what the subject of the degree was. And those who know what they're doing consider certification irrelevant. The problem is that the certificates tend to concentrate on a subject (knowledge of the language and/or programming environment) that is almost completely orthoganal to what the recruiter is looking for (problem solving skill, essentially). Past experience is the only thing most are willing to consider.

The question of how to get this experience is problematic, but not overly so. There are, as I see it, two routes open:

* Computer science degree courses, with the caveat of avoiding online programs. A good CS course will include several group projects, and these can provide the kind of experience the recruiters are looking for. I believe there are even courses available that focus on game development skills, if you look in the right places.
* Getting involved in your own projects. Develop an indie-style game yourself, or get involved with an open-source game project.

The point is to get something that you can show to recruiters, tell them "I've done this, which is similar to the kind of thing you'll want me to do for you." This is much more important than any certificate you can show them.

Once upon a time, I was helping my mother make my birthday cake, and I put in the specified quantity — of salt rather than sugar.

They were both kept in unmarked glass jars, though, if I recall correctly, in different places. (We added a label after that.)

I don't recall whether I ate my portion.

(On a related issue, what about the poesy....]

Amd I'm not always to blame for it.

On separate topics:
1) The Fairness Doctrine needs to come back NOW. The latest outrage--WBZ radio, part of the Infinitity/CBS, reporting, without any commentary from the calumnified, or questions, or any tone except APPROVAL, the Fux TV broadcast of person who was in the office of the Vice President of the USA from 2001-2008, condemning and excoriating the investigation and those authoring the investigation into the Department of Justice authorizing of "enhanced" interrogation methods in 2001-2008. The lying scum has the temerity to claim that the investigation is political skullduggery and indication that it would not be happening were there moral upstanding sensible people controlling the US Government, and stated that the enhanced interrogations gained information critical to protecting the USA....

2) Sen Kerry said that the public option for healthcare could be negotiated away. I think that Sen. Kerry for saying that should be replaced.... but NOT with a Repuke!!!

1) I am completely disgusted with your willingness to dump the public health option. The USA needs single payer, and not greedy grasping unethical immoral so-called health insurance companies. They're parasites on the US public and taxpayers. Didn't you listen to all those intercessions by the Kennedy family descendants on Saturday about healthcare must be a right and not a privilege? The opposition are rabid weasel and mad dogs, negotiations with those with rabies, only makes one painfully infected and DEAD, and continues the rabies epidemic... which is a matter of public health....
2) I am completely disgusted with WBZ radio, reporting on Fux TV broadcasting an interview with the lying scheming out of office former Vice President (FVP). The FVP was condemning all who want the Department of Justice and CIA investigated for the "enhanced interrogation techniques" --mealy-mouthed terminology for torture up to and including rape and homicide- as politically motivated, and indicating that a sensible responsible government would not pursue any such investigations. He stated that the interrogations were important to national security....
In reality he's a Constitution-raping malevolent liar, intent on keeping his ass covered--despite the outing of Valerie Plame, despite massacres of prisoners in Afghanistan, despite rape at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, despite the callous murder of at least one Afghan who went into CIA custody in an attempt to make them see he was not a terrorist and not Taliban... THOSE type of abuse make implacable enemies out of reasonable people, Cheney -created- terrorists and Taliban sympathizers and anti-American Iraqis, out of people whose families and lives were gratuitous ly destroyed by the Unites States. And I am infuriated that Pres Obama has refused to completely repudiate the Cheney era policies, he and Nancy Pelosi refuse to allow a full investigaton of the former Executive Branch of 2001 - 2008 from the top down. As far as I'm concerned, the top people in that (mis)adminstration are guilty of starting a war under false pretext and mass murder by accessory (the Agfhan massacres, and the deaths of a million Iraqi from violence and disease during the mishandled occupation of Iraq--along with other war crimes (failure to protect libraries, schools, government offices, museums, archaoeological sites... from looters, arsonists, and robbers)
Getting back to WBZ-TV, for failing to provide ANY questions of Cheney's comments and failing to provide a speaker commenting on Cheney's comments exposing them for the lies that Cheney speaks and calumny he heaps, I want the license re-examined and either enforcment of a re-imposed Fairness Doctrine, or the license yanked and 50,000 watts of power which is NOT rightwing sympathizer and propaganda used for HONEST, fair reporting...

Two pictures. A stack of books on a bedside table. An overflowing bookshelf. Science Fiction and Fantasy and Koontzian suspense predominate. If you didn't know the context you would think it looks like an ordinary fan's bookshelf. The books were on the shelves of Jaycee Lee Dugard, who was a captive of a convicted sex offender for eighteen years. These books were her escape during her captivity.

• a machine as a McGuffin


• a dangerous man


• a red-headed girl


• black leather


• crime


• death

Um, not the pages of the dead trees. I mean the website pages for books they offer for sale.

Meanwhile, I've been amusing myself imagining the Scriptures according to Rocky.

Serge @OT128 #729:
Just as long as a wardrobe malfunction doesn't result in their turning transparent....

Michael Mock @#19:
It seems to me like social engineering is one of ha-Satan's usual weapons in Jewish writing. On the other hand...

Vicki @#38:
...there is often a belief that contact with, or even hearing read, holy writings would cause physical damage to demonic forces, which would explain why they would think the Devil couldn't read their holy book and act upon it. (This doesn't play well in the Jewish model, as demons weren't so much evil as they were different (think D&D "lawful/chaotic" axis, except that neither "good" nor "evil" could apply to them; this differs from Faerie in that they had their own laws and notions of good/evil) and ha-Satan is explicitly and openly doing G-d's will.)

re indigo: Indigo is a funny coloring agent because it's not really a dye (the things one learns reading about blue jeans) but more of a laquer. So it adheres to the surface. This is why jeans fade in the ways they do.

Where the material is more flexed, the indigo flakes off more readily.

I guess that makes me a cyberpunk writer too.

Does a race between airliner flying-boats, riding the leading edge of a thunderstorm to the finishing line, count? It ought to be a song...

Yep, the machine's there.

And the man is very dangerous.

A red-headed girl? Well, I suppose a furry-style vixen counts.

Black leather flying jacket.

Crime and death? Definitely.

There's also Black Magic intended. And vengeance.

The weather balloon is just a weather balloon.

Two months to NaNoWriMo.

Silk, wool and cotton are easy to dye, in about that order. Linen is really tough to dye, which is why the pattern in Europe for so long was "white linen underwear with colorful wool outer garments".

Silk and wool, being animal fibers, like acid dyes; in most commercial versions the acid is vinegar or the like.

*Especially one likely to expect logical and coherent answers that don't sound stupid, which are almost impossible to provide when talking about something as trivial as fashion.

Looking at your original account, I do get that disturbing sense of passivity. They're making it sound as if it's nothing to do with them. Now, saying it's a fashion might not be much better but it implies a choice.

I can't say that I follow fashion, but it's never seemed to be something which doesn't have room for personal choice.

I hope he used some wound salve on that cut to his leg.

a machine as a McGuffin: the microfilms inside the antique
a dangerous man: lots of them, but especially James Mason
a red-headed girl: Eva Marie Saint is blond, but Cary Grant does ask her how a girl like her becomes a girl like her.
black leather: I think there's one leather-clad truck driver
crime: espionnage, murder, attempted murder, theft, assaulting a police officer
death: the list is quite long, but we can begin with the literal backstabbing at the United Nations.

Oy.

Dave Bell #151: I'm just curious as to the reasons for that choice. Some fashions of the recent past have seemed particularly strange to me (thong underwear, for example, which seems very uncomfortable).

Tattoos, not so much.

The living wall gravity-defying gardens remind me of something I saw in M.C.Escher.

So sometimes it's hard to tell which is the up side and which is the down side.

If anyone has read Dave Freer's books, or his blog,you might be aware that he's moving from South Africa to Australia. They are also trying to move their pets, but the monies budgeted have been overcome by currency problems, so they need more.

However, Dave doesn't want to beg for charity, so he's writing a story especially for his donation page, Save the Dragons. Donations are payable through Paypal (managed by Walt Boyes, a longtime friend and editor of an online magazine for engineers).

They are really desperate -- a writer doesn't make a lot of money, as we all know -- and they can't abandon their pets just to move to a better life themselves. They have to leave SA, against their better wishes. It's a very tough spot to be in: they can't stay and they can't go until they know they can pay for their dogs and cats to be safely quarantined.

If you can, please donate. If you can't, please spread the news as wide as you can -- Dave's a good man and I think he deserves to have some assistance in bringing his beloved pets with him.

I know it isn't a scam, because I've met him here in the US; I've known him since I was on Baen's Bar, for more than 12 years (and he's not a Mil-SF writer).

I know the situations aren't analagous, really, but I thought maybe you could use a reminder that what you are doing does make a difference.

Bless you all.

