Apologies if this has been shared here before, but it's pretty brilliant.

When shepherds get bored (no, not like that you sicko).

Well, Patrick, I'm not surprised. I mean, you play in a band, so you're in show biz, and the axiom is "The Show must go On!"

OMG, Eric. Thank you.

PNH: Hope you caught up to the others eventually, or that you're adjusting to your new life on the polder.

I saw a mouse!

Are we sure that Don Quixote didn't travel to Holland at some point in his life? The giant kneeling by the water seems familiar somehow...

More information about the windmill in het Twiske.

Eileen @3:
Although Patrick did indeed reappear, we hope to yet convince him to don some clogs, shave off his beard, and settle more completely into the Dutch lifestyle. He's already there in terms of both cheese and genever.

Today we celebrated Teresa's birthday with homemade chocolate ice cream, a sadly off-key rendition of "lang zal je leven", and the ceremony of shaking hands with the relatives of the jarige Job (birthday celebrant)*.

-----
* Presumably to congratulate them for putting up with the person for the last year†.
† I may not have this custom quite right. I blame the genever that Patrick introduced into the household.

You could have blamed the crooked horizon line on subsidence.

* * *

MFB! GDMFSOB!

After nagging the HR department at work, I finally got a corrected version of my W-2 form. Settled in to do my taxes. Discover in my inbox email from E*Trade, the online broker, telling me there was a corrected 1099-DIV waiting for me.

Ah, what great timing!

I downloaded the PDF and printed it out.

And it is blatantly wrong. As in, the several AHEM COUGH AHEM dollars of dividends received and foreign taxes paid DISAPPEARED from the tally.

This is information they send to the IRS.

A can buried in the yard seems a more and more attractive alternative to banks.

Abi, #6: Yes, because your household is so perfectly representative of "the Dutch lifestyle." And when are we going to see the mounds of cheese that, I'm reliably informed, hold back the North Sea?

Stefan Jones: At the moment, a can buried in the back yard looks like it would be a better Treasury Secretary.

PNH @8:
Yes, because your household is so perfectly representative of "the Dutch lifestyle."

You are absolutely correct; we are not sufficiently Dutch. Thus do we need you to go forth, settle in, and then return and show us the True Path of the Low Countries, with clogs and cheese and a great big mustache.

I think Abi has me confused with a Dutch version of Steven Brust. Or perhaps the Super Mario Brothers.

Europe, it's very confusing.

Did you say Comedy! Tonight!, Patrick?

Hey there, Making Light folks. Some of you know that I and my partner, Ericka Johnson, are currently struggling to save our house from foreclosure. The whole story is on the profile page of the LiveJournal community created to organize the auctions for our benefit.

There are some great things up for auction: Books, art, jewelry, DVDs, a book dedicated to Your Name, craft materials, a cool hat and more! Stop by and have a look.

(If you feel so moved, you can also send donations directly to me by PayPal. There's a button for that on the community profile page.)

We now return you to your regularly scheduled shepherding and biking adventures.

Patrick is still in happy ignorance of the ancient Dutch tradition of excessive mustache-growing.

It's bliss, I'm sure.

Ah, the glorious Hierarchy of Beards.

Good on the Dutch for maintaining the diversity of one of humanity's sillier obsessions. Likewise, I understand the Belgians have taken responsibility for beef jerky, Carpenters B-sides, and pogo sticks.

It's a hard world. Everyone needs to take responsibility for part of it.

I like beef jerky.

Dave Bell @ 4: Where?

The Dutch have enthusiasm, but they just don't have the competitive spirit to shake German dominance at the World Beard and Moustache Championships.

Happy Birthday, Teresa!

abi @ 10... clogs and cheese and a great big mustache.

Personally I don't think a great big mustache is quite you.

(Say... Is the abiveld the real reason why Patrick had this happen to him?)

I fixed the crooked horizon and tweaked the exposure:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/heckblazer/3374254476/

Hope you don't mind.

I like Carpenters b-sides. Also beer.

What, no number-related tidbits in this thread? Okay, I'll start:

121 is the third row of Pascal's Triangle. What I like to do with a Pascal's Triangle is divide every number by some n and use only the remainder. This means that as the triangle grows you get larger and larger triangular areas filled with zeroes, until it starts to look rather like a Sierpinski triangle.

More mundanely, 121 is the number I have to dial to pick up my voicemail.

And apparently, "One point twenty-one jiggawatts!" is the precise power of a lightning bolt that strikes the clock tower at exactly 10:04pm. Combine that with a car that's passing exactly the right point at exactly the right speed at exactly the right time, and I start to wonder why I still like that film so much when it stretches my suspension of disbelief to that extent.

Patrick #11: You'd need a different kind of hat then, wouldn't you?

abi #6: Oude genever, by any chance?

I like genever, but the only Dutch guy I ever asked about it said "yuck, no, I prefer tequila."

Judging from your comically offended tone, I assume you're not typing this in a Comedy! Tonight! full body cast with your only free appendage, your left toe?

I'm sure some people are curious whether you were wearing your helmet.

That windmill is obviously the hideout of a gang of villains from the Adam West Batman show.

Tony Zbaraschuk #5: Are we sure that Don Quixote didn't travel to Holland at some point in his life?

He's also been to the US.

I've got a bottle of young genever in my freezer. Alas, it's almost empty. I've got an almost full bottle of old genever because I really don't like it that much.

And, alas, my next trip to Europe won't get me anywhere near the Netherlands, or the mainland for that matter.

I think I could live in Amsterdam or its environs pretty easily. Or Berlin.

I hope the rest of the trip involves less cyclo-aerobatics.

Information for John McPhee fans — he's a lacrosse nut. He has an article about the sport in the March 23rd New Yorker: Spin Right and Shoot Left. The link goes to a snippet. You must register to read the full article.

There are just 62 days left until the next International Beard and Mustache Championships. If you haven't started growing one yet, it's probably too late.

But Patrick, have you had the raw herring yet? I'm going to be in Amsterdam for a weekend in May, and I'm almost looking forward to the herring more than my cousin's wedding.

Er. I just realized that could be misunderstood, so to clarify: I'm very much looking forward to both the wedding and the herring.

No raw herring yet, alas.

Heresiarch #27: As far as I can tell, the only cyclists in the Netherlands who wear helmets are sport racers. It's difficult to convey quite the range of human activities that are conducted while riding bicycles; as I observed in a conversation, pretty much everything up to, and possibly including, backyard barbecues.

Oh, and heckblazer, #21: Lovely job. I felt under the circumstances that I should post the photo unedited, but your version actually looks better.

Patrick @ 35... You must cut down the mightiest tree in the forest... WITH... A HERRING!

James MacDonald @ #32, if I entered the mustache portion of the contest at least I'd be starting with a clean lip.

(It feels very odd to drink soup or eat corn on the cob with no strainer attached below my nose.)

Happy Birthday Teresa!

VictorS @ 22: I like Carpenters B-sides too. Well, Mary Chapin Carpenter's, anyway. Pour me a beer, please.

I would just like to state for the record, right here and now, that this is the third site I've tried out with Google Chrome and I am utterly bowled over.

I had no idea Firefox had gotten so sluggish.

Ask me again about Google Chrome if NoScript and Adblock ever get ported to that browser. heh.

Cheese? Check. Bicycles? Check. Genever? check.
Windmills? Check. Brown cafes? On agenda.

Ice-skating is ruled out by seasonal constraints. Tulips are unavoidable (seasonal constraints).

That seems to leave herring, dropjes and stroopwafels on the list of essential experiences.

Happy Birthday, Teresa! Wish I could be there.

My brother has just returned from Amsterdam sporting a magnificent Van Dyck (or possibly Frank Zappa) style beard and moustache. Clearly this is the influence of the Netherlander love of facial topiary.

On the other hand he's been in various central asian countries for the last 15 months so it may be representative of an Uzbek or Azeri fashion for all I know.

#26: Jenever (note spelling) is something that's thought of as an old man's drink over here until a few years ago, with the stereotypical consumer being the retired worker or fisherman or somebody like that ordering a "kopstootje" (beer + jenever (in separate glasses of course)) at his local.

Then the yuppie distilleries like Ketel 1 revamped it and its slowly becoming popular again.

Neil Willcox @ 44... Has Dick Van Dyke ever been seen sporting a Van Dyck?

Thomas @ 42... I guess tulips were bound to be brought up, even in passing. After all, isn't this where the expression 'to pay tulip service' comes from?

One does wonder whether Serge has the stamena to keep going with these puns...

Put the petal to the metal, as the saying goes...

The trouble is, if things go too far, it could be pistils at dawn...

For those who aren't watching the "recent comments" list on the side of ML (as I often don't):

Marilee has waved hello from the rehab center in an old thread, and hopes to be going home Tuesday or Wednesday.

Very loosely related to Martin Wisse @45, IMO it's kind of funny how sometimes, hipsters from one country discover something from another country's culture that hipsters from that other country tend to find horribly un-hip. (The standard example I can think of is many US hipsters' interest in European soccer teams.)

"Let us go to the banks of the ocean
"With the sunrise above the Zuider Zee
"Long ago I used to be a young man
"And dear Margret remembers that for me"
--refrain from a song, -- The Dutchman--?

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Are there lots of artisanal breads over there?
After all, in the Netherlands one excepts the natives to do everything with flours....

Michael I @ 48... I see that you rose to the occasion.

Serge #52: And here I was expecting you to get your iris up, or something like that. Amaryllis happy to see your moderate response to Michael's peony, I mean punning.

In an entirely different discussion space than fibrous joke nettings and pleasure travel....

++++++++++++++++++
I've been trying to come up with a sonorous (I can't think of the actual word I want-- onomatopeia perhaps? -- I've been trying to come up with a term with r-- to use as phrase such as "Roadblock Republicans" or "Roadwreck Republicans" that carries connotations and denotation of intentional hypocritical obnoxious malicious obstructionism and vandalism (vandalism isn't a strong enough word, the term I want instead carries more the meaning of intentional vicious destruction and damage for purposes of spite and scorched-earth policy/attitude--hmm, earth-scorching is one of those type-terms....). Anyway, the Noose Media (which has about as much honesty as Karl Rove and Rush Limbaugh)is playing stovepipe broadcasting all the lies and smears and accusations of the the fascists who lost their illicitly acquired control of the White House (but has all those abominable "burrowed in" S/t/a/l/i/n/i/s/t/s (can you tell that I've forgotten the code for doing a strikeout?!) fascist apparatchiks in alleged Civil Service (who were 2001-2008 political appointees moved into permanent Civil Service positions the last few months of the Misadministration) positions continuing to work their evil vicious damages on the world) and lost the majority in Congress....

Hmm, in all the derisive dicussions of Evil Overlords in fantasy and science fiction, little time and attention gets places on their syncophants, supporters, handlers, and all the appartchiks and minions and adherents and associates and subordinates and affiliates constituting the facilitating and sustaining network.

Translating the above--an evil overlord doesn;t exist in a vacuum. If nobody carried out the evil overlord's policies at lower levels and nobody implemented them, the evil overlord couldn't exist as an evil overlord...

The current arc in Girl Genius (which I finally started reading a few months back after years of other people extolling it.... wasn't the right time until recently for me to read it) applies--Zola is a willing front person for the conspirators/backers with power and money and wealth and influence to stage a giant powergrab. It didn't occur to me until just now but Zola seems to have more than a trivial amount in common with That Twerp who occupied (and I do mean "occupied" the White House for eight years.... Anyway, there are the enforcers surrounding Zola who follow her directions and who were detached to her/assigned by the wealthy and powerful to accompany her--theyre doing it willingly and they follow her orders to assault to, to enter the Castle, etc., and they're -scary- -- they're vicious enforcers, and those who get in their way, -splat-. On they other hand, they're being expended, too... but none of them seems to have any interest in defecting/peeling off. And Zola's backers are arrogant and wealthy and powerful and offensive to anyone saying, "This does not seem like a good idea..."

But back out of analogy:

The US Republican Party is the home of warmongering greedy socially irresponsible environment-destroying slavery-loving fascists, who make pre-Revolutionary French aristocrats look like radically active democrats....

=======

And on a related note, reported from someone on a a newsgroup I'm on that people sometimes mention politics on:

Startling admission made during public hearing in CA to consider decertification of the company's voting and tabulation software...

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=6995

Would the Democratic Party and the organizations of lawyers (such as the one that stood up in public with accusations that the US Government was contrary to federal law at the most basic national constitution level giving illegal orders at the highest levels and stovepiping them down the Department of (in)Justice and demanding the Judge Advocate General corps (the lawyers) in the US military implement and carry out and distribute the orders to arrest without warrants and authorize torture upon them)please charge Diebold with fraud and criminal violation of US law, election tampering, gross negligence, coverup, and all the rest of that stuff??!!!

(Personally, my feeling is that there are bunch of people who for the actions and policies in force from before 2001 -- the plots that put the fascist front man into federal office didn't start on Jan 20 2001....-- deserve the treatment Vir wanted--and got-- for Mr Morden... Mr Morden was a much less evil and evilly-intentioned fellow, there was some core of decency and kindness in him, though his choices and decisions and self-interest otherwise, mostly overwhelmed it.... It doesn't seem at all that sort of thing regarding Rove, Cheney, etc.

Paula Lieberman @ 51, artisanal breads -- I've seen desem bread in Holland. Definitely worth keeping an eye out for.

As I write this, the Amsterdam meet-up is in full swing. I VERY much wanted to come and meet everyone (and show off my nearly-finished Laminaria), but it didn't work out. Enjoy! And happy birthday, Teresa!

Paula Lieberman @ 54...

But was the Twerp, like Zola, involved in a scheme to raise giant squid in the sewers?
Oh.
Wait.

Here are the fragments of this oldest tale
in our large repertoire: silver in tone,
golden in spirit, force that cannot fail.

Each child will gather sand in a small pail
to build a castle, imitating stone:
here are the fragments of this oldest tale,

how we begin to lay a proper trail
for you to follow, once the flower's blown;
golden in spirit, force that cannot fail

to show the wary how to raise the veil
gaining what's wanted without angry moan;
here are the fragments of this oldest tale

fresh as we heard them, ready to inhale
into our deepest parts; so we atone,
golden in spirit, force that cannot fail

now that we're ready, to reach due scale
conquering all that we could hope to own.
Here are the fragments of this oldest tale,
golden in spirit, force that cannot fail.

Talking of Amaryllis, can anyone help with the following:

I have three amaryllis, all of which have grown and been repotted several times, and which have developed side bulbs. This year they are producing four, five and two stems (including those from side bulbs). I want to separate the larger side bulbs off into new pots. However, all the info. I've been able to find talks about separating them in October or thereabouts, once the leaves have died back - and for the past two or three years the leaves have not died back. Suggestions? I keep them in the guest room (to keep them safe from the cats), with the heating on only low in the winter, which theoretically should encourage them to die back. I could try further reducing watering in September or October, but I don't want to harm them by stopping watering while the leaves are still growing.

Paula @ 54
Did you mean "alliteration"?
Personally, I think that, as the less evil group, we should be sensitive to minority feelings, and use politically-correct terms like "Rugose-Squamous-Republicans".

Wrt your rant about the steadfastness of henchmen: many of them have their eyes fixed firmly on the prize (gold, power, or sex-objects) they've been promised. It's greed that keeps them chained to their masters; when things get bad they tell themselves that there's just this one more obstacle to overcome, one more evil to commit, and the prize will be theirs. And they tell themselves they are the meanest mothers in the valley, and cannot lose; they can't imagine any future in which theirs is not the boot and ours is not the face.

Fragano @ 54

Very nice. I love it when the term ends and you don't have to read the horrible things your students think are English, but can write some beautiful ones yourself.

While we're on Holland...

I've been investigating the shelves of the library where I work, to see if what we have is adequate to support what our students and faculty are doing, and this month it was History. It turns out that we have very little on Holland. We don't teach any classes on Dutch history, but we need to have something -- anyone want to recommend the top five must-have books for Dutch history?

Serge @ 46
Has Dick Van Dyke ever been seen sporting a Van Dyck?>

Only the alternate universe Dick Van Dyke.

dcb, I'd say after they bloom and stop growing, dig them up and separate them to the extent that the bulbs are willing to separate. 'Not growing right now' is probably the best you can get. (I had to whack the stems on my lilies to get them dormant enough to dig and chill them a few weeks and convince them it was really winter. Or, as I describe it, finding the five minutes the plant is dormant enough to prune.)

Paula Lieberman @ 51:

"Let us go to the banks of the ocean
"With the sunrise above the Zuider Zee
"Long ago I used to be a young man
"And dear Margret remembers that for me"
--refrain from a song, -- The Dutchman--?

Yes, that song is "The Dutchman". I always assumed that it was written by Steve Goodman, but according to Wikipedia, it was written by Michael Peter Smith. I've only heard it performed by Goodman.
Steve Goodman was a wonderful songwriter and performer from Chicago. His most famous song was "The City of New Orleans", as performed by Arlo Guthrie. I saw him perform in about 1979, and he put on a great show. Sadly, he died of cancer in 1984.

Bruce Cohen @ 62... the alternate universe Dick Van Dyke

...whose brother Jerry starred in My Mother the Monster Car.

Steve Goodman?

What are the odds. I've just come back from the pub where the Making Light meet was held and we got talking about Steven Goodman when a French song to the tune of his "The City of New Orleans" came on the stereo.

Quick report: it was fun, with several lurkers supporting us in e-ma^walcohol. Apart from PNH, TNH and Abi, present were my good self, my partner Palau, Thomas, Aron (sp?) from Boston who was in Frankfurt anyway and used his railpas to get to Amsterdam, Auke (a Dutch lurker) and Bo (sp?) (another one, who promised to get posting here), as well as Steve Glover and his partner Jenny. Drinks were had, Dutch pub food was tried and merry was made.

61: Tony Zbaraschuk asked:

anyone want to recommend the top five must-have books for Dutch history?

I'd recommend Jonathan Israel's The Dutch Republic, it's Rise, Greatness and Fall 1477- 1805 as a good and thorough overview.

Bruce Cohen (Speaker To Managers)#60: Thank you.

However, I've still got six weeks or so of term to go. And I've just been informed that "Emmit Til (sic) was drastically and brutally awoke by being drugged out his bed and killed."

Tony Zbaraschuk #61: For Dutch colonial history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries I'd recommend C.R. Boxer's The Dutch Seaborne Empire, a wonderful little book.

Fragano @ 68... I am beginning to get this horrible feeling that your students come up with such pearls of prose because they know you talk about them here. Either that or their communication skills truly are as ghastly as it appears. I'm not sure which is scarier.

Serge @ 70:

The latter, surely. The former at least means they're having fun.

Do they really not read what they've written?

Now I have a mental image of a group of thugs injecting a happily-sleeping person with some not-so-nice stuff, marching him off and doing him in.

Serge #70: Unfortunately, I keep getting students whose ability to write English is far below optimal. This is not helped by their deciding to write assignments the night before they're due.

They're trying, but middle and high schools no longer lay the basis for clear writing, and two semesters of freshman comp aren't going to fix the problem. So I get statements like this: The republicans and the general public main objective is Capital grain by any means necessary, no matter what race you are.

Capital grain is so important in these days of common grain.

Fragano @ #72, Capital grain sounds ricey to me.

Do they always write such floury prose? Or perhaps are wheat too quick with the rye humor?

I think that much of my agony could be avoided if they would just take a millet or two to revise.

Happy birthday, Teresa!

The photo and story together put me in mind of a pair of drawings I did in Rocky Mountain National Park, where I climbed up a hill with my clipboard tied to my back with a windbreaker and sketched looking down at the road. I went to climb down, and the clipboard slid off, teetered briefly on the edge of a rock, then gracefully let all its pages scatter freely across the mountainside. I watched in consternation, which turned to alarm as I realized that I was starting to follow it. I dropped to hands and feet, and slid off the edge anyway. My companions looked up when I yelled, laughed at the papers, and helped me gather it all up. Once safely at the bottom, I sketched the place where I'd been for reference, and later inked the two drawings in during a shift at the answering service. I think I used them for cover art in AZAPA, but I could be wrong about that.

I'm going to go listen to art spiegelman tonight, at RIT. I went to see his talk in October (I think), only to have it postponed until tonight. Looking forward to it, especially as the industrial-grade diarrhea I had from Tuesday on seems to have gone away. When it was raging, Cathy suggested calling the med center and telling them I was ready for my colonoscopy a week early.

P J Evans @ 63

Okay, thanks for that - that's probably what I'll have to do. I've a few months to wait before trying anything. At present, the first stalk has four beautiful flowers on it; the other stalks range from "just visible emerging from the bulb through the leaves" to "about 3 ft tall and starting to bud out."

The one down-side to having our beautiful cats is that one of them is a plant eater, so only plants which either (a) she doesn't eat (e.g. rubber plant, small-leaf Ficus) or (b) can cope with being eaten (spider plant) can be out around the house. The rest (amaryllis, ponytail plant, Tradescantia, dragon trees, Christmas cacti) have to be shut away in the spare room.

Serge @46 - Anthony van Dyck/ Dick van Dyke/ dikes in the Netherlands/ beards - about then we decided not to go any further with the puns; he was still jetlagged and I'd been working.

