And, of course, one gross was the number of guests at a certain Party, chosen to match the sum of the ages of the celebrants, eleventy-one and thirty-three.

It's also the number of hours for work available in a week if you set aside one day for resting....

It is one of the largest numbers that has its own name (a gross) but is not a factor of 10

I think you mean multiple of 10, though it isn't a factor of 10 either.

Is that gross of cubits measuring the short way or the long way of the wall?
Because it's apparently going to be either a very thick wall or a very small city.

P J Evans @ 4: height, maybe?

144 even has its own Wikipedia page....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/144_(number)

What's the square root of 42?

How about the squares of 9, 8, and i? That gives 81+64-1=144.

Michael Adelstein @6:

I'm probably giving away Making Light blogger secrets when I tell you this, but every number up to some unreasonably high one has its own Wikipedia page. I use 'em as jumping off points for Open Threads when I have nothing already prepped.

The sum of 3 squares bit is just plain wrong (as those three together add up to 204, not 144).

... and "the square of 12" and "the 12th square number" are equivalent statements -- no new information comes from stating both.

Honestly, nitpicking! Shush.

In spite of recent updates, gallery "Making Light and Faces" counts a total number of photos that's one third of a gross plus 4 heads away from a full gross.

81 + 36 + 27 = 144.

Unless I've screwed up my arithmetic, the only way of expressing 144 as a sum of three squares is as 64+64+16.

Not that 27 is a square. Sheesh. *hangs head in shame*

Carol, don't hang your head...two squares and a cube beat three squares. :)

Sum of two squares and a cube is easier, though: there are three ways of expressing 144 as a sum of two squares and a cube, and only one as a sum of three squares.

Serge, to push the total number of images in Making Light and Faces closer to the number of this open thread, you can find a picture of me here: Ben's Lab Page

...and, for anyone who was following the conversation on fMRI from the previous open thread, the above link goes to my page within my lab's page. Lots of information and papers there for those who are interested.

Benjamin Wolfe @ 18... Done. Thanks to this photo, the gallery is now only (1/3 gross + 3 heads) short of one gross.

Steve C.@16: Carol, don't hang your head...two squares and a cube beat three squares. :)

Now that's a poker game I'd like to see!

Serge, you could pair this one with the more recent one of me you have. It would be a horrendous "before & after" sequence.

Its rare properties are Fibonacci, hungry, and square.

Indeed. It is also one of only 3 Fibonnaci numbers without a proper divisor^a.

Also, 144=12², and if you reverse 144 and 12, it still works, since 441=21², which is nice.

Talking of squares, Bob, the smallest magic square^b you can make out of consecutive primes consists of the 144 odd primes from 3 upwards.

Alas, The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers, which is one of my top 144 favourite books ever, though more comprehensive than wiki number pages, doesn't mention 144's hunger...

^a here meaning a divisor that does not divide any smaller Fibonnaci number. (The others are 1 and 8).

^b a square where all rows, columns, and both diagonals have the same sum. (Here 4,515).

Unless I've got my hexadecimal arithmetic hexed, 42 + 81 + 81 = 144 when all four numbers are hex.

So Teresa's claim is not grossly baseless!

12 squared + 12 squared + 0 squared.

Oh, I'm sorry, that's too gross.

Me at #23: Unfortunately, none of the hex numbers involved are squares.

I suppose I should send Serge a more up-to-date photo of the new (as of late August 2008) beardless me.

(The reluctance has been because being clean-shaven is job-related, and that beardless visage is not my real face. I keep hoping something will come along to make it financially feasible to dump the part-time security work and move into full retirement.)

(Oh, and those people who say my being beardless makes me look younger? THEY'RE WRONG.)

Me @25: Except for 144 hex, which is the square of 18 decimal.

I think I'm done now.

Even more excitingly¹, UK readers especially may be aware of, or remember, the The Legendary Countdown Numbers Round.

Now, as named on previous threads, the bitzer for this Open Thread will be post 144.

If we take, and I don't see why we shouldn't, the alphabet, and then assign the number 1 to the letter A, 2 to B, etc., then we can generate a set of numbers for a Countdown numbers game from the letters B, I, T, Z, E, and R thusly-wise:

2, 9, 20, 26, 5, and 18.

Can it be mere coincidence that these numbers lead so easily to 144?:

18 x 9 = 162.
20 - 2 = 18.
162 - 18 = [drum roll] 144.

I think not!

¹ I've now cast away my numbers dictionary, and am entirely powered by wine...

@22: That's probably because hunger is one of the silliest properties of numbers ever devised. It's in the staggeringly comprehensive online encyclopedia of integer sequences, but even that doesn't know the name "hungry" (which I can only find here).

Thanks to Janet Brnna Croft, the gallery is now 1/3 gross and 2 heads short of a gross...

Maybe I'm just easily amused, but I laughed out loud at the comment under the Garfield cartoon:
Note also: Garfield is actually incorrect here. "Loser" does not in fact rhyme with wolverine

Chris Eagle #29,

Thanks - that's brilliant! It may be silly, but the fact there's a way of defining "hungry" numbers eating pi is the possibly the best thing ever.

Hooray!

I nearly disenvowelled Janet Brennan Croft over @ 30. Could our moderators fix that? Thanks.

Just thought I'd mention.

Included in the latest news item from the ReConStruction (NaSFic 2010) home page: vuvuzelas have been banned from the convention.

Darn. And here I was looking forward to a nice relaxing vuvuzela concert. :-)

Linkmeister's 1977 incarnation makes the gallery 1/3 gross and one head short of a gross...

Serge, in contribution to Gross causes, here's another pic of telescopic me. You can use the caption from the picture if you want.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sclayworth/4616770005/

(BTW, I love being able to attach faces to the names here. Thanks!)

Gripe du jour: In the wake of new federal regulations, my bank (and probably yours too) is aggressively pushing to get me (and you) to accept their "overdraft coverage". Thus they are attempting to continue their previous scam of charging me massive fees instead of notifying me at point-of-sale that my account is dry, or allowing me to use another form of payment instead.

Some links on the issue.

Open thready gloating: I'm about to go see Seven Samurai on the big screen.

I love living in a town with an art house theater, and I love my taekwondo school for sponsoring this particular film!

They're exploiting customer embarrassment. American Express used a similar technique to promote their no-limit credit product.

Serge:

My elbows are deep into Pennsic Prep (and the sewing machine just broke, damn it. Thankfully, I'm about to hand work), so I've been using this pic all week. That should even up your numbers, if I'm counting right.

More on the bank gripe: MSNBC's Red Tape Chronicles is even more scathing.

Mischief is made by those who hate all peace
and want us all within hard walls and gates.
With loudest words, and after harsh debates,
they'll order silence, and demand we cease
turbulent thoughts that challenge their caprice;
command each soul into narrow estates,
and keep each heart distinct from its best mates
just so that love and light may both decrease.
They call it summer when they see it snow,
mistake the cold for some redeeming balm
and bid us all accept the freezing rain
out of the north, claiming they see it glow
with ready warmth. They tell us all is calm,
that all is gentle, that we're past all pain.

On a happier note, I got to hike again today, as for once the heat let up a bit without "benefit" of a thunderstorm. No berries on this trail, but lots of butterflies! I found one gorgeous one dead -- pale green, with what looked like a little mouth icon on each wing.

That list of rhymes for 'wolverine' actually has 149 items on it.

Sisuile, 40: Ooh, lookit the blackwork! Is it reversible?

The "rhymes with wolverine" list leans pretty heavily on the chemical suffixes "-ine" and "-ene", not to mention all 7 appearances of the numeric suffix "-teen". I am, however amused by the inclusion of "Dion, Celine". Anyone want to try for a poem rhyming "wolverine" with "buckminsterfullerene"? :-)

Sisuile, how'd you get the supermodel to wear your blackwork?

I just feel compelled to share this: my work contract got extended a couple of weeks. I'm a census clerk, and we are shedding people right and left. Tomorrow, the clerk contingent in my part of the office gets cut in half.

My boss's boss told me I'm being kept around (in spite of being probably the most junior clerk there) because I do "fantastic work."

I was told this Wednesday afternoon, and I still feel floaty about all of it.

David Harmon @ 37:

My sleazebag bank (the one I gave up on when they took over the bank I used to be with) has been annoying me with letters and emails about overdraft protection. They've been trying to spin it as a wonderful, positive thing, including that you can use it as a very short-term loan! Since I think I have a whole $15 in that account these days, I think I need to toddle down to the nearest branch and say my goodbyes.

Lila @ 38:

Gloat away!

Here you are, Sisuile. And there you go, Steve C. Thanks for passing the pictures on.

Mirrors do not show the truth
or if they do, we are not equipped to hear it.
A mirror reflects only that which we expect to see,
our hopes, our fears, our vanity
reflections only of the eyes that see it.

The mirror absorbs images
Impresses them into its lack of soul.
Magazine girls, too slim,
Tweaked to absurd alien perfection,
Hollywood starlets in their eating disorders
wrinkles smoothed, curves cleaned
soft-focus lenses, one thousand tricks
that I know, subtle distortions of reality—
Stalin would be proud.

Mirrors are cold, backed with metal
and care not if their harsh reflection leaves scars
I will never be thin enough
I will never be pretty enough
The mirror is Despair's domain with just cause.
Cold rationality for a world
for which reason has taken on too much
Much that is not its purview.

Mirrors do not show the truth. Truth
is only to be found in human eyes.

You are beautiful. Believe this.
You are so beautiful.
You are so beautiful.

Hmm. That was not the poem I had intended to write.

On that note, however, we're a few weeks away from yearbook photography, and in all of my years of photographing high school students, I have only ONCE heard a girl say that she liked her own photo. Every other time, the subject of the photo hates it while all of her friends think she looks great.

Why is this?

B Durbin @ #52, I can't answer that. I can say that I've just been through collecting current photographs of many in my high school class, and very few of them look anything like they did in 1968.

The occasion was a 60th birthday bash held in the same location where many a school dance was held way back then. About 50 people showed up (including spouses), but as a result of the original mailing someone suggested collecting birthday photos and I volunteered to put them up on my Picasa space. I now have 100 pictures there.