Naked Capitalism has two really fascinating posts up right now, stuff ISTM you don't see discussed clearly much in the MSM.

This article describes some dishonest reporting w.r.t. the true cost of the bailout to the US, and the true value to its recipients.

And this article discusses one of the statistics being bounced around as evidence that the financial crisis is over and all is well--an improved savings rate. The funny thing is, it matters a great deal how you account for income inequality when discussing this....

Twits.

I don't know what's involved with 'getting my nails done.' I'm pretty sure that if I just went in, I wouldn't demand that the nail person justify her every move to me-- it would be rude. Once I knew something of it, I might ask, but I might have internalized the she-knows-what-she's-doing thing.

This morning, one of that team came into the office with a gift for me: a scarf with silhouettes of beetles on it! It now marks my chair.

I came home and told this story. Alex grinned appreciatively about the insect pictures, and then said, "You know, one day you might find a rabbit in the software. Then you can name it Bugs Bunny."

I'm so proud.

The abiveld extends to bad jokes, eh?
Say, do you know know why computer bugs are called 'bugs'?

Sticking plaster: I dimly recall seeing old movies and tv shows where a man cuts himself shaving, then applies a little dab of white stuff to staunch the blood. In some later occasions, I gather the substance is a little wad of toilet paper, but through some vague means, I've gathered that there is, in fact, a kind of plaster used for such purposes.

My Google-Fu fails me, and all I come up with is that "sticking plaster" is British for what Americans call "adhesive bandages" (frex Bandaids).

The context of the request is that I have a guinea pig with a chronic ulceration on the pad of his foot. It's difficult to treat because, as soon as I clean it off, it immediately fills up again with, um, stuff from the bottom of the cage. Bandaging his foot is approximately as practical as putting a Bandaid on a cat's nose (and, no, E-collars aren't an option). I'm thinking that sticking plaster (as in, actual plaster) might actually be an effective treatment.

I'm hoping that somewhere here a) has heard of this stuff and b) maybe can tell me where to buy it or how to make it.

http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/images/h96000/h96566k.jpg

I'd ask your vet about it, since I'm not one.

The consequences, on the other hand...

Your GP may not need any more than one or two dressing changes. If you don't see healthy pink tissue under the dressing, bring your GP back to your vet for treatment. Normally, the hydrocolloidal dressing generates nice pink granulation quickly, and it will grow to encompass the entire ulcer, which will shrink and then cover over with skin.

Works on humans too -- I used this technique on my son a few years ago. Well, on his leg, which was developing an ulcer after he kept getting kicked in the same spot during soccer camp.

Australia is very strict about quarantines and letting things into the country, and rightly so. You have to even declare wood-framed furniture. Good luck to him on the move.

abi @ 167:

Congratulations on raising such a good kid.

Andrew Plotkin @ 175:

The New Hacker's Dictionary has an entry for bug which states that the term is most certainly older than 1947 when the first 'real' bug was found. It also gives a pointer to a paper on the subject.

I do very much like the Admiral Hopper story, though.

Ginger @ 180:

For a moment I read GP as general practitioner and wondered why they couldn't take care of the bandaging themselves. Then context kicked in.

Because GPs don't get paid enough, so junior GPs go into specialty medicine.

(Image of small rodent in white coat w/ stethoscope optional)

Diatryma, #165: That seems very odd to me. My current dentist is in a 2-person office, and mostly I see one of them but sometimes the other. However, if I'm getting anything beyond a basic cleaning, they are always both very certain that we have agreed on what is being done before any work starts. I would be quite annoyed at a dentist who didn't at least double-check, especially if he hadn't seen me before.

KeithS, #181: When I was studying programming (back in the days of the dinosaurs), the Hopper story was told to me as the origin of the term "debugging", not of "bug" itself.

I got my teeth cleaned today. I like my dentist's office (a big practice, with lots of individual dentists and hygenists) normally. Today, I got the hygenist with the persistent cough and occasional sniffles through the entire cleaning. She wore gloves and mask, and I washed my hands as soon as she was done, but I have zero doubt that I will be coming down with her cold in a few days, if I haven't already had it. Grmbl.

I should have just asked to be rescheduled to see someone who wasn't so obviously contagious, but I just didn't think it through until there seemed little point.

This sounds like a very interesting proposition, except for the "adhesive tape" part. Mr. Junior is a remarkably copasetic little soul. (How many guinea pigs have you encountered who can fall asleep at the vet's office?) But the notion of taping up his little hand leaves me dubious. Particularly since he has somewhat limited use of the back leg on that same side. (He's 7.5 years old, and still loves to chase his girls, though he has to kind of gun the engine to do so.)

Also: GP often makes me think of Guinea Pigs, until I grasp the context.

Have decided that I would like "clusterfuck" to be a collective noun. As in "A clusterfuck of politicians."

That's not the term already?

I suspect that my internal model of cyberpunk follows from film noir - so the Maltese Falcon also has an overlap. I suppose though, that the lack of actual computation excludes Richard Thompson from a truly strict definition of "cyberpunk". Not that "console cowboys" seem to have much in common with the computer security people I used to work with.

Antonia, your story sounds like it would make a heck of a Hitchcock-style movie.

From the About Us page:

"The Outer Alliance is a group of SF/F writers who have come together as allies for the advocacy of LGBT issues in literature. Made up of individuals of all walks of life, our goal is to educate, support, and celebrate LGBT contributions in the science-fiction and fantasy genres."

I am a member, and will be posting my Pride Day post tomorrow.

Joel@138: different places, different specialties; in Carolingia "Digby cakes" (his "excellent small cakes") are much sought after. Cookie size/shape, tending toward shortbread, and loaded with currants when properly done; the local from-across-the-pond vendor has a modern knockoff whose name I'm blanking on.

(reposting from way-behind at the previous OT):
Harvard professor gets grazing rights. Much likelier than the one about the student, the ale, and the sword.

I'm so sorry.

One of the excuses I made to myself for going (I'm in a workaholic rut) was that I'd bring this stereoscopic camera I made and make a travelogue of 3D pictures.

I discovered a few days ago that the little pen cameras I ganged together would not work with the Vista OS on my "work" laptop . . . so I got a netbook, which I'm typing on now. A hasty purchase, but one I would have made within a month or so.

I had mixed results with a trial run, but I wrote it up to battery problems in the Left camera.

Today, after taking 17 pictures of the trip down the gorge and on a ferry across the Columbia, the Left camera just totally busted. The trigger button fell down inside the case, and now it won't store anything.

So I'm stuck with a 2D holiday.

In a weird twist of fate, the motel I picked out of the AAA guide as a base for hiking turns out to be in a town known for . . . well, a picture is worth several dozen words:

http://home.comcast.net/~stefan_jones/forks_motel_lo.JPG

Shudder. I've looked at summaries of the current parodies out there--but something more is needed.

Like, say, rewriting it from a Maoist perspective. Or a Trotskyist perspective. Or...at that point, I realized that you could rewrite the durn thing from almost any particular political philosophy and it would actually work better than the original.

Right now I am soothing my mind with what a Maoist Mouse would do. Or, say, what James T. Kirk would do if someone moved his cheese. Anything, anyone, other than those obnoxiously boring characters. Stephen Pastis's Pearls Before Swine version, say.

Does anyone know of the existence of such a thing?

You might like this review at the venerable Not My Desk, which was a part of the whole cheese week. He was not impressed with it either.

I'm not aware of any complete re-writes, sadly.

I'm surprised that thing is still around, though. Don't faddish management books like that tend to die off after a year or two?

On the other hand, it can be seen as part of an increasingly abusive business ethos, which is throwing away the virtues of stability. Blessed are the cheesemovers, for they will have cheese.

Yeah, right, and the rest of us suffer the stress of knowing that, when we do get the cheese, it's going to be taken away. Temporary jobs, for instance, with no time to socialise with the other employees: we're not evolved to be always among strangers.

(And there's a nice indirect connection to Patrick's latest post recommending that Greenwald post- remember, people, we live in a meritocracy, with "merit" being partly defined as "being the kind of person who would like or be willing to pretend to like Who Moved My Cheese?".)

One of the things that I like about the ML community is that most of you seem to think of your pets as family members.  The idea that “they can’t abandon their pets just to move to a better life themselves” (#160) wouldn’t occur to some people, who do so without a thought.

As for a complete rewrite--other than Who Cut My Cheese versions, there doesn't appear to be anything appropriate.

Heh. I may be building something.

Mark @215--actually, my first reaction was AnarchoSyndicalist Mouse, not Maoist Mouse. It's telling that the reactive metaphors on my part all seem to be political, instead of the reactions others had.

Rewriting the thing does appeal in a perverse manner. I may do it if I keep getting Cheese stuffed down my throat.