Bruce Cohen @59 ...they can't imagine any future in which theirs is not the boot and ours is not the face.

In an alternative interpretation, they can't imagine any alternative to boots in faces, so if you aren't the boot, you're the face.

Martin Wisse @45:
The bottle Patrick bought is labeled "Genever". Is there a difference among the spellings?

abi @80:

If you cross the border to francophone Belgium, jenever is known as genièvre. Its Walloon name is peket; Liège is known for the many varieties on offer.

A college friend has refused to watch any episodes of the new Battlestar Galactica. He was a fan of the original and thought that the dark and ambiguous new version was an insult. However, he was curious about how the new series ended.

I obliged him:

My Version

Captain Adama was visited in a dream by his ancient ancestor, the "real" Adama played by Lorne Greene. They used a combination of old clips and animation to do it . . . pretty amazing. This Adama told him to select twelve wives, one from each colony, and fly in a shuttle to a previously unknown 14th colony.

Meanwhile, Starbuck finished rescuing the crew and passengers of the Orphanage Ship from the Toymaker Planet, which was revealed to be a Cylon trap. The treacherous dagget which had led them into the trap was converted to Good by the tears of a spunky young orphan.

Apollo, leading the remainder of the fleet, fought a pitched battle in which the Queen Cylon was killed, but not before wiping out most of the Galactica's "Blue" squadron.

During the battle, an explosion killed the marines guarding Baltar's cell; the condemned criminal escaped and -- with the help of Count Diabolico, the Cylon assassin -- made his way to the hanger deck. Outraged at the sight of Apollo being hailed as a hero on his return, Baltar fired Diabolico's Energy Gauntlet at him; Boomer sacrificed himself to save his friend by leaping in the path of the blast.

With the death of the queen, the Cyclon began crashing into planets and fighting each other. Against everyone's wishes, Apollo saved two baby Cylons from lifepod and vowed to raise them on the side of Good.

Another lifepod was found to contain a message from Adama, giving the coordinates to the 14th colony, which is revealed in the final scene to be called "Deseret."

Nobody reads what they've written, or so it feels sometimes. It's not just the students taking a couple of semesters of college composition that they'd rather not be doing: it's professionals.

It's not that the latter can't write. It's that once people write a sentence, paragraph, or chapter, they know what it's supposed to say, and they don't stop to check that what they meant is what they typed. That's true of college students writing papers they don't care about, of professional writers who care about their work, and of people writing job applications and love letters.

But it produces some of the problems Fragano posts about. It also gets me manuscripts in which (for a recent example) the text says "raise" where it should say "lower." (These things are easily enough fixed by an editor who, not having written the copy, could see it a little more clearly.)

Even people who are good at this find it hard to proofread their own work. College students mostly haven't even been told they should proofread, and even if they have, they're not going to find a friend willing and able to trade off proofreading if they finish the paper an hour before it's due.

Meanwhile, a freelance writer may well be in, say, rural Delaware, or for that matter the middle of Brooklyn, but not have a friend who has the time and appropriate skillset to read the manuscript over before they send it in. Also, deadlines don't magically stop being a problem once a person is out of college.

This is, in fact, part of why I have a job: publishers don't expect manuscripts to arrive so perfect that all the editor needs to do is read it over, check off that the writer has, in fact, done everything we asked them to do, and hand it on to composition.

None of that makes it less frustrating when you're dealing with certain problems, and I realize it's much worse for Fragano and his colleagues. But "not reading what they write" is hardly the only problem there.

I'll be showing up later than usual for my regular Sunday night chat with a friend and whoever else wanders by. I mention this because it's conducted over a venue called meebo which censors so aggressively that the funnyman with the world's worst cockney accent shows up as **** van **** in conversation. Hilarity invariably ensues. It's easy enough to get around (I do it by inserting extra arrs: Drick van Dryke. Hah!)

That's odd. I use meebo.com all the time, because Macmillan's IT department blocks the ports and protocols used by free-standing IM clients. (Don't get me started.) And I've never run into meebo censoring anything.

Fragano @ 72...

Capital grain?
Moral fiber is what kids need.

Vicky @ 82

Proofreading your own work is difficult, and when the deadline is due and you're sick to death of what you've been slaving over for weeks/months, it's even more difficult. In my work I've had many errors (from transposed numbers to repeated paragraphs) spotted for me, thankfully, by other people. I've also noticed published work with missing letters: e.g. "plage" rather than "plague" in a running title of a book chapter; missing words: importantly, in one case the missing word "not" (I'd read the paper referred to the previous day so knew the conclusion had been opposite); repeated paragraphs and so on.

However, I think there are several factors which can compound the problem: lack of understanding of the meaning of words (poor vocabulary); poor understanding of sentence structure and punctuation; absence of care whether your words and phrases means what you intend them to mean, and over-reliance on computerised spell-checking, which will not catch the wrong word if it is correctly written, and may change a wrongly-spelled word into a correctly-spelled word - but the wrong word for the sentence.

I'm totally fed up of people who don't know the difference between "e.g." and "i.e." - and I see wrong useage of such abbreviations much too often in published scientific work as well as in documents not professionally published.

(And yes, I'm sure this post will contain at least one typo.).

It sounds very much to me like the problem is not that Fragano's students don't read what they have written. I think it's that they don't read anything, ever, at all. People who don't read prose have no sense for how sentences should go. They don't hear the words in their heads while they're writing them. It's like being tone-deaf.

I don't have any idea what this is like, any more than I know how to be tone-deaf or colorblind. But I observed it many times with my classmates all the way through school, until I got to a level where everyone did read.

dcb @ @ 86... There are only three persons in the group I work with whose native language is English and none of them is me, as people can guess from my posts. We have Cantonese, French, Mandarin, Indian, Arabic, Russian. Interestingly, we all have a good grasp of English grammar, probably because we had to learn it. Sometimes some of us slip and use the wrong word although it's easy to figure out what the person meant by looking for the phonetic equivalent. It can make the writer blush though when one points out that she should have written 'bear with me' because 'bare with me' could be interpreted the wrong way.

(This also reminds me of last year's Hulk when Edward Norton's Bruce Banner is hiding in South-America. At some point he is surrounded by thugs who threaten him and he struggles in Spanish that subtitles translates as "Don't make me hungry... You won't like me when I'm hungry.")

Serge @ 88

From the evidence presented on Making Light, you have a better grasp of English (grammar, vocabulary and spelling) than many (most?) of Fragano's students. I've come to realise, for example, that in order to paraphrase properly (to avoid plagarism in writing review papers etc.), you need both an understanding of sentence structure (so you can turn things around and still get the same meaning) and a reasonable vocabulary (so you can use alternative words, and recognise when a word suggested by a paper or computer thesaurus will change the meaning). You also need to recognise when to go with a quote instead.

Semi-literate students aren't that new a complaint -- there was at least one "collected essay" of those in print during my own high-school years (early 1980's).

If they've become more common in the past couple of decades, I'm inclined to blame those Reprehensible Republicans and their abuse of grade-school education.

Steve Goodman recorded several of Michael Smith's songs. I recommend to you in particular:
The Dutchman and Roving Cowboy.

I'm now going to be spending some time at his
site checking out the lyrics to his other tunes.

So I was just measuring the latitude and longitude of my new house (closing in three days!) to play around with solar heating ideas -- when I noticed how close to 40 degrees of latitude it really is. Just a shade further north, and it would be right smack on it.

So I panned north a little, then a little west... My Dad's chicken house is precisely at 40.0000 degrees latitude. My old bedroom is at 39.9997.

That's ... well, it's definitely open thread material, but I just had to share it with somebody.

Happy B-day, Teresa! (Belated, it seems.)

Thomas@42: You may have left off an essential \tourist/ item: poffertjes. Possibly also out of season as I recall them connected to beaches and vacations, but the only times I was in the Netherlands were Augusts so I don't have a broad sample; Wikipedia says they're available from March to September. Certainly not on any reasonably diet, but travel is supposed to be a time for new experiences....

Patrick: Okay, the horizon line’s a little crooked. So sue me.

Obviously, you were inspired to emulate Don Quixote.

Serge@88: I for one would not, solely from your posts, have known that your native language is not English. And I'm not insensitive to such things, either.

On students and editing: My students are required to turn in both a first and final draft of everything they hand in, each of which gets a grade. It's not just about writing sensible sentences (which they are pretty good at, to be honest) - it's also about teaching them the conventions of technical/scientific writing. For example, students frequently use the phrase 'observation x proves y,' which makes me, as a scientist, shudder. The first draft is usually heavily edited, but the final draft is then mostly graded on its content, with few edits. One of the nice things about this is that they get to see how editing produces a good report. And judging by how much better the first draft of the second report is, this clearly gets something across.

It's quite labour-intensive, though, and it really helps that I have small classes.

CHip @93:
We've had pannekoeken (pancakes). I did recommend poffertjes at the time, but we were hungrier than that.

Patrick and Teresa are going to be doing some touring on their own for the next few days; I'm sure they will consider poffertjes it they're hungry.

Poffertjes/schmoffertjes — they must have a rijsttafel!

#58 dcb :

Assuming those are florists' "Amaryllis" (Hippeastrum) cultivars, many of them don't go dormant under house conditions unless forced to, and they really do best if kept growing, so the best course seems to be to remove the largest offsets after the blooming phase has passed. Avoid over-potting &/or over-watering and all should be well.

Strike One: Obama Administration Supports Telco Spy Immunity

Strike Two: Obama administration sides with RIAA in P2P lawsuit

Anyone want to guess what Strike Three will be?

Earl Cooley III:

The Paulson/Geithner Bank Enrichment Plan?

Joel Polowin @94: Obviously, you were inspired to emulate Don Quixote.

Tilting at windmills?

Vicki #82: That's very well said. I cringe at the errors I find in my own writing, generally months after I've written it. Yet I proofread, and that involves a lot more than relying on spellcheck.

Caroline #87: That's the truth. I find that a growing number of young people don't read anything they don't have to read. When a transient summer-school student from a major public university challenges me for using the word "inimical" in class, as happened a few years ago, I find myself wondering what on earth is happening in the education system before young people reach me.

Serge #88: I felt embarrassed, back in the day as they say these days, every time one of my errors of either grammar or spelling was caught by my dissertation advisor. He's Dutch.

Open threadiness: I found this post on Felix Salmon's blog very interesting, and relevant to some of our previous discussions here w.r.t. the financial meltdown.

David Goldfarb @ 95... Thanks. By the way, how goes the planned move to the Lone Star?

Fragano @ 105... Everything Dutch?

"Casey Jones - The Next Generation"

Bad student writing, getting worse?

I think there's a case to be made that once it became necessary for everyone to get high school diplomas, the proportion of college-bound types who could write well would go down. Our (U.S.) educational system does a great job of educating the top 20% of students who would do just fine anyway, and does a mediocre-to-awful job with the rest. (Mind you, illiteracy is waaay down, as is/are high school dropout rates, so it's not all bad.)

Also, my writing skills deteriorate like hell as soon as I start posting in a conversation about other people's writing skills. So, sorry that this is so crap compared to what I usually do.

I don't know how my "then" compares with anyone else's, although I've seen some accounts which suggest that British schools generally dropped formal teaching of grammar before my time. Some of the things which some of you recount are nothing like my recollections. Sentence diagramming?

While my teaching wasn't all bad, I cannot but think that my writing and vocabulary have damn little to do with the formal teaching I experienced. I was reading, voraciously, and not the "Dick and Jane" sort of stuff. When, I wonder, did I first read Ungava. Was it before or after I read Treasure Island? I was reading old stuff, and not the old stuff which was force-fed through English-lit classes.

I wasn't reading the classy literary stuff, much, but the competent popular prose of the pre-cinema generation. Some of that is pretty dreadful: what would a modern editor think of the prolixity of Thorndyke's Dr. Syn? (Though the wordcount isn't so incredibly high.)

Forty years later, despite the apparent lack of formal teaching, I think I seem to manage. And I did get my O-level, lang. and lit., so my teachers can't be said to have failed. What I sometimes see in print is still dreadul. There's a cringe-worthy clumsiness to the phrasing of so much written for our modern world.

People assure me that I write better than that. Some of you here have asked me for copies of writing which I have excerpted here. But I shall admit to weaknesses, and not just in keeping track of the grammarians jargon. I was never, that I recall, taught anything about the overall structure of a work. Despite so many O-levels depending on writing a series of short essays in the exam, I have no recollection of being taught anything of that craft.

I didn't pass the history O-level. That was all essays, and the allocated period of history was pretty boring.

And what can you write in half an hour per question, which was all the time we had?

It wouldn't astonish me if, under those constraints, some of my writing was as dismal as that of today's students. But I got better.

"He used... sarcasm. He knew all the tricks, dramatic irony, metaphor, bathos, puns, parody, litotes and... satire. He was vicious."

I became not unfamiliar with litotes before I ever left school. But it wasn't anything to do with my teachers.

And I will admit to puns.

But I never mentioned the Spanish Inquisition.

Dave Bell @ 111: I feel the same way. I learned to write because I read everything voraciously, and copied it.

One thing I did learn in school was how best to structure a formal five-paragraph essay (and related forms). This was accomplished through endless drills -- in AP English we wrote in-class essays at least once a week. I learned that the only way to plan and write an essay in 30 minutes flat, which was the time allotted, is to lay out your argument tersely and explicitly, in almost newspaper-style declarative sentences. Before learning that, I tended to ramble. (This is also a good skill for scientific writing.)

I passed the AP US History exam, but not by much. It wasn't so much the essays; I just don't have the head for history that I do for literary analysis. I couldn't come up with the argument in 5 minutes, as I could for the English exam. (And I blamed Nixon for the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Still embarrassed about that nearly ten years on. I'm amazed they passed me.)

On the subject of writing that makes one wonder what, if anything, the writer was thinking:

I recently read an article in the newspaper about Stephan Elliott, who's spent the last few years recovering from a horrifying skiing accident. How horrifying? According to this article, he lost his body weight in blood.

Paul A. @113:

That reminds me of a student who wrote "Oxygen is rich in blood."

Paul #113:

I suppose his treatment was made more difficult by the way he kept shooting toward the ceiling, as a result of his now negative remaining weight....

In reviewing various emergency preparedness threads, for reasons that will become apparent, I found Jim Macdonald's query for "I'm looking for A Kit To Take if the Gas Company Guy says, 'There's a Leak, Get Out!' " If found, add to it the label, "What if the LAPD knocks at 3am and says 'Get out. There's a bomb next door!' "

What he actually said was, "We'd like you to evacuate as quickly as possible. There's a hazmat situation next door." Since they weren't grabbing people and flinging them out the door (as they did in the Sesnon fire recently), I woke spouse, got into pants, sox, shoes, and we were out the door with smallest gobag in less than five minutes. This live fire exercise showed a few holes in the kit, some already dealt with, others under review.

LAPD bomb squad detonated the device at 0530. No damage or injuries to report. I don't know the neighbors well enough to have any clue why someone would throw a pipe bomb thru their front window.

Thanks to Jim Macdonald, for your posts and lists and thoughts, and to all the ML family who comment their own lists and thoughts. The evac process went smoothly, shoes found, keys found, kit found, and out the door.

dcb @58: Amaryllis are supposed to have a dormant period, usually in August. They are forced into dormancy by witholding water. After the leaves turn brown, wait six weeks.

When the six weeks are up, remove bulbs from pots, divide and repot, adding bulb fertilizer to the soil mix.

If you follow this schedule you will have blooms at Christmas/New Years.

Paul A. @ 113: he lost his body weight in blood

Thanks, I needed a laugh. And if he'd lost that much blood, he'd be dead several times over. (Also, what albatross said. )

It's not impossible he could have lost several times his entire blood supply; people do, if they have to undergo major emergency surgery. You just have to keep pumping more into them until you can fix the leaks. But, yes, losing about 150 pints would seem a little excessive.

Paul A @ 113... Ginger @ 118... This reminds me of a line from the coming attraction for Jane Austen's Mafia, after a mobster has been shot:

"You lost a lot of blood, but we found most of it."

I read the Fred Phelps as Con Man particle with interest. I think it quite accurately describes how he and his 'church' make money and how they plan their events, but I disagree with calling him a con man. Calling him a con man implies that he doesn't believe the stuff he's peddling.

As a counterpoint, I found an article entitled Running From Hell*, which is an interview with one of Phelps's sons who managed to escape. I think that Phelps seriously believes what he preaches, and, even if he doesn't, most of his family has been indoctrinated to. The first comment on the post is from one of his daughters, and it is both quite telling and rather sad.

* Warning: the article has gone through brain-dead character-set conversion at some point in time, making it hard to read. It was UTF-8, treated as something else (Windows-1252?) and converted to UTF-8 again, so some of the punctuation is wonky.

Serge #108: I was simply pointing out his superb fluency in English.

ajay @ 119: The distinction here, I think, is the intra-operative losses which are managed with transfusions during the process, versus the loss of blood and subsequent transport to the hospital. The latter generally results in a lack of good outcome. [There was a case of shark bite a few years back, where the shark hit the boy's thigh and he bled out on the beach. He's alive, but seriously brain-damaged.]

Keep in mind that even intra-op losses, if too large, are dangerous, as the patient is at ever-increasing risk for DIC (disseminated intravascular coagulation), and death.

abi, I had an American friend (from the US. USian?)who spent a year or two in The Netherlands. He had a beard similar to Patrick's which he shaved when he learned the Dutch name for said beard.

Can you confirm, as I've always assumed he was pulling my leg, the the Dutch phrase for a goatee is a reference to "Parting the C@%T"?

My initial shock was replaced by skepticism. However, slang words are often derived from innocent sources, so who knows?

CHip@93

Good point. I saw a van selling poffertjes on Saturday morning, so they aren't completely out of season.

Dave Bell @ 111:

If English grammar is still thoroughly taught, I missed it in bouncing around different countries' educational systems. I think I learned more about English grammar in Latin, French and Spanish classes than I ever did in English.

Caroline @ 112:

I had the same experience as you for practicing to write AP English essays. I don't think that it was quite as simple as simple, declarative sentences, but it was pretty lean. It also helped that they all pretty much followed the same form. I'm a bit out of practice with that now, sad to say.

"He rolled a truck and lost his own body-weight in blood."

"Wow, wouldn't that kill him?"

"He was a delivery driver for the Blood Transfusion Service."

The best training I got for writing was four years of speech team, doing Impromptu. Walk into a room with an index card and a pen, get the slip of paper with the topic, clock starts. Eight minutes later, stop talking.

That and junior year AP US History, with a test every four or five days, AP test style, including an essay. I usually discovered my thesis toward the end, which wouldn't work for speech, but I remembered everything as I wrote it rather than before.

Caroline #112:

There were three solid years of school when I had to write a "composition", as it was called, twice a week. A précis, at least as often. A business letter, two or three times a week. I believe it had an effect on my ability to write. I passed O-level English and Spanish, both with distinction at the end of second form. I'd already passed the Jamaica School Certificate English and Spanish examinations with distinction (which meant that I was at fourth form level) before I started first form. Granted, I was never good at mathematics. But the constant drill meant that I had the basics of writing down early. Devouring the library as soon as I could also helped.

Living in a Third World country also meant that banned books got passed from hand to hand in high school. Banned meaning that possesion of the book was good for gaol time, not that the local school board didn't want it in the hands of impressionable children.

KeithS @121:

Louis Theroux did a BBC feature called The Most Hated Family in America. Reconciling their apparent niceness with the vitriol they spew is a jarring experience.

Fragano Ledgister @129, Jamaica bans books? What kind of books?

PNH @35: I scolded my Dutch upstairs neighbor for not wearing a helmet while bicycling. She commented that wearing bicycle helmets is very un-Dutch. I pointed out that Dutch bicyclists don't usually have to contend with American drivers.

Don Fitch @ 99, Lori Coulson @ 117

Two different approaches: "let it grow" versus "forced dormancy". Hm. I'll have to think which option to try. I admit I'm a bit concerned about totally stopping watering and forcing them to die back, but then I'm also concerned about damaging them trying to separate side bulbs while the leaves are still green. The leaves did used to die back (without deliberate forcing), but haven't now for at least two or three years.

Hood

Do not stray from the path.

They knew the forest in those days,
knew, and had reason to fear
old growth, vine-encrusted, blotting out the light
thickets tangling the route
no trail of bread to guide the way
the wolves that, in hunger, lose their fear.
Our forests seem tame
second, third-growth, monoculture, trash forest
all handicap accessible
with markers to teach us what once we knew.
I have walked the forest
alone
with only the stars
(fading year by year from the encroaching light of cities,
miles away)
and feared nothing worse than a misstep,
a stubbed toe
(do not stray from the path)
though it did turn out later
there were bears
stealthier than we knew.

We do not fear the forest.
Instead we fear the urban jungle
city buildings, vine-encrusted, blotting out the light
cold breezeways leading us astray
blind alleys, lairs where danger lurks.
Our predators wear a more familiar face.
I have walked the city streets at night
alone
over my friends' objections
(do not stray from the path)
under the brilliant summer sky
or the sodium glow of a snowy winter
and feared nothing worse than an obnoxious drunk
though it did turn out later
that mere blocks away
a human wolf was taking his toll
in those days
when I dyed my hair red
and knew that I would never come to harm.