My family moved 6,000 miles from the East Coast to Guam 3 days after graduation. This was the first contact I'd had with any of these folks since that day 42 years ago. It was fascinating and a lot of fun.

Why I Wear Headphones, and Should Never Remove Them For Any Reason Outside Emergency or Desire:

Friday afternoon, the guy working one particular corner in downtown Toronto for a well-known charitable organization (one we've donated to in the past, in fact) asks me if I like children. This is his usual line, because he works for an org that apparently thinks placing teens on streetcorners with a hard-sell routine is the best way to endear potential donors to youth. I should know. He and I have done this dance before. That first time, he asked me: "So, are you gonna punch me if I follow you like this while I give you my talk?"

"Yeah," I replied. "I might punch you. But it's cool, because I'm little and I probably won't do any permanent damage."

This wasn't my first run-in with the org -- another binder brandisher for the same org once told me I had "a strong handshake, for a girl."

"Dick," a friend said, when I told her this.

"Yeah, I think that's what he had in mind."

Skip to Friday afternoon. He's wearing mirrorshades (mirrorshades! sincere ones! with un-ironic khakis and a pristine white polo shirt!), and he looms over me and says: "I know you're just going to walk away, but can you tell me, do you like children?"

I hesitated, staring at the blazing red hand where I wished the walk signal was. "I've decided on my response in these situations," I said. "And that response is to tell you that I do like children. A lot. They taste great with barbecue sauce."

Madeline Ashby @ 54: The charitable organization types in downtown Portland have become so numerous and pushy that I'm tempted to start giving money to panhandlers. A peculiar reaction, but I've never claimed to be all that rational.

Steve C.! You do the "Observable Universe" blog for the Houston Chronicle website! I had never connected you before. I went out and watched the Iridium flash that you wrote about.

(Now I have to try to remember if I found out about that blog from here...I don't think I did, I think it was somewhere else....)

When it's a grey winter day (it is) and the SAD is starting to bite (and it is) there's one sure cure:

Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra doing a medley of Baby Elephant Walk and the Sesame Street theme before a massive *screaming* audience.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1PqrBDQOdQ

There's no other bit of music so certain to remind me that life is good. Wish I'd been there.

Nine's an interesting number. Multiply any number by nine, then add up each of the digits in the product and keep doing so until you have a single digit left and you'll always get nine. To give a couple of random examples:

9 x 3 = 27 = 2 + 7 = 9

9 x 44 = 396 = 3 + 9 + 6 = 18 = 1 + 8 = 9

9 x 456 = 4104 = 4 + 1 + 0 + 4 = 9

As I recall, this is a property of any number X in base X+1. (E.g., in base 8 all multiples of 7 will have a digit-sum of 7.)

David @59 — I did not know that. That's cool.

I knew about 9 because of how numbers are treated in numerology. My observation was also based in part on the observation that taking 9 (which I am in numerology) multiplying it by the month of my birth, 3, gives the date of my birth in that month, 27, which reduced, again, to 9.

But I'm a 9 because the number of my first name (which adds up to 15 = 6), the number of my middle name (which adds up to 24 = 6), and the number of my last name (not the pseudonym you see here; which adds up to 33 = 6), add up to 18 (= 9). But the numbers of my names individually would give some people reason to pause: 666. Behold, I have the number of the name in Revelation 13:17-18. :P

Madeleine, #54: That first time, he asked me: "So, are you gonna punch me if I follow you like this while I give you my talk?"

Teenage guy, probably not exactly a bruiser, right? I would be SO tempted to respond with:

"No, because I don't have the upper-body strength to do so effectively. However, I probably weigh twice what you do -- and I guarantee you that if I body-block you into the wall, you're gonna feel it. Now, are you going to leave me alone?"

(Depending on my mood, I might follow that up by muttering, "C'mon, punk, make my day.")

B. Durbin @ #52, the simple answer would be that to the friends, the photo looks like the way they see their friend every day, while to the subject, it's reversed from the way she normally sees herself. I know very few people of either gender who like the way their voice sounds on recordings--we prefer to hear ourselves with all that extra bone-conduction resonance.

Madeleine @ #54, that is infuriating. I guess they're working from the "if you're annoying enough people will give you money to go away" panhandler paradigm.

B Durin @ 52... Is it that uncommon even among boys?

BTW: Seven Samurai (the 200+ minute, Criterion version) on the big screen is massively full of win.

The rambling, 20+ minute introduction by a local film studies professor....not so much. I deeply wanted to say "could you please shut up and let us watch the movie??" Or possibly just beat him over the head with a club marked "show, don't tell".

I didn't get the job. On the bright side, it probably would have killed me dead by Thanksgiving anyway.

TexAnne, I'm sorry you didn't get it, but I'm VERY glad you probably won't be dead by Thanksgiving!

B.Durbin @52, lovely poem. We (especially women) are so trained by society to be uncomfortable in our skins and dissatisfied with our bodies that it drowns out even the voices of our family and friends telling us we're beautiful. We carry around ideas of what we are supposed to took like, and photographs and mirrors rarely match. I know someone recovering from anorexia, who says when she looked in the mirror all she saw was the "fat" parts, no matter how skeletal the rest of her got. So I was pleasantly surprised to find myself actually LIKING nearly all the pictures of me taken at Mythcon. It feels good to have reached that level of comfort with my appearance.

David Goldfarb @ 56 -

Yep, that's me - thanks for reading. I owe Observable Universe another post this weekend.

I did make a post here back in March about the blog, so that's one possible place you could have found out about it.

Relevant to some people's interests: a lady I know through LiveJournal has learned to bookbind and posted about it, with lots of pictures.

Elliott, 69: You know her too? I'd say "the Internet is a very small place," except that she's the person who pointed me to ML in the first place.

TexAnne @70: Her son Colin and my daughter Beka were due the same week ... Colin came 5 weeks early, and therefore is now older. :->

I've been reading her lj since 2001 or 2002. I forget how I first came across it; perhaps I was reading Respectful of Otters first? In any case, I found enough of her posts fascinating to 'friend' her then, and have been reading ever since.

She may very well be the only person I 'met through livejournal' whom I haven't met in person, yet.

Metacomment: With any luck, this is a special half bitzer, the first since "bitzer" was coined, and unique in the realm of ML bitzers and comments because it simultaneously marks half of one and six dozen of the other.

I for one prefer TexAnne alive.

TexAnne @ 70... I'd say "the Internet is a very small place"

It is. A few weeks ago, I noticed some of the people whose names had been added to a friend's FB list. He was the Best Man at my wedding.

It'd appear that Paul A has been replaced by his Evil Universe counterpart.

Lee @ 61: Actually, this guy was about twice my size. (Then again, I'm very short. So it's easy to be twice my size.) Even if I had body-checked him, it wouldn't have done much good. Again, this is a good reason to wear headphones. An aural condom is good protection against this sort of thing. It just doesn't always work, when the person trying to get through is sufficiently caustic or weaselly.

Lila @ 62: That's probably it. My guess is that the level of the org that handles street dealings is totally different from the level that handles their print and online marketing. Their print and online material actually communicates both their mission and methods of accomplishing it in a very clear and accessible way, without bullying.

Serge @ 63: Some guys will try to get their photo retaken on specious reasons, but they very rarely comment on it other than to be annoyed that they have to take the photo at all.

Lila @ 62: Unfortunately, it's not so simple as that— they hate the way they look in photographs and think they're hideous and ugly and all sorts of things. And they usually want the photo retaken.

Sometimes we'll allow this, especially if the student shows up nicely dressed as opposed to the original photo's slovenly clothing and hair, and they promise to smile this time. But it's not as though we don't send out multiple notices when photographs will be taken.

We did finally figure out a way to cut down on the complaints about the yearbook & ID photo with its mandatory pose and clothing rules. We take a different picture first, where they have several options for poses (including choose your own). Our complaints about the ID pose dropped to near zero when we started taking the others, and it actually speeds things up.

David @59 -- We learned a trick in elementary school for checking addition on long columns of multi-digit numbers. Add the digits across each number, and if the sum comes to two digits, add those. Then add those number, and if necessary reduce to 1 digit. Then, add the digits of the answer. It should be the same number.
346+112+25=483
3+4+6=13 1+3=4 1+1+2=4 2+5=7 4+4+7=15 1+5=6
4+8+3=15 1+5=6

It was called "casting out nines", and thanks to the internet I finally know why. We didn't actually cast out any nines, which I why I was mystified for so long.

Open thready question: I was dreaming last night and got into a discussion of how one pronounces the comic-strip word "AAAaaaaaugh!" I pronounced it as if it were a slightly fading sequence of As -- the other person pronounced it "aa-oo-gah". Now I know the latter is Just Wrong, but I don't think what I was proposing in the dream is right either. How do you pronounce it? Or do you?

Tom Whitmore@79

In IPA symbols I would say "ɑː" fading to "ɔː" and perhaps even as far as "uː". That is, "ah" maintained as your mouth closes at the end.

I used to pronounce it awg (aw as in bawl). Now I pronounce it with a sort of long positional glissando from a (as in father) to ə (as in but), optionally with either a full g or a dying gh (as in Afghanistan when pronounced by a native Pashto speaker) gurgle at the end.

It must be prounounced loud.

Question for the team: if someone calls Fox News a "legitimate news source that you don't happen to like," am I justified in dismissing them as 1) a troll, 2) a wingnut, 3) a fugghead, 4) none of the above?

I pronounce it "aaaaugh." Not to be confused with "oooooooooh," an expression of surprise and alarm.

Tom Whitmore @ 79... Isn't "aa-oo-gah" the onomatopiea for a submarine's signal that it's about to dive? Jim Macdonald probably could confirm.

Madeline, #76: Yeah, that would be a problem. OTOH, that puts it into the realm of things in which the police might take an interest -- "Officer, this guy is following me and harassing me and making implicit threats." (But I'll bet they're also trained to check for cops before doing this.)

My fallback position would be to make a scene ("Stop following me, you pervert! I said I wasn't interested!") -- thereby invoking social stereotypes and possibly persuading some nearby White Knight to come to my defense. I may not like stereotyping, but it's what he's doing, and two can play that game.