This Pew Center poll is very informative. The discussion of party affiliation is fascinating, and the data doesn't actually fit the narrative into which the MSM is currently inclined to hammer reality. In particular:

a. A lot of folks who were identifying themselves as Republicans in 2006 are now identifying themselves as independents.

b. There's broad dissatisfaction with the party within the GOP, and that is consistent across conservative and moderate Republicans.

c. The GOP's ideological balance (in moderate vs conservative terms) hasn't shifted much at all--they've lost huge numbers of people from all parts of the ideological spectrum.

As I've said before, I think you can often learn a great deal more about the world reading polling results than newspaper stories. This is especially true in a world in which the powerful have become spookily good at controlling the press in various ways.

Don't you know that, as fiberpunk's tenets have become a normal part of Society's fabric, it needed a new label?

Seampunk.

Fiberpunk's the wrong genre for the seamy side of things.... Setting fire with lit punks to the bad side of town, now that....

Championned by Michael Velourcap's New Wool'd.

In fiberpunk we call it the wrong side of town.

(Those stories always keep me pinned to my seat!)

It isn't a direct response, but I found DeMarco's Slack to be a partial antidote to Who Moved My Cheese. Among other things, DeMarco points out that change comes in different flavors, some good, some bad; he also points out that increasing efficiency leads to increasingly stressed out employees which leads to decreasing effectiveness.

Three, almost four now, years ago the new management in my company gave every employee a copy of Who Moved My Cheese. Within six months a lot of the more productive, effective, and fun to work with people were gone.

Hope that helps.

You're getting perilously close to invoking the underpants gnomes.

Cadbury.

*Ob on topic pun.

Fragano Ledgister #98 et seq. When I was visiting my sister the other week, one day she painted her daughters' (7yo twins) nails. Not only multiple colors, but also polka-dots! No particular comment made,not even "looky my nails!" Regarding the girl's "passivity", she may simply trust her stylist to know what's fashionable at the moment.

A reliable informant has let me know that the purpose if thong underwear is to prevent the dreaded VPL* without actually making one's...er...cleft more noticeable. And that it has a much higher than usual possibility of producing a tvey cnegf jrqtvr,** which is about as uncomfortable as you'd imagine.

*Visible Panty Line, not to be confused with the Dread Visible Pirate Line.
**I just can't bring myself to write that plainly.

I am speaking here from sad experience, a drawer full of money I'll never see again, and shall never wear.

Love, C.

This moose still translates VPL as Vericolor Professional Long[1], which I suspect Kodak may have stopped manufacturing years ago.

Cadbury
[1] The long exposure colour film with Tungsten lighting balance, as opposed to VPS which was the short exposure daylight balanced version.

I have never experienced the effect Edgar reports @248.

OK? Can we now move the conversation away from women's underwear? It's getting...prurient.

Let's talk about boxer shorts. How do guys cope with the feeling of them wrinkling against their thighs under their trousers?

Trivial, completely unrelated open threadiness: Since I had never watched it before and was curious about it, I looked for a clip of FDR's First Inaugural Address and found this one. So I watched it and was quite impressed, until a bit after 5:30 I suddenly thought "OMG why is there a giant alien head looking on in the background?".

Thank you for linking to that poll. Definitely interesting reading.

abi @ 251:

I really, really miss M&S.

Also, no idea. Briefs.

Let's talk about boxer shorts. How do guys cope with the feeling of them wrinkling against their thighs under their trousers?

I used to wear briefs until about 5 years ago, and then switched to boxers. Partly it's because boxers have a little more "give" in them for the expanding middle-age girth, and partly because briefs started to seem, oh, juvenile.

The wrinkling of the material around the thighs isn't noticeable because it's relatively light and loose. However, I have been annoyed at the tendency to ride up in back instead of firmly hugging the waist. For that reason, I've been thinking of checking out the boxer briefs.

This episode of True Underwear Confessions has been brought to you by Jockey(tm) and Fruit of the Loom(tm).

John Stanning, #214, I have a condo, so no burying allowed. I have little wooden boxes with the ashes of each cat that's died on shelves here in the dining room.

Speaking for myself, I straighten the boxers and the trousers out when they get wrinkled enough to be constricting. It's generally only a problem when I'm seated. The easiest way is to just get up and walk somewhere. "Shake a leg" as it were. The "while seated" adjustment process is less pleasant - especially when belted into a motor vehicle - and looks odd to anyone paying too close attention. No complaints have been directed my way that I know of, though my wife has had a few laughs.

Better seating would probably help a lot, as would better local climate control - heat and odd seating positions hasten the constriction process. Also better fitting trousers - much trouser/boxer mismatch seems to be due to loose trousers. Off-the-rack doesn't give me as much choice as I'd like in that department, though, as too-tight is far more uncomfortable. Briefs are intolerable unless they are the "boxer-brief" variety, and then only for exercise where the protection provided by the additional support overrides the "too tight" objection.

Rot13'd for the fastidious or squeamish.

If you browse using Firefox, you may be interested in the Leetkey addon; one you've installed it, if you highlight text and hit the right mouse button, your context menu gives you a list of possible actions you can do to that text, including "Text Transformers", under which is Rot13. Click the Rot13, and it'll decrypt (or encrypt) the highlighted portion of the text for you, as if it had been typed in plaintext. I learned about it from a post here, and I gladly pass it along.

No, that's an Orthodox adoration icon of the Great Pumpkin.

It's Oz, the Great and Terrible. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

(And I know it isn't necessarily about that, but "jerking off, or possibly Teh Gay" didn't have quite the immediacy of impact I was going for.)

As for the gent...I thought you were YEARS younger than him!

My husband, a federal employee, had a business trip to NYC. He managed to snag one of the very few government rate rooms at the Waldorf-Astoria -- usually you can't get them but it's the week before Labor Day and not that many people are traveling on business.

He got there this evening and they upgraded him to a suite. At the Waldorf-Astoria. He sent me an email with pictures.

I'm at home with two teenagers, one of whom seems to be getting pretty sick, thus forcing me to forego the free tickets to August: Osage County for tomorrow night that I had been offered.

It's soooo not fair.

*pout*

Okay, end of whine.

Boxers v. briefs: my sons were all briefs until they hit middle school. At which point, peer pressure kicked in and they switched to boxers.

Serge: Serge's Law it is, then. And that portrait? Would it be in shades of gray?

Painted by an a-dorian' artist.
(Not my best - or worst - pun, but I'm still waking up.)

Re: TexAnne's comment on the Lev Grossman thread, I clicked on the second link, saw it was performed by the Ensemble Gilles Binchois (also known as Gilles de Binche), and had a totally different image in my brain.

The "poignant guide" itself can still be gotten here, in PDF form. I'm reading it now... Pretty funky stuff.

Oh, you said Rochefort. Never mind.

On a related tangent, I've been trying home yoghurt making recently, and the results have been pretty good except for a large number of very small lumps that won't dissolve when I stir it. Does anyone have any idea what to do to prevent this?

Um... pass it through cheesecloth or a strainer?

Fragano @276 -- Well, I always say Dumas de merrier.

One of the things that I like about this place is that it gives me an excuse to do research into things I know absolutely nothing about.

I assume that this is occurring when you add your starter to your yoghurt to be, as that's the only step I can see where you're really mixing anything together. Unfortunately, I don't have any suggestions apart from adding the starter only a very little at a time, blending it thoroughly after each addition.

Yog Sysop, White Courtesy Phone:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G3bY8KtbSI&feature=player_embedded

I'm sorry about Shiva, and I hope you find the right new cats.

abi@251: that's probably why the polls I've seen favor briefs ~9:1. Boxer wearers may find that the wrinkling is a reasonably tradeoff against the chafing-in-tight-spots that one can get from briefs.

Allan@262: do you think the text is actually transmitted? I would have guessed it was a locally-run bit of Java, but I don't know for certain.

That's certainly a rather stunning hat. More nice hats.

Allan @ 262 and CHip @ 297:

Rot13.org uses locally-run JavaScript. Other people's that use CGI (if there are any of those left for something as simple as rot-13) might leave traces in server logs.

Speaking of web pages, Mount Fuji in HTML source.

There. Was that delicate enough? I did it without saying "buttcheek."

The other half of the OMM team was Ken Blanchard, who still cranks out a lot of business management stuff. The list of titles on his Wikipedia article is substantial (and occasionally gorge-raising - Lead Like Jesus). He's a master, imo, of taking a very simple concept and making a 120 page book out of it. There's nothing wrong with the OMM guidelines - I use them. But they're not earthshattering or groundbreaking.

The "59-Second Employee" is on "managing up", a kind of judo for applying the flavour-of-the-month in reverse to get the formula manager to do the right thing.

I did a four-day management training course recently, and it was heavily Hersey-Blanchard "Situational Leadership", with Blanchard-trademarked materials. It has some stuff to offer.

Twilight Tourism.

There are several storefronts that are nothing but Twilight. One is a tour operator; they have a branch in Port Angeles as well. When returning from the shore last night I passed the tour bus parked by the "Welcome to Forks" sign. A staffer was photographing a family.