I've just gotten home for work, and while I'm checking my email and packaging up a custom order to mail out, I can hear the skateboarding whippersnappers come down the sidewalk behind my house. The scraping and clacking sounds of them practicing flippy-whatnots in the cul-de-sac go on for awhile, and I resist the urge to pop up and glare out the window suspiciously. I'm not that old yet, dammit.

Then I hear,
"I can break this. Should I?"
"No."

?!

B. Durbin: I can be slow to notice people, but gosh, you're good.

Lin @ 116:

What were the holes you found? What was superfluous? Enquiring minds....

(BTW, my Go Bag inventory list is at http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/009528.html.)

(If the list(s) is/are useful to you, it's okay to copy, quote, link to, modify, or otherwise use 'em. Just please give credit. My guiding principles are: Cheap, light, easily obtainable, multi-purpose. The kit you put together is infinitely better than the kit you intend to put together someday....)

Raphael #131: Whatever books the government wants to ban. At the time, the banning orders under the Importation of Forbidden Publications Act covered a number of Russian, Chinese and Cuban publications, all books published by the De Laurence company of Chicago (those had to do with witchcraft and divination), anything written by Elijah Muhammad, The Groundings with My Brothers by Walter Rodney, and The Children of Sisyphus by Orlando Patterson. I'm not sure of what else, but that's what I can recall.

The Rodney book and the Patterson book, a novel*, had a significant underground circulation. So, I gather, did the De Laurence books, though the people who read those also were liable to prosecution and imprisonment under the Obeah Act, for the practice of obeah.

Most of the bans were lifted in 1972. Except, I believe, for the ban on the De Laurence books. Those were unbanned a little later, since I recall seeing books with that imprint openly on sale in 1973.

In 1981, a copy of the Encyclopaedia of Marxism was seized from a visitor arriving in Jamaica, and returned to him on his departure from the island. But, as far as I am aware, no order regarding this book was gazetted.

* The novel describes the first prime minister of Jamaica, Sir Alexander Bustamante, lightly disguised as 'Montesaviour', as two-faced: Sweet-talking an angry crowd of unemployed people waiting outside the Ministry of Labour, then orderlng the police to forcibly disperse them.

B. Durbin #134: Wow. Just wow.

Paula Lieberman... Your comparison of the Twerp to Zola is becoming quite eerie today

Patrick, since you're in Europe I suppose that all of your misadventures, bicycle and otherwise, should occur in the style of Hergé.

Open Thready: Girl Genius got a shout-out (a while ago) at a softer world.

#141: They'll need to borrow a small white dog.

emergency preparedness question:
let us propose that the power and gas are out, and i am indoors. if i just want a damn cup of tea/soup/thing-involving-hot-water to warm back up, how do i boil the water?

Shadowsong #144: I'm no expert, but I'd say get a can of Sterno, or even a camp stove (with suitable fuel).

Shadowsong: Camping supply stores sell all kinds of little-bitty stoves.

Sterno is cheap and stable. You can put the lid back on to extinguish it.

Buy a couple of small enamel pots and/or large enamel coffee cups to use with the stuff. Water comes to a boil faster in these than in a heavy duty pot. You could probably make a stand out of a large can.

In addition to a half-dozen sterno cans, I have a little stash of instant soups / noodles of the "add boiling water to get a hot meal" sort. I've seen instant mashed potato cups as well.

Patrick, thank you. I'm delighted you found my post of such value. I'm touched.

Jim @ 137

Quite a tidy little live fire exercise. I have plans for big evacuations, earthquakes, train derailments, where to meet up if evacuated, that sort of thing. This was an itty bitty thing, evac two blocks down the street, for a few hours. Nothing in the plan book for that. That is being corrected.

1) Spouse's 3 days worth of critical meds piece didn't include critical herbal things. It was ok for a morning to not have them, and they have since been added.
2) Planning on evacuating cats doesn't work really well if the cats have been frightened into hiding. Getting them out, and then into carriers was deemed too much time, so I made sure they had access to water and left them. Not a hole, precisely, but the feedback from ML threads caused me to do a fast check on long term water availability.
3) Spouse is hypoglycemic. We have a "you have 30 minutes to get stuff and leave" kit that has food in it. The "OMG get out right now" kit does not. That can be rectified by the addition of small bags of nuts hiding in the same place as the meds.
4) Evacuation plans always included car, because neither one of us is in any kind of hiking condition. Sunday morning, street completely blocked by police cars. Even with evacuation point just down the street, cats could not have been evacuated because we couldn't have carried four cat carriers. Thoughts on this include a fold-up dolly like cons use for supplies. Other ideas welcome.
5) There is a slightly larger kit than the "OMG get out right now" kit, but I didn't even remember it. It had food. It wasn't in an easily remembered place (it was in my car; when the car got vetoed, apparently everything in the car was filed in "forget"). I need to rethink deployment, or just rethink. Get my CERT buddy to toss WhatIfs at me more often. Anyway, under review.

Small items like my sarape is really nice when getting from one place to another. Not really good for standing on a street corner in a rising wind. A cat in a carrier gets really heavy really fast (we managed to get one, the oldest). Where do we evacuate for a few hours, rather than days? And in the middle of the night. We could get transport, but where to? Transport person reminded me of a mutual friend who's out of town, and we went to the apartment. And ate his waffles. The apartment was only a few blocks away, so I got to hear the *womp* at 0530.

Jim, your posts, your kit lists, are the first place I go. I'm building a kit from the ground up for a friend off on a serious road trip, and I'm starting with your lists. And all the comments, because they not only include what, but hows.

Mary Dell @ 141... Mille milliards de mille sabords!

From the FWIW department:

I have a backpack with a change of clothes, towels, and toiletries stashed in my cube at work. An overhead cabinet has a few packs of instant noodles. So if the zombies attack my neighborhood but not the next town over, I have a place to crash. (There's even a shower in the mens' room.)

We have a portable camping stove for if the power goes out. I think I could cook a decent meal on without much trouble. I traded mobility for a bit of stability.

If you want something really portable, a quick google of army surplus suppliers might bring up something. A hexamine-fuelled cooker, for instance. I think they come with the field ration packs.

At the other end of the scale, I've seen an Army surplus field kitchen trailer advertised at GBP 350. Note that the towing arrangements are NATO standard. But ideal if you expect company (maybe a bit small for a battalion).

Current kit apparently includes a metal mug and a matching hexamine cooker.

US readers will have different kit available. Terry?

B. Durbin @ 134

That was excellent. Really good.

I'll make sure to get some Sterno, then. Is it just propane and kerosene that you're not supposed to use indoors?

Pendrift, #130: Reconciling their apparent niceness with the vitriol they spew is a jarring experience.

One of my favorite Sondheim quotes is an important thing to remember: "Nice is different than good."

Stefan Jones, #143: They'll need to borrow a small white dog.

Apparently Snowy will hire himself out for just about anything these days.

B. Durbin @ 134

That's very good.

shadowsong @ 144

We have a 2 burner propane stove we bought in 1972 when we camped out 'cross country, moving from Boston to Sacramento (a 3,000 mile trip we turned into 6,000 by turning off to see a lot of scenic places on the way). We still have it, and it still works well for the occasional power outage. It's a little heavy for a short-term gobag, though.

Jim, your first aid kit list has SAM splint. What size?

B. Durbin @ 134: oh my
very very nice
thank you

KeithS@121: I too read the Phelps particle with interest. I stood with my fellow residents of Lexington MA in facing off against the standard minivan of Phelps-oids about 10 days ago. After training to meet these "hatemongers" with trial runs of very personal, in-your-face invective, the actual event came as somewhat of an anticlimax. There was definitely a feeling of choreography about the way they (the Phelps-oids) went about it.

The SAM splints I carry are 4.25 x 36 inches. You can always cut 'em down if you need to.

Oh, and I carry 'em folded flat rather than rolled, for ease of packing.

John Aspinall @157: I grew up in Lexington. What was Phelps doing there?

Back from the con, and slo-o-o-wly catching up...

janetl, #31: Did you know that there was a Calvin and Hobbes strip that referenced lacrosse? I found it here, the 4th illustration down; click on it to see a larger version.

Caroline, #87: Also, they have no sense that words on a page are in any way related to words that a person speaks. So when they try to read aloud, everything comes out in a monotone. My partner's daughter always got the best parts in classroom dynamic readings because she was generally the only kid in the class who knew how to read with expression.

David, #95: Seconded. Serge is both fluent and idiomatic in English, and the latter is much harder to pick up than the former.

B. Durbin, #134: That is fabulous.

J Austin, #135: You might get the desired results with less negative-energy expenditure by watching the performers and applauding periodically. Whether you want to applaud the successes or the failures is up to you.

Steve C., other folx within driving distance of Houston, and anyone else who might be planning to be in the area at the right time:

CHOCOLATE DECADENCE XXII will be held on Saturday, April 4, from 7:00 PM until whenever we kick the last couple of late-stayers out the door. Bring booze if you want it, and a chocolate or fruit goodie to share. Folding chairs are also a good idea -- sometimes we run short of seating. Drop me an e-mail at the mailto connected with my name if you require specific directions. For those coming in from any distance, crash space here is limited, but there's a Courtyard by Marriott two blocks from our house.

BTW, would the person from here who recently friended me on LJ under a nick that doesn't translate please also drop me a line to identify yourself? Thanks!

The hard part of the go bag is "two cats" - Cat#1 can usually be grabbed and shoved in a box and has a clue about how to live outside if he needs to; Cat#2 can only be caught with a group of 3+ people or simultaneous luck and trickery, so if there's a fire-like emergency we'll have to just leave the doors open for her to escape.
The earthquake supplies mostly live in the garage (camping stoves, heavy-duty water jugs, etc.), and shouldn't be hard to dig out if the garage collapses. My wife's meds live somewhere easy to grab, and mine are lower priority and easier to replace, though it'd make sense to get a couple days worth in a go-bag again.

Thomas@125: good to hear that poffertjes are already findable -- especially in this weather. (Boston's latitude is hundreds of miles south of the Netherlands', but today was barely over freezing.

abi/janetl @97/98: Poffertjes are supposed to be an and, not an instead-of -- although I wouldn't swear they would follow rijstaffel very well, and having them after pancakes might be monotonous. (Or maybe not; all sorts of things can come with pancakes -- including a former Revels colleague I ran into at a pancake house in Leiden....)

About the Phelps particle, the source of the text is from a message thread on fark.com, by El_Camino_SS back in early 2006 or late 2005. I haven't been able to find the actual thread, but an early quoting by another Farker in February of 2006 was acknowledged and replied to by El_Camino_SS. For those interested in snoping out the source at least there's some provenance.

Of course, I found the original link a couple minutes after hitting the post button. heh.

The grab the cat part of the go plan got a live trial tonight for a tornado warning. I keep the cat carrier out in the living room all the time so that he's not alarmed by its appearance.

Of course sheltering from a tornado doesn't involve most of the things that you need to take care of for other disasters. Weather radio, cell phone, keys, wallet, and cat. Come back upstairs in 35 minutes.

Lee@160;
I don't actually mind the performances, other than I'm just turning into my granddad, but it's the perpetual carpeting of endless cigarette butts flicked over my fence(into my tinder-dry yard) and the thoughtful, "I can break this. Should I?" from out by my fence.

Someone's recently wrenched my mailbox flag out of shape trying to rip it off, and though it's briefly amusing, the sight of the wood from my partial split-rail fence bobbing by every once in awhile for fort-upkeep (younger kids down the block)makes me wonder what they're doing to my house when I'm at work.

I'm not sure the applause would be well received, and I worry about my dog. Probably silly, because I don't think any of these things is intentionally malicious, or directed at me personally, but you never know.
Harrumph!

Fragano # something or other...

Years ago a friend remarked that his coworkers were "paraliterates" -- people who could read and write but really wished that they couldn't.... And they didn't like to/want to think, either. They didn't like to read, they didn't like to write, and when given suggestions such as "to figure out how much steel cable gets wound onto a spool, weight a known length of cable, weigh the spool before winding the cable on it, weigh the spool after winding cable on it, subtract the empty weight of the spool from the weight of the loaded spool, and divide by the weight per foot of cable."

That idea/concept was too complicated and advancdd for the managers and his coworkers to grasp....

In re: everyone re: Sterno, small camp stoves, and other means of producing directed heat in the event of an emergency: Since the original poster asked specifically about indoor use, note that anything -- Sterno, kerosene, a small camp stove[1] -- will produce CO, which, as we all know, Bob, is colorless, odorless, and a serious poison. Only use such in a well-ventilated area!

(Some time when I'm not late for bed already, I'll tell the story of my own live-fire exercise...)

[1] Serious love for the MSI Wind (ironic name, but whatever), which my hiking partner and I took on our month-long trek through the Sierras. Best part: it comes with a couple pieces of really stiff metal foil that you use as reflectors to increase the amount of heat that gets into your food, one for the ground and one to surround the stove and pot. So simple, yet so effective! It's the first camp stove I've ever met that sips fuel -- we never touched our spare canister.

I had a co-worker -- the company marketing manager -- who needed me to use a ruler for her.

Was folks like that that drove me to go to grad school.

Fragano/Paula/Stefan:
An acquaintance who works in Japan shared the story of a series of IT trouble-tickets opened by one of his co-workers because "Excel will not let me divide by zero." Her response to everyone who replied to explain why was along the lines of "That's Western math! In Japanese math I can divide by zero! You are in Japan so you should make the software use Japanese math!" He had saved the entire sequence of trouble-tickets because it was so boggling.

Clifton @ #170, is there an explanation in those tickets for why someone would want to divide by zero? That's truly bizarre.

Serge@107: Nothing happening yet. Katie's employers turned out to be very accommodating about start date, and Katie decided she wanted to attend a graduation ceremony. So our plan is to go back sometime around the end of April to try to nail down a place to live, and then move in the last week of May.

David Goldfarb @ 172... My best wishes for a smooth move. Off that topic, but, since you are a fan of Green Lantern, you might be interested to know that there is a direct-to-video animated film coming out this summer, and a live-action movie next year.

Tonight, Turner Classic Movies is airing a documentary on Chuck Jones. It'll be followed by some of his classic cartoons, including What's Opera, Doc?, which has the surprising sight of Elmer Fudd as a Wagnerian hero, and the not-at-all surprising sight of Bugs Bunny in drag.

That's all, folks!

170: obvious explanation of wanting to divide by zero; if you had, say, $120, and you wanted to know how many $15 books you could buy, you'd divide $120 by $15. Now, if you had $120 and the books were free, how many could you take? A Western response would be "as many as you want" but that would be selfish and greedy. How many, a Japanese person might want to know, could you take while still preserving wa, or harmony? Hence wanting to divide by zero.

Linkmeister, #171: is there an explanation in those tickets for why someone would want to divide by zero?

One possibility: say you've got a spreadsheet tracking percentages. You're getting these percentages by dividing a smaller number by a larger (i.e., 35 divided by 50 = .7, or 70%). You add a new category to the spreadsheet... but the new category doesn't have anything in it yet to track. Until you have some data the resulting cells are going to show an ugly "DIV/0" code.

It's a minor thing, but perhaps annoying to the chronically neat.

Clifton Royston #170: Oh, ye gods and small fishes.

Paula Lieberman #167: Eek! No Archimedes among those folks.

There's a solid clump of people who want qualifications because they need those in order to get jobs, but don't want to make the effort to learn, or to think.

Linkmeister, #171 et al: You might want your calculator to graph f(x)=(sin x)/x. It's no matter what the graph shows for x=0, random value or gap or big red splotch. But what you want coming out of it is a graph, not an error message.

For that matter, you might want to graph f(x)=1/x. Simple-minded cutoffs that omit the graph when it goes off the chart are easy, but you still don't want the machine to choke at x=0.

Serge @#149: Milliards de boursoufler les bernaches bleues!

Mary Dell @ 180... Bande d'ectoplasmes de tonnerre de Brest!

Don't know if any of you have heard of the rather shocking Killer Brawl at Sydney (Kingsford Smith) Airport. Predictably, some politician has called for airport security to be issued with machine guns.

John Aspinall @ 157:

I have yet to watch the documentary that Pendrift linked to so I haven't really seen them first-hand. I'm sure they have a system worked out and they have everything planned out to take advantage of as much as possible. I just disagree with the claim that Phelps is a con man.

Dan Hoey @ 179:

Yes, but 1/0 is still undefined, and sinc(0) is strictly defined whereas sin(0)/0 isn't. Besides, if you're trying to graph mathematical functions in Excel instead of just plotting a bunch of points, you're in trouble. Not as much as thinking dividing by zero is a good idea, but still in trouble.

Wesley at 176 is probably closer to the mark, judging by the number of times I've seen similar questions addressed on Excel websites. At least, I sincerely hope he is, because otherwise I'm very afraid.

KeithS@183, Dan Hoey@179

I agree that percentages of a zero denominator are the most likely not-entirely-insane use.

For other problems such as drawing graphs, this sort of thing is why God (or rather, Kahan and IEEE 754) gave us Inf and NaN. You don't need to throw an error on division by zero to handle it correctly. Pretty much any computer that won't fit in a pocket has hardware support for infinity and not-a-number nowadays, although there are some compilers that annoyingly optimize bits of it away.

Mez @ 182... some politician has called for airport security to be issued with machine guns

This sounds like the premise for a really bad John Carpenter movie.

Lin Daniel @ 148: Even with evacuation point just down the street, cats could not have been evacuated because we couldn't have carried four cat carriers. Thoughts on this include a fold-up dolly like cons use for supplies. Other ideas welcome.

A friend of ours has cat strollers that have two zip-up mesh cages apiece. Each person could push one, or cats could be stuck two to a cage if they don't hate each other. A quick Google Shopping search for "double cat stroller" shows about $250 new from several sources, or $50-60 used on EBay.

Thanks for the reminder that we need to update our go bags.

I agree with everyone else that B. Durbin is teh awesome.

Fred Phelps is a con man because he has no source of income other than suing people who violate his rights. As for combatting them, I like the GOD HATES SHRIMP people, but I also like the idea of signs that name members of the Phelps family, perhaps with pictures from public sources, and notations like "FRED PHELPS IN HELL." If anyone objects that they're still alive, the answer should be "No, they aren't." No further explanation given. If REALLY pressed we could point out that they sure look undead to us.

Is there any truth to that idiot's claim about Japanese math? I mean, was there a period in the development of math in Japan where division by zero was allowed/defined? Math is, of course, a universal absolute (just about the only one), but I'm trying to figure out how deep her delusional rabbit-hole goes.

I suspect that in reality she was just too godsdamned lazy to put in a check to ISERR(), and add another column. Supposing the quotient you're looking at is in A3,

=IF(ISERR(A3),"Ooo, Japanese Math!",A3)

Fragano (177): I learned that as 'ye gods and little fish-hooks'. I wonder which is original? And why the change?

Serge @#181: Ouragans de tonnerre de dix-millièmes! You have stumped me! (in regard to the common English for your Haddockism, I mean)

Serge @#181: Wikipedia has now educated me further, so I see that we are employing the same Haddockism. Apparently your French is more accurate than Babelfish's...

Xopher @ 187:

The only quibble I have is definitional. Phelps is a loathsome, hateful person, but I don't think he's lying in that he sincerely believes what he's saying and doing.

As for the Japanese math, it sounds like a typical outrageous excuse for doing something stupid rather than any legitimate complaint. I would be interested to be shown wrong, but I doubt I will be. I have occasionally seen misguided people think that dividing by zero should be the same as dividing by one, but their reasoning is, of course, a bit off.

The first Amazon review for the English translation of a standard 10th-grade Japanese math textbook says in its 4th paragraph, "The authors rarely state explicitly that division by zero is not permitted." Presumably this means that the authors *do* still state this prohibition, and that therefore it remains part of the basic framework.

(There's also a somewhat mindboggling history of Japanese mathematics here on Google Books, but it doesn't have any immediately obvious index entries about (not) dividing by zero.)

You know that "undersea volcano" that erupted near Tonga?

It was actually a Japanese fishing trawler whose accountant tried to divide by zero using a pocket calculator.

Division by Zero: Just Say "E".

Mary Dell @ 190... I was able to refresh those memories of my long-gone youth by going to "Les insultes du capitaine Haddock", a site that lists each of his insults in alphabetical order, along with the stories in which they were uttered.

All knowledge is on the internet.

Serge @194:

You might want this in your library.

Pendrift @ 195... Sapristi!

Fragano Ledgister @138, thanks.

Paula Lieberman @167, Stefan Jones @169, Clifton Royston @170- Unsere Leistungselite!

Georges "Herge" Remi passed away with one last Tintin book loosely sketched out. It has been finished by others. Canadian fan Yves Rodier made the art, and it has been scripted, colored, and translated into English.

I wonder if the other completion of this, the one signed as being by "Ramo Nash" (a character in this tale), has been fully finished now. There were interesting differences between them, owing to the vagueness of the outline both started from.

Anyway, I hope some of you enjoy this. It's a sort of gift for Tintin fans who thought they already had everything.

KeithS 191: Phelps is a loathsome, hateful person, but I don't think he's lying in that he sincerely believes what he's saying and doing.