Tom, #79: My default pronunciation would be along the lines of "awwwwwg" -- "aw" with a g on the end.

@85: if I recall das Boot correctly, the signal for "this submarine is about to dive" is ALLLLLAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRM, shouted like two Brian Blesseds.

Xopher:

Personally, I'd spell that as "Aaaaargh", but then I speak a non-rhotic version of English.

The 'gh' gurgle occurs more accessibly in Dutch, if anyone is motivated to try to learn it from a native speaker.

Xopher@82:

It depends on whether they have ever watched Fox News. If yes, then (1) or (2), if no, then (1) or (3).

Xopher @ 82 : I prefer fool, but wingnut or troll seems fitting. Going on at length to describe the cortical lesions required to find faux news a useful source is recommended but not required (probably lesions in prefrontal cortex at the very least).

Calculated Risk's periodically updated unofficial list of problem banks for July 30 (see if yours is on it) -- more than 800 of them -- is here.

5 today.

All of these, needless to say, are small banks, not big enough not to fail, and did not receive the bailouts -- that then went to paying bonii to their execs.

Love, C.

Hmm, Benjamin, you make me miss my dad again. He could have written a parody neuroscience article (for, say, the Journal of Irreproducible Results) about what part of the brain has to be damaged for a person to take Fox News seriously. And probably would have.

If I was not enmeshed in all of the busyness that is packing and getting ready to move, I might do that just for the amusement value. There is enough social neuroscience / neuroscience of decision-making work out there to bounce off of that a very amusing article could be written. I know a few of the researchers in the aforementioned subfields; they would be amused.

Xopher@82, I'd either go for (n)dupe or (n+1)victim. (Unless it's troll, of course, which can be a fine position for friends to take...)

Xopher:

I wonder if the disagreement is mainly about what a "legitimate news source" means. If you define that in terms of having the trappings of being a real news source (big and well-funded, widely watched, often widely cited, apparently taken seriously by other media), they definitely fit that category.

If you define it in terms of whether they're honest or careful with the facts, you're in a different realm. There are a number of recent cases (the Sherrod case being the obvious one) where Fox has been at least very careless with getting the facts straight, in the direction of their open political affiliation.

Now, that's not unique to Fox. My impression is that they're unusually bad in that direction, but most of the respectable MSM seems to be susceptible to the same disease, especially when the story they're reporting on fits the broad narrative they expect on some issue.

If someone wants to cite Fox as a source for some news item or event, well, it's probably about as legit as most other news sources as long as it's not an explicit partisan point of contention. Otherwise, I'd want to see if it was covered the same way by other sources. (Though that isn't a guarantee of correctness, or we'd all be talking now about what a visionary Bush was for stopping Saddam's nuclear program just in time.)

Relevant to Serge's question @ 63: this study says that "underweight males are at high risk for depressive symptoms, as are female "weight pessimists" -- girls who think they are overweight but are actually normal weight."

However, that only speaks for weight. Even when I was thinner, I never thought of my face or hair or other features as pleasing. Occasionally I catch glimpses of myself and think I see what my husband sees, but mostly I just have to trust that his programming, while wildly different from mine, is relatively bug-free. I think it's telling that we identify totally different women as attractive -- I think Carrie-Ann Moss is beautiful, but he finds her "skeletal." He was disappointed that Halle Berry couldn't fill out Ursula Andress' bikini in Die Another Day. I don't know if it was nature or nurture, but I happened upon someone pre-adapted in my direction. And even if I don't understand it, I have to accept it.

Regarding why it's such a problem in Western culture, though, I think we could discuss that forever and never come up with an answer. At least, not an answer that fits everyone's issues. Everyone's issues are too different. I think a large part of the problem is how we discuss our bodies in front of our children. Some people worry about swearing in front of children, but think nothing about saying things like "I'm so fat/ugly/decrepit" while they're in the room. If you believe in the viral nature of language, and you think that using curse words or slurs or improper grammar is wrong because it influences the word choice of others in common speech, then it follows that you should be equally conscious when applying descriptors to the body. Another anecdote: the Ontario College of Art and Design (where I'm doing some grad work) is hosting a summer camp this year, and while using the bathroom I overheard a seven-year-old tell a camp counselor, "All my friends say I'm chubby."

Adolescence is not the time to address this issue. It starts earlier than that.

They posted a link to a clip. I scoffed. They defended it in the terms I quoted.

I think using clips from Faux News for any purpose other than showing up Faux News for the lowbrow propaganda engine they are is, at the very least, indicative of a certain political point of view that is distinctly to the right of mine.

On photos and dislike of them: You've heard me say I mostly look like a mole in photos. This is true. I don't like how I look in a lot of them, and every once in a while, I get one so very bad it drags the others down by association.

I think it's partly because I don't see my face very often, and when I do in a mirror, I'm doing other things and can either pose or change the angle to one I like better. I like the parts of my body I see. I don't see the part under my chin very often, even if mirrors; in photographs, it's either squished or stretched depending on whether I've been told to drop my chin or look up, and since many pictures are taken by people below me, ick. I also move a lot, and so the part I see of myself in mirrors is either posed flatteringly or active. I'm kind of like a Youtube video still-- pictures always catch me at an awkward place.

So yeah, mostly that people aren't used to seeing themselves at all, and the parts they don't see most are often parts that aren't supposed to be visible, like under the chin.

G D Townshende #60, Tracie #78:

Yup, that's a classic way to checksum arithmetic. It works for multiplication too, and with a slight extension¹, you can also use it for subtraction.

To use it for (integer) division, run it backwards: multiply the checksum of the quotient by that of the divisor, add the checksum of the remainder (continuing to cast out nines as needed), then compare to the checksum of the dividend.

In fact, the basic pattern works for other bases as well -- that is, for octal, you're casting out sevens, and for hexadecimal you're casting out fifteens.

¹ sordid details: Subtraction is the same as adding a negative number. When adding the digits of a negative number, you treat the resulting checksum as negative, and (if needed) add 9 to make it positive. (Ditto if subtracting the checksums yields zero.) So, "243-125=118" --> "243+(-125)=118" --> "9+(-8)=1" <--> "9+1=1" (mod 9)

Xopher:

Further right than yours, perhaps. But that doesn't automatically mean dupe or villain. And even the "further right" isn't 100%. I read and listen to stuff from a *really* wide range of views, and sometimes cite them or make reference to them in discussions, without any claim at all that I agree with that source in any other area, or even that I generally trust their honesty or care in collecting and reporting on the world.

The problem with Fox news isn't their political slant, it's their unreliability as a news source--a problem they share with most other news sources, but I think they have it worse.

Is your objection with citing Fox about reliability of the information, or about determining whose side your friend is on?

Not MY friend. This guy is calling the Cordoba Center project "inappropriate" because if will cause "pain" to the relatives of 9/11 victims.

I'm not friends with bigots.

But I didn't answer your question. I think that if he thinks Faux News is a "legitimate news source," he may be too far gone into the "LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU" school of "reality" to be worth arguing with.

It's a "legitimate news source" only if you're not particularly concerned about facts.

Bedeline Ashby @ 95... Some years ago, I was going thru some old stuff when I came across my student cards from the Halcyon days that high-school was not. Looking at the photos, I found myself thinking that my acne had been nowhere near as bad as Martin Landau's in Outer Limits episode "The Man Who Was Never Born". Self-image... Last year, I was visiting a friend up in Quebec City, who told me that her 14-year-old daughter despaired of ever getting a boyfriend because she is... too tall. Doesn't matter to her that that she's a gorgeous young woman. Silly.

Albatross @94, but Fox News isn't "widely watched". In prime time, Fox News currently averages 1.84 million viewers, which puts it ahead of the other cable news channels, but way behind network news shows, which are currently getting 5-7 million viewers for their evening newscasts.

Fox News is primarily a channel for the dissemination of political opinions. Their best-rated shows are Bill O'Reilly's, Sean Hannity's, and Glenn Beck's opinion shows, all of which get more viewers than their news programs. The news programs exist to give the opinion programs a veneer of respectability, and allow the viewers to make believe that they're watching news and being informed.

Chris Eagle @ 86... Maybe 'ALLLLLAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRM' is the German word for 'aa-oo-gah'. As for the BrianBlessed unit of scientific measure... I like it!

Xopher @100, whoa, you know Abe Foxman?!

Xopher, #96: Remind them (or, more likely, inform them) that Fox went to court for the right to broadcast any damn thing they please, whether true or not, and call it "news" -- AND WON.* Since then, you can't trust anything they say without independent confirmation.

* I can't remember enough details to narrow a Google search, but the case involved a news anchor who was fired for refusing to read a report containing known factual errors. The case went to court, and the court ruled that it was NOT a wrongful termination.

In other news, the Dutch have managed to brew the world's strongest beer at 60% alcohol by volume: as strong as many cask-strength whiskeys.

Avram, no, just someone who's quoting him on BoingBoing.

B. Durbin (52): I liked my senior class photo. I liked two of the three alternate shots, too. More recent photos, however, always surprise me with how large I am. (I know what I weigh. I know it's more than it was 25 years ago. But my mental image of myself is stuck in the past.)

Thomas (87): To me 'Aaaaugh' is a cry of despair and 'Aaaargh' a cry of frustration, because the 'r' in the second one gives it a hint of a growl.

What of Lucy van Pelt's 'waugggghhhh!!!' ?

Lee @106, try fox sued for right to lie.

This seems like the right venue for this question.

I'm looking at the copyright page of a 2003 Penguin reprint of Elizabeth Gaskell's novel, North and South. It gives dates for the first serialization in Charles Dickens's magazine, Household Words (1854-1855), on up to the present edition with an Introduction by Patricia Ingham and a Chronology.

Then, beneath all that, appears this statement:

The moral right of the editor has been asserted.

What is that about?

Debraji@112: Moral rights as defined in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 have to be 'asserted' at the time of publication, even (it seems) if the author is long dead.

Sometimes publishers use a gender-specific form of wording... and use the wrong one.