Almost every other business -- hotels, restaurants, the supermarket, drug store -- has references to the book, e.g. "Bella Shops Here."

I send my nieces a specially postmarked postcard reading: "No Sign of Sparkly Vampires."

I hope they someday understand the irony.

All my art projects (including an art car) are lit with fluorescent bulbs, so I'm doing my part for the Fluorosphere.

Blogger and columnist Michelle Malkin claimed Obama's trying to create "junior lobbyists," and wrote that "parents have every right to worry about their children being used as Political Guinea Pigs for Change."

'Guinea Pigs for Change' sounds like a catchy name for a campaigning group. What about 'Hamsters for Humanity'?

A convenience store on the boundary of a nearby Indian reservation had a sign:

TREATY BOUNDARY

NO VAMPIRES BEYOND THIS POINT

I wonder if they're playing along or sick of the whole deal.

On a day-to-day basis, I have no distinct preference for either boxers or briefs (I do want one or the other, though). However, for long-distance hiking I have found, the painful way, that boxers are vastly superior.

That doesn't help with Twilight vampires. The only reason they can't go out in the sun is because they're sparkly and it's obvious they're vampires.

I am not making this up.

This is not a request for anyone to go read it or rate it. Just thought I'd let you know that I'm tracking it to see how well it does as a free book on a site where it's sure to be completely buried. Eventually, I'll start reporting the statistics over at P&E. This you might want to pass along to others who might be interested in how some books fare.

By the way, it's been seen (presumably downloaded and read) by over 50 individuals and rated at 4.5 out of 5 stars. Not bad for absolutely no publicity or marketing up to now.

I'm et up with envy at your travels to the Peninsula; we used to stay in Amanda Park and travel out to Kalaloch every year at this time, but trying to organize a trip involving three adults with conflicting work schedules is a trick. The last time we made it, there was what was left of a juvenile finback whale being scavenged on the beach; the extra imput to thefood chain meant that there was more of everything from sandfleas to bears fora mile along the beach south of Kalaloch lodge.

Back when I was young and unencumbered I dated a guy whose idea of a good time was to drive up to the crumbling ends of old logging roads and car camp. I've seen huge herds of elk running across a clear cut section (square mile), silent except for the clicking of foot tendons over bone, and awakened after sleeping in a doorless pick-up canopy to find cougar prints in the dust on the roof.

Edgar lo Siento

Here's the video of Sue. Looks like you need a decent broadband connection to watch.

JESR, #314 & shadowsong, #316, I've always thought of Kalaloch as having at least another "c." Probably because I don't remember seeing it before, just hearing it. For many years, I thought the town was O'Karbor.

Rats for Reform?
Squirrels for the Future?

Gerbils for Justice?

Muad'Dib for Messianicism?

I always thought it was "Claylock" when I was little; it was a mythical place for most of my beach-going life, because it was so many hours beyond Oyehut and Moclips, our usual goals. The same boyfriend who thought heading out into the Olympic Mountains on old logging roads (in a 1962 Chevy step bed with a broken gas gauge) was the epitome of fun thought going to Kalaloch on a February weekend a very good idea (he was right).

It's a good thing that the water there is so cold, and it's so far from everywhere, because otherwise that gorgeous seven mile stretch of roadside beaches from South Beach to Ruby Beach would be less wonderfully empty. The Olympic National Park beaches only accessible by hikers are even more spectacular, of course (I'm most fond of Cape Alava) but they are, well, only accessibly by hiking, and I don't think my utterly screwed-up knees are going to make the two miles and change, most of it on bouncy board walks, out to Cape Alava from Lake Ozette again.

I wonder if they're playing along or sick of the whole deal.

playing along (i heard a cbc program on the whole phenomenon). cause in the book, all the werewolves, the immortal enemies of vampires, are from the nearby native american tribe.

yes, in twilight, the nonwhites are half-animals. how very coincidental.

Ah, my mistake. I went to rot13.org instead.

boingboing.net/2004/12/06/cartoon-character-sk.html

www.boingboing.net/2006/08/31/artificial-cartoonch.html

Initially, the two cheap cameras had their shutter buttons wired together. But one of those pair had a damaged LCD (perhaps toasted by the soldering iron) and produced crappy photos.

So I used another pair of cheap cameras and simply pressed the shutter buttons simultaneously.

That is what I'll do when I have enough scratch to buy two RELIABLE cameras. (The cheap ones were $10 pencams from Aiptec.)

Once you have two cameras full of pictures, download them to RIGHT and LEFT folders, and use Photoshop or Gimp to set them side by side. Then either print out or view on screen and cross your eyes to view. Or use a stereoscope.

Here:

3ddigitalphoto.com

There are tools for editing 3d photos.

I walked on Rialto beach on both of my visits up there. Last time Kira found something to snack on:

http://home.comcast.net/~stefan_jones/dead_ray.jpg

This time she gnawed at this mass of what looked like Ramen noodles embedded in a pile of those tentacle & blob seaweed things. I haven't uploaded the picture yet.

Thanks! Jupiter was high on the list of possibilities for the small group that was observing and wondering, but I wasn't sure.

But why do you ask?

Moles for Medical Reform
Shrews for Social Justice

Plus the inevitable:

Voles for Vendetta

Cadbury

a High School Musical X-Men crossover with Warren Worthington III as the Angel Gabriel in the Christmas pageant.

We also speculated that the lawsuits over rights already sold by Marvel could get pretty baroque, given the vast number of alternate histories and versions on some characters.

3 standard physical dimensions
1 standard temporal dimension
2 non-standard physical dimensions
1 cross-temporal non-linear dimension

But I thought everyone knew that...

Having been reminded of Solitaire, I went and looked at it again, and noticed a mention of the possibility of using a computer for one end of the encryption. The page includes programs for doing so...or at least the code for them; has anyone made an actual widget that those of us who lack compilers can use?

(I need another L for the Liberal Democrats, here.)

Moose for the Monarchy

Cadbury.

(Insert rimshot here)

Meanwhile, in the counter-sane world, we have:

Schoolchildren across the nation "will be forced to watch the president justify his plans for government-run health care, banks, and automobile companies, increasing taxes on those who create jobs, and racking up more debt than any other president."

Republican Party of Florida on Tuesday, September 1st, 2009 in a press release

That garnered a "Pants On Fire" rating from PolitiFact.com.

Wasn't it under a year ago that any criticism whatever of the President was prima facie evidence of treason?

And what about the reading of "My Pet Goat" eight years ago.... No criticism would the Repukes accept regarding that....

Mad dogs, rabid weasels, rabid foxes, and foaming at the mouth insane skunks, out spreading their vicious infections insane diseases.

Lynx for the Liberal Democrats.

They'll say whatever need to be said to keep the proles in a constant state of fear and indignation. And the proles are stupid enough to uncritically swallow it all, day after day.

The Oregonian devoted a fair chunk of page two of today's edition to reprinting the FactCheck article. Good for them.

http://www.paysonroundup.com/news/2009/sep/02/evacuees_grab_pets_bibles_and_flee/

(And also, I am amazed they didn't lose any homes. A lot of those houses have -- or had -- dense vegetation around them.)

Hippogriffs for Humphrey
Unicorns for Udall
Mermaids for Mondale
Catweazles for Carter

(I don't know, these all seem like presidential lobby groups this time.)

"Tell him what you do, Wolverine."

"EAT DRUMS! EAT DRUMS!"

"No! No, Wolverine! Beat drums!"

Hilde and I will be there at the Discworld convention briefly this afternoon, and hopefully a bit longer Saturday and Sunday. The leave time I applied for from work several months ago fell down the rabbit hole, so I end up having to work graveyard shifts this weekend after all.

(The "rabbit hole" involved, about a month ago, the sudden -- "Here's a box for any personal items you want to take with you. By the way, you're not director anymore." -- replacement of the site's security director, creating considerable disarray and unhappiness. Of the ten employees then at the site, I and one other guy are the only ones left, everyone else having quit, been fired, or transferred to another property and been replaced by new hires.) (Dare I say that I am being reminded in some ways of a Convention That Shall Go Unnamed Here?)

Loons for LaRoche (take it either way).

BEMs inside the Beltway.

Satyrs for Solipsism.

Manatees for Moderation – but not

Dugongs for Democracy! – activist breakaway, in huge snitfight with Dugongs for Democrats! (Splitters!), vide supra, @346.

Labradors for the Liberal Party

(/tasteless)

Chris

Thanks for the Fluxx deck dimensions. I asked because I saw a plastic (soap?) box at my local American Science and Surplus that looked like it might be fat enough to hold a deck of Fluxx cards, and I know some people whose deck's box is falling apart, that I'd like to surprise with a box-holder if it's the right size (or a bit bigger). Now I've got the dimensions, the next time I'm there I'll know whether I should buy one or not.

I love my American Science and Surplus. It's a very strange place.