Ah, I think we have an essential point of disagreement. The fact that he and his family make their entire income by suing people they've goaded into breaking tort law makes me doubt that he's sincere, or ever has been, about what he's saying and doing. He's utterly without empathy for his victims, but that's typical of con artists.

I think he just found a good scam and enjoys the notoriety. Some of the other members of his twisted clan may have bought into the whole bullshit structure, but I don't believe he really has. He's just a money- and fame-grubbing scumbag.

I really want to see this guy get caught in flagrante with a male prostitute. Preferably an underage one.

What about cases where zero doesn't exactly mean "zero", like 0 grams of trans-fat (which labeling laws allow to mean "less than 0.5 grams, rounded down")? You could reasonably expect to want to divide by that kind of zero, I suppose.

Or perhaps division by the letter "O."

Patrick @84 - Odder and odder. I'm wondering if you are using a version of meebo that you pay for -- we're on the free one. If it's not that, maybe you could stop by one of the Sunday evening chats and see if you can spot any reason it's doing it differently.

Julie L. @ 192:

The book on Google says a little about division, but, as a history book, it doesn't really touch on the finer aspects of things that you can't do. In the course of arriving at mathematics as we know it today, it took a while for people to recognize that zero is an actual number and not just a placeholder or a nothing. This is probably true of the history of math in Japan as well.

Earl Cooley III @ 199:

Then it's not really zero, but you don't know what the number actually is besides being greater than zero and less than half.

Xopher @ 198:

I'll admit that I don't know if he is truly sincere in his beliefs or not, although for various reasons it appears to me that he is. Sadly, whether he is or not, I think that most of his family have been indoctrinated.

I'm not sure that the way he makes his money makes him any less sincere. He purportedly has never been one for peace and love, and it's entirely possible that he discovered this as a way to cover his expenses and make himself famous.

This is not to say that we aren't otherwise in agreement. He does enjoy the notoriety, he does do it to make a living, and he is without empathy for his victims. In fact, whether he really believes what he peddles or not is irrelevant, because of the consequences of his actions.

I just hope that if he does get caught doing something inappropriate, everyone (and/or everything) involved consented.

I'm going to try to find the time to watch the documentary that Pendrift pointed me at tonight.

The phrase "for certain large values of zero" comes to mind. heh.

0 + 0 + 0 > 1

Whee!

Mary Aileen #188: I'd like to know the answer to that too.

Then there is Heaviside Operational Calculus, and there are transfinite numbers including infinitesmals and infinite integers and hyperreal calculus, however, I do NOT think that those get taught to Clueless Wonder math illiterates.... and especially not morons involved in Excel spreadsheet attempted abuse!

(Once upon a time a coworker with BS, MS, and Ph.D. in math from MIT was telling me that his software program was crashing trying to invert various matrices. "Did you make sure the matrices weren't singular?" I asked which--which is basically the same thing as checking to make sure there isn't an attempt to divide by zero.... Guess who hadn't checked to see if the matrices could be inverted (this was back when compilers and general software programming tools were stupider and less forgiving than they are today... modern software tools generally have that sort of error checking and zero-checking in them to prevent he software from going boom...)

Oh, I forgot.
There are those jokes about what countries to never get what from.

Something to NEVER get from Japan--space launchers, unless you want the payload to join the submarine failed-to-get-to-orbit satellite and destroyed in launch failures constellation....

Perhaps "Japanese math" might have somethng to do with that... do the math wrong, and you're going to have problems....

When we were singing "Up With People" songs in grade school, one had the line, "We are a nation / divided by none!" I always maintained that this made us undefined.

ps:
Click on my name to see a blog entry called "a billion and one blistering barnacles," with a link to a Tintin book (PDF) most of you probably have never read: "Tintin and Alph-Art," as completed by Yves Rodier. I tried it with a link, and it went straight to Limbo.

There's an article just above it that links, in the first line, to a collection of Sarah photos, because today is the 6th anniversary of the day we became a family. We call it "Family Day."

Kip W 2 207... a Tintin book (PDF) most of you probably have never read: "Tintin and Alph-Art,"

Heck, even I've never read it.

Has anyone pointed out Japes For Our Times yet? Middle English translations (and re-interpretations) of various comics... rather amusing!

Funny story there, David. Short answer: yes.

re 207; I knew of it, and I knew of the original publication in its unfinished form, but I'd never seen that anyone had tried to make a finished version. It's one of the only two Tintins we don't have in some form ("Congo" is the other, but having plowed through "Soviets" I'm not really sure I want to).

Kevin Riggle @168: Yes, indoors was the primary issue. I've actually been looking into something like a Trangia alcohol-burning stove. Any clues if there is a particular fuel likely to produce less CO than the others?

(Also, while laptops do tend to get warm with use, i don't think a netbook like the MSI Wind would be all that effective as a stove. The MSR WindPro, on the other hand...)

C Wingate @ 211... I passed on Tintin chez les Soviets when it was re-released in the 1970s. It looked very clumsy and primitive. Well, it was clumsy and primitive, but, aside from its historical interest... Besides, I always prefered the SFnal stories.

(Somewhere I have a western novel from the early 1970s that I won from being on a spelling bee TV show. It has an introduction by Hergé, which is amusing because the latter leaned toward the right, although not that far to the right, and the book's author, Frenchman Pierre Pélot, was an anarchist.)

Pendrift @ 130:

I just watched that documentary. It was interesting, but also quite painful to watch in places. I'm going to go ahead and write down some of my impressions and reactions to it here. This post almost certainly wanders into too long, don't read territory, but I feel like I have to respond to it somehow. Feel free to ignore it.

To get my one objection to it out of the way up front: at the beginning I think that Mr. Theroux interrupted a bit too much. I know he wants to ask questions, but it occasionally sounded like he was interrupting what would be an explanation. Not a good explanation, mind you, but an explanation.

It looks from the documentary that the family believes their message. It's possible that they're all putting on an act, I suppose, but it stretches credulity to believe that they could for a month of observation.

I am both amused and saddened by the young children. It's clear that they don't really know what they're doing and they're just parroting back what they're told, which is good, I suppose. They're too young to understand, and their parents aren't really explaining it to them. On some level I have to wonder if it's because the parents want to keep their children somewhat innocent, but on another I wonder if the parents themselves really understand.

At the same time, they are clearly being exploited and manipulated, and the outside world hates them. The boy who was hit with a drink at the protest learned that outsiders are scary and bad. Whether it was aimed at him in particular or the group in general doesn't matter.

The cheeriness with which the group members believe that they're in the right and everyone else is going to hell is a bit disturbing. The one woman who lives away from the family a bit seemed a little troubled by even some of the very basic questions, preferring not to think about them at all. Perhaps the cheeriness is a defense for some of them? As it went on, there seemed to be a bit of nervous laughter in response to some of the questions.

Phelps himself is— I'm not sure what to make of him, really. Sometimes it seems like he's a bit scattered and not quite with it; as if he's going through the motions. He's almost like a robot. He reads his script, then goes back to a state of semi-dormancy.

He doesn't take kindly even to the simplest questions, and seems to think that if you're not on an even footing with him then you shouldn't even be able to ask him questions. How are you supposed to learn? Or are you supposed to accept what he has to say as truth without question? That sounds like a typical cult leader. That sort of attitude might work to keep his family in line, but it comes off very poorly to an outsider.

They claim to be following the Bible. Some of them claim to read the Bible. They obviously are only reading certain bits of it.

Xopher, now that I've seen this I'm not sure if Phelps believes what he preaches, or did at one time, or doesn't at all. His family does, but he seems to almost be more of a manipulative paranoiac ruling through intimidation. On balance, I still think he does believe, but it's not the same kind of belief I thought it was, if that makes any sense.

I'm rambling too much. I'll let everyone else return to talking about fun things like Tintin and division by zero.

KeithS, I really wouldn't worry about tl;dr syndrome around here.

As for Phelps, I think he's setting himself up for martyrdom; one of these days, I think that he's going to meet someone who really, really doesn't like having a particular funeral disrupted and doesn't care about jail time.

Thanks for the kind compliments. It helps alleviate the symptoms of my poetry relapse (almost ten years poetry free!)

(Lyrics don't count... do they?)

B. Durbin

Well, all of the resident poesyholics are clearly going to have to contribute to the undoing of your sobriety.

Did y'all watch or listen to the Obama press conference this afternoon/evening? Best line of the whole thing (13 mostly vapid questions):

From the Obama press conference as live-blogged by the NYT:

[CNN's] Ed Henry follows up. Why did you wait days to express outrage [about AIG bonuses]? All the action is coming out of New York Attorney General’s office.

Ah, finally, a reply. Mr. Obama: “It took us a couple of days because I like to know what I’m talking about before I speak.”

Nice not-so-subtle shot at the cable networks, Prez.

Full video here.

Serge @213 (Somewhere I have a western novel from the early 1970s that I won from being on a spelling bee TV
show. It has an introduction by Hergé, which is amusing because the latter leaned toward the right, although not that
far to the right, and the book's author, Frenchman Pierre Pélot, was an anarchist.)

My impression is that Hergé generally tried to get along with everyone, and his politics were all too often simply a
result of who had the most influence on him at the moment. So it's not that surprising that at times, he might have
gotten along well with anarchist authors, too.

KeithS @214 They claim to be following the Bible. Some of them claim to read the Bible. They obviously are only
reading certain bits of it.

I Don't think so. One of the things I think I've learned in my time on the internet is that people can be very good-
even without any malice involved- at reading all kinds of things into all kinds of texts. And this applies especially
if people already have some idea of what they'll probably see in a text when they start reading it. By the time a
young Phelpsian reads any part of the Bible that many of us would see as a clear refutation of the stuff Phelps is up
to, that young Phelpsian will already be trained to read everything in the light of Phelps' claims, and he or she
will either interpret that Bible quote as a confirmation of what Phelps says, or simply not get the idea that there
might be any connection between that quote and the stuff Phelps is doing.

(For the record, I think Phelps actually got one thing right: If you really, strongly, without reservations believe
in the various traditionalist religious conservative positions about life and society and culture, it makes more
sense for you to hate America than to love it. Since I don't believe in the various traditionalist religious
conservative positions about life and society and culture, that doesn't matter to me, but I think it's a point where
Phelps is more consistent than more mainstream US religious conservatives.)

Odd- I kept getting two simultanous error messages whenever I wanted to post the last post- one from Moveable Type, one from NoScript- and I eventually posted it in a different browser. Any odd line breaks in that post are results of that.

Raphael @#219: If you really, strongly, without reservations believe in the various traditionalist religious conservative positions about life and society and culture, it makes more sense for you to hate America than to love it.

Indeed -- but that's not because of the particular religious beliefs, it's because America was founded specifically to stand against that sort of authoritarianism. And conversely, for any group to maintain that level of control over its members, the group pretty much has to isolate the members from contact with American society, and especially from any contact with the secular authorities. That's because the secular authorities would compete with the group leaders' authority. And that sort of authoritarian mindset cannot tolerate any competition whatsoever... (sound familiar?).

Also, I'd say that the question of whether Phelps himself "really believes" is poorly defined -- his brand of patent insanity involves actively attacking and suppressing any concept that would challenge his world view. If he were ever to admit any hint that he might, possibly, have Done Something Wrong, that would shatter his entire sense of himself as the Voice of Godly Authority.

... Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him. But the old man would not so, but slew his son....

The "Soviets" Tintin story was uphill sledding for me, and not snowy enough. I could figure out the slapstick parts, but then there were all these blocks of text. (It's like they have a different word for everything over there!)

The "Congo" tale has more sight gags and visual appeal. It's funny-ironic to see the little dark children worshipping their Belgian benefactor. Considering what Leopold did to them, it's not funny-haha.

I toss it out to the learned folk here: is there any handy translation online of the black-and-white books, or even of just the first couple? All I need is to know the words in the text blocks; I have facsimiles of the first dozen stories.

For something that later became exceptionally well-researched, the early tales are totally off-the-cuff improvised stuff. Yanks wishing for an idea of how far out the first two stories are should read the third, where Tintin visits an America ruled by gangsters and Indians, with car wrecks, billboards, and tidy little European mile markers along every road. Herge was so inventive, he even got things right in a couple of places.

Raphael @ 219... It may also be that Hergé appreciated being loved for the influence he had on younger generations, no matter what their politics were.

Kip W @ 222... Herge was so inventive

Ah yes, his vision of 20th Century America was bizarre. And yet it could be quite incisive, even in its most surrealistic moments: within minutes of oil being found where the Indians live, the National Guard is relocating them to a Reservation, and the kids are crying.

Tintin in America is just ludicrous, not to mention that it still has something of a "and then things happen" plot. There are times when I wonder how close the naive European picture of the US resembles the one Herge drew. Cigars of the Pharoahs is the first one that has a real plot, as far as I can tell.

Herge's politics rather conspicuously changed over the years, to the point where Picaros in particular is profoundly cynical. I suppose you could say that he was always a bit of a conservative to the extent of consistently preferring legitimacy of government (even Alcazar has some claim to legitimacy in San Theodoros); on the other hand, there is a suspicion of commerce and the bourgeous that perhaps reaches its peak in Jolyon Wagg, who actually manages to elbow Castafiore aside in the competition for most obnoxious character. Out from under the thumb of Fr. Wallez, Herge seems to me to have adopted no particular ideology, but he does seem to have adopted certain concerns which recur from book to book.

KeithS 214: Not tl;dr at all, and it makes a ton of sense. I could argue that all cult leaders are to some extent con men, but then we get into "not guilty by reason of insanity"* arguments.

Earl 215: As for Phelps, I think he's setting himself up for martyrdom

That could be what he's trying for, but I hope he doesn't succeed. Martyrs are hard to discredit, and Fred Phelps discredited (I'm still rooting for** a male prostitute) is the gold standard ending for trash like him.

Serge 224: What's surreal about that? Didn't happen quite that fast, of course, but relocating Indians from land with value to land with none was a habit of the US Government well into the 20th Century, and the Tears of the children have left Trails all over the nation.
____
*You can't imagine how tempting it was to type "not guilty by reason of Sean Hannity," nonsequiturial though that would be.
**American sense...though the Australian sense is also interesting in this context.

Raphael @ 220

If the error is something about suspicious cross-site scripting, I see that occasionally too. I believe it's the result of the NoScript analyzer being confused by a sequence of characters in the text you've typed into thinking it's found a Javascript attack from a separate site. I'm not sure what the cast of characters that can trigger that is, but '&' appears to be one of them. In any case, it's perfectly safe under the circumstances to click on NoScript's option to "Reload Unsafely", which will get you to where you want go with your comment in place.

Xopher @ 226... What's so surreal? After Indians have been ousted, a modern city has sprung up, so fast that Tintin is still wearing his cowboy outfit and the motorists look at him like he's some kind of weirdo.

If I were asked what my favorite Tintin story is, the Moon story's 2 books would be it, followed closely by Tintin au Tibet. That one has a happy ending, of course, but it's tainted by the sadness of a creature who has become lonely once again.

Xopher @ 226:

*snerk* Thank you for those footnotes. I needed a good chuckle this morning.

Regarding the general Tintin discussion:

I have fond memories of catching the cartoons on TV when I was younger. Unfortunately, I'd always wind up finding them in the middle of the story and then they were never on again until some time later, when I'd find them in the middle of the story. Thanks, BBC! I should go to the library and see if they have any of the comic books.

Serge and other francophones, how taxing would the originals be on my meager and now rather rusty French?

The Tintin books have been reprinted into a handy series of slightly reduced size with three books per volume.

The middle of the story is where I came in, myself. In the 1960s, Children's Digest was serializing slightly cut versions of the tales. I stumbled on them at the children's library in Fort Collins. They covered one volume per year, and the library didn't have a single complete year that I could detect. I made a checklist and haunted thrift shops, trying to get them all myself. Finally, in 1975, I found that Lois Newman Books in Boulder had the color albums, and all my still incomplete runs of the serialized copies (in black and white, with one added color per story) went away somewhere. Possibly to a farm, where they could run free and chase rabbits.

According to the Guardian's newsfeed, the former chairman of the RBS has been shown that the public may not wait for punitive action by the government over his pension and benefits.

I wonder if that's enough to "encourage" any of the others, as Voltaire would have put it.

KeithS @ 230... Unless your French is extremely meager and extremely rusty, the stories shouldn't be a problem. As for the cartoons... I discovered some of the stories thru the cartoons first, some the other way around. I seem to remember that he animation was so primitive that it'd make Hannah-Barbera's look like Fantasia but, hey, the kid I once was didn't notice and didn't care. Especially when they went to the Moon, when Apollo was something I had not heard about yet.

Bruce Cohen @227, thanks.

Re Tintin in America, ok, the tidy little European mile markers along every road are silly, but aside from that, keep in mind that it was written during prohibition, and at a time when neither the Indian Wars nor the Gilded Age were nearly as far in the past as they are now; and keep in mind that Tintin was never completely naturalistic, but usually had some hyperbolic jokes, too. (For instance, I don't think Hergé really believed that Latin American armies have more colonels than corporals, either.)

fidelio @232, err, no, I don't think vandalism against the homes of people I don't like is a good thing. After all, there are some people I like who are hated by many, too.

Raphael @234: The thing about the book is that it's a picture of America from outside, with great gaps in knowledge filled in with tabloid tales (policemen saluting masked thugs on the street), penny-dreadful stories (fierce Indians! lynch-crazy cowboys! Opium-puffing Asians!), and the rest uncritically imported from Europe. It's entertaining because even then, Herge's genius was starting to show.

For Americans, the book is a good indication of how accurate Herge was in depicting other cultures at that point. He started valuing accuracy later on, I think around the time of the Blue Lotus.

No, Raphael--I'm sorry--by "encourage the others" I meant other investment bankers and similar types, who may still be in doubt as to just how much blame and public aggravation they are the target of--going by remarks from the head of AIG and others, a lot of them still seem to be inside the bubble of Bankerland, where what they are doing, and have done, seems perfectly right and normal. We don't need to encourage the people who throw bricks and set fire to things--they're good enough at encouraging themselves as it is.

Besides, both riots and really big fires get out of hand all too easily.

fidelio @ 236... riots and really big fires get out of hand all too easily

Victor Frankenstein's family knows all about that.

"A riot is an ugly thing. NAQ V GUVAX GUNG VG'F WHFG NOBHG GVZR GUNG JR UNQ BAR!"

"WHAAAT?"

"I said I think that it's just about time that we had one."

"Ohhhh!"

#166

Natural pest control: plant poison ivy.

Xopher: RIOT-13?

Welp, as of about an hour ago I am the proud owner of a reeeeeaally big, cheap house. My sister is there taking pictures as we speak, and says we could probably strip the fixtures (like the original buffet) and sell them for $50K. My mother says the kitchen will have to be fixed before we even set foot in it. The seller's agent congratulated me by proxy for having bought it so quickly, and says if I want to sell it, she has a list of 14 people who specifically said that they would like to be called first.

Turns out that "carriage house" is indeed a two-story structure, and like many such buildings in Richmond, its second story has been remodeled as a small apartment. My sister says that it features a great deal of mold in the kitchen and bathroom, but -- rental opportunity. Or, frankly, we could put all our stuff in the carriage house while not actually living there, have an apartment to use while visiting Indiana, and rent out the big house until we're ready to move.

It'll be a month and a half before I can get there to see it. This buying houses online thing is frustrating. Ha.

I'll post pictures when I get them from my sister.

Mold? uh oh. You might not want to try to rent it out before getting a certified mold inspector to look at the place.

No worries, Earl. If there's mold, it will be stripped and refinished -- as in, no moldy drywall will remain (if that's the problem). My son's allergic to mold, and we do not play with it.

We've done this before.

I always figured that Tintin in America was set in the same world as the Brecht/Weill Mahagonny.

Abi is distracting me by showing YouTube videos of a Dutch Tintin stage musical. My mind is blown. I leave it to her to post the URLs.

(Why, yes, I am a total Tintin fan from about age 5, why do you ask? Coelecanths! Bashi-bazouks! Anthropophages!)

Patrick @244:
Your wish, sir, is my command.

Kuifje is the Dutch-language name for Tintin. The stage play, per Wikipedia, covers The Seven Crystal Balls and Prisoners of the Sun. It was produced in Dutch in 2001, then translated into French in 2002.

The website for the play, De Zonnetempel.

My favorite clip, Duizend bommen en granaten, (Billions of blue blistering barnacles); note the appearance of the key* character at the end.

YouTube has plenty more clips. Search for "kuifje zonnetempel".

-----
* or off

FYI-ish:

The early Tintin animated cartoons seem to have been all but forgotten by history. They played on NYC area TV on Saturday (Sunday?) mornings in the 1960s. (Often in horribly chopped up form.) I'm glad to read others have seen them.

A new series of cartoons was produced a few years ago. A college friend got a pirated DVD set during a trip to China.

Stefan Jones @ 246:

Sorry to disappoint you, but I've only ever seen (bits of) the new cartoons. (You and Serge both can insert a kids these days comment here if you need to.)

In addition to cartoons and a play, there have apparently even been radio adaptations. There's a list here.

There have also been a couple of live-action Tintin movies.

The same friend mentioned in #246 says that they were disappointing. (He's Belgian, FWIW.)

Abi @ 245... Oh goodness.