Serge, you could add the picture of me from http://www.wildlifeinformation.org/About/AimsHistory.htm (I'm the one without the black-and-white fur coat). It's a few years old, but I've not changed that much - slightly shorter hair now (and some grey hairs, but they don't show on pictures yet). At least it doesn't have me in evening wear (most recent pictures of me do, and I only wear dresses like that a few times a year - but that's when the cameras are out).

Steve with a book, 113: To clarify, editors who produce new editions of public-domain texts count as people who have earned moral rights in a work. They have to choose a base text, collate every edition against that base text, make lists of variants, resolve errors (and in many cases punctuation), add notes and comments, and write introductions. It can take years. When academics do it, it counts for tenure (though at a reduced rate because although scholarship can't happen without editions, tenure committees don't think it's "real scholarship.") (Gosh no, I don't have any lasting bitterness, why do you ask?)

Serge, if you link to DDB's pix, there's a good one of me from 4th Street this year over there. DDB, would you mind it going into that set? http://dd-b.net/cgi-bin/picpage.pl/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/2010/06250-pblog?pic=_DDB4395 should reach it...

Fragano Ledgister @ 42, B. Durbin @ 51: Thank you for sharing your poetry. I'm not much good at writing them myself, but at least I can appreciate those presented to me.

On the topic of "what I look like", I think I'm very lucky in that I'm basically happy with my appearence and body shape. It's sad that so few people, particularly so few women and girls, are, nowadays.

patgreene @ 48: Congrats. on the work extension and the complimentary reason for it.

Madeline Ashby @ 54: Great response!

David Goldfarb @59: Cool! I knew it worked for nine, but didn't know the wider rule.

TexAnne: Sympathies for not getting the job, but yes, better not dead.

TexAnne@115: yes, sorry—I had misread debraji's post slightly and thought that the long-dead author's moral right was being asserted rather than the editor's.

Actually, while we're on the subject of copyright-page boilerplate: You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Why?

Steve @ 118 - "you must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover" -

One reason I heard was that it was to prevent libraries from buying paperbacks and rebinding them in hardback so they would last longer.

@118: It's my understanding that clauses like that one are void under the first-sale doctrine: once you've bought the book, it's yours, and it's no business of the copyright holder what you choose to do with it (as long as you don't make copies).
This doesn't stop people trying to impose such clauses, of course.

Steve C.@ 68: Yes, that's where I found out about the blog: I didn't make the connection that it was you who was conducting it, I thought it was just something new that you knew about.

TexAnne, sorry the job didn't come through. Best of luck with a better fit some time soon.

I think Mary Aileen @109 has it right: 'Aaaagh' is despair (scream devolving to death rattle) and 'Aaaargh' is frustration (scream devolving to growl).

Serge @110: By the above, 'Waaaugh' is a tantrum (scream devolving to wailing a la 'Gimme what I want or I'll scream until I'm blue!')

One of my favorites along that line is "bleargh", a portmanteau of "blech" and "argh".

And of course there's the classic "GAAAH!"

TexAnne, #65, well, bad news, good news. I hope your next interview has a better result.

Elliott Mason, #69, I met Rivka the year before Alex was born, and saw her when Alex was a baby, and, I think, when Alex could walk by holding onto tables (there's a name for that and I've forgotten it) -- all at cons. I think they only go to SUUSI these years.

Diatryma, #97, and mirrors reverse your look -- it can be surprising to see yourself in a photo after being used to seeing yourself in a mirror.

This is brilliant:

Composites from WW2 photos, and modern shots

He took new photos, from the same vantage, and layered in the older images. Really good. Some are poignant, some are downright spooky.

dcb said: I think I'm very lucky in that I'm basically happy with my appearence and body shape. It's sad that so few people, particularly so few women and girls, are, nowadays.

It is sad, but it's not surprising. There's a huge industrial web which encourages women to be unhappy with their physical appearance, and makes immense amounts of money from products they then sell to assuage that unhappiness. I'll list just a few: weight-loss and diet foods, books, programs and drugs, cosmetics, hair products, personal trainers, gym memberships, high-end beauty shops, cosmetic surgery, fashion and clothing manufacturers -- you get the idea. Massive amounts of money are spent in this culture to make girls and women believe that they are ugly. Every woman I know encounters the vampire effects of this advertising barrage every day, and has, from childhood. It's a wonder any of us are halfway sane.

/rant

Marilee, I'm not sure how strong that effect is on me. I'm mostly symmetrical, and while I can never remember which side of my nose my mole is on* it doesn't make as much of an impression as the under-chin in photographs. I've never been able to tell the difference, really. I did the trough-mirror thing in the Explorabook years ago and never figured it out. It's probably more my perception than anything else, though. Anyone else have data points?

*scarmole, started when the cat Scheherezade/Shazzerade took a piece out of my face

Terry, 128: Good grief, I half expect Sapphire and Steel to show up!

Steve with a book@113, TexAnne@115, thanks for the explanation & links.

It seems strange that one must assert a moral right to the work one is presenting to the public, as if the act of presenting it as one's own is isn't assertion enough.

Diatryma @ 130
I have a red birthmark above the right corner of my mouth. It's always a little surprising in photos that it's on the "wrong" side. And in a way it's surprising to me that there's a birthmark there at all in pictures. By some quirk of personality or whatever, I've rarely been self-conscious about it and really don't see it when I look at myself in the mirror.
I guess it's a different aspect of the anorexia thing with mirrors - our brains make choices of what to focus on or ignore.

B. Durbin @ 51/52: It may not have been what you intended, but it is what it needs to be-- very powerful. Thank you.

I really don't think the reversal of a mirror is the true root of women's dissatisfaction with their looks. That can be unsettling, but most of us are trained to hate what's in the mirror as well as what's in the camera.

Women are told constantly that appearance is the *single most important* thing about them. Little girls get complimented on their hair or dresses or told that they are pretty; I can't remember people (non-family) ever remarking on anything else about me-- or any other little girl in my hearing. ISTR hearing little boys told they are brave or strong or smart in casual conversation, but girls get appearance remarks. Even when they're positive, it still underscores what's really important.

Women-in-the-media has been discussed plenty elsewhere-- Walter Cronkite and Tom Brokaw can soldier on and become more "distinguished" and "trustworthy" with every year, while Barbara Walters gets "shouldn't you retire?" I even catch myself at it-- a less-decorative woman reporter comes onscreen and I think, "who thought *she* was qualified for this?" Mentally wash my mouth out with soap and try again.

I've seen arguments that men evaluate a woman's suitability as a mate visually by looking for markers of youth, to produce healthy offspring, while women evaluate a man's suitability as a mate by looking for markers of social status, to provide for offspring. Even if I accept that, my "suitability as a mate" had ruddy well better not be the main criterion most people (all but one on the planet, in fact) use to evaluate *me*. Add to that all the financially-motivated messages that Lizzy L points to @129, and here we are.

Lizzy L #129 : I agree;  yet people have tried to improve their appearances since prehistoric times.  I’ve often thought that basic cosmetic tools – mirror, comb, scissors – are among the most valuable human inventions.  Where, between those simple things and the items in your list, is the line of unacceptability?

Zelda #134 : ISTM that if we evaluate each other in the way that you describe – and there’s a good deal of evidence that we do, not only evaluating the opposite sex but also the same sex in terms of competitiveness, as you describe in your penultimate paragraph – then the instinct to do so is built into us at a very basic level, either by evolution or by cultural conditioning, perhaps both.  If that’s the case, then maybe we do better to accept it, and live with it, and work to civilize it, than to fight it.

Anyone have cross-cultural or historical information about how women feel about how they look?

My impression is that the obsession with never being attractive enough is a fairly modern American thing.

I've heard about a book which analyzed American girls' diaries and found that at some time in the past (before 1900?) there was a lot of concern with moral self-improvement, but then there was a shift, with the impulse to self-improvement going into improving their appearance. Anyone know of this book or if I've got the premise right?

Are there cultures where women dress up and then typically think they look pretty good?

My (unfounded) impression is that while girls and women have always been somewhat concerned with their looks, the American obsession (and with thinness in particular) dates to the spread of mass-media advertising. Especially television, but I suspect that glossy magazines had their part in it even earlier.

This is pretty awful, but today is the 176th anniversary of Emancipation Day in the British Empire, which has particular significance for me.

I bow to those who went before
bearing the hoe, and long cane-bill,
who wept and worked at others' will
till August eighteen-thirty-four.

We make our choices, know the score,
believe we act with style and skill;
but every option, good or ill,
begins in eighteen-thirty-four.

The ships that took them to that shore
in stink of vomit, shit, and swill,
rivers of ink and blood to spill
till August eighteen-thirty-four.

We cannot tell how much they bore,
which ones resisted, which stood still
and fed the canes into the mill
till August eighteen-thirty-four.

Our duty now is not adore,
but spread the word from plain and hill
that we bear their remembrance still
since August eighteen-thirty-four:

To bow to those who went before
bearing the hoe and long cane-bill
who wept and worked at others' will
till august eighteen-thirty-four.

"you must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover" ...to prevent libraries from buying paperbacks and rebinding them in hardback so they would last longer.

I seem to recall one of my previous incarnations as a librarian, in a city somewhere in North-West England; that's exactly what we did.

Marilee @ # 126: the mode of toddler locomotion using furniture to assist in remaining upright is called "cruising".

Terry @ #128: those are both beautiful and unsettling.

Various: advertising for women vs. advertising for men.

New additions to "Making Light and Faces"...

A more recent pic of Fragano, and first-ever here of dcb and Tom Whitmore.

Fragano Ledgister @ 139: Thank you for sharing that.

Lila @141: That video - yeah, just about sums it up. I'm so glad I don't have a TV or read glossy magazines...

lila @ 141...

"...because you're already brilliant..."
I am?

Serge @144

lila @ 141...

"...because you're already brilliant..."
I am?

Brilliant enough to make the bitzer!

Lila @ 141 - That vid is hilarious....and so true.

John Stanning @136:

I say again: my suitability as a mate¹ is not an appropriate basis for evaluating my worth as a person. If by "civilizing" this impulse, you mean seeing it, naming it for what it is, and banishing it to the corner where it is relevant, I think that's what I've been trying to say. Quit mixing up suitability as a mate with suitability as a teacher, or reporter, or analyst of your data, or technical resource to your customers, or company at your dinner table. Cultural conditioning can be changed, so maybe we should be training ourselves that a woman's appearance is *not* the single most important thing about her. If you mean something else, please do explain.