Mustn't forget the cross-temporal non-linear dimension, yes.

Thanks for all the advice on getting the house PC back in order. Once we got the chip in and found the CD, it booted right off, and it only took two tries to get XP reactivated.

Are you on Windows or Mac? I just grabbed the C# and Erlang ports of Solitaire, and would be happy to compile a Windows version for you.

Although I think what you actually want might be a deck-of-cards simulator so you can watch the magic work as it happens. That would be a fun project, but I can promise no firm delivery dates. Maybe there's something already out there.

No, definitely the Liberal Party.

(But it was a Great Dane called Rinka, not a Labrador - my forgettery is playing up again.)

Make that "Great Danes for the Liberal Party" instead.

Chris

The abstract of the Science article refers to "emergent quasiparticles resembling monopoles. [...] Where these tubes end, the resulting defect looks like a magnetic monopole."

It'd be lovely to be able to see the cards move, but really I want to play with the output more.

Can the user set the deck's order, I hope?

The bad news--statute of limitations ran out....

I hope most people here with an interest in politics are following Glen Greenwald's blog. It's more depressing than I can say that:

a. Obama in power turns out to be much more comfortable with scary police-state powers available to the executive branch than he ever did as a candidate.

b. Some revoltingly high fraction of Democrats seem very comfortable with all this, basically reassuring the cynical among us that their opposition to Bush's power grabs (such opposition as they provided, which mostly wasn't anything to brag about) was entirely a matter of who was going to have those powers.

c. The American people as a whole are mostly pretty comfortable with our continued movement toward a police state. Eavesdrop on every phone in the country, no problem. Disappear people off the streets of US and foreign cities, fine. Extract confessions with torture--maybe we'll make you tone it down a bit, or ship them off to Yemen or Saudi Arabia to do the dirty work, but still basically okay. But f--k around with Medicare? What're you, some kinda Socialist?

The whole idea that the Obama administration is proposing formal preventative detention powers is breathtaking. Yeah, far-left liberal Democrat. Right. We're now in line to have a massive surveillance regime and a policy of disappearing citizens and foreigners who are inconvenient scary to the administration, and it will have been the party of civil liberties who gave it to us. Just like the party of smaller government gave us eight years of the Bush administration.

Nice. As if I needed another reason not to read the books.

I was in Forks earlier this year, during a roadtrip on the Olympic Peninsula and Vancouver Island - photos (with commentary) here, here and here.

It certainly points out the defects of meta-data. Jul, nal sbby xabj gung gur orfg jnl gb gerng n Wrj vf gb bssre gurz n tbbq ontry, znlor jvgu n avpr fpuzrne, fbzr ybk, n yvggyr gbzngb naq bavba...

This suggests a pretty fundamental design flaw.

That is: Aspartame gives me a headache, and I want to chew sugarless gum. Why is it that, while some brands put aspartame in all flavors including cinnamon, if there's one aspartame-free flavor, it's always the cinnamon?

I like cinnamon gum, but I'd love some variation. All the other flavors of sugarless gum have aspartame in them, across all brands (anyway, all the brands they sell around here).

Those guys are trying to sell a medical records search engine, so they do a dumb string search. On Wikipedia.

And they didn't even bother to test it for meaningless results.

I'm going to guess that the management (who seem to be all MBAs) bought the technology from someone else, because there's a definite "magic computer is always right" feeling I get.

Go to TechCrunch, whose commenters broke the story, and read the marketing guy's response. It's beyond me to paraphrase it.

As for "stempunk:" my yard decor includes a two-foot box end wrench, several large gears, a 1920s vintage road grader blade, and chunks of a cast-iron cook-stove which disintegrated after a chimney fire (not so much acquired as uncovered, with the stove bits eroding out of my driveway). Oh, and the metal parts of half a buggy, hanging up on one of my outbuildings; the other half was sticking out of the blackberries and went in a WW2 scrap drive. A next-door relative is growing one of my climbing roses up over an abandoned Pinto, the title for which we've been unable to clear so it could be legally hauled away.

Are you surprised?

The new TV series will star Pinikett (of Battlestar Galactica and Dollhouse) as war journalist Matt Ellman, who dies while on his honeymoon with his wife Jessie (Smallville and the new V’s Laura Vandervoort) and wakes up in the titular Riverworld, a mysterious planet where every person who has ever lived on Earth is brought after their death. The premise of the show will have Matt trying to find Jessie, while at the same time uncovering the truth behind Riverworld. Check out the first promo images from the show below, plus a behind-the-scenes video with co-star Alan Cumming as he transforms into one of the blue-skinned guardians that watches over Riverworld.

Sigh. Why would anyone paint a rail fence, anyway?

And, in a real democracy, I don't see how the media can do other than the BBC is doing.

My personal hope is that he gets his chance, and comprehensively shoots himself in the foot. It maybe needs to be one of those political rough and tumbles where nobody else quite gets out of control, and nobody is given a free ride.

Didn't know there was a film, though. Might have to look that up.

I mean, even putting the most obvious things in the search box turns up totally bizarre results. It wants a disease, symptom or treatment... OK, by far the most common symptom of any disease is fever. They *must* have tried that while testing it.

The drug & medication section at least looks reasonable, although I'm not quite sure what "vaccine" is doing on the list as it is neither a specific drug or medication nor useful for treating fever as far as I'm aware. Nor, AFAICT, does "CNS depressant" belong on that list. The other three hits sound sensible, though.

The treatments section is where it starts getting truly bizarre. Antibiotics sounds reasonable, but then we get to "bark". Which, drilling down into the results, seems to be primarily due to the fact that aspirin was first isolated from willow bark. Then we have "hyperthermia therepy", which AFAICT is totally unrelated, "song" (!), and "antibiotic therapy" which is just the first result repeated.

Food and plants? I'm not even sure what the section is doing here, but the only result even approximately relevant is "water". But its suggested subcategory of interest, "holy water", is frankly bizarre.

But, at least the page does have some purpose... it contains a link to "pros and cons of song", which has really got me thinking. Song will, apparently, help me choose a mate, achieve [a] higher position, achieve painting [?!], and activate [my] GABAergic neuron. But, unfortunately, it is costly, unimaginitive, and "sin, sin, sin". I'm not actually convinced that "already charming subversion" is actually a con, though, despite being listed as one.

Their diabetes link contains both "transplantation" and "transplant" as possible treatments. Along with "mouse". Causes of diabetes include "injection" and "insulin resistance" (the latter, as I understand it, being like saying that ceasing to live is a cause of death).

"In a way, this search engine is equivalent to me putting bursitis in google and looking through the top 50 results."

And that makes me wonder if they even have a search engine at all.

Follow Friday: people recommend interesting Twitter streams.

Yeah, it seems inevitable. If your journalists get to decide whose views are too creepy or weird to allow the public to hear them, why would you expect them to be right most of the time? In the US MSM, we get plenty of that--they'll be careful not to let crazy folks be taken seriously, so the public won't be misled. You know, crazy blame-America-first types who thought we shouldn't invade Iraq, crazy civil liberties extremists who think someone above the rank of corporal should see the inside of a prison for torturing prisoners to death, wackos who imagine we might one day want to stop being the country most prone to invading other countries on the planet. We're well protected from such confusing ideas here. But I'm not sure that has necessarily worked out all that well.

Speaking of cougars, there's an upcoming new ABC show, Cougar Town, starring Courteney Cox. (link to promotional picture of how she will look in the show) I'd been mildly insulted by the concept of 'a cougar,' because it seemed to mean a dissipated older woman, often of low socioeconomic class, who is mocked for repeatedly and ridiculously going after much-younger men.

Since WHEN is COURTENEY COX a cougar?!? The woman's only 45, and a very-well-preserved (and gorgeously made-up) 45, at that. Does she pursue paperboys? Because if she's just dating college boys, man is that a watered-down version of 'Cougar'.

Mind you, there's no way any major network would star someone who looks like the usual insult implies they look, period, but STILL.

In the places I've heard the term there didn't seem to be any class implication at all, unless a slight one indicating wealth (because the boytoys don't want to pay).

(Cranky. It's been a bad summer in many ways).

In the places I've heard the term there didn't seem to be any class implication at all, unless a slight one indicating wealth (because the boytoys don't want to pay).

Huh. My first exposure was via a (now no longer apparently extant) YouTube video called Cougar Barbie, where her hair was all messed up and she was dressed like a skank, and lived in a trailer park, so I guess I presumed they were all like that.

The results of this software seem more like putting in the name of an illness, selecting one phrase where the word appears off of each of the top 50 pages, and putting them together as the answer.

It's not just a "dumb search engine", it's a dumb dumb search engine.

I speculate that the porn industry may have further popularized it for marketing reasons. In their strange viewscreen on the world, the "typical" age for women is early 20s, so they need to be able to label product suitable for men who are attracted to women in their 40s, which of course lots of men are. As the original quote said, here's an interesting intentionality implicit in MILF, and more so when you consider the MILF/cougar distinction.