Stefan Jones @ 248... They were disappointing. Let's put it this way. In the 1960s, French cinema wasn't very good at adventure movies. Today is another story. Now, if Caro and Jeunet were to make a Tintin movie... I'de see Ron Perlman as Captain Haddock.

Kip, #240: 888888888888888888888888888888

Michael, #243: Once you're all renovated and moved in, will there be a Fluorospheric Gathering in the works?

Stefan, Serge: I have a film book of "Les Poissons d'Or." I can pick out a little French, but when it comes in paragraphs and pages, I glaze and roll over, so I mostly look at the photos. Tintin looks kind of goofy. Tournesol looked great. Haddock came in between those, more on the good side than not.

YouTube seemed like it had a clip, but on examination it turned out to be a recording of the theme song with a couple of stills for visual interest. Not enough.

Kip W @ 252... Les poissons d'or... Which one was that? By the way, I seem to remember that, a couple of years ago, Patrick mentionned that Spielberg would produce Tintin movies, and that they'd use motion-capture to reproduce the comic's look. Whatever happened to that?

I find motion capture in animation looks just icky if you stare at it too long.

For example the French anthology-movie Fear(s) of the Dark featured several animated horror shorts, and one was an animation by Charles Burns, which had live action characters autorotoscoped to look like a Charles Burns drawing, with lots of parallel lines looking like his idiosynchratic brush stroke textures. It was just too narrow-valley for me, as anything would be if it were all autotraced humans.

A friend of mine just emailed me, frustrated about a college class she's taking. Specifically, she's upset about the curve:

To obtain your letter grade for test 1, apply it to the curve below.

72 and above - A
71 - 60 - B
59 - 47 - C
46 - 36 - D
35 and below - F

This is for a test where they were given all the questions beforehand. Her grades are considerably above a 72, and she's frustrated that her efforts are being wasted.

None of my classes ever had a curve. Is this at all typical? I had the impression from TV* that curves were based in part on the performance of the best students. This...yeesh.

*TV's always right, after all. Right?

Erik Nelson @ 254... Motion capture has been becoming better. Good thing because Polar Express came off as very creepy, especially where the eyes of the characters are concerned. That being said, I think that Patrick had said the Tintin might go for the approach used in A Scanner Darkly.

Tintin meets Philip K. Dick?
Hmmm.

Lee: "all renovated" might take a while, from what I'm hearing from my local correspondents. I'll be in residence starting mid-May, with a clock ticking down for minimum residential capability when the fambly shows up on July 3 as per current plan.

Anybody wanting to come strike a tent in the formal dining room with me during the initial triage is more than welcome to see all that sunny East Central Indiana has to offer. (Note: the tent is a rhetorical device, as the roof is reputed to be sound.)

Seriously: a Fluorospheric Gathering would warm the cockles of my heart. Mi casa es su casa. Except that no, I won't give you, or sell you, any of my antique doorknobs. My sister already asked and the answer is "No."

One piece of good news: the hexagonal window thing on the second floor south side is, in fact, in a room (not at the end of a hall or something) so -- we have our library.

Patrick @ 244 and abi @ 245:

I don't understand a word of it, but it looks like great fun. They seem to have captured the look. If YouTube weren't blocked at work I would have to press one of the Dutch ex-pats into translating, and that really wouldn't be polite.

Michael Roberts, it is good that you mentioned the doorknobs, because I keep telling myself that no, I am not allowed to take the hinges from my kitchen when the lease runs out. I am not allowed to take the hinges from my kitchen. I am not allowed to take the hinges from my kitchen.*

Do you have red-clay doorknobs? Those please me beyond what is reasonable because of the Steamboat Arabia museum and the poor restoration worker who explained about porcelain and clay doorknobs every couple minutes for ages.

*other thrice-repeated phrases include, "I do not need a reef tank," and, "I do not need a house."

Diatryma, I have no idea what kind of doorknobs I have. I have never seen the house -- I just own it. (cf. my blog.) All I know is that my sister asked if she could buy some doorknobs, and I responded with a categorical negative.

There's a hole in the kitchen floor, though. So it all kinda balances out.

Serge, I'm not sure which one. It was a live-action movie. I hope I don't have the title wrong, because the book is still in a box, and it's not the only box. Was the Spielberg item that far back? I was thinking it was a more recent threat.

Back when I first found the Alph-Art completions, there were some Tintin take-offs called "Zinzin," about Tintin's evil twin and the detective, Lanceval, who keeps trying to stop his evil plans. Lanceval is not terribly effective, and Tintin and most of his friends (including Herge) die horribly (and graphically). It was well drawn. My French isn't up to comparing how well the volumes were written.

Three of the six albums by Exem are at this page, along with other parodies of varying eptness (including a translated version of "Tintin in Beirut," from National Lampoon). The Exems are linked on page 2. Exem's work is exemplary in its way, but certainly not for everyone. "Zinzin, Maitre du Monde" may be the best of them. The violence isn't as horrific, and the jokes are more apparent. NSFW.

R.M. Koske @255: Don't know how typical that is. IIRC, when I was in high school 75 = C, and A >= 90. Of course, that was more than 30 years ago, and doesn't account for inflation.

Kip W @ 261... I've figured it out. The movie you're thinking of isn't Le poisson d'or ('The Golden Fish'), but La toison d'or ('The Golden Fleece'). I remember very little about it aside from the text-heavy book. The other live-action movie, Les oranges bleues, had Professeur Tournesol breed blue oranges that were absolutely inedible - because they were synthesizing fuel, I think.

There were a couple of big-screen movies done in the 1970s that had decent animation, but they were ok, no more than that.

As for Spielberg... I think Patrick mentionned it within the last two years. One could get worse than Spielberg involved in such a project, but I haven't forgiven him for screwing up War of the Worlds.

R.M. Koske @ 255: None of my classes ever had a curve. Is this at all typical?

Based on my experience as a TA at two universities, the curve is whatever an instructor decides the curve should be, unless a particular department or school specifies rules.
In a very large class, the scores on a well designed test will make a nice bell curve, but in small classes the distribution can look pretty untidy, making it tricky to draw the lines. It's not uncommon to have some outlier, very high scores, well above the line for an A, and still not give out all that many As (though I've no reason to say that's the case in your friend's class).

The most unpleasant "curve" I've ever seen was in a music history class at Michigan State University:

4.0 - 100%
3.5 - 98%
3.0 - 96%
2.5 - 94%

and so on. This was not based on the statistical pattern of the actual scores. The way it was explained to me was that there are very few jobs available for good musicians, so there is no point in graduating average ones. Grade in such as way that you quickly eliminate anyone who isn't highly talented and insanely motivated. I think it was meant kindly: push those kids to change their major, and get a degree that will put food on the table in exchange for all that tuition.

Congratulations, Michael, on the house deal. I'm glad you've done renovation work before as that means you know what kind of trouble you're getting into.

The mold— ick. Mold is a no-go for us, but if there's brick you can, worst case scenario, strip is down to the walls and start over. I think the carriage house-apartment while renovating is a great idea. Id be a little leery of renting out the house proper if it's got so many salable touches, though, unless you get a really good screen on the renters.

B: The mold is actually in the carriage house, not the house itself. Since I didn't even know there was an apartment there, I don't regard this as a loss. I'll just strip it out when I'm trashing everything else that needs trashed, and repair it ... whenever. Pretty low priority. Apparently there are new windows for it, sitting in the building. I'm looking forward to seeing the pictures as soon as my sister finds her USB cable. (Grumble.)

What I'm actually going to find in the house, God only knows. I mean, it's basically livable with some plumbing work (I think), but actually making it nice is going to be a multiyear project. I'm 42. This is just about the right phase of my life to tackle this sort of thing.

That, or I'm just going to work harder earning money, and hire the Amish.

Linkmeister @ 218

Ah, finally, a reply. Mr. Obama: “It took us a couple of days because I like to know what I’m talking about before I speak.”

This has me grinning from ear to ear. Similarly, the phrases "I screwed up" and "The buck stops here" coming from our president's mouth warm the cockles of my heart. Not because I'm happy that these things happened, but because the personal responsibility is such a difference from the years of "mistakes were made" and knee-jerk reactions.

RM Koske @255:

That looks a lot like British grading, where the marking is harsher. I nearly fainted when I got my first essay back with a 65%; my tutor had to spend a little while talking me down*.

Time spent learning stuff, however, has its own rewads.

-----
* he had dealt with other American exchange students. He was expecting my reaction.

Michael, I don't know how literal "hiring the Amish" might be, but it's the general sort of deal which puts money into the local economy.

You might do better for your future neighbours than the politicians will.

Wesley @154: Into the Woods was the first Sondheim musical I ever saw on stage. "Nice" wasn't the right word, though - KeithS @214 described it better as cheeriness.

I wonder about the non-family members that joined the WBC. If they weren't raised in that atmosphere of heavy indoctrination, are they participating enthusiastically in something they well know is a scam, or do they actually believe the schtick?

Louis Theroux's faux-naïf style is irritating at times, but most of his documentaries are interesting. It reminds me of the Franco-Belgian series Strip Tease - an excellent show, often uncomfortable to watch. One episode followed an official delegation to North Korea, another showed a man who built his own spaceship. Plenty on Youtube (in French), but add "emission" and "RTBF" to your tags.

Re: Tintin the musical: It was later adapted into French and had a short run in Charleroi, in Belgium. There were plans to bring it to Paris, but they fell through.

The Hergé Museum will finally open in June after several delays. Hergé's widow has come under sharp criticism in recent years for her heavy-handed, overly profit-oriented management of the Tintin brand. (Tintin figurines are horribly expensive - easily twice or thrice the price of similar figurines in specialty shops.)

I've always been an Asterix fan, though.

The Phelps as scam theory has charm, but does anyone know of Phelps winning lawsuits? Or even starting them?

Here's a category of preparedness which I don't think is covered in the medical posts-- science fiction conventions.

I was recently dealing with someone with a seafood allergy who'd eaten some shrimp. A restaurant accidentally included the shrimp in a non-seafood dish.

However, one of the pieces of the situation was that the person with the allergy hadn't packed enough Benedryl-- fortunately, more was found quickly enough from an attendee. The hotel drug store was closed. The con had EMTs, but practically no first aid stuff. No one thought about the possibility of a 24 hour drugstore, even though one was fairly nearby. I intend to check on 24 hour drug stores near conventions as a matter of policy.

I'm willing to have some OTC drugs with me. Any recommendations?

A minor thing from sad experience: How reliable is Pepto Bismal? I've had it transform serious nausea into instant vomiting.

Another piece of it was that the person with the allergy talked about the possibility of their throat closing, at which point I went into "I must make useful things happen as fast as possible" mode. I didn't think to ask how much warning they'd get-- I was afraid they'd be turning blue, and *then* someone would call an ambulance.

Should I even be bothering with this stuff unless I get proper training? Is there a list of indications of when it's time to call an ambulance?

I don't think I did anything horrendous, but I didn't keep my head as well as I would like to have. Any advice on that one?

#262, Rob Rusick -
What you're remembering is what I had in high school and college too, going on twenty years ago.

#264, janetl -

Ouch, yeah, that's an ugly one all right. It quite likely would have worked on me, and rightly so. I wasn't cut out to be a musician and washed out after a year.

Though I think I'd have harbored hope if I'd failed because of such an unreasonable scale. As it is, I know I really gave it my best effort and it wasn't good enough, and I'm fine with it.

#268 - abi -

Hm. I'll have to tell my friend that. She made an 89 on the test in question, so she had the feeling that the marking was typical, the test relatively easy, and the curve astoundingly forgiving. But if she did well on a test that was actually quite hard, that's different.

Thanks all.

janetl@264

One of my roommates in college told me about this class a friend of his had taken.

There were 10 students in the class. The friend got in the range of 80s in the tests and the other 9 mostly got in the range of 30s or below. The friend got a B in the class.

The professor's explanation was that 1% of the class gets an A, 1% of 10 rounds to 0, so no one gets an A.

Happy Birthday, Mary Aileen!

Hey, does anyone remember the name and author of the 50s story where everyone was required to consume at least a certain amount of food, clothing, and other items? And if you fell behind, you were notified that you were below your consumption quota. As I recall, the resolution to the story was that a woman found a way for household robots to consume, thus ensuring that the economy would keep functioning.

My brother is involved in the statistical science of testing and marking in schools.

The problem is that neither tests nor students are consistent. With large numbers of students taking the same course as was taught last year, it's possible to pick out the effects of differences in test questions, and you can do things like having easier and harder questions, so you can compare the results for easy, or hard, questions with the overall result, and so test the test.

Michael @274, I doubt your friend's professor knows any curve-fitting statistics more subtle than 36-24-36.

#276 ::: Steve C.:

It was definitely by Pohl, and either "The Midas Plague" or "The Man Who Ate the World".

I got used to setting the curve in my biology classes, usually in the low seventies or high sixties. Most professors looked for natural breaks in the grade distribution every ten percentage points or so.

My first year, Gen Bio tests were every two weeks, and the scores were listed in the hall. My parents came, I showed them, told them my number, and I got angry looks. "It's out of eighty, not a hundred," I said, and the looks did not stop entirely. "Look at the other grades." Mine were at the upper end of normal, not great at that point.

My favorite grade-distribution test was in my calculus class (of doom), which I shouldn't have taken to begin with but I knew everything back then. The mean was 50%, the median 90%. There ended up being a fifty-point curve for those of us who really, really screwed it up.

Steve C. writes in #276:

Hey, does anyone remember the name and author of the 50s story where everyone was required to consume at least a certain amount of food, clothing, and other items? And if you fell behind, you were notified that you were below your consumption quota. As I recall, the resolution to the story was that a woman found a way for household robots to consume, thus ensuring that the economy would keep functioning.

I know! I know! It's "The Midas Plague," by none other than blogger Frederik Pohl. Galaxy, April 1954.

Thanks, Nancy! (I was kinda suspecting it was Pohl). And "The Midas Plague" sounds right.

Thanks, Bill! I love this place.

Nancy beat me by two minutes. Will type faster, next time.

Dave Bell writes at #277:

My brother is involved in the statistical science of testing and marking in schools.

I heard they named a curve after him.

Here's a way-cool site that shows off the solar system. Think of it as a web orrery...

Planets

Open threadiness:

If you're in the area and have some free time, the Trolls et Legendes festival will be held from April 10 to 12 in Mons, Belgium. It's about an hour from Brussels or Lille.

George Bush we're poor,
We weren't always poor
George Bush each day
We hate you much more
We want our rights,
Which you took away
We want you all busted
TODAY.

Note that Pohl's "The Midas Plague" is one of several stories in that world, collected in the book "Midas World".

Pendrift @ 270:

I wonder about the non-family members that joined the WBC. If they weren't raised in that atmosphere of heavy indoctrination, are they participating enthusiastically in something they well know is a scam, or do they actually believe the schtick?

I've met people who had that same sort of craving for an absolute, unswerving way of living life. They didn't go as far, obviously. There's something about a certain type of mindset that just needs to believe, and in the end it doesn't really matter what that belief is in so long as it speaks to them somehow.

That's my hare-brained idea for why some people do things like bounce from wild drinking and partying to some strain of fundamentalism, anyway, and I think it's probably applicable here too.

Serge (275): Thanks!

There is cake. Homemade. With cinnamon buttercream frosting. So I'm happy.

I don't know; I've always thought the "curve" my grad supervisor built for his class was meaner yet:

There are 4 questions.
Each must be worth at least 15%.
None may be worth more than 40%.
The total must come to 100%.
Please write your choice of grading clearly on the front page before handing the test in.

re 263: I found a few clips of La toison d'or on YouTube (blocked here, so I can link them). They are quite odd in some respects, though the fellow who played Tintin did know his judo (one of the clips runs through the fight scenes, pointing out various moves).

Worst curve story: For the first exam in MATH 411, we had half a bell-shaped curve-- the right half. I got the high grade, which was a 71; then there was someone in the fifties, and a few in the twenties, and it trailed off from there. The professor managed to adjust his exams after that to make them more doable.

Apropos of nothing: Dave Bonta writes of The genetically modified poem.

C Wingate @ 293... Is this the Tintin link you meant?

Michael, #257: Oh, there's no hurry -- I just wanted to plant the seed, as it were. That house sounds as though it would be outstanding for a weekend-long party, although you probably wouldn't want everyone trying to stay there; are there cheap hotels nearby?

Michael I, #274: "1% of 10 rounds to 0"? WTF? I would have been complaining to the Dean about any professor who stole my A on such specious grounds as that!

Dave, #277: Oh, SNAP! I'll have to remember that one.

abi@245: Thanks for that link. I was really impressed about how well they did the reverse doge hat haircut. In another clip, you see microphones in it, creating the appearance of a robotic hairpiece.

And Patrick@244: I imagine you were referring to the noir atmospherics and schizophrenic geography of Mahagonny, but abi's video also contains a bizarrely coincidental homage in the form of a crowd of women with suitcases.

KeithS, I concur. I've seen people who were raised fundamentalist Christian become "fundamentalist" Gardnerian Wiccans, the sort that never do ritual without reading it out of a Gardnerian Book Of Shadows.*

I was also at some pains to convince a young friend that finding the promiscuous gay party-boy lifestyle empty and unsatisfying was not really the same as having a vocation to join the Jesuits. They really seemed like the only two paths for him. My description of the middle ground (I gave one example) really changed everything for him.

But neither of those is exactly the case you describe. I think some people were taught that everyone who isn't a good Southern Baptist (or whatever) is a hard-drinking scoundrel headed for jail, the gallows, and hell. So when they can't do the Southern Baptist thing any more they think they HAVE to become hard-drinking scoundrels. Fortunately they usually get over it.

A related effect: atheists who retain cultural assumptions about religion (such as the false idea that all religions involve unsupported beliefs contrary to scientific fact). They're no longer buying the content, but haven't realized that even the framework is wrong.

____
*Please note that I am not a Gardnerian initiate and have never actually examined a Gardnerian BOS (I've been read to from one with obvious copying errors, however); I've met the people, though, and while they would never talk to ME about ritual matters (lowly neo-eclectic self-initiated upstart that I am), their peers have told me that when caught without a BOS they're totally flummoxed. And been told by similar folks that if you're not Gardnerian or Alexandrian you're "not really Wiccan," which is like saying that if you're not Roman Catholic or Church of England, you're not really Christian.

Dave @269 - in East Central Indiana, hiring the Amish is literal. My Dad says they're looking for work, since people aren't doing as much building right now.

Lee @295 - well, it's a big house... But Richmond is on I-70, so there is no shortage of cheap hotels.

The 56 pictures my sister took yesterday afternoon are uploading to Flickr as we speak.

Diatryma, the doorknobs are brass. Brass with filigree.

Dan Hoey @ 296:

I wondered what those were. Why I didn't think microphone I have no idea.

Xopher @ 297:

The way a former coworker described himself was that he was a hard-drinking scoundrel who wound up in jail (though not the gallows) and was bound for hell, then he found Jesus. He actually had quite a profound impact on my life, but not in the way that he would have wanted.

Xopher @ 297... When I'm told of Gardnerian Wiccans, I can't help but think of secret ceremonies being led by Gardner Dozois garbed in a monk's habit.

Xopher @#297: everyone who isn't a good Southern Baptist (or whatever) is a hard-drinking scoundrel headed for jail,

It occurs to me that the upbringing of such folks may leave them underprepared with means of self control beyond "the preacher says it's bad". Certainly a teetotaler upbringing would leave them short on skills for "alcohol management"! (e.g., I learned when I was 12 that I was too big for my family to carry me home. Being Jewish, I learned this at a Passover dinner at my grandparents' house, not at some keg party or whatever....

re 294: I'd like to say yes, but since what I meant to type was that I can't link to them, it'll have to wait until I get home.

re 297: Perhaps one can be Christian and not Anglican, but it is entirely possible that if one is not Anglican, one cannot be a Christian gentleman.

David Harmon @ 301:

Very much so. If you've been raised to think things through, then you have a firm grounding for making decisions. If all you're told is that it's bad, all you get is guilt.

The other lesson that you learn at Passover is that Manischewitz wine tastes nasty.

Serge, I had a friend who had a button that said "Earl Stanley Gardnerian: Celebrate the Mysteries!"

She had a "Martin Gardnerian" one too, but I can't remember what it said.

KeithS@299: Why I didn't think microphone I have no idea.

I cheated and read the youtube comments. Fortunately, there was one about the microphones in English. (Perhaps Dutch speakers had more interesting things to discuss than stagecraft.)

The Flickr photo set for the house is here.

I'm not sure if this was a rerun, but last night I saw Neil Gaiman on Colbert's show. Colbert of course pretended to be aghast at the dark stuff in Gaiman's kid book Graveyard and asked if he read Lovecraft while still in the crib. Gaiman responded that he had disovered Lovecraft at 11, along with Tolkien. Colbert asked what his favorite part was in LoTR. "Everything but Tom Bombadil." It went downhill from there. Silly.

Michael Roberts #306:

Umm ... wow, heartfelt version. You've certainly got your work cut out for you, but some of the details are beyond gorgeous. My first thoughts are that you're going to need a floor man and drywall guy(s) really bad and first thing. My second thought, omg, *look* at that sideboard!