¹ The matter of what besides appearance goes into this calculation is a whole other discussion.

Wanting to look better begs a couple of questions: what's "better"? What criteria are useful in deciding? Sexy is one. For some men, heavily-made-up is sexy; for others, a complete turnoff. Strong could be one -- sumo wrestlers are strong, but they sure don't fit "height-weight proportionate", which is another criterion that gets a lot of play out there. "Gentlemen prefer blondes -- but they marry brunettes."

One of the dirty little secrets of advertising is that there is always some measure on which any person doesn't get a good score. This ties into one of the more interesting pons asinorum moments of modern evolutionary theory, the concept of "evolutionary load" -- if every less-than-optimal gene is less fit, how does any actual organism survive to mate since there's so much heterozygosity and every organism is far, far below the optimum for its species? The explanation: that's just not a useful way to think about things.

John Stanning @134, why do you think those tools are among the most valuable? What are they useful for? What value do they add? I can find lots of very valuable uses for them that aren't cosmetic, but practical -- did the cosmetic uses predate the practical?

The Clock Stories Particle worried me: I thought for a moment it might be a site with somewhat different clock stories.

Even if someone (and I would say 'not an evolutionary psychologist') manages to find really, really good evidence that our self-destructive obsession with female beauty is absolutely hard-wired into us at a basic level, part of being human is fighting the counterproductive urges of our ancestors.

I have seen the argument that mass media really boosted the obsession because before, who do you see? Who's the prettiest woman you've ever known? How much prettier is she than you are? If you're in a small farming community, she's probably not hugely better-looking by your standards. Then you get TV and suddenly you're seeing the prettiest woman in America, and you can't measure up.

John Stanning, this is a complex and wide-ranging discussion; I'm not sure I have the stamina for it.

However, in answer to your question: I agree, means to change one's appearance have been around since prior to recorded history. I object to specific means when 1) those means are placed at the service of an ideology which devalues, dehumanizes and degrades the people who use it, or on whom it is used, and 2) those means are physically and/or spiritually and psychologically damaging. The means may be innocuous but the ideology pernicious, and in that case, it's the ideology and the results which follow from its application that I object to. I don't object to scissors: I object to the ideology which persuades women that hair which is not manipulated according to fashion dictates is ugly. I DO object to foot-binding.

As I said, this is a big and complex subject, and even people who agree generally with what I stated above may not agree with my specifics. (For example: are tattoos damaging? People disagree. reasonable people disagree.) Hell, I don't always agree with my specifics. For example, I think in general that risking surgical procedures for cosmetic reasons is not a good idea. Surgery to remove a pre-cancerous mole, good. Surgery to tighten up the skin on one's 60 year old face, not so good. But when I look at my own 60 year old face, one of my emotional responses includes a desire to get rid of that damned frown line! Women in this culture (and perhaps men, too, but I know less about this and therefore cannot speak to it) -- and particularly women of a certain class and experience -- live constantly with tensions like that.

Sometimes those tensions are easily resolved. Sometimes they are not resolved, and sometimes they become pathological and lead to anorexia, or constant dieting, or self-mutilation, etc.

Addendum to my post above: when I said that women of a "certain" class and experience live constantly with the tensions created by social expectations around physical appearance, that suggests that some women don't live with those tensions. I don't mean to suggest that at all. I think all women live with those tensions. The ways we choose to address them are very different, and often have to do with what social/economic class we came from, the specifics of our upbringing, and how much money we have.

Body hatred...where do I start?
Start with having a body that wasn't any good at anything the p.e. teachers wanted, but they wouldn't let me just skip the class. Or help me find out about something I WAS good at.
Gettting yanked out of school to get glasses put on me because my eyes weren't good for distance, but never hearing anything about how good they might be close up. Having a bunch of teeth taken out without so much as a by your leave. Hearing that some teeth had shallow roots, but never hearing that others might have deep ones.
Having a parent take up the hobby of gouging up my skin with fingernails because supposedly my complexion wasn't right (no one never consulted a doctor about this) while other parent never said a word, waiting to submit to same treatment next.
As an adult, having relatives hassle me about my weight whenever my financial situation got dodgy. Having them spin the old I'm-sorry-it-has-to-be-like-that capitulation-and-betrayal to the whims of the marketplace, instead of give me props for just trying to live my life.
Recalling how if I ever complained about my looks they would wave it aside, totally refuse to listen, but their own dissatisfactions with me were sacrosanct. Logic fail. And so on.
Seeing ads for plastic surgery, cosmetics, etc. and giving them the back of my hand, resolving to not suffer any more for someone else's esthetics.
Hunting and farming tools, fire, medicine, art, writing and music are far more important inventions to me than body ornamentation/ modification.
I'm not in this world to decorate it. I'm up and dressed, that ought to be enough.
I wish that all adults who find something wrong with a kid's body, take time to find something better'n normal to balance it out. They are like teachers who pile on homework in one class w/o thinking how much homework the kid might already have to deal with. This stuff is cumulative, like mercury, and just as poisonous. I'm still getting over it decdes later.
What Diatryma said--even if destructive patterns are hardwired, they must be counteracted.
# 72--*snort* Thanks!
As a teen I existed (won't call it living) in a tiny remote village whose school principal was a tyrant and a sadistic creep. He may not have been all that smart either, because when the school ran short on magic-markers, he ordered... a dozen gross.

tykewriter@140: and I understand that decades ago it was quite common for publishers to supply books as unbound leaves to libraries (both public libraries and privately-run circulating libraries like Boot's) for them to bind in their standard format... perhaps the no-other-binding warning is a relic from the days when unbound-leaves-for-libraries was a strictly separate product from HB and PB.

TexAnne: sorry about the job; work on books (particularly those books that take years of work with no distractions) as opposed to papers seems to be criminally undervalued in academia these days.

I don't have body hatred. I happen, by and large, to be quite comfortable in my skin. I don't think I photograph well in some contexts, because I am quite lean/slender, and clothes tend to show that off poorly.

Which is why I don't wear shorts.

But I have what is, basically, an invisible problem; I am too thin.

Not for health, but for the market. Boots, pants, shirts, they don't fit. Shoes I get by in, because they don't need to fit my ankles. I don't dare try to complain about it, in a general way, because the level of scornful (even hostile) derision those who don't know me come back with is appalling (even to one as thick-skinned as I can be). My friends are, by and large a bit better about about it, but any sympathy tends to be loaded with a bit of either teasing, or gentle dismissal.

It sucks. My motorcycle gear... all of it is a bit too large. I can't buy protective trousers for men, because I am too small. Women's pants fit me in the lower leg, and sort of in the waist (I have "textile" pants, with a liner. When the liner is in, they are almost small enough in the waist, with it out... the velcro isn't long enough to get them smaller than about 2 inches too large. If I got a size smaller, couldn't wear them at all.

My chest, is about a 36. My neck, a 15 1/2, sleeve length 32/33. The patterns for that, don't exist. The "fitted" shirts seem to assume I will have a waist of at least 32 inches. I don't, it's a 27.

The only place I could (and that's changed now) get clothes which really fit me, was the Army.

I don't know how to really explain the levels of frustration which go with all of that. It's both not as big a deal as I might be making it seem, and more. Because the level of "not existing" is pervasive, and the reaction when I speak about it so discounting.

But, mostly, I don't have to read articles telling me I am, in some way, wrong. I just don't count for anything.

Well, I've compromised my principles. I had weaned myself off of Amazon quite some time ago in moral support of the various #amazonfail protests, but I fell off the wagon today.

I'm currently sick as a dog, to the extent that I can't do grocery shopping in meatspace. So, I bought a bunch of bulk groceries from Amazon to hold me over for a while; all but one item is supplied by third-party sellers, but Amazon is certainly profiting from my situation. Sigh.

Earl, 156: As has recently been pointed out to me, not dying is a good thing. I would prefer that you spend your strength on healing, rather than guilt.

I've been reading about eating disorders recently -- not happy reading, but it helps to understand that even parents with the very best of intentions can say things that reinforce society's cruel messages to their children. You may be very careful about what you say about and to your child, but what you say about yourself without thinking comes through loud and clear and undoes it all. Expressing dissatisfaction with your own body hurts just as much as saying something bad about theirs. (By the way, it's Be Body Positive Day.)

Zelda #147 : I agree with most of what you say.  My point is that we do, by instinct, assess people we meet very quickly, on appearance alone, before exchanging a word, and that – because of what’s called the “halo effect” – that initial assessment can have a strong influence on our subsequent interactions.  There’s been quite a lot of research on the influence of appearance on first impressions.  It seems that this is something that’s built into our psychology;  it won’t go away, and it can’t be entirely suppressed, so all we can do is be aware of it and modify it by experience, learning and simply growing up.  Your reaction to a less-decorative woman reporter (#134), and your awareness of that reaction, and your response to it, is a good example.

So I’m saying that whether we like it or not, appearance is indeed important – not in women only, but in men too – because appearance is what determines how people begin to respond to us before they’ve spoken to us to find out what sort of person we are.  I’m *not* saying that it’s a matter of ‘beauty’, whatever that is, or ‘suitability as a mate’ (in grown-ups, at least).  It’s a matter of the totality of our appearance – expression, dress, deportment, je ne sais quoi – that influences whether others are interested enough in us to start a conversation and find out the rest.  Of course the appearance that one person finds attractive can be different from the appearance that the next person finds attractive, which is a good thing for diversity!  The aspects of appearance that people find attractive are surely culturally determined, but the *influence* of appearance seems not to be culturally determined but hard-wired.

It’s important to realize that we don't assess only people in this way.  Somebody did some research (which I can find if I dig for it) which apparently showed that web users form a first impression of a web page within a second or less, and that (through the “halo effect”) that first impression can color subsequent judgments of perceived credibility and usability of the page.  This is what leads me to believe that we’re dealing with something basic that's built in to us, not derived from cultural or market influences.

Lizzy L @151:

I confess that I entirely missed your frown line.