Yes, that's worse. Having it revealed as a shell around Google would indeed be less embarrassing.

As a friend of mine used to say, "I could sh*t a better search engine!"

Paul Biba at Teleread reports that the entire WoT series will be made available in e-book format. He quotes from the Macmillan press release:

The Wheel of Time series is one of the most highly requested series on Kindle, and they are finally becoming available to fans as ebooks. Beginning on October 27th, Macmillan will release one ebook per month, beginning with The Eye of the World. The full text of the books has been retypeset to better accommodate the ebook format and all original illustrations and maps will be retained in these new releases. We’ve also commissioned new cover art for each book, and I can announce the first four artists now: David Grove, Kekai Kotaki, Donato Giancola, and Sam Weber.

So books can be requested?

* I was recommending books to a friend who's just bought a Kindle.

I think there is an important question of whose intentionality. My understanding of the 'cougar' vs 'MILF' distinction is this:

If an older woman wants to have sex with a younger man, it's 'cougar', and an insult.

If a younger man wants to have sex with an older woman, it's 'MILF,' and, at least nominally a compliment.

Note that both of these are from the male perspective. In other words: same old, same old.

I'm relieved to see that was literal rather than figurative -- my brain is already reeling from the unfortunate junction between an images search for the ostensibly innocuous and rule 34.

Doing it on a Kindle means (a) not storing those heaps of paper, and also (b) being able to go right on to the next in the series when you finish the one you're on, without a midnight bookstore run being necessary.

Re: PNH's sidelight on "Lost worlds of the North Sea," and the sad history of the exemplar city:

Talk about a Dunwich horror...

It may not be much of a reference source, but as a boundless source of drams and dances*, it's not bad.

-----
† He's not that bad, honest!
‡ He's not that bad either, really.
* whisky, tango, foxtrot

We managed to get her to drop the rat in the lawn, then brought her back inside. I went out a few minutes later to check out the beast. A cursory inspection didn't reveal any bite marks, but fresh bleeding from the nose, mouth and ears, leads me to suspect it just died from ingesting rat poison, and not from feline rodenticide. I hope the cat didn't eat any of it.

After checking out the "nuclear attack" result, I have to say it's reassuring to know your medical treatment may be decided by Mobile Suit Gundam.

*It was none the worse for wear; I brought it to a shelter and they fed it and released it the next day.

debcha, #421, yesterday's WashPost Magazine had an article ranking the new TV shows and they have a picture of her as a cougar.

I have two new cats in quarantine. They haven't seen a doctor since their birth in 2005, but have had rabies shots. They're both overweight, and one has massively matted fur. I left a message for my vet, who comes to my house, and she and her assistant will be here Thursday to check them out and cut the mats. They've been very nice cats even stuck in the guest bathroom, and I hope they will get along well with Spirit.

I appreciate the sentiment, but I think that you're being disingenuous. Millions of Americans love their female dogs, but 'bitch' is still an insult.

But I do agree that it's primarily, but not unambiguously, pejorative - see the range of Urban Dictionary definitions.

I'm always interested in what the lacunae in our language says about our culture. Older women who go after younger men are cougars - what are younger men who go for older women called? What do you call someone who has a sugar daddy? Why is there no feminine form of 'cuckold'? There are many more examples, I'm sure.

So you're the one who ended up with the MITSFS gavel!

debcha@443: What do you call someone who has a sugar daddy?

There may be hundreds of possible terms; "homewrecker" is traditional, "arm candy" is modern (although neither is really specific); the one I'd call closest is "jennifer". (I have no idea where that specific name came from -- possible its frequency in a certain age group?). Another classic question for your list: what is the male equivalent of nymphomania? (Yes, I know everybody here will know it, but in the general population it's said to be much less known.)

Iron and Roses

Interesting point of language variation here. In these here parts (New Zealand), the word is "toyboy", not "boytoy". A "boytoy" sounds to me like a young woman whose social (and perhaps other) life is defined largely in terms of the young men she has sex with.

JHomes

Vauban was only fighting for the French, though his earliest experience was in the civil war of the fronde.

Modern borders have shifted.

Vauban's style of fortification was a series of developments of what had gone before, and the idea of the star-shaped trace, made by triangular bastions, which was already well-established.

It's possible that his innovations as a fortification builder arose from his own successes at taking a fortress. He developed the system of attack to a peak, making a siege almost a predictable formality. In at least one case, he introduced into his fortification building a feature which had given him problems as an attacker.

As far as building fortresses is concerned, he has the advantage of being French at the time of Louis XIV. This, perhaps, is why he is more famous than Coehoorn.

But have a look at Naarden, some twelve miles from Amsterdam. Most of the works are obscured by trees, but you still have a lot of visible detail from Google Earth.

In this instance, the ditches are full of water, which changes some of the details of how the defences work, but the key is how much unpleasantness can be hurled in your general direction by the cannon in those well-shielded batteries in the sides of the bastions.

"...dig down anywhere here and there's iron in the soil. Fairies would have a bad time of it on this hillside..."

Your place sounds like the setting for a Realms of Fantasy story, especially the part about Aunt Emily's crib, which she bent to bits while "just playin'".

* This actually applies to any target of stigma, but it's particularly obvious with women.

** Calling someone any variation of a dog, has been an insult since well before English, and not limited to Western cultures. Modern Westerners see dogs almost exclusively as pets -- but for most of our shared history, they've walked a precarious balance among "slave", "vermin", and "emergency meat".

*** What happened to super- & subscripts? :-(

A close examination of the most recent U.S. Department of Justice data (2006) found that while one in 30 men between the ages of 20 and 34 is behind bars, the figure is one in nine for black males in that age group

The total is about 1% of our adult population behind bars at any given time. One percent. (For men between 20-34, it's about 3%. For black men 20-34, it's about 11%.) It wasn't always this way in the US. This table from the BJS[1] shows the amazing increase in people in prison or jail (the chart includes everyone under parole or probation, too, but the numbers let you extract more information). In 1980, there were about 500,000 people behind bars. In 2007, there were about 2.3 million people behind bars[0].

Combine this with the increasing militarization of the police forces across the country, with the ongoing acceptance of prison rape and other abuse (and remember where the Abu Girab guards had learned their trade), and the increasing use of surveillance against US citizens (with a huge push for this during the first Bush administration and during the Clinton administration). Add in the nationwide fear-based security theater we're treated to everywhere--metal detectors to get on a plane, go into a courtroom, the Smithsonian museums, many government buildings, even some schools. A lot of that started in the Clinton administration, as a response to some school shootings and the loss of TWA 800[2].

The Bush administration's abuses and scary steps toward a police state weren't some inexplicable one-off. They were continuations of a long trend. They are reflections of the kind of people we are, now. We can change that, but not without recognizing it.

[0] I suspect much of this growth comes out of the lobbying of private prison companies and prison guards' unions, both consistent advocates for harsher mandatory sentencing laws. It's also worth noting that this is a long-running thing, and oddly, didn't take place solely under Republicans.

[1] This is an irresponsible, untrustworthy internet site that gives people unfiltered access to ugly, inconvenient facts. Right-thinking folk should certainly shun it, and trust journalists and political activists to decide which facts are fit for them to see.

[2] When it was believed this was a terrorist attack, that was justification for requiring government-issued ID to fly. When later investigation determined that it was probably an accident, of course, the ID requirement (which coincidentally solved an annoying business problem for the airlines) remained.

Eep! I met you in the dealers' room at the Discworld con yesterday and chatted with you briefly. After that I kept thinking, "Tom Whitmore, Tom Whitmore... that name sounds really familiar." So, um, hi! Sorry about that.

Fragano Ledgister @ 452: I have just learned that one week this month will have two Thursdays.

Going on a long trip? If so, have fun.

This was not as interesting as the memo once sent out by our IT department which announced a number of changes which would take place at set dates in the past. I emailed the vice president of IT asking for the loan of his time machine.

(Thank you for sharing those fries, Lee. I was running on very little sleep at that moment, and the carbs helped.)

Wish we'd been able to attend more. Conventions tend to have a "vibe", and this one seemed to have a very positive one.

and far too many of my Wednesdays and Thursdays feel like Mondays. %$@#!

Ah, yes, I've had that (days being turned into other days, not time-travelling upgrades). Did you ever get to borrow the time machine, or is that one of those executive perks?

Ginger @ 465 and albatross @ 466:

I'd like to be able to batch up a bunch of my Mondays so that I can get them out of the way.

Bruce Arthurs @ 464:

Lee says you're welcome.

(She also wanted me to say that she'll be away for a few more days, for driving home and prep for another event.)

*I once had a job where Monday was my Sunday, and Tuesday was Monday.

As compared to the job I once had where Sunday was Monday, and sometimes it was Tuesday that was my Friday, and sometimes it was Wednesday?