David, #301: Yes, exactly. This is my counter-argument to the "there can be no morality without God" types; if the only thing that keeps you from being a criminal or a bastard* is fear of hellfire, then you don't HAVE any morals -- what you have is a bully standing over you with a stick. Which is to say that I believe morality** must be internally generated to be of more than trivial value.

* And what of all the good Christian bankers and financiers whose lack of morality has brought us to the current crisis? Being religious certainly didn't make them into moral people!
** Actually, I prefer "ethics" in this context, but I use the language I think the other person will understand best.

Dan Hoey @ 305:

YouTube does not have comments. YouTube can not have comments. The alternative is too horrible to contemplate.

(I had a scrap of CSS that made them all vanish, but they changed something and now I need to fix it again.)

Michael @ 306: It looks to me - at a blurry speculative glance - like most of the floorboards are oak and still pretty solid. It doesn't look any worse than our floor was when we bought the house, certainly. (Termite munching in our case.)

With help you should be able to cut out the holed, rotten or damaged boards and slide/nail in fresh tongue-and-groove oak floorboards to replace them; then sand the whole thing down with a combination of the big drum sander and disk sander. If you can afford it, get a pro to run the drum sander - those take off material so fast that if you don't keep them moving at a perfectly even rate you end up with ripples in the floorboards. Then lots and lots of coats of polyurethane and final sanding, and you'll have a floor that people ooh and ahh over. This takes a pretty long time, but is worth it; in a house this big, you'll probably want to close off areas and refinish it in sections.

I like to use the simplified definition that morals is ethics enforced by threat of force. That might not be sufficiently precise for finicky logicians, however.

Now that you have pictures, start looking for a House Porn show to refurb it for you!

Steve C. @ 285: cool site - thanks for sharing; that's the first time I've really understood the retrograde movement thing.

Marking. At my high school (UK) marking was pretty harsh. As I recall, if you were getting marks consistently in or above 70s for in-house examinations you were likely to get an "A" in the official external examinations.

Then there was the final year maths exam in which the top person scored 118% - and several others also scored over 105% or higher. How, you might ask - particularly for a maths exam? Well, there were 120 marks on the paper, and it was 1 mark = 1%. Obviously you were not supposed to manage to answer enough questions to get over the 100%. The school wrote all their marks down as 95% which i thought was a bit mean. The girl with 118% had got a single plus or minus sign transposed (she did go on to study maths at university).

Michael Roberts: I have house envy. We have a perfectly good house, and it doesn't need loads of work doing to it, and it's on the correct side of the Atlantic for our jobs, families etc. But I still have house envy. Good luck - it's going to be wonderful.

Michael Roberts: Your blog seems to lack a feed, which I would subscribe to since I am interested in additional information on the progress of your have-bought-a-house.

Aye, Kevin, it does lack a feed. Eventually I may actually address that lack. It's not like RSS is hard.

KeithS @#303: Hey! I like the sweet stuff! And rarely drink enough to worry about its famous hangover....

#309 Lee: Yep. Of course, there's also Madoff! Now, Jews don't have that authoritarian thing going, but that didn't stop Rabbi Marc Gellman publicly tearing him a new orifice....

Eric Cooley III #312: I beg to differ -- I'd say there's a much bigger difference, but that religions in general tend to confuse the two rulesets.

In my view, "ethics" are the rules regulating interpersonal offenses (supporting trust, limiting or forestalling violence, etc.). In contrast, "morals" represent the other rules and customs (sexual, personal display, etc.) which serve for tribal identification and bonding, but which would not be seen as offenses by unrelated cultures. Morals and ethics aren't completely distinct, as some moral rules represent general responses to common social problems, but once you get past that whole "commanded by God" thing, they're surprisingly separable.

Michael @306:
Teresa and I were oohing and aahing over your pictures. I'm definitely envious.

You know who Tintin reminds me of in the musical clip? Limonadovy Joe -- "Lemonade Joe," as portrayed by Karel Fiala! Finally, someone's posted it at YouTube. I'll have to see if their copy has anything that's missing from mine, which got to my iPod via the subtitled VHS version, which I understand is slightly cut.

Random cultural comment: Do you ever get the sense that we, as a culture, maybe at a species, are thrashing? Kind of like a drunk weaving all over the road overcorrecting, because he can't work out where he should be relative to where he is on the road and what the effect of the most recent steering wheel adjustment will be?

The financial crisis looks this way, but honestly, we've had a sequence of these radical scary weird shifts of direction. I keep thinking that this kind of thrashing, sort of being inside our own decision loop w.r.t. social, economic, technological, and political change, is a symptom of closeness to singularity. By that, I don't mean rapture-for-nerds singularity. I'm thinking something more like Crazy-years singularity--it becomes harder and harder to plan or understand the world because of the sheer speed of available changes in the world and progress.

For example, CDS were invented sometime in the mid-90s, and are alleged (with I don't know how much truth) to be a major part of the current thrashing economic order. That's something like 10-12 years from being invented to shaking the foundations of the industrialized world. CDOs are definitely a big part of the crisis, and the first ones came about in the late 80s.

How long has the web been a going concern? Can you even imagine trying to describe the world to someone from 1985 without a pretty long discussion of the web? The net has been around for awhile in some form (I was netted in the mid 80s), but the web started around 92.

How long has China been a dominant force in manufacturing, producing some huge fraction of the stuff we buy every day? Remember when it was Japan that was going to take over the world, and China that was going to remain mired in Communist poverty?

Those are three of a whole bunch of fundamental things driving the shape of the world, that were either not in existence or apparently inconsequential in 1985. (The Berlin Wall still stood, the S&L crisis was simmering but not yet aflame, we were well into massive peacetime deficit spending, the Reagan/Thatcher revolutions were afoot, the PC was becoming widespread and important among wealthy first-world folks.)

Our decisionmaking institutions don't handle this pace of change well. It appears that few countries were regulating their financial sectors well, partly because legislatures and regulatory bodies don't actually move all that quickly. Private decisionmakers fared little better--look at the companies that have run aground in this crisis. Lehman and Goldman and UBS and AIG were the sort of corporations you might have expected to outlast most governments, and yet one's dead, one's waiting for the respirator to be turned off, and the other two are in the hospital in critical condition. The current responses by all decisionmakers don't provide much reassurance.

We're thrashing. Our leaders have little idea what they're doing, and less control than they imagine. We live in really interesting times....

Nancy @272, carrying Benadryl is useful for being in service in that sort of emergency, but really, the allergic person ought to be carrying an Epi-pen.

I ought to be carrying an Epi-pen, but my last one expired without me having to use it (yay!), I no longer have insurance, and my triggers are uncommon enough (paraffin and Brazil nuts) that I'm willing to risk walking around without one and just exercising general caution. Although there was that scary moment at the Chinese restaurant where the menu said "almonds, cashews and peanuts" and the dish came out with a big fat Brazil nut sitting on top -- clearly they'd just opened up a can of "mixed nuts" for the dish. At least the Brazil nut wasn't buried or I'd really have been in trouble! Sent it back and made them take it off the bill.

If you see the person's face puffing up, call the EMTs. Even if they DO have an Epi-pen. Better safe than sorry.

#320:

"Modern science has imposed upon humanity the necessity for wandering. Its progressive thought and its progressive technology make the transition through time, from generation to generation, a true migration into uncharted seas of adventure. The very benefit of wandering is that it is dangerous and needs skill to avert evils. We must expect, therefore, that the future will disclose dangers. It is the business of the future to be dangerous; and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties. The prosperous middle classes, who ruled the nineteenth century, placed an excessive value upon the placidity of existence. They refused to face the necessities for social reform imposed by the new industrial system, and they are now refusing to face the necessities for intellectual reform imposed by the new knowledge. The middle class pessimism over the future of the world comes from a confusion between civilization and security. In the immediate future there will be less security than in the immediate past, less stability. It must be admitted that there is a degree of instability which is inconsistent with civilization. But, on the whole, the great ages have been unstable ages."

--Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 1925.

#320 ::: albatross:

I agree on thrashing. There's some specific stuff in Stafford Beer about needing time to assimilate new conditions, and we aren't getting it.

What's worse, we have what Scott Adams calls confusocracy-- airlines and credit card companies and (after he invented the concept) finance companies gaining advantages by being incomprehensible.

#321 ::: Rikibeth:

Thanks very much.

Rikibeth #321: yeah, Chinese restaurants are infamously dangerous for people with allergies.

albatross #320: Sorry, but I think you're just suffering a bout of "future shock", a la Toffler.

Our late financial disasters are speculation bubbles -- not so new. The particular instruments at fault (this time) were "new" because they were created rather specifically to escape regulations on untoward risk-taking, and permitted by a government that was in league with the speculators. The ensuing disaster wasn't specific to the details of CDOs or such, it was the natural and inevitable consequence of giving the speculators free reign.

Similarly, China is just the latest of several countries to make their stake in manufacturing -- admittedly the biggest, but China has been dominating Asia for centuries if not millennia. They were never a Third-World country -- getting their economy into high gear isn't "coming out of nowhere", it's basically finishing their recovery from the Opium Wars.

And the Internet certainly is a new and shiny thing, but it's ultimately parasitic on the real world, and forgetting that is a good way to lose your shirt (or pants, depending... ;-) ). Ultimately, the Internet is about people, and people are mostly the same as they ever were.

Yes, we have a problem with our leadership handling the changed situations, but that's not new either -- there's a reason that innovation and experiment are traditionally a young-folks' game.

David Harmon #317: Eric Cooley III #312

There are plenty of Eric's around here. I am not one of them.

And a seasonal note: Wild garlic is back in my neighborhood! OK, it never really "left", as there were a few shoots in my lawn even well into winter.

But, today I literally found some on the sidewalk -- someone had pulled a whole bunch of full-grown plants, and strewn them on the sidewalk, bulbs and all. I rescued the ones that hadn't been trampled, and later dug up a few more (the rain makes that much easier). Now I'm having some chopped into my spinach.

Earl Cooley III #325: Whoops, I'm sorry. Clearly I had a braino while typing.

Riding the curve:

I once got a 34 of 100 on a thermodynamics test.

It was a solid A.

David @ 324, I fairly well agree. Our species has always been thrashing, since we first left Africa.

Abi & TNH: stay tuned, then. Starting mid-May things oughta get good.

I'm honestly thinking of doing the wall and ceiling work with honest-to-God plaster, instead of drywall. Drywall seems so ... Johnny-come-lately. Although I do believe that the dining room ceiling has been repaired in drywall. Which I may just remove and start over. Along with all that wallpaper.

I loathe wallpaper. Back in the early 90's, we lived in a third-floor walkup a few blocks from this house (on Main Street, which was at the time a real live pedestrian zone!) The wallpaper in the kitchen of that apartment was sagging off the walls, despite relatively recent provenance, because they had never removed any of the earlier layers. We took it all off -- an exercise in archaeology; I wish we had had digital cameras then, because I would definitely have recorded each layer -- and painted it all a proper and blinding white. It was lovely after that.

That's my plan for this house.

Stefan Jones @ #322 -

I like that a lot.

Michael Roberts, it's a _beautiful_ house. The built-in buffet is magnificent. It will be a lot of work, but it will be worth it. What a steal. I love the doorknobs.

Cursory research indicates that plaster resists mold far better than drywall, even blueboard. So that has decided me. I'm going to be doing a lot of plastering.

Mwuahahaa. I love it when a plan comes together.

So we're at about 95% moving to Indiana now, rather than just going for the summer but staying in Puerto Rico another year. My family will be going to Budapest and returning to JFK on July 2. Uh, anybody want to spot me a futon in the NYC area on the night of July 1? In return, I will allow you to whitewash this here fence, I mean, plaster this here wall. Although my wife is very particular about how plaster is applied. She might not trust just anybody to get it right. Maybe I'd better go ahead and do it myself.

Wallpaper is like neckties. All but the most basic designs look utterly foolish ten years later.

Micheal, I'd wrap that clean up that buffet, apply finishing oil, and then seal it off with bubble wrap and cardboard until everything else is complete.

In lieu of actual participation:

A visit from a smooth criminal or, as it's also known, Mustela freneta.

Michael, #329: The house looks fabulous! Or at least, I can look beyond the fixing-up that needs to be done to see the fabulous place you'll have once it's finished.

I do agree with you about the wallpaper. That was one of the things going thru my mind while I looked at the pictures -- "That wallpaper has GOT to go!" While I'm not as dead-set against it as you seem to be, I do find many of the most common styles to be fugly. In my condo in Nashville (which otherwise had dove-grey walls throughout), I had wallpaper in

1) The dining room -- rose-beige grasscloth, to pick up the color in the chandelier glass
2) The kitchen -- a cheery abstract, mostly white with thin strokes of bright primary colors scattered across it
3) The upstairs bath -- water-resistant paper that looked like sponging in shades of blue

and I thought all of them improved their respective areas considerably.

Too funny not to share!

For the times when you really DO give a flying f*ck...

(Worksafe only if your office is lenient about obfuscated profanity.)

#328 Nancy
I once had a final exam in a math class in college in which a zero was a passing grade.... (wrong answers involved points being taken off. It was a graduate level class in non-linear methods.

re 295: That's the one.

My uncle told me of a test in a decision-making class of some sort. It was multiple-choice, and you ranked the answers according to probability that they were right-- if you knew beyond doubt that the answer was A, you put A-100, B-0, C-0, D-0.

The points awarded were related in some way to the natural log of the number you put next to the correct answer.

The natural log of zero is negative infinity. If you answered as above and were wrong, no score for you. Part of the test was figuring out how sure you could be without wrecking everything if you were wrong.

Diatryma @ 340: I once had a biology test in high school that used a scoring scheme like that: 10 points and 5 answers per question, allocate the points to the answer(s) one preferred. But the final score was just the sum of the points allocated to the correct answers. If I recall correctly, there was a further complication in that a few of the questions had more than one correct answer, and one had to allocate points to each of those correct answers in order to get the full score.

Most of my classmates were not happy about this scheme.

C Wingate # 339... If you go to YouTube and search for "Tintin Lune", you get many clips from the animated film where he goes to the Moon.

@320,322,324

The Whitehead quote has the right of it, I think. There are some times when a fundamental shift in the structure of culture, economy, technology, and pretty near everything else results in a ferment in which great deeds (and horrible ones) are done, and beautiful things (and ugly ones) are created. The European Renaissance (particularly in Italy) was one such time; ours would appear to be another.

The one difference between now and previous such eras is that the world is now so much smaller, and every ripple in one place causes waves everywhere else. Cultures aren't meeting and struggling just at their geographic borders anymore; the mixing and hybridization takes place all over and all at once. I don't think that's going to go on forever, though. Over the next century or two things will settle down somewhat, as competing cultures reach accomodations, and mixing levels the racial, ethnic, religious, and economic differences among populations.

In the meantime, buckle up: it's going to be a bumpy ride.

Michael Roberts:

Your house will be a home with less work than I feared as long as the invisibles (plumbing especially) are intact. My boss just tole me he'd bid on two houses before the one he ended up with and backed out because of bad inspection findings— one had, literally, no real plumbing anymore as it had corroded away. "Nice garbage disposal, though."

We've put in a bid on a house that is much smaller and more recent. It was built in the 80s and has had NO updates since then— which on the one hand, is nice because we can literally see that there's been no roof issues. We'll see where we get with this one; the listing bank has been beyond obnoxious so far so if they yank our chains much more we're just going to withdraw.

Oh, Stefan -- that's a good idea. Thanks!

You know what's happened since I last had to buy appliances? Craigslist, that's what. This might work out OK.

Re the particle of The Naked Taoiseach: in keeping with the grand naming tradition of political scandals, this is now being called Picturegate in Ireland.

albatross @ 321: "Do you ever get the sense that we, as a culture, maybe at a species, are thrashing?"

I'd go with oscillating. We change a little, maybe privatize some state functions, and reap a slight benefit as a result. Then we decide that if a little privatizing is good, then we should privatize everything! Then we find out, oh, no, total privatization is actually pretty terrible. So then we decide that we should nationalize everything! ...and back and forth, and back and forth. We can't really learn from previous experience because by the time we've cycled around again, so much has changed that it's at least arguable that previous experience doesn't apply, and of course there will always be someone willing to argue it.

Michael Roberts @ 330: "Our species has always been thrashing, since we first left Africa."

"We" only left Africa for values of "our species" excluding all those human beings who, y'know, still live in Africa. I get what you mean, but you might want to stay away from that particular construction.

Christmas gifts in case of disaster-- this strikes me as having the open thread nature. It's a recommendation for giving first aid kits and a list of good multi-tools.

Michael Roberts @ 307: I, too, now suffer from house envy. That is one seriously neato place. I think the "laundry room" was originally a bathroom, because the windows and corner cabinet remind me strongly of my in-laws' former house. They had a Central PA-standard issue "colonial" with an attic just like yours, a porch only a bit smaller than yours, and all brick. (In fact, their kitchen was completely tiled, floor to ceiling.)

Anyway, nice house. Good bones.

And while the Tintin fans and the Asterix fans continue on happily, those of us who like Valérian: Spatio-Temporal Agent and want to read it in English are stuck with three out of print adventures from the 70's since every publisher that has started printing it in English has gone bust without decent distribution.

On Chinese restaurants: I have a friend who has an allergy to onions who can eat at one Chinese restaurant in the city with no worries. This is because the first time he ate there the chef decided my friend was just being fussy when he said he was deathly allergic to onions and needed them kept out of his order so he hid all the onions in the dish while it was still in the kitchen. The owners were nice enough to cover the cost of the 911 ambulance run and the emergency room expenses...

Bruce E. Durocher II @ 351... I met Mézières a couple of times in the mid-1980s. He mentionned that someone in Hollywood wanted to make a movie based on Valérian's "Subway" stories. Obviously it never happened. Would have been interesting. By the way, guess who Mézières would have liked to see play Valérian? Tom Cruise.

Anyway, if you want to see what a movie based on Mézières's drawings would look like, go see The Fifth Element.

Extra! Extra! Read all about it! Obama uses hypnosis!
Obama hypnotizes

At first I thought was one the most elaborate put-ons I've ever seen, but it just comes down to a classic case of a nutter with a soapbox. I have to admire the dedication, though.

This thread reminded me of Making Light, so, xref:

http://scienceblogs.com/bushwells/2009/03/what_one_word_tips_you_off_tha.php

I need to gripe about this somewhere so I'll do it here... I said over on another thread that this week was our anniversary? Actually, yesterday, instead of our anniversary, turned out to instead be my day for "Cancel the dinner reservations and lie on the couch hacking up phlegm because it's too hard to sit up at the computer." Oh well, we're taking a rain-check and will try it next week or later, after I've recuperated.

(I actually made it in to the office for about an hour yesterday morning, because I had to build a new software release so testing could get underway on it. That wiped me out for the remainder of the day.)

Clifton @ #355, Sorry to hear it. You actually found a restaurant that's remaining open long enough to reschedule your reservations?

(That's an inside Oahu joke. Several very high-profile restaurants have closed their doors recently.)

Clifton Royston @ 355... Sorry to hear about that. My best wishes for a speedy recovery.

Ginger @ 350: seriously? A bathroom? It's facing the street! That would be very weird. Not to mention, the house already has four other bathrooms.

I'm virtually positive it was just a nice, sunny upstairs veranda kind of room. That's how I intend to use it, anyway.

I just had a perfect Vernor Vinge moment.

I was out walking the dog, and glanced up at Orion. There was a very bright star there, out of place, so I stopped to look. It was moving. Ah, the space station, I thought, and stood watching its track for a minute, so that I'd be able to identify for certain it at heavens-above.com at home.

... and then the second ship appeared, even brighter, following a minute behind the first in the same orbit. It brought tears to my eyes.

It turns out that the first ship was the shuttle, STS-119, and the second brighter ship was the ISS.

Sadly, neither was the interstellar ramship Pham Nuwen.

Diatryma @340:

I took a class with that grading policy - Decision Analysis at Stanford with the guy who basically invented the methods. The grading scheme was as you describe - most of the work (homework, midterm, final) was multiple choice, and for each question you assigned each of the four options the relative probability you felt of it being correct. The specific algorithm was grade = (1 + log(p)/log(4)), where p was the probability you had assigned to the correct choice.

The algorithm is weighted such that a .25 probability (1/4, or chance) equalled 0. A probability of 1 gets a grade of 1. Anything below .0625 gets a grade below -1, which means that you are better off being conservative - but not too conservative - because those negative points build up fast.

We were explicitly told never to assign a 1 probability, because that meant the other options would all get 0s. A 0 probability for the right answer would mean a grade of negative infinity, or flunking the class. Exceedingly low probabilities (.0000000000001) had similar effects. Yet, apparently every time the course was offered, somebody did that and got the answer wrong - and failed the course. [Stanford has liberal course drop policies, so if it happened early enough in the quarter they could drop the class without serious GPA effects.]

Dividing by zero

oliviacw @360.

A -infinity scoring might be valid at the end of such a course, though it seems a harsh method. It looks a stupid way of marking in the early stages, if the course grade is based on the total marks for the whole course.

Didn't the teacher expect his students to learn anything?, and improve their skill in what he was teaching?

Michael Roberts #317: RSS? Atom. Much better specified.