More broadly, our own perceptions of what stands out about ourselves are so rarely accurate. (Of course, my habits of denigrating my appearance are an exception; I really do have all these faults.)

Tom Whitmore #148 : I’m not sure whether cosmetic uses predate practical, except that in the case of combs at least, the reverse may be true, as one of the very earliest prehistoric combs (in a museum in Switzerland) seems to be a nit comb, for combing out the eggs of head lice.

I think those basic tools are important because they enable basic self-care.  A mirror lets me look at my own face – and parts of my body that I can’t see directly – to deal with spots, for example, that make me uncomfortable.  Personally I find my hair much more comfortable when combed than when uncombed and tangled.  Scissors let me cut my nails, for comfort again, rather than biting them or breaking them.

Now that I say all that, I realise that I'm talking about practical, rather than cosmetic, value of those tools – yet if I’m comfortable in those ways (combed hair, cut nails, etc.) it seems that I get a cosmetic improvement too, because I’m neater, and also because if I’m comfortable I probably look happier, which also improves my appearance.

Terry Karney @ 155: I sympathise. I have some similar (although lesser) experiences re. being a non-standard size, particularly in recent years, since a number of companies got together and funded a big project to measure women, with the result that they have changed womens clothes sizes. Apparently the average woman no longer has a waist ten inches smaller than her hips - so they have made the waist bigger. I however, do have a waist 10 inches smaller than my hips, so now, buying theoretically the same size clothes as I have done all my adult life, if the hips fit, the waist is too large by several inches - a problem for trousers in particular (if I can even find any which actually reach the waist, with the present fashion for "low-waisted" trousers, but that's another problem). And I spent my teens and twenties shifting hay bales, carrying 25 kg (55 pound) feed sacs around, mucking out stables and so on. So I have shoulders. This means that "fitted" shirts and (particularly) jackets correct for my bust size are too small across the shoulders. If I go up a size to fit the shoulders, they're much too large across the chest. However, I do sometimes find garments that fit, so I'm not as badly served as you are.

Lizzy L #151: (For example: are tattoos damaging? People disagree. reasonable people disagree.)

And the distinct question: Given what happens to them within a couple of decades, are tattoos stupid? At the least, they seem to represent a certain shortsightedness -- the classic tension between short-term gratification and long-term benefit. Again, reasonable people can disagree on the tradeoff.

I'll agree with John Stanning that appearance issues apply to men too, but note that for men, the "test" is different. Instinctive initial reactions to men are more based on dominance and status markers. These are a bit less whimsical than the dictates of female fashion, but still heavily culture-dependent -- leisure markers, trappings of wealth, upper-class accents, and so forth.

Terry Karney #155: Indeed, your problem is more with the mass market, and the industrial/manufacturing structure that drives it. When mass manufacturing is "where clothes come from", anyone who isn't "one of the usual types" gets shafted. (I have a milder problem in that regard -- my legs are short enough that I have trouble finding pants in most stores.)

dcb #162:

It's worse if you wear so-called plus sizes, situation where you're already at considerable cultural risk. If you're also short like me ... Two purveyors of catalog wares sell trousers that now suffer from waist fail as you describe above, but you can get them hemmed to order; another couple have more stylish, more expensive stuff that, surprisingly, fits in both waist and hips, but does not come in any length shorter than 5 inches too long. I'm not quite at my wits' end, but it takes much too long to do the alterations, not to mention that I could buy two pairs of trousers from the less expensive people for the price of one from the others.

PS to John Stanning: Degree and type of grooming is a marker for wealth and/or leisure! Being unkempt in public (stubble, tangled hair/beard, untrimmed nails, worn-out clothing, etc implies (socially) that for some reason you can't manage basic grooming, and most of the likely reasons for that imply very low status. At the other end, a man with carefully styled hair, heavily groomed nails and skin, fashionable clothes, etc, is displaying that he has the wealth and spare time for expensive haircuts, manicures, and so on (and a lifestyle which won't void the results of same).

joann @ 164 -- Standard pants don't fit me: many are, hmm, binding if they fit my waist; all are too long in the leg if they're otherwise okay. So I assume, when I buy pants, that I'll be cutting something off the legs and hemming them. My skills with a sewing machine are somewhat eclectic (as some of you know) but a simple hem is within my abilities.

David Harmon #165 : by all means, except that 99.9% of the population (I guess) fall between the two extremes that you mention.  If ownership of a comb is a marker for wealth, leisure and expensive haircuts, I’m missing out, big time.

I followed the "Swine Flu Music" particle to the download link...and I find that the download server has embedded ads. Including this popup:

Flu

Find Great Flu! Check Top Rated Sites. Flu Highly Recommended!

Flu.Pages.US.c** (URL redacted to avoid giving them googlejuice)

That's the best auto-keyword ad I've seen since Fault Line was offered me for low prices on eBay.

John #167: No no, mere ownership of a comb, razor, clippers, etc -- and willingness to use them -- just keeps you above the "epsilon"¹ status level, usually reserved for "street people" and the like. Certainly there are more distinctions and levels between those extremes, but my own limited social awareness makes me the wrong person to try and explain them.

¹ My own extension of the usual "alpha" through "delta" dominance levels.

David Goldfarb #168: Also, if you click the wrong (more prominent) "Download" link, you instead get offered an assortment of dubious "bandwidth meters" and suchlike.

David Harmon @169 said [intervening material redacted]: ...keeps you above the "epsilon"¹ status level, usually reserved for "street people" and the like. / ¹ My own extension of the usual "alpha" through "delta" dominance levels.

And here I thought you were making a Brave New World allusion, which would also fit in here fairly seamlessly. :->

Diatryma, #130, the difference for me is quite a bit now -- I took prednisone last year at a high dose (to make my brain shrink) and I got the traditional moonface. Well, as we tapered the prednisone and my moonface got smaller, the area under my chin became very different. I have a scar there from surgery on my vocal cords, and the scar side is much tighter than the other, which hangs down and wobbles.

Lila, #141, ah, thanks! I saw Kip's daughter cruising at a con, too. And since my balance is bad, I frequently have to stabilize myself by putting my hand on a wall. I wonder what that would be called.

Pants - I found someone to make them for me. I buy the fabric and pay her $25/pair, which in total is a lot less than plus-size pants from catalogs that never quite fit. She's making me a new robe now because the old one is falling apart.

Diatryma, #130, the difference for me is quite a bit now -- I took prednisone last year at a high dose (to make my brain shrink) and I got the traditional moonface. Well, as we tapered the prednisone and my moonface got smaller, the area under my chin became very different. I have a scar there from surgery on my vocal cords, and the scar side is much tighter than the other, which hangs down and wobbles.

Lila, #141, ah, thanks! I saw Kip's daughter cruising at a con, too. And since my balance is bad, I frequently have to stabilize myself by putting my hand on a wall. I wonder what that would be called.

Pants - I found someone to make them for me. I buy the fabric and pay her $25/pair, which in total is a lot less than plus-size pants from catalogs that never quite fit. She's making me a new robe now because the old one is falling apart.

I went kayaking on the Charles today, and I saw a great blue heron close up! Tried to take a picture but my camphone was awkward.

TexAnne@45 it's not reversable, though I must also say it's not my work. I don't have the patience to do blackwork. It was a gift, and so it went on the new chemise last year for a friend's wedding.

Xopher, you are too kind.

Madeline @ 54 my former roommate worked for them for all of three days a couple weeks ago. It's one day of training, one day on the street with a trainer, and one day without a trainer. If you don't manage to get a subscriber in 2 days on the street soliciting, you don't have a job. The required rate goes up as you survive.

dcb: Even when I am working out/moving bales, etc., I just get stronger, not bulkier. Even when I was straight out of basic (or a bit later, in Monterey) and working out all the time (from basic I was 136 lbs. and carrying some fat. In Monterey I was running 40-60 miles a week, and was about 125), I was still about the same dimensions.

I get told, should I complain, that I just need to, "go to the gym," or, "eat more."

Hah.

#149 ::: Bruce E. Durocher II

The Clock Stories Particle worried me: I thought for a moment it might be a site with somewhat different clock stories.

Strange site. I'm intrigued, but can't stand to work through it in one go (I'm up to four and counting). It immediately reminded me of this
creepy place in Lucas, Kansas.

Re the "Not confident about the venue" particle: Either they fixed whatever the problem was on the website, or I completely missed what Patrick noticed.

The Cuba Quarter is basically the bar/restaurant/nightclub part of downtown Wellington, named for Cuba Street. I don't know that specific hotel, but I did get to know Cuba Street pretty well a couple years back.

Looks pretty typical for a mid-priced NZ hotel to me.

165,167,169:

Remember that rainy day
When you threw me out
With nothing but a fine toothed comb?

Self@178: And now I've looked at the convention's own site.

It seems to me that holding a con in Wellington the weekend before an Australia Worldcon is either sheer genius or suicidal madness. And I love Wellington. I guess time will tell.

Elliott, #172: That was my first thought too.

Terry, #176: While not wanting to minimize your legitimate difficulties with being outside the standard size ranges... based on pictures (and the videochat for the ML gather), I am obliged to say that from my POV, there are compensatory advantages.

[completely unrelated to ongoing conversation]

It has really started to hit today that I am actually moving - it is not just an abstract idea floating betwixt my neurons - but it is really happening. A couple of things slammed it into the realm of the concrete: I sold my car this morning, for a more than respectable price and with a minimum of hassle. Also, I have been packing for the last week (which I have posted on before - the dust bunnies and their dust llama steeds are beating a retreat to the Great Bed Fortress, from where they shall be routed in a couple days) - but I have all of a week left at Vanderbilt, which feels really weird. It will not even be a full workweek, as I am taking one day off to pack and load, so that my stuff gets to Berkeley around the same time I do. Having most of my stuff in boxes makes my current apartment feel, in a large way, less mine - and just a set of rooms I am inhabiting. The last time I moved, I made the mistake of taking down all of my art towards the beginning of the project (all of it is flat photographs) - I found that to be very depressing, and am opting to leave it up as long as I can this time. I figure, it can be stuffed back in the box and the box can be stuffed in one of my suitcases with a minimum of fuss.