A Quick History Lesson

The U.S. Post Service was established in 1775. So they've had 234 years to make it work. It is broke.

Social Security was established in 1935. They've had 74 years to make it work. It is broke.

Fannie Mae was established in 1938. They've had 71 years to make it work. It is broke.

Freddie Mac was established in 1970. They've had 39 years to make it work. It is broke.

The War on Poverty started in 1964. They've had 45 years to make it work. About $1 trillion of taxpayer money is confiscated each year and transferred to “the poor.” It hasn't worked.

Medicare and Medicaid were established in 1965. They've had 44 years to make it work. They are both broke.

AMTRAK was established in 1970. They've had 39 years to make it work. Last year it had to be bailed out and today continues running at a loss.

$700 billion bailout of 2008. It has yet to create a single new private-sector job.

Cash for Clunkers in 2009 went broke after 80% of the cars purchased turned out to be produced by foreign companies.

The U.S. government has a 100% failure rate.

My acquaintance says, "I would love to have a pithy set of answers to show that almost all of this happened under Republican control.... [I'm not sure about this, actually. - CQ] I would really love to frame an answer that was factual, and not full of emotion. I would also like to have examples of all the great corporations that are “broke” like AIG, GM, Merrill, etc."

Social Security and the Post Office are fairly easy to debunk, but the others I admit I don't have info handy on. So please, have at it! I'd love to know what you can come up with!

Thanks.

Using ¹, ² & ³ for superscripts – numbers beyond 3 and &sub1;, etc, for subscripts don't seem to work. Trying₁ number₂ versions₃. Seems to work. Other⁺ numberⁿ entities₍ mightⁱ also₊ work⁾. [My browser shows nine in this par. YBMV.]

One of many HTML entity lists online.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, SERGE!

The rest of y'all can catch up in your own time.

I'm pleased to say the latest was a success; no more lumps, so I guess an inadequately mixed starter culture was the problem. I also had one batch that completely failed to anything at all, so I'm thinking of switching from my current starter to something that'll hopefully be more reliable.

Writing project related to that: A Day On The Planet (English version explanation, 7 more languages: اللغه العربيه - 中文 - Français - Deutsch - 日本語 - Español - Русский). About 400 words/1 page on your 9th September. Many stories to be put online, 500(?) published. Charity support to be decided.

This may be useful to you on the subject of welfare. It hasn't been updated in the last few years, but it's still a good summary.

Also:

Cash for Clunkers in 2009 went broke after 80% of the cars purchased turned out to be produced by foreign companies.

Er... Unless there's something I don't understand about how this thing was supposed to work, isn't that a complete non-sequiter? The program was an attempt to get old cars off the road and to try to get money flowing in the economy, right? That's something that you don't necessarily do on a continuing basis, so you can hardly say that it went broke. Besides, I'm sure that the government wouldn't have let all those nasty foreign car companies into the program if it were being funded somehow by kickbacks from the glorious American ones.

Still, I'd also attack this by denying the entire conclusion. Even if all of its supposed premises were true, which they aren't, those are hardly 100% of all government programs. Besides, are they trying to argue that the military is broken? Or the interstate highways? The FDA? NIST?

Epacris @ 471:

For a little while, the <sup> and <sub> tags were working. ^{They still} _{seem to}.

Jules @ 473:

Glad you got your yoghurt sorted.

KeithS #475: Aarggh! I was trying to use <super> -- I could have sworn that actually worked just the other week, but apparently it was just me ^brain_faulting. Thanks!

Then they turn around and point to the programs' lack of funding as proof that government programs do not work.

Serge: Félicitations! Joyeux anniversaire!!

Je te souhaite un très agréable jour. Bonne fête!

Hmm. Those <sup>/<sub> tags didn't work at first.

1. Go figure³
2. That this should happen is known as the Perversity of Inanimate Matter; it is a fundamental law of nature.
3. Sub and superscripts are working nicely now.

The post office ran fine (civil service) until the government decided to make it a semi-private corporation, and then started expecting it to make a profit (generally at the expense of the carriers, who work ten to twelve hour days at times).

Amtrak was started to keep passenger rail running, when corporate rail was trying to kill it off (freight is more profitable and doesn't complain about being hours late). It's a semi-government corporation and expected to make a profit on minimal funding. Which is why fares are several times higher than airlines on the same route, and travel a lot slower than by car.

Social Security isn't broke, but it will be in about forty years, if the income ceilings aren't indexed to inflation. It doesn't help that the trust fund that FICA deductions go into is used as a piggy bank for budget-balancing by both parties.

Medicare is closer to going broke, but again there's no indexing to inflation, and the government is also forbidden to bargain for better prices on drugs. That's the Republican contribution to making sure old people die earlier than they need to, along with that @#$%^&* Part D. Medicare's kept a lot of people from dying of poverty, and apparently that's a bad idea.

Medicaid works, but barely: you have to be impoverished to use it, and that's hard on people: to see that your spouse is taken care of, you have to give up your home.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are semi-private corporations. They were allowed to play in mortgage-backed securities. The guys doing that were, I think, appointed or hired by Rs, and Congress certainly did no oversight on those deals (although I suspect they'd have allowed it anyway: greed is bipartisan).

The 'War on Poverty' may or may not have been hopeless, but it doesn't work very well when Congress cuts funding for projects that actually work (Head Start, Vista, AFDC, WIC) and expects people who are making minimum wage to immediately be able to survive on their own. It also doesn't help when elected officials start talking about 'welfare queens' as if everyone getting help is out there living it up on the minimal money they're getting.

The bailout has, in fact, created jobs. Not as many as it should have, but the Republicans and the Blue Dogs were doing their best to make it a program that didn't help anyone but corporations (including, most particularly, the banks that caused it).

Cash for Clunkers - that program was so successful, it had to be re-funded a week after it started, and it sold more than 700,000 vehicles in two months, at a time when nobody was buying otherwise. That's car dealership jobs that would have gone away, too.

If government doesn't work well, it's because some people don't want it to work at all.

I couldn't help myself. I said

It does appear that there is no shit on him. Perhaps I speak only for myself, but I think that fact enhances his attractiveness!

My clocks all tell different times (and days!) ... so...

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, SERGE!!!!!

Serge: Hippo birdie two ewe!

Oh, does anyone else think that March of the Sinister Ducks (hooray for Neil Gaiman for posting the link, and hooray for Alan Moore for doing the quacks) is a natural pairing with the video Sex with Ducks by Garfunkel and Oates?

The roadrunner versus mirror particle is wonderful. It reminds me of one of our cats looking in the mirror. On looking in the mirror: hey, another cat! On looking behind the mirror: huh, no cat. Repeat until cat gets bored or is shooed away.

albatross @ 492:

Now that you put it that way, that email looks suspiciously like a Gish Gallop—throw out so many wrong ideas at once that your opponent will get bogged down just refuting one or two of them, which makes your opponent look slow, bad and defensive while you look knowledgeable and confident.

Happy birthday! And if people forget, keep this in mind (paraphrasing Michèle Bernier):

Si on oublie de me souhaiter mon anniversaire, c'est qu'on ne me voit pas vieillir.

Whatever happened to -direct- gas guzzlers, high emissions of global warming gasses vehicles, based on the -damage- done by the vehicles... the cost of gasoline directly, is low compared to the vehicle cost.... again, they are being rewarded while I get financially raped by it...

Katrina response versus hurricane response when neocon political shills weren't "running" emergency services--again, evidence that government works when staffed by people who have competent working background and experience in what they are supposed to be managing rather than grandstanding.

2001-2008 see scientists in the federal government be -gag-ordered- by apparatchiks political officers who seem to have gleefully flunked or avoided third grade science and any science classes beyond that in favor of anti-intellectual religious dogma of science-hating ideologues on everything from C02 emissions and salmon stock collapse in the Pacific Northwest, to redacting of studies on healthcare and medicine and outright lying about anything that involves human sexuality and reproduction and stem cells and such, to placement of books claiming that a Biblical Noah's Flood created in the Grand Canyon in the science section of at least one federal bookstore...

How can ANYTHING respectable be created when liars have control?

Chris Quinones, do I get this right that that message was spread through a technology called "e-mail"? Where did that technology come from?

(And, of course, the whole point of having things run by the government is so that it's possible to maintain projects that are useful or convenient or necessary even though, if you analyse them as businesses, you'll conclude that they're permanently broke.)

Bonne fête!

I'm all ears, oui, oui!
(The above is supposed to sound like Pépé le Pew channeling Charles Boyer)

Advisory: This film contains violence, end-of-world themes and the voice of Crispin Glover, which is just as creepy when not attached to the actual actor.

I'll be subversive and wish you one whether or no.

Linkmeister @ 483, Rob Rusick @ 485:

I didn't have to wait for the elctrician for very long; he was stuck on the Banfield Freeway in heavy traffic for about 20 minutes, but he had no trouble finding the house (some people drive right past because the numbers aren't easily visible from the street in one direction).