(I have in the past written a program to screen-scrape a feedless source — but I haven't got the time or enthusiasm to write a variant for this purpose.)

Another question for Micheal . . .

In what shape is the yard? Weeds and broken glass? Just a little overgrown?

Might be interesting to see if a community group is interested in using it as a garden.

Reason: Having reasonably responsible people visiting on a regular basis might discourage squatters, vandals, and thieves.

Also, when you visit you can stand by one of those tower windows and pretend the gardeners are your vassals.

Michael Roberts @ 358: You're probably right -- it just struck me as strongly reminiscent of their upstairs bathroom (which was their only bathroom for many years). I think it would make an excellent little sun room for you now. (I did mention my envy, didn't I?)

The yard's OK. I don't know about lead content. It's not very sunny, though, especially in the summer -- lots of trees. Not ideal for veggies, although I'm going to try if we actually move there instead of being absentee owners.

The yard looks pretty typically Indiana March to me (here and here).

Oliviacw, it's probably the same course. I just couldn't remember anything specific enough to cite.

Sadly, none of this sort of thing has come up in my teaching college courses course. It's largely student-led, and kind of underwhelming. Some of that's due to the structure-- we have people who teach HR courses, piano teachers, and me, Little Miss Lecture-And-Lab-Based-Science-Courses. I had hoped that the 'evaluation and grading' discussion would include favorite and least favorite testing methods, both as student and teacher, but no, not so much.

I would have shared my Animal Physiology final: write your own question and answer it within two pages.

Cliff @ # 170: The people at Tech Support Comedy would appreciate your friend's divide-by-zero Japanese math trouble tickets.

Steve/Nancy: "The Midas Plague" is a reminder that the attitude of "The world is hard! Let's go shopping!" has been around long enough to be satirized in 1954. "The Man Who Ate the World" was a ~sequel which (unlike the original) was also the title of its collection -- possibly somebody thought it would grab monster-movie fans.

Earl@313: David@318 is much closer to the definitions I've commonly seen -- notably including Sturgeon's in More Than Human.

Nancy@339: I remember that thermo test; it was part of my school's first AP chemistry class.

dave@362: most teachers I've had have not retested material, except on the final; the intermediate exams tended to be free-standing, so expecting competence on each was reasonable. cf the comedian who professed not to care about the diploma on his doctor's wall: -"If I'm in there for a kidney problem I want to see his grade on kidneys!"- OTOH, that doesn't mean that blowing one \question/ should be a failing grade for the entire course; I also dislike the system as described because I think there's way too much hedging (much of it aka "fair and balanced") these days; students should not be taught that everything can be hedged any more than they should be taught that everything has an absolute answer.

There are a \lot/ of replies with off-by-one comment references, suggesting that the numbering code is mishandling something (a delay post?) -- I thought this had been fixed?

Well, I had a tiring but fun day... I went hiking in the Shenandoah Nat'l Park, (White Oaks Trail) with a couple of guys twice my age. 6 miles of rocky trails and climbing mostly upward, past the gorgeous White Oak Falls. I know I'm in poor shape, so it wasn't even embarrassing being paced by a couple of 80-year-olds....

And now I'm formatting my new terabyte drive...

My first computer, was a 4K Commodore PET that loaded programs from audio cassettes. My second was a Commodore 64 which used 170KB floppy disks -- IIRC, the drives cost something like $200 apiece by the time I got them.

Now, some 25 years later, I just bought an effing terabyte drive, seven orders of magnitude larger than those early floppy disks. For $120.

I had a physics professor whose grading system was rather nice— he gave the point spread, said, "this is the minimum grade you'll get," and went on to explain that if you showed improvement over the term, he'd up your grade a bit to reflect that. He also gave ~ 20% to "in-class quizzes" where half of the two points per quiz was for turning in a piece of paper with your name on it. He used that in lieu of taking attendance, which would take too much time.

Hardest class I've ever taken, and it was a first- or second-year course. EM, optics, relativity— and real questions such as "You have a sphere of equal charge x surrounded by a sphere with a charge according to y equation. What is the charge at point z?" Nobody finished the tests before the end of the period.

I got 3 Cs and a D on the four tests, but B in the course as a whole. Either I rocked the final or everything else added up pretty well for me.

BTW, I loved that course. But I feared it just as much.

David Harmon @ 370... My first computer, was a 4K Commodore PET

It always amuses me, watching 1982's Bladerrunner, when I catch sight of the neon ads for Atari computers.

Serge:

By the way, guess who Mézières would have liked to see play Valérian? Tom Cruise.

Not to be heightist or anything, but isn't Cruise a head too short?

Nancy Lebovitz (#273): I concur with what Rikibeth (#322) said - Benadryl is good, but you really want an epinephrine pen.

I asked at my local pharmacy if I could purchase one, and was told they were prescription-only. I have a fantastic GP who is used to my academic weirdness. When I explained to her that I was taking students and colleagues on a field trip to dig up the nest cells of Colletes inaequalis, and that they are pretty docile bees, and I didn't think anyone was allergic, but I wanted to be on the safe side because we'd be out in a powerline right-of-way a mile of hiking out from vehicles, she promptly wrote me a prescription. Then I took it to the pharmacy and explained that yes, I really wanted to pay for it outright rather than just paying the co-pay on my insurance, since technically it wasn't for me (it's about $60). The risk of needing the epi-pen is pretty low, but the value of having it if you need it is extremely high, so it seemed worth the effort to get one.

#369 ::: CHip:

I think the major point of "The Midas Plague" is that people can turn anything into a status symbol, even austerity.

There are subordinate points about status-seeking-- it's pretty funny to watch the frantic scramble from the outside, but it's painful to be stuck doing it.

Bruce E. Durocher II @ 373... Tom Cruise too short to play Valérian? Actually, no. Valérian is not a tall guy. In fact, Cruise would have been physically right. As for the rest... I'm not questionning his acting abilities, but movies with him in it tend to be all about him, whether the story is supposed to be about the last days of the Samurai or about alien invaders. Valérian really is a humble man trying to do his best to keep the world going. 'Humble' and 'Cruise' don't go together.

Speaking of European comics making it to movies... I was a bit dubious when I heard that Hugo Pratt's Corto Maltese stories had been made into animated features. I found some clips on YouTube. While the animation isn't quite on the level of a Disney classic, it manages to keep the look and feel of the original comics. I shudder to think that someone once wanted to make a live-action version. With Lee Majors as tall skinny Corto.

Kevin Reid at 363: I've been using Dapper for that purpose. It seems to work well - I've been seeing some hiccups in the feeds, but then I use Bloglines too, and that can have occasional issues.

To Serge and all the other punsters in the Fluorosphere, an explication of the punomonon.

About that terabyte drive...

I'm still formatting the first 200GB partition! Or rather, I decided to specify a full (read/write) scan for bad blocks before the formatting proper (Linux mkfs... -c -c). Well, 18.5 hours later.... If it goes on to write zeroes (it's done 0xaa, 0x55, and 0xff so far), the total time will exceed 24 hours -- for the first of 5 partitions (200GB each)! (Of course, actually building the partitions will take negligible time, by comparison.)

Oy vey --- but if I don't do this now, then when? ;-)

Just coming up on 20.30 over here. Time for lights out, computer off, candles lit - I'll catch up reading on traumatic brain injury in an hour.

David Harmon @379: I'd recommend never. Modern hard drives don't show errors in surface scans until the entire disk's about to fail. And you should have _heard_ it being noisy before that happens. The reason for this is that when it hits an error, it remaps the sector to a reserved space. When you start to run out of reserved space the remapping moves blocks a long way, so you hear lots of long seeks. After that, it runs out of space and you start seeing actual errors.

The test's useful for floppies, but next to useless on a hard disk.

All the talk of test marking reminds me of a group project we were assigned in the final year of my CS degree. In this particular project we were split into groups of 6 and told to go away and finish the project, then decide how to split the final marks between the participants. 4 of the members of my group never bothered to turn up to any of the meetings we arranged. Asking the course tutor if we could assign them zero grades, he says it's unusual but within the rules. Only damned assessment I've ever scored 250% on.

Linkmeister @ 378... Caligula ordered an actor to be roasted alive for a bad pun

That seems rather excessive.

"Puns are the lowest form of humor - unless you think of it first."
- Seamus Zelazny Harper

I just received my copy of Ravens in the Library. The book, which had been put together to help defray S.J.Tucker's medical expenses, looks very nice.

Jules #381: Hmmm. So there's no "occasional" bad blocks anymore?

I've pre-empted the test for the other 4 partitions for the moment, I figure I'll let the first one complete, just to see just how long it takes. (I was already losing enthusiasm for continuing the test -- most of a frakking week?)

David @ 370 - yeah, I'm having the same feeling about my house.

Clifton @355:

Congratulations on the anniversary, however late the celebration. The real achievement is the years spent together, and they contain their own reward.

Linkmeister #378:

That article seems to be missing the point. What both I and my husband (an inveterate punster) got out of it is that punning is conscious and willful, and therefore almost a moral issue or character fault. My spouse, OTOH, will testify that it is uncontrollable, requires no conscious effort, and should be regarded as a brain wiring condition vaguely akin to Tourette's. We both believe that what is actually going on, what worries the listeners so much, is the context-switch that is required both to produce a pun and to hear/see it. You're screwing with reality--and that is, in many views, unforgiveable.

joann @ #388, I lean in your direction. I do it without thinking; when I try to manufacture a pun it usually fails.

Anybody remember this visual example?

joann @ 388... My spouse, OTOH, will testify that it is uncontrollable, requires no conscious effort, and should be regarded as a brain wiring condition vaguely akin to Tourette's.

In my case, it is conscious, but little effort is involved.
("Snort!")
I heard that.

"Puns are the death of wit."
- Voltaire, who probably never could come up with a good one.

I think of punning as being akin to the "fannish fount of trivia" syndrome; both appear (to me) to be related to having an overactive free-association circuit. And I agree that the best puns arrive unheralded and with little or no thought -- they just happen, like weather.

Of course, one also has to have a love of language and its oddities to enjoy puns. I would bet that the guy who wrote that article is a very dull conversationalist.

The main difficulty I have with puns is that I don't necessarily hear words when I read them, and I don't necessarily see words when I hear them. Not that I let this stop me, mind you.

It was an Asimov story where it turned out that puns were the only true human form of humor, right?

KeithS @ 392

Right, and all other forms of humor were created by aliens, as an experiment. When a human figured it out, they ended the experiment because of contamination of the subject, and all forms of humor stopped being funny.

Going thru the list of Hugo finalists.

Tonight, John Kessel's short story Pride and Prometheus, in which bookworm Mary Bennet meets kindred soul Victor Frankenstein.

Highly recommended.

Nancy@375: status is an obvious point; but there are various signs that Pohl was aware of the economic-philosophy disagreements that later produced (e.g.) Packard's The Waste Makers and a weak counter from Reader's Digest, "Waste Not, Have Not?". In the same decade, Pohl's sometime-associate Damon Knight was more pointed about the conservative spend-our-way-to-riches idea (e.g., Hell's Pavement) -- but Knight tended to be more pointed about \everything./

Jules@381: It's been decades since I was a sysadmin working at that level, but I'm wondering whether excluding weak spots immediately doesn't at least give the OS a better picture of the usable size of the disk, so that it reports being full when it's run out of usable sectors instead of throwing errors because it thinks there is still space? Or am I giving Windows too much credit?

Now, some 25 years later, I just bought an effing terabyte drive, seven orders of magnitude larger than those early floppy disks. For $120.

They're $95 in Boston this week.

In college, I remember everyone being awed by my friend's Apple II with 48K memory, a black-and-green monitor, and two floppy drives. Cost: $2500.

(Said friend wrote a game called Wizardry on it, which made a little money ... )

Leonard Pitts, in his usual compelling and evocative style, gives a eulogy for Dr. John Hope Franklin.

shadowsong @213: Drat it, you're right, and thanks for the catch -- I meant the MSR WhisperLite, not the MSI Wind. I blame buying a new laptop right before the hiking trip. :-)

I am a lousy typist. OJT, and the use of a pencil/copy editor are not conducive to perfect mastery of the keys. I am also fast, which is no help. What I did discover was how much I/we all needed the copy editors. If I let something sit for 2-3 days, I could spot errors I missed on the first/second pass.

It was how I improved my grades. All the copy was submitted for grading. Any copyediting marks we added were considered to be included. So long as 1: I'd not made any differences in the typewriting, and 2: I'd not asked anyone else to go voer it after I turned in the production copies, I could delay submission for grade a couple of days.

The steady stream of "whites" to the advisors was such that it didn't change their workload. So I started to submit my "pinks" and "yellows" to the desk (the production deadlines were absolute, and would hurt my grade if I missed them; they'd also hurt the paper), and sit on my whites for a couple of days.

Then I'd re-read them, fix what I'd spotted, and turn them in. But if I didn't wait... the brain would gloss the mistakes to what I'd meant to type. I have more toubles editing on screen too. I despair of ever having really pretty blog/comment posts.

On the flip-side, it probably makes it harder for people to spoof me.

Re body weight in blood. If we assume blood is thicker than water, and give it a weight of eight pounds per gallon, (at 8 units the gallon) than I would need 116 units of blood to lose my own weight in it. It's a pretty potent visual metaphor for how much that is, which is to say, about 14 gallons.

Which would be a lot of transfusing.

But I suspect he was larger than I.

dcb: re bulbs. I have some amaryllis (in Los Angeles) as does Maia's mother. I water mine more religiously than she does. I got moderate dormancy (the smaller bulbs went dormant in Novemeber, the larger ones in September). All were up in January. Hers go dormant about August, and return in February. Mine are a different type (Spider Lillies), but the pot I missed when I repotted last year went dormant in Oct. I gave it to Pat (Maia's mother) in January, and put it (still dormant) in the ground last week. All four bulbs are now green and growing.

Dave Bell: re hexamine and "compos" They do, and they don't. Each case of Composite Meals (the British MRE) comes with a box of cookers, and hexamine. The individiual meals don't. I don't know how well the surplus stores do at getting complete cases (or at selling them complete) there. I do know the meals are plainly labled as being MOD property, and not legal to sell.

MREs have chemical cooking bags (a compound of caustic lye, just add water to the line, and then slide the food packet into the bag. For serious heat slide it back into the cardboard box the food packet was in. You can also warm water with it, after the food is hot. The newer MREs have bags meant for this. It won't make real tea, or coffee, but instant will be warm enough to be as pleasant as it ever is).

Problem, the heaters give of hydrogen gas (this makes for many amusements in the field. It's the fuel for the infamous, "MRE Bomb"), and should not be used in small spaces with poor ventilation (not a real problem when one has only a couple of people, in a kitchen, but not a good idea when one has 20, in the back of a truck). They also have a disctintly metallic odor. I will never forget it, you may find it off-putting.

But they do make the MREs more palatable. Each MRE has one, and most surplus stores carry them. They can be put into water (inside the bag) so long as the water doesn't mix with the contents, as the byproduct is bad for people.

R.M. Koske @256: Yoiks! I supsect all your classes had a curve, but many of them were very flat. :) What is usually meant (or was, when I was in school) by, "grading on the curve" was to define 100 as the highest score attained, and then setting the relative grade-points from there.

I had teachers who did that in a way which both moved (when I wasn't in those classes. I was terrible for curves, at least in non-math classes), the grades down (so say, a 90 = A), but didn't save the really poor performers, because less than 70 still earned an F.

My psych of human sexuality prof had a different curve.
100-93 = A
92-84 = B
84-75 = C
less than 75 = fail (well it was a D, but that still wasn't credit worthy, so it was an effective fail. USC's College of Occupational Therapy sets that at C, sort of. You can get a C, and the class counts, but if your average isn't a B, you can't pass out of the school).

To tie that into my story about my journalism courses.

We had a straight 10 percent scale:

100-90
89-80, etc.

But we also had to make "inch count", of written (not published) work.,at four, 60 ct. lines to the inch

150" =C
225" =B
300" =A

If you wrote at least one letter grades worth of copy more than you recieved, you could be bumped up one grade value. This was to make up for the extra risk (because papers were graded all the way down to zero) turning in the extra copy caused.

But... you also had to write one each of news, feature and sports. Miss one of those, and you got a fail, No matter how stellar your writing was.

My first term on staff I lost track of the timeline, and didn't get a sports assignment. Fail.

janetl re Music Theory: When I was in college last I was interested in taking harmony (i.e. theory II), but I couldn't. The Prerequisites were, pass Theory I (I had) and be enorolled in Harmony (3 units), A keyboard class (3 Units, plus 2 hours practice) Another instrument class (2 units, plus one hour practice), and a performance class (1 unit, plus rehearsals/performances). That was nine units, with an extra 3-6 hours a week of classes.

Kept those who weren't really serious from taking the class.

Terry Karney @ 399: Your description of the prerequisites for a college music class sound like what I recall my friends going through at MSU. For example, the poor souls would be required to sign up for 1 credit of Band, which would involved several hours of band rehearsal per week, and you were supposed to show up already knowing the music. Then, to make things really fun, they'd put the band on a bus to another city during finals week to do a performance. Judging by what I saw, music is the toughest undergraduate degree there is.

A brief note: on Saturday, my third day home sick, two things happened. My wife relapsed to the point where she was coughing worse than I was - her asthma kicked into high gear from the aftermath of the cold, and I had to take her out to get a nebulizer and start taking hefty doses of Extra Stuff. And, in the evening, our phone line and our DSL both went out. The Powerful and Benevolent Phone Company says they'll look into it by Tuesday or thereabouts. I'm seriously considering cable internet now.

I'm posting this from a coffee shop we headed out to Sunday afternoon, because we couldn't fight the Internet withdrawal pains any more. After 3 and a half days of dying inventively, I'm tired of Nethack for a bit.

Clifton @ # 401 says "The Powerful and Benevolent Phone Company"

which is currently in bankruptcy.

Betcha never thought an almost public-utility company with a near-monopoly in its past could do that, didja?

Linkmeister, which phone company are you talking about?

Clifton Royston, if you do switch to cable internet, I recommend that you do not also get digital phone service unless you also have cell phone access; otherwise, you'd be one rampaging backhoe away from having all your comm utilities cut off at once.

About the upcoming worldcon... It is my understanding that, last week, its organizers were bemoaning the lack of volunteers. That's rather amusing. A friend and I both volunteered months ago and neither of us ever heard a single thing back.

News flash: Obama denies bailout funds for automakers. I

For once I like hat guy.

Clifton Royston @ 401:

A while back when I had to set up a phone line, it amused me that I had to telephone the telephone company so that I could order telephone service. I think there's something a little screwy about that.

I hope you feel better from the combination of illness and internet withdrawl.

Xopher @ 406:

I have dreamed of doing things like that. Fortunately, I don't own the right equipment or have the time. Sometimes I fantasize about having telekinetic powers on the freeway to deal with obnoxious people, but they don't exist.

Proof (in case you wanted it):

1. If telekinetic powers existed, then we would see cars taking up multiple parking spaces compacted to take up less than one, tailgaters flung off to the side of the freeway, and those insanely bright headlights popped.
2. We do not observe any of these things.
3. Therefore telekinetic powers do not exist.

Corollary: I would be a very bad Jedi.

Well, TK powers wouldn't necessarily have to be Sylar-level to exist. If they're relatively subtle (like, enough to influence the fall of a rolling die, but no stronger), we wouldn't see the effects you describe.

I'm very glad I don't have pyrokinesis. It's not a good thing to have if you have a temper. I think much on it.

Open threadiness: I'm pretty sure this hasn't been mentioned here yet, but thought it might be of interest --

The Army's National Museum of Health and Medicine has been scanning their photo collection and starting to post on flickr. There's a good article about it on Wired, and the flickr set is here.

It's really a fascinating compilation, since the museum has pictures from the Civil War to Vietnam. The pictures that have been posted at this point, however, all appear to stem from WWII.

Earl @ #403, that would be Hawaiian Tel. It's losing landline customers to cellphones and other alternatives.

Linkmeister @ 402:

Clifton @ # 401 says "The Powerful and Benevolent Phone Company"
which is currently in bankruptcy.
Betcha never thought an almost public-utility company with a near-monopoly in its past could do that, didja?

Another interesting case of looting. Hawaiian Telcom was bought out from Verizon by the Carlyle Group, a multi-billion investment fund which boasts George Bush Sr. and Colin Powell among others as shareholders, and has had Bush Sr., Frank Carlucci (former Secretary of Defense and CIA Director) and a host of other famous establishment names as directors, advisors, counselors, and chairmen. The purchase was approved despite the Carlyle Group having zero experience in telecommunications and despite its requiring Hawaiian Telcom to take $1 billion in debt to pay for its own purchase. Now that it's in bankruptcy, suddenly its employee pension plan, previously amply funded, is reported as badly short of money. It's possible that all that pension money vanished in the market downturn, but I suspect that close scrutiny might show that some of that pension money ended up diverted to indirectly fund HT's buyout or to other destinations instead.

I also suspect that scrutiny will never happen because of the Carlyle Group's standing "above suspicion", and that it will remain above suspicion because they spread their political friendship generously across both parties. Ex-FCC Chairman Bill Kennard, who put this deal together, is now one of Barack Obama's chief technology advisors, and see - you just don't question people like that.