My living room is covered in a range of boxes - some empty, and occasionally explored by Totoro the Cat - others full and taped and looking drab (or, by their very presence, reminding me of other moves - I have saved the same boxes through up to five moves at this point). After Tuesday, once 95% of my worldly belongings have been loaded for the move, the apartment will feel even more strange than it does now.

I will note that audiobooks minimize the annoyance of packing - even when one realizes that packing the mini speaker setup used to amplify the iPhone for such uses was a bad idea.

Patrick Connors, #178: I just took a look at the hotel page, and it certainly doesn't seem like anyone's edited it recently. Or at all, which I think was the point.

Carol Kimball: Strange site. I'm intrigued, but can't stand to work through it in one go (I'm up to four and counting).

I should have mentioned it's tied to this book. If you like the site, you'll absolutely love the book.

It immediately reminded me of this
creepy place in Lucas, Kansas.

Interesting place based on the pictures, but for truly creepy the Afterglow Vista Mausoleum beats it like a drum.

Patrick Connors @178, 180.

Having been to a scientific conference at this very hotel last year (Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand), I can agree that it's much the sort of hotel that gets used for such things in NZ.

I can't think of anything bad that it's unusually close to, and the facilities are much what you'd expect (it's very like the hotels used by previous cons I've attended).

The timing is deliberate (and they hope it will be genius); they are hoping that people coming a long way for Worldcon will consider the marginal cost of the side trip to be small compared with the base cost of coming in the first place. It appears not to have worked for Charlie Stross :-(, even though I've promised him a beer if he comes.

J Homes

I'm somewhat baffled by the hotel sidelight. Can someone tell me what the problem is in the clear?

abi @186: I read it’s authenticity and atmosphere is good for your soul—twice—and winced.

Pendrift @ 187: Me too!

Headline found this morning on Comcast's site:

Older Brains Work Better?

Yes, the "it's" thing can stick out like a sore thumb if you're sensitized to it. (I groaned inside when I saw a proud, permanent-looking park sign in Philly the other day that misused it.)

It can be distracting enough that it sometimes takes a little while to notice other copy errors, like the "Fom" that leads off the same paragraph.

Re Au Contraire: The hotel's site has been prettied up since I looked at it while booking a few weeks ago. It wasn't branded 'Cuba Quarter', I don't recognise the 'Location' page, and I don't remember the changing graphics.

Given that the con has warned that they may have to cap registrations, I would suggest 'genius'.

The marginal cost is presumably somewhat less if you are going to WorldCon from North America, rather than Europe (avoiding the USA).

Tom Whitmore@116, Serge@142: Happy to be of use! (And I'm feeling like agreeing after it's been done can be read as snippy, so I wish to disavow any snippyness in this case; it just seems polite to answer the request.)

I got interested in Clarke's old short story "The Nine Billion Names of God" last week -- among other things something that seems like a weird continuity error. Any opinions on why the Lama first says he has calculated that the project will last 1000 days, then (in the very next paragraph) that he wants to hire technicians for the 3 months the project will take to complete?

I'm very happy about the parallels between this story and Borges' "The Library of Babel." I don't believe Clarke would have read that story at the time he wrote "Nine Billion" -- it did not appear in translation until 1962. But he was drawing water from the same well.

I've got some posts from a few years ago on the subject of summing squares, which were fun to write...

Susuile @ 175: Well, that's frustrating, on a variety of levels. If I were in your former roommate's position, I'd have been pissed and stressed to find myself doing commission sales for a charitable org. And it certainly explains the hard-sell tactics. I just can't imagine why the org thinks those tactics are a good idea, when the rest of the marketing is so intelligent. It also makes me wonder where our money is going. I told my husband about your comment, and he said: "So, we've been funding a Douchebag Encouragement Program?"

Benjamin Wolfe: For sheer sad/strange, the moves from DLI are probably tops. One shares a building with lots of people (modern barracks are two-to-a-room) and all of a sudden 30 people are all packing like mad, because they are all leaving within the same three days.

When my class came to go, I took advantage of quirks in the system to ship out about 30 days after my class ended. It was a pleasant, if slightly strange, existence. I was sort of like a ghost, lingering after my time was done.

sisuile/Madeline: Color me clueless, but I have no idea what group you are talking about.

ddb @ 192... I did jump the gun on that one. My apologies.

Modesto Kid #193 : I wonder if it stems from a typo.  Maybe Clarke originally wrote “100 days” in figures, then some copy-typist (this is in the early 50s) accidentally added a zero, then the typesetter turned that into “a thousand days”, and nobody noticed.  Stranger things have happened.  Three months seems to be what Clarke intended, because the story jumps to the point where the machine has been running “for weeks” and will finish the project in another week.

Modesto Kid @ 193 -- In all copies of the story that I've got at hand -- The Nine Billion Names of God, Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. I, The Other Side of the Sky, and the error-ridden The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke -- the lama says that the project will take "a hundred days". I'm suspecting a weird error in your copy. I see that several on-line copies of the text have it as "a thousand days". Perhaps it was an error in the original publication that was corrected for later collections?

Thanks John, that seems plausible -- I was trying to figure out where the error had been introduced.

Joel, I was reading it from an online source.

Between my junior and senior years of college, I stayed on campus to do research-- more killing time than anything, but the professor actually did need someone to take care of some animals, and I was desperate for Original Research for grad school applications. It worked out wonderfully, though I had a lot more time on my hands than any of the other summer researchers.

The school wasn't set up for summer students; we were all at the faraway dorm (all of a seven-minute walk!) because cheerleading camps had the others. We were able to move into our school-year dorms early, and did so. That week was weird. They were painting my dorm, so doors were open up and down the halls. They were phasing in the new mattresses, much more comfortable than the old, so I switched with another room. I had a friend visit for the week. Then freshmen arrived, then the rest of the school a week later.

It was a good summer, and better than I would have had at home, but surreal in a way that required that visit from a friend to make me fit for human interaction afterward.

Serge@198: Thanks. Without rejecting the principle (of ownership of images) in general, I was trying to convey that I didn't mind at all in this particular case.

Open threadiness: It's not just arrows and bullets that can hurt when they fall back out of the sky. Tragic slighshot accident. Presumably one could have created this same problem with a trebuchet and other kinds of catapult as well.

Be careful out there!

@194: It's not dreadfully difficult to calculate the number of ways a number can be expressed as a sum of two squares, directly from the number's prime factorization. I count zero as a square (so e.g. 4=2^2+0^2 is a sum of two squares); if you don't, you'll have to change things slightly.

Suppose the number n that we care about factorizes as 2^a*(p1^b1*p2^b2*...*pk^bk)*(q1^c1*q2^c2*...*ql^cl), where the ps are the prime factors of n that are one more than a multiple of four, and the qs are the prime factors that are one less than a multiple of four (either k or l could be zero if n has no prime factors of that form).

Then for n to be expressible as a sum of two squares at all, it's necessary that every c be even. Given this, the number of such expressions is (b1+1)*(b2+1)*...*(bk+1)/2, rounded up to the nearest integer.

So for example your 3,453,125 factorizes as 5^6*13^1*17^1. 5, 13, and 17 are all one more than a multiple of 4, so the number of ways 3,453,125 is expressible as a sum of two squares is (6+1)*(1+1)*(1+1)/2=14, as you calculated.

Terry Karney @ 176: More sympathies. I just get told "At your size, what are you complaining about?" or "Well you could always put on weight - you're too thin anyway." (I -like- my size, shape and weight. I don't want to put on weight, have more to carry while running and stop fitting the clothes already in my wardrobe).

And then of course there's the "large fits all" assumption problem which I discovered while assisting with oiled wildlife response. I understand the basic logistical concerns, particularly when you're outfitting sometimes more than 1,000 people a day, but no, large gloves do -not- fit all, they just make those of us with small hands clumsy and less able to do our jobs (I ended up getting my own gloves, ones which fit).

joann @ 164: Yes, sympathies - I know that compared to some other body shapes, I have it easy. But I also know what Terry Karney means about it being assumed that if you're small/thin (which fits the cultural "ideal" in women, of course - less in men) then you don't have problems finding fitting clothes, and if you do, it's your own problem, you should just gain weight to fit the clothes. And as for the tyrannies of fashion - I am SO glad I have enough pairs of trousers in my wardrobe to (hopefully) keep me dressed until waistbands start reaching the waist again.

Madeline @ 195 It's not commission, it's hourly, but your continued employment is dependent upon sales. It's nasty.

Terry @ 197 It's a large children's welfare agency, one that I first became acquainted with because of their tie designs. From what I can tell, they've hired a contractor to promote their sponsorship program, and the contractor is the one with the hard sell tactics. I hope so, anyway. It's not a particularly bad group.

Sparkly Hedge Fund Vampires

Fragano @139: Thanks; I found this moving. It reminds me of the song "I Remember, I Believe" by Bernice Johnson Reagon of Sweet Honey in the Rock, which opens with this verse:

I don’t know how my mother walked her trouble down
I don’t know how my father stood his ground
I don’t know how my people survived slavery
I do remember, that’s why I believe

Earl Cooley @209 -- didn't get far enough in the comments, but I think it's interesting that the hedge fund manager found Twilight so inspiring when combined with its fairly obvious and well-documented Mormon message.

Diatryma @ 203 - Your statement that "It was a good summer, and better than I would have had at home, but surreal in a way that required that visit from a friend to make me fit for human interaction afterward." describes the danger of my own solitary tendencies disturbingly well. I am happy enough if I hole up on my own for days at a time (well, less so if I am packing, but certainly if I am settled) - and the need for human interaction is something that I do not usually notice until I really need it.

This is one of those "all knowledge is contained in the fluorosphere" questions.

I happened to be on Mount Desert Island a few days ago and was climbing Cadillac Mountain, a lovely hike/climb where in spots there are metal rungs (and other metallic accoutrements) implanted in the granite rock of the mountain. I looked carefully at some of the joins between the metal and the hole in the rock, and they were tight. My wife and I discussed this as we were climbing, and tried to figure out how it was done. Drilling, presumably, but the apparently non-glued, no-visible-space part was hard to figure out.