So now I find out I've been making my saving throws versus house fire regularly for at least 2 years, and I didn't even know I was rolling the dice. The electrician took less than half an hour to find the problem. It would have taken less, but his first move was to check that the service panel was properly connected; only when he'd opened it up and checked did he check the 220 volt service line coming into the power company meter. And guess what? One of the conductors hadn't even been connected: the bare wire was too short, so whoever worked on it last just pushed it against the lug nut rather than screwing it down. So the connection was made through just one side of the wire; it must have heated and arced every so often for years, and the power stopped whenever the hot wire bent away from the connection far enough. We're very lucky it didn't start a fire.

So we called the power company, and they had a tech with some time on his hands; he came out and helped the electrician pull the line in towards the house 8 or 10 inches, cut off the burnt ends of the wires, and connect the line up again. The tech was in a good mood, and he waived the requirement that we get a permit and have the job inspected by the city, saving us hundreds of dollars and the likelihood that the inspector would gig us for something else that we'd then have to pay for. Sighs of relief all around on this job.

But one of my colleagues lent me De brief voor de koning, by Tonke Dragt. It's been a firm favorite in the Netherlands since its publication in 1962, and was even made into a film here a year or two ago.

It's got the swift pace of YA fantasy, and has a lot of the tropes I'm used to in English: map in front of the book, omniscient-perspective overview in the prolog, and a young protagonist on the verge of proving himself. I think it'll be an interesting read.

Of course, it took me 90 minutes to read 20 pages, and it's 440-odd pages long. This could take a while. But it's definitely the most interesting homework I could be doing at this point.

I subscribe to the print edition of the Saudi Aramco World, a glossy magazine published by oil-drillers by appointment to the Saudi royal family. I suspect it's intended as a public relations gambit, and it's certainly a good ambassador of Arabic culture to anglophone intelligentsia, but I read it because it has many beautifully illustrated articles.

The latest issue came yesterday, and it contains a lovely article on Islamic tile design. Now, if you have ever studied the art or the mathematics of tiling patterns, you no doubt know that designers in the Moorish Empire and in other parts of the Islamic world discovered all 17 possible regular, periodic tilings of the plane centuries ago. What you may not know (I didn't) was that they also discovered the simplest non-periodic tiling, using what are known to Western mathematicians as Penrose, or quasi-crystal tesselations. Roger Penrose (re-)discovered these in the 1970's, so he clearly does not have precedence. When I got the issue, I saw the article listed in the contents and turned to it first, because I've been fascinated by the mathematics of tesselation for years; I have quite a few books on the subject. I recognized the Penrose pattern with some shock on seeing the first photo; I had assumed that no one before the mid-20th century had studied non-periodic tilings.

Interestingly, the American physicist who brought this to the attention of Western mathemeticians was not aware of Penrose' work when he first saw the tiling in a mosque in Usbekistan; he was fascinated by the fact that the tiling was non-periodic, and only found out about Penrose when he returned home and did some research.

The magazine has a very good-looking website (it was an article on arabic computer caligraphy mentioned on ML a year or two ago that got me to subscribe), but unfortunately the contents of the current issue don't yet appear to be online.

http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/Program_WV.aspx

Noon, Chicago Public Radio. Jerome McDonnell

Talking about the usual (i.e. interrogation, torture, etc.).

In the Tesla/Lovecraft vein, are you reading the current 'Atomic Robo' story?

Now, let them eat cake.

"The whole world is a circus if you know how to look at it. The way the sun goes down when you're tired, comes up when you want to be on the move. That's real magic. The way a leaf grows. The song of the birds. The way the desert looks at night, with the moon embracing it. Oh, my boy, that's... that's circus enough for anyone. Every time you watch a rainbow and feel wonder in your heart. Every time you pick up a handful of dust, and see not the dust, but a mystery, a marvel, there in your hand. Every time you stop and think, "I'm alive, and being alive is fantastic!" Every time such a thing happens, you're part of the Circus of Dr. Lao."

A fast Question-and-Run for the Latinate among us for someone doing family history. There is supposed to be a Family Motto "Nec Prece Nec Pretto", which purportedly translates as "Neither by Prayer [n]or Bribery". Do both of those seem reasonably correct? Or what would you suggest?

Health Update: My chemotherapy continues; unpleasant, so far surviving.
Friend with stroke is conscious! He has some movement on one side, very little on the other. Still tracheostomy & nasogastric feeding, because his swallowing isn't good, but breathing by himself. He seems frustrated at being unable to speak & tiring easily. Both understandable.
I feel helpless & inadequate; hoping to be a) healthier later; b) able to help with further rehabilitation. (I'll put this near the earlier comment too.)

It was Hippo Bathday, Serge.

Sorry it was late, and hope you had a good (Nay, _excellent_) one.

I'm very glad your house didn't burn down. Being sloppy is perfectly acceptable in some situations, but that's definitely not one of them. (Actually, it makes me want to smack the guy, if he hasn't managed to electrocute himself already.)

abi @ 511:

Good luck on your reading. From what I can find out about the book, it seems like it ought to be good.

We've never met, but we're getting together tomorrow.

ObQuiltingPhotos: two of my current wips, having been In Progress for quite some time ...

-- The Quilt of Fearful Purpleness (block detail), which is now a top and a full ready back, waiting for me to buy more innards and actually quilt it together and bind it. It's for my sister, who deeply appreciates both its loud purpletude and the Hello Kitty motifs. The back, by the way, is zebra-striped. Violet and lavender zebra. Just in case she wants a 'plainer' side to leave face-up on her bed. :->

-- The Stripey Triangles of Mystery, which were a bunch of fat quarters I seamed together as strips and then cut into triangles to experiment with 60-deg patterns ... and then never committed together into a quilt. Part of the problem is that there don't seem to be quite enough of them for, well, anything I had ideas for. I may make more with a different set of fat quarters and use them all together for, um, something. Someday.

Google for "penrose tile quilt" if you want to get inspiration from some lovely quilts. And for those interested in just playing around with tiles, get a copy of Google Sketchup (free download from Google for Windows or Mac) and get a copy of "Patterns Based on Five: Kepler and Penrose Tiles in Google SketchUp 7".

I also set up a new firewall/router, with Xubuntu. The old firewall is going to my stepfather, who needs an old-hardware machine for his tinkering. (I stuck Xubuntu on that one too; dunno if he'll keep that or not.)

I have this friend, see, who wants to get book plates made, and is looking for inspiration.

(Yes, really)

Elliott Mason, #540, I like purple so much that I had the woman who's making me winter pants that fit make three pair -- two in one purple, one in another -- because I wear them so often.

Mez @528: Sending good thoughts your way. I'm glad to hear your friend's getting better.

Twitter was mentioned upthread; here's an excerpt of The World According to Twitter* for those who are wondering what the fuss is all about. Long intro, actual tweets start on page 13.

I am enjoying it much more than I thought I would. That also sums up my experience with Twitter.

*Full disclosure: one of my tweets is in the book.

Serge @547: I don't actually remember learning to read. My sister told me that my family only discovered I'd learned to do it on my own when they started reading me a book and I told them how it turned out.

Sheepishly raising hand. I just watched three of them in the last 30 minutes: What's Opera, Doc, Rabbit of Seville, and Tex Avery's Magical Maestro.

Yeah, the comics in the paper are what got me reading too; I think it was Flash Gordon in my case, but I'm just not sure. I bet there are a lot of people in our generation who started that way.

I have, ah. Quite larger hips than my waist, which leads to amusing* issues finding pants that fit me. I ran across some corduroy jeans at Land's End that worked. In my size, they had three colors in stock: very-purple, goose-turd olivey green, and dark brown. I bought the purple and the brown.

For conventions, I tend to bring one main pair of pants and rewear with different tops, to cut down on packing. Since the joy of SF conventions is never having to say, "But where would I wear THIS??" about anything, I brought the purple pants.

I discovered on Sunday that people who didn't know me were having me described to them as "Long brown hair, purple pants," and FINDING me in the consuite by that with no trouble at all. So there's something to be said for it. :->

** Amusing to some people, or after the fact; rather horrific during the shopping trip itself.

The funniest story is a friend's daughter was caught reading a NEW book to her friend at about five years old, they thought that their pre-kindergartner did not know how to read because she always wanted them to read to her.

When asked, she fessed up but was distressed and made them promise to still read to her.

The backstory of the character is that he is an automaton built by Tesla. In exchange for service in WWII, he was granted citizenship rights by the US government. Later he runs his own consulting company for unusual projects.

The current story starts with Charles Fort and H.P.Lovecraft showing up on Tesla's doorstep. The transdimensional menace they fought in 1908 (and demolished over Tunguska with a blast from Tesla's Wardenclyffe Tower installation) has manifested again...