I should have mentioned, re the fraud thread: see also under "bust-out".

That's what a lot of "taking it private" deals really are - bust-out the business to pay out all its accumulated value to the new management and/or owners, then dump it. In recent decades, it's usually included looting the accumulated value in the pension funds and leaving the public stuck with making good on those pensions, because that's become virtually no risk - the Fed agencies involved have shown absolutely no interest in criminal investigation of accounting fraud involving pensions, even when the government is getting stuck for $100s of millions or $ billions in pension liabilities.

Twitter search (top terms at the moment: #earthquake, Morgan Hill, San Jose) tells me that there's a certain amount of shakin' going on out West.

Everyone OK?

David, #405: From the article: President Barack Obama refused further long-term federal bailouts for General Motors and Chrysler, saying more concessions were needed ... before they could be approved.

Okay, now why the HELL can't he say that to the banks and finance companies? It really does start to look like class-based discrimination.

4.3 Earthquake, epicenter 11 miles north of Morgan Hill.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/03/30/BACN16PF4O.DTL&tsp=1

There were no immediate reports of damage.

Magnitude 4.3, they say. Or, "Hey, I felt that one" on the "people I know in chat are saying" scale.

Clifton:

Privatization always seems to me like an example of something that should work out well in theory. I mean, the investor should overpay as often as he underpays. But the agency problem rears its head, and leads to a persistent problem: the actual owner of the resource is some diffuse entity like a community or city or state. That entity's representatives, its agents, don't actually own what they're selling. While the investors have a great incentive to know the value of what they're buying, the sellers don't have much incentive. Even without outright bribery (which can definitely happen), there are a lot of ways for the sellers (agents with no skin in the game) to find it in their interests not to bargain real hard. The investors are likely to be in a position to be of use to the agents in the future--seats on the board, consulting jobs, paid positions working for one of the investors, etc. They're also likely to be well-connected, meaning that p-ssing them off by negotiating hard isn't likely to be a win for the agents.

It doesn't have to work out this way, and I'm sure it often doesn't. But it sure does seem like a common pattern. More broadly, whenever I'm investing my own money, and you're on the other side of the negotiation handling someone else's money with no skin at all in the game, the smart money will bet on me coming out ahead.

Poetry party at Elise's place!

Elise Matthesen made a pendant named "Nine Things About Oracles."

Jo Walton wrote a poem inspired by the pendant.

Now it's a meme. Elise is collecting the poems in sets of nine. Come and play!

Albatross:

Actually, I was referring to "taking it private" in the sense of a leveraged buyout of a previously publicly traded entity, or (as in this case) a portion of some public entity.

Oddly enough, much of what you said above about privatization of public entities applies there too: The collective shareholders are the actual owners of the business, but they don't necessarily have a good way of knowing its actual value; the top managers who are selling the business (often to themselves) have little interest in maximizing the payout to shareholders if they can find a way to maximize the payout to themselves instead; and the new investors (if they are not the same set of managers) can do massive favors to the management. In the case of large corporations, the board of directors - who are nominally the overseers and protectors of the shareholders' interests - are usually more aligned with the top managers, via class and via networks of interlocking multiple relationships and arrangements. As seen in the whole incestuous mess of executive compensation, they usually find ways to rubber-stamp anything the CEO and top management want to do. In the entire transaction, the pensioners and other creditors have no voice at all, no matter how large their interest in the outcome, until the money is all gone and the company ends up in bankruptcy, by which point it is too late to protect their interests.

No, I'm not cynical at all, why do you ask?

Xopher at 408, if I had enough telekinesis to influence a rolling die, I would probably use my powers for frustrated about half the time. "You honked at me! I am not at fault! I am upset and shall now corrode the wires in your starter." "I'm going to sit and think about your porch for a while until there's an inch of slick ice from the melting on your roof. Next time, shovel your walk." Then I'd go to Vegas.

Anyone got ideas about this?

The National Weather Service said Monday there is no evidence of any naturally occurring phenomenon to explain bright lights in the eastern sky that prompted hundreds of calls to the service and emergency officials. Callers from Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina described brilliant, streaking lights followed by an explosion-like sound at about 9:45 p.m. Sunday.

I did not hear anything last night, and wasn't outside to see anything. Anyone else around here hear/see it?

Unless this is a really elaborate April Fool's setup, involving the national news media (first heard it on NPR today), I'm really curious. Probably space debris, eh?

(I kept an eye out for tripods and zombies on the way home. Didn't see any.)

Caroline @ #421, "(I kept an eye out for tripods and zombies on the way home. Didn't see any.)"

Well, if you'd used both eyes . . .

Ugh.

What should I do if a dear friend of mine, who is 35 and gay, has in a fit of patriotism, enlisted in the Navy? Other than be supportive I mean.

I likewise wasn't outside at the time. I didn't hear anything, but with one thing and another, I likely wouldn't have noticed unless it basically rattled the windows.

The second Communist leader elected to office in the Americas has died

Caroline @ 421:

The source of the excitement seems to have been a Soyuz second stage.

Leroy @ 426: Oh, wow, that's cool! Man, I wish I'd been on that plane -- okay, so I would have been terrified if I didn't know what it was, but it would have been so neat to see it from the air.

nerdycellist@423: Offhand, I'd say being supportive is about all you can do. At 35, your friend is presumably a grownup, and capable of deciding for him- or herself what risks and sacrifices are acceptable.

#423 & #428: I promise you this. He or she definitely isn't the first gay person to have enlisted in the Navy. Not even close.

The Navy in general is a great deal of fun. Give him/her my best.

Jim, #429: Oh, great. Now I'm going to have "In The Navy" as an earworm for the next few hours, and it's all your fault. :-p

#423: Suggest that Godzilla is a great theme if you're making commercials for the Army/Navy game?

Oh, wait, that was my friend Ryan. Never mind.

"The Navy in general is a great deal of fun."

Ha. Back in my day the lower ranks were chock-full of malcontents who were in it only because they didn't want to get drafted into the Army and go to Vietnam.

I'm sure it's improved drastically since then, though. Sea duty might get dicey if your ship is in the Straits of Hormuz.

Just so folks know, the first chapter of my story, A Wolf in the Fold, is now up on the web.

Lust, death, and anarchists with guns: naturally pulpy.

Fragano @425

News Link fixed.

Xopher wrtes about TK powers:

enough to influence the fall of a rolling die, but no stronger

I never really understood this one. I mean, I can influence the fall of a die, by applying a force with my finger. But the only way I can make it come up six is to grab it and put it down with the six face up, which is really obvious. Even if I use the Invisible Hand of Telekinesis, it's going to be really obvious.

The TK dice trope seems to assume I have TK powers and a subconscious ability to poke things with it so that no-one can detect the poke directly, yet the poke accomplishes a complicated 3D piece of Newtonian physics which I couldn't possible manage consciously.

Wouldn't it be simpler to demonstrate TK by moving a little balanced pointer in a vacuum jar? No, lets use dice! After all, there's no reason a swindler might have experience with games involving dice, right?

And we'll use decks of playing cards to check for ESP!

The best (and most tedious) way to make dice rolls the way you want is to first create a temporal checkpoint before the die roll. If the roll is what you want, then proceed to victory; if it is not, then jump back to your checkpoint and roll again until you get what you want. One downside of this technique is that you age normally during all your attempts. If you go for an extremely rare shot, then you may shock people when you appear to noticeably age when you throw the dice (or pull the slot machine lever, etc.)

abi@413: I felt it, it woke me - I noticed a single light shockwave going by. I thought it was a small earthquake close by. I was a bit surprised to find that it was a medium earthquake a ways away.

During the last week, btw, there seems to have been quite a swarm of earthquakes down by the Salton Sea, at least according to the USGS CA-NV earthquake map.

Caroline @ 421... I kept an eye out for tripods (...) Didn't see any.

I did.

nerdycellist @ 423:

I think that being supportive is all you can do. He's presumably thought through the issues for a while. I've heard it's fun as well, although I'm not hurrying to find out for myself.

Earl Cooley III @ 436:

That's starting to sound like Carl Sagan's (?) simple instructions for making a cake from scratch: you have to create the universe first.

Thanks, Jim and Debra -

He is a grown-up and can make his own decisions, but I worry about the political football that is DADT - that if he's got cool shipmates and can remain relatively "discreet" he might have a fine time serving, but that he also might have a difficult time getting what is due to him. I also worry a bit that he's another non-college-educated smarty-pants like me who has difficulty listening to others in authority.

Ah well - it's his choice to make. Just wish he wasn't making it as a "last resort" to get something going on with his life.

nerdycellist 423 et seq. Funnily enough, I have a much younger gay friend who just did the same thing. He ran out of money for college, and the Navy will, if all goes well, put him through med school. He wants to be a corpsman while he's on active duty, which a) means he'll probably hit the Sandbox (or maybe the Icebox, as I've taken to calling Afghanistan) and b) is way too The Boy Who Picked the Bullets Up for me.

Niall 435: No, that's not how you do it. First of all, you start with one die, in private, and you don't try to nudge it to come up six, you pull down hard on the one. Much easier, trust me. You practice that for weeks to months, until you can get the die to come up any way you want.

Then you practice beginning the pull after it's turned over a couple of times, so it won't look so obvious. This is harder, but as your TK strengthens and sharpens you'll be able to do it.

Only then do you move on to two dice. That takes several more months to master. What, you thought you'd be able to do it without practice? Not even mental powers are quite THAT royal a road, my friend!

But the key point is that TK isn't so much like having an invisible hand to move things; it's more like having a talent for persuading the die that it wants to be in a particular orientation, and encouraging it to find that orientation.

By the way, since in craps all you have to do is roll randomly then NOT roll seven or eleven before you roll your point again, all you have to do to win at craps is disrupt sevens and elevens, which is much easier than trying to roll a specific combination. (I may have missed some specialness about box cars, too, but I don't much care for craps, so I may not have learned all the rules.)

Well, I can't say that I'm not relieved, but it appears my friend has been disqualified for naval service. I know (the unspoken) part of his decision was based on feeling stuck in life - cruddy job, etc - but a good deal of it was an honest feeling of wanting to make a difference. So I feel kind of bad for him. I'm hoping I can help him find something else to do with his big brain.

Xopher @ 441:

I didn't know much of anything about craps apart from the fact that it involved dice and rolling/not rolling sevens. I had the opportunity to learn and play with fake money, and quickly came to an understanding about how it can suck people in. There are so many special, arcane ways to bet that it seems designed to distract you from the simple facts of probability. A good casino guy at the table will feed into that as well by invoking the gambler's fallacy.

All that said, a seven is the most likely total of the roll of two dice (unless you construct dice that don't roll sevens), so if the dice don't roll seven much at all the casino guy is going to know that something's up.

KeithS @#443: Yeah, but he's far more likely to suspect that the dice are somehow bad than that you are a telekinetic. If it happens a lot at the same table they'll likely shut the table down (after several dice changes), but they aren't going to decide you're a psychic unless such things are common in the universe in which you live. Which may or may not be the case here, but here "everybody knows" there's no such thing as telekinesis. Just don't try to make your retirement fund all at once and you'll be fine.

That's when your friend the telepath steps on your foot to let you know the croupier (is that the right word?) is getting suspicious and that it's time to crap out. Any kind of cheating requires an awareness of when you're about to get caught.

That's not the reason I don't cheat, though. I just don't play those kinds of games, because the odds are stacked in favor of the house and if you do anything to even it up, you're "cheating" and they throw you out. For example, in blackjack you can consistently win over time if you can keep track of all the cards that have dropped. By no reasonable definition is this cheating, but if you get caught doing it they'll throw you out.

Casinos bad. Stay out, that's what I say. I figure I'll do con things at Reno in a couple of years!

Also, what Carrie S. said. She smart, that one.

I've come up with a couple of theoretical ways of changing the odds in craps. Just a little. I don't have a lot of manual dexterity, I'm not willing to practice for several hundred hours, and the standard deviation can kill ya pretty quick even if your theory is sound and the execution flawless.

For reference, the magician John Scarne claimed he could throw whatever he wanted, tossing the dice twelve feet onto dirt. Someone asked him to prove it. He grabbed the dice, threw, called "heads" in the air... and two pennies landed twelve feet away. They were heads.

My boyfriend can reliably cause a flipped coin to end up whichever way he wants it--I've seen him demonstrate this trick maybe a hundred times (once about 20 times in a row for a skeptic) and he got it wrong precisely once.

So when we need to flip a coin, I do it. :)

Back when I was DM-ing for my high school buddies, a couple of them were pretty good at manipulating the dice. Even d20s....

Xopher @#445: That's when your friend the telepath steps on your foot to let you know...

Not a very good telepath, I take it? Foot-stepping, hmph.

Well, I never had a projective telepath on the team. Receptives are much more common; besides, projectives can make easy money with other schemes.

Xopher @ 445

People who make money at cards or dice (and don't work for casinos) do it in "friendly" private games, where there's no house edge, and you can sucker in players who don't know anything about probability. I knew a couple of guys in the Army who had their own GI bill based on knowing the odds of the various poker hands, and extracting a high fee for "teaching" that to other players.

Yes, but a receptive telepath will never fall for a bluff in poker, and a projective will make the guy with the high hand fold.

"Wouldn't it be simpler to demonstrate TK by moving a little balanced pointer in a vacuum jar?"

I can do that!

Okay, maybe not me...

I keep expecting Jean Grey to come swooping down on us.

Xopher @ # 451: "... projectives ... receptives ... "

Is that what they're calling pitchers and catchers these days?

I went to the Bayou City Art Festival over the weekend, and got pictures. (Note: all photos were taken with the permission of the artist!) I'm told that this is one of the most prestigious art shows in the country, and after seeing the level of work on exhibit, I can readily believe it. Abi, there were two bookbinders, and I made sure to get pictures of both booths.

Xopher @#451: I can no longer find the extremely creepy bit of fanfic in which I discovered the terms*, but I've seen receptive called "read-only" and projective "read-write". Which I thought was hilarious and quite apt.

*When I say extremely creepy, I mean like "Professor X is a psychopathic cult leader, Magneto works for the UN, and they have to execute Wolverine by running over him with a steamroller because shooting doesn't work" creepy. It's bad.

It looks like the comic-book Jonah Hex is being made into a movie.

Jimmy Hayward is directing the film, whose cast also includes Josh Brolin, John Malkovich and Megan Fox. It's the story of Hex (Brolin), a scarred bounty hunter tracking a voodoo practitioner (Malkovich) who wants to raise an army of the undead to liberate the South.

Hopefully John Malkovich is better at southern accents than he is at pronouncing French names even when his character is supposed to be French.

Product of the Year:

Squeez Bacon

It looks like this year I can finally manage a holiday to the lovely island country of San Serriffe.

Carrie S. @ 458:

I am not a comic book person, but my understanding was that Wolverine has managed to survive worse.

Steve C. @ 460:

I'm not sure whether to be delighted or appalled. Probably both.

Steve C (460): That's an April Fools joke, right? Right?

Mary Aileen, with Thinkgeek, you never know. :-)

Aaannnnddd...I just tried to buy some. It's a joke. Good one, though.

KeithS @ 461... The movie Wolverine is easier to stop and, while bullets can't get thru his skull's adamantium, the concussion will knock him out. The comic-book Wolverine has been burned to ashes in a concentration camp and still he came back. Oh, and this is the guy who, when he was trapped underground for a long time, ate parts of himself to feed.

Steve C. @ 464:

The others today are good too. Teresa would almost certainly want to keep a unicorn chaser on hand for emergencies, and I so desperately want the tauntaun sleeping bag to be real it's not even funny.

Serge @ 465:

Conservation of energy and mass never seem to apply. Or common sense, for that matter.

Mutters to self: it's only a comic book; it's only a comic book.

KeithS: Wolverine's regenerative ability fluctuates wildly, based in large part on how big a Logan fanboy the current writer is. I've seen people claim he could come back from being decapitated, while others have him laid up for a few days after merely being stabbed in the gut with a tanto*.

But they all seem to agree that he needs time to regenerate, and the point of the steamroller was to inflict enough damage quickly that the regen ability would simply throw up its hands and sputter out. And since the writer sets the rules for his story, it worked. :)

*Or possibly a wakizashi; a Japanese short sword/long knife, in any case, and given that it was a ninja I'm going for tanto.

KeithS @ 466... Conservation of energy and mass never seem to apply.

Well, if puny Banner can turn into a 1000-pound Jolly Green Giant, what's to prevent Logan to nibble at himself?

That being said, Hank McCoy has always been favorite mutant.

Carrie @458: That image suggests a 'Looney Tunes/X-men' pastiche. From what you describe, Sylvester might be Wolverine, because we'd expect that he would survive getting run over by a steamroller[1][2]. Tweety could be Professor X, because of that high-domed forehead.

[1] Although Wiley Coyote would also be a good candidate.

[2] SCTV once did a skit titled Quincy - Cartoon Coroner: "What do you mean he died of natural causes! He's flatter than a pancake! This cat was run over by a steamroller!"

I've always wondered about the mutants who just didn't qualify because their abilities were just too dull. There are probably some Heroes like that as well.

So, here are some who didn't make the cut:

VerizonMan: Able to get at least three bars

Sneezer: With the right irritant, he can blow over a house of cards 30 feet away

Drone: Makes time stand still by talking in a slow monotone

HelpDesk: Takes forever to get a hold of him, but when you do, your spreadsheet formulas will finally work

SteveC @ 470... The Frying Nun?

IIRC, when Wolverine was gutted by the Silver Samurai, he was also suffering from an infestation of nanobytes that inhibited his regenerative power.

Just recently he was incinerated down to his skeleton by Nitro, but got better, so you're right that his ability to recover from injury depends mainly on who's writing for him at that time.

Besides, if he can survive the Hulk ripping his legs off (he crawled over and stuck them back on, they then regenerated to full ability), they'd figure out how he could survive losing his head.

Late breaking news: the Singularity has arrived.

John L@#472: No, I was talking about the Kitty Pryde and Wolverine limited series from the 80s. My copies of the originals having been sacrificed to the Moving Gods when I left California, I cannot remember whether it was Ogun or Kitty herself who stabbed him.

Anyway, the Silver Samurai is not a ninja. :)

Steve C. @ 470: Superuseless Superpowers

Bruce Arthurs @ 475 -

Some of those are hilarious.

This community will probably appreciate this one better than anyone...

Steve C. #470: In the collaborative Wild Cards series (edited by George R. R. Martin), normal-looking super-powered folks are called "aces", except that those with trivial or very weak powers are more usually called "deuces".

Bruce Arthurs @ 475... TeleKinnearsis? We're getting into Mystery Men territory, and yes, I do remember that Kinnear was in that movie.

#470, Steve C -

"Mutants with dull abilities" was part of the premise of Mur Lafferty's novel Playing for Keeps. The main character's power was that anything she had, she kept. (In other words, she couldn't lose or have it stolen. Discarding things was okay.)

Among the other powers in the story were the ability to carry a full bar tray and never drop it, and the ability to know and cook exactly what someone wanted at that moment, to perfection.

Jeremy Preacher ##477:

Cute... Best comment from the MutaMetafilter thread:

***Ỉ DỌ NỞT RỂCṎGNịZỄ YỖỪR PỮNY DỊSẾMVỚWỀLỈNGS***

Mods, have you ever had one of those?

The only deuce superpower I've been able to demonstrate is something I call Dictionary Luck, where I can take a reference work with which I am familiar, have someone ask a pertinent question covered by the topic of the book, and open the book to the page with the answer on the first try; a critical success in the attempt is when I can also call out the page number before I open the book. That can come in very handy during tabletop gaming, for example.

Is the abiveld a power for Good or for Evil?

David Harmon #481: ***Ỉ DỌ NỞT RỂCṎGNịZỄ YỖỪR PỮNY DỊSẾMVỚWỀLỈNGS***

The Novalis disemvoweling tool (for example) handles that without difficulty:

*** D NT RCGNZ YR PN DSMVWLNGS***

R.M. 480: Among the other powers in the story...[was] the ability to know and cook exactly what someone wanted at that moment, to perfection.

You must be kidding. I would kill puppies for that power! While I probably couldn't make money with it (chefs can't get FTF with every customer) the impact on relationships alone...!

re 470: I have one of those powers (and it isn't "drone").

Nun Plus... This nun is very strong, but also very dumb.

Serge @ 483:

I was going to say good, but at this point I think that the abiveld just is.

Earl Cooley III @ 484:

I made that disemvoweller barf by feeding it pointed Hebrew, but I'm not going to hold that against it.

Xopher @ 485:

I think I can find some puppies for you, if you really need them.

My superpower seems to be Google-Fu, but I haven't tested it under controlled circumstances.

My useless superpower is "Precognitive Earworm" - I get a song stuck in my head, then in a few days, someone starts using it in a commercial. (Oh, how I long for the bygone days of jingles... Ok, I can still tell you the phone number for Jhoon Rhee Karate (USA-1000), but at least I wasn't walking around humming stupid classic rock songs all the time.)

I've got a friend whose power is "Spot Blue Heron" - actually kind of neat when we lived on the Eastern Shore, not quite so useful when he moved to New Mexico. (But if there *had* been a blue heron there, you can bet he would have spotted it. It was uncanny.)