That is, they didn't seem to be glued or cemented in, and the holes were just right, and the rungs didn't seem terribly pounded (e.g., by a sledgehammer a la John Henry). But they were still very, very tight after 50 to 100 years.

I found via ferrata via Google, which describes what they are like but not how they are made.

Anyone have any experience or knowledge? No doubt it turns out to be something simple, perhaps involving hamsters. (Or hamsters with jackhammers, anyway.)

As an aside, this seems to be one of those cases where the Google search algorithm falls down flat on its face. Lots of where they are, where they might be created, who likes and dislikes them, but nothing on the how. Complete sentence searching didn't make it any better.

#205, thanks for the warning. My trebs are little ones that throw marbles, ball bearings, beads, etc. but I am careful. Tensional, torsional, and gravitational launchers each have things that can go wrong, and I would not go to a hurling meet where the spectators are behind the machines, even with a safety net--I seem to recall that someone got hurt when something backfired the other year, even with the net. It's best for everyone to be off to the side, and the trigger is made to be operated from the side also, preferably from a distance.
Too bad such devices can't be deployed against all the industries, institutions and so on that make things harder for people whose bodies don't conform to this or that standard.

DaveL @ #213: explanation here.

a Via Ferrata is a fixed-protection climbing path. The protection consists mostly of heavy-gauge steel wire, periodically fixed to rock with thick metal bars with eyelets on the end. These bars seem very similar to the 'rebar' steel that is used to reinforce concrete in buildings. These metal bars are drilled and cemented into the rock.

Nice picture of Via Ferrata in a rock wall here. There's more at that site. It's translated from French, so it's a bit fractured, but not impenetrable by any means.

Does this have anything to do with the Macmillan/Amazon ebook brouhaha?

Re: NZ Convention hotel

I missed the language misuse part of the site; it would indeed have made me cringe had I caught it.

Glad to see the convention is doing well. Have fun!

Help!

Looking at the particle "Things that don't make me feel confident about the venue of Au Contraire, the New Zealand National SF Con, later this month" I can't see what makes it different from any other hotel ad.

What incredibly obvious thing am I missing?

Ok - language misuse spotted after reading backthread. I was expecting something more massive.

The wine is red. I got ahold of a speaker of Hebrew,and the gist of the passage is to beware of red wine, because it will sneak up on you, and you won't like the results.

#54: my first "you shoulda said" response (what is 'l'esprit de l'escalier'in the second person?) is "Do you know you sound like a rapist? " I suspect I'm feeling a little asocial myself.

Benjamin Wolfe at 212, yeah, it's not a great way to be semi-introverted. It's why I'm staying in Iowa City until I have a reason to leave, actually-- I have people here, and a framework to see them. I don't have that in my hometown, and in the summers between college years, I holed up like a bad thing. I don't have people there any more, not ones who aren't related to me anyway. Here, I have Knitter's Breakfast on Saturdays, Pub Knit on Mondays, people from lab who call me for dinner, people who visit. My social life requires an external framework, and I require a social life.

When I get a Real Job, I'll be in a new place. I hope I'm able to find an external framework quickly, before strange habits set in.

This week's Newsweek has an article about self-publishing books. They give 3 examples of writers making money, and don't mention any downsides at all.
Who Needs a Publisher?

I found this out the hard way for the most recent time last December - I took ten days off from the lab, but rather than flying home, stayed in Nashville - and did not see anyone for the great majority of said days. Just sat around my apartment, reading and playing computer games. I realized afterward that just doing that for over a week was not exactly healthy. I find it survivable when I have all of my stuff around - being introverted in an environment that is very much mine is easier than not - but I am worried about the first half of next week. My last day at my lab is this Friday, but I will have shipped all of my stuff out on Wednesday, save a couple of suitcases and the cat. So, I will have next monday and tuesday with pretty much nothing to do save cleaning the apartment, and I am insufficiently obsessive to be able to do that for two days. I am thinking of setting up a dinner with a couple friends for one of those days, and I will probably make a point of wandering away from the apartment for my own sanity, but it will be a couple of very empty-feeling days.

I am not expecting to like the experience of living in my apartment here without my belongings for the next week. It should be a tolerable experience, but I do not expect it to be an enjoyable one.

Benjamin, #225: Take your book and go down to Bongo Java, and sit there and read rather than in your empty apartment. That should give you enough "being around people" to keep you stabilized.

The WashPost had an article back a couple months ago that was very inaccurate about science fiction and I wrote the editors a letter. I got a "maybe we'll use it," but it hasn't been, so you might like to see the article and give your own opinion. I'm linking to my LJ.

Have friends over to help clean, and when the place is done, go out. Walk to the library if it's within walking distance, walk somewhere else if it's not*. If you aren't calmed or otherwise positived by walkies, go somewhere with people, yours or otherwise. It's not just hermitting you have to fight but being-inside-forever.

Good luck with the packing and the move!

*It took me far too long to realize that the reason I was so out-of-sorts at the old apartment was that I wasn't getting three-mile walks on a regular basis. I had some proper walkies soon after that epiphany and felt so much better.

Benjamin, take care of yourself and your kitty. The kitty will likely help with the strangeness, but will also be feeling it itself. You two are what you have in a semi-empty apartment.

Take care and best wishes!

Too many little worries in my head to sleep. Maybe if I ask a couple questions of the Fluorosphere, I can at least move on down the list to lesser matters.

Weighty problem #1: I'm about to attend my first con since my daughter was born seven years ago (and SF cons were rare for me before that). In the intervening years, I've acquired a laptop, which is my bread-and-butter (I'm a freelancer) as well as primary source of entertainment and communication. What little travel I do--even just to my parents' house for the weekend--I *always* take the laptop along, and I have been planning to do so for this trip.

But I'm suddenly worried about the logistics over several days of a con. Can I safely leave it in the room while attending panels, dinners, etc.? Or should I ask about having it put away in the hotel safe? Or should I just plan to take it with me wherever I go? (I've got a good rolling laptop backpack.) Or should I revisit my plan to take it? I'd thought to get some work done on the trip, but is that at all reasonable? Any feedback welcome.

Weighty problem #2: Any idea where I can get a list of what letter tiles ship with Scrabble Junior? My Google-fu doesn't seem up to this one.

Whew. Goodnight, all, and thanks.

Janet@224, speaking of NewsWeek and "who needs a publisher?", apparently NewsWeek needs one - they just got bought for $1 by Sidney Harman, audio tycoon and husband of Congressmember Jane Harman.

No time to go back and find the response in OT 143 that recommended Greens in San Francisco, but would like to give thanks to that person because we went tonight (at sunset, despite the fog and lack of view) and it was absolutely delicious. Simple food, incredibly well prepared, and really nice staff. I would definitely go again, if I ever come back to SF. Three very full days so far, and we're looking to hit the bookstores tomorrow. Wish me luck. I've already spent far too much money on chocolate. Well, and food. The food here is fantastic. I haven't had a bad meal yet.

I leave you with my quote when I realized we'd reached our bus stop this evening. "Falafel! Sharwerma! We have to get off the bus!" Yes, I recognized our stop by the sign in the restaurant window. Possibly I pay too much attention to words.

Tom Whitmore #107:
Call me a purist, but that's more distilling than brewing because percentage-wise, yeasts keel over once the alcohol level hits the high teens. Getting the alcohol levels this high requires (IIRC) freeze distillation.

Britain's solution to the problem of immigration: cut legal aid to destitute asylum-seekers.

Joy #230 : I also take my laptop on almost all trips.  Before I go, I take a backup so that if I do lose the laptop, by accident or theft, at least I’ve still got my files to load on the new one.  I use a fairly generic case that doesn’t shout “expensive laptop in here!”  I’m a bit twitchy about it:  I make an effort to have it either (a) attached to me, or (b) within my view, or (c) somewhere that I assess as secure enough, or at least trustworthy.  I’ve never had one stolen (unlike a colleague who put his case down for a moment to buy a newspaper at a stall – when he turned round, it was gone).

Often I need my laptop in the conference room anyway (at a business conference).  If not, it depends on the hotel.  Better hotels have room safes big enough to put a laptop in (not the whole case, but the laptop itself).  Otherwise I take it with me in the morning, while rooms are cleaned, not because I don’t trust the cleaners but because rooms are often left open while cleaning is going on, but the cleaner may go away to do something and leave time for a thief to nip in.  In the evening, I don’t mind leaving the laptop in my room, but I conceal it somewhere so that a thief doing a quick in-and-out won’t see it instantly, and I don’t leave a lot of accessories lying about with a laptop-sized space in the middle!

Obligatory disclaimer:  each of us is different.  What works for me may not work for you.  Security is only partly a matter of habit and routine.  To keep yourself secure, you must be responsive to individual situations, assess each location each time, and act according to your assessment.  “You cannot step twice into the same river.”  By the way, all of this paragraph applies to safety as much as to security.  Good luck.  Have fun.

Soon Lee 233: Call me a purist, but that's more distilling than brewing because percentage-wise, yeasts keel over once the alcohol level hits the high teens. Getting the alcohol levels this high requires (IIRC) freeze distillation.

First, could it be that they discovered or bred a yeast that can survive in higher concentrations of alcohol?

Second, freeze distillation is also called jacking, correct? Where you freeze the liquid and let the concentrated liquid melt out of the water ice?

salixulon #210: Thanks!

Joy Freeman @230; Take it. If you don't, you'll just spend half the trip wondering if you'll need it and getting twitchy because you've not got it (in my experience - YMMV).

Sensible advice @235, which I'll second. I've always gone for a protective sleeve, then a backpack or other bag which didn't scream "LAPTOP IN HERE - PLEASE STEAL": but having it on wheels may be more important to you. I've lugged mine round enough conferences (and occasional SF conventions) that I finally got myself a netbook for travelling, reducing the weight by 2/3 - 3/4 (my back and shoulders are grateful).

As for getting work done... At a convention? Doubtful, unless you're (a) awake bright and early before everything gets going (despite being up late the night before); or (b) got something boring and pretty mindless that you can do while sitting around chatting (I've been known to search for and correct broken hyperlinks in a large website, while at a beer festival, for example).

In re laptops at cons ...

When my total cargo load is small enough, I often bring mine along. Partly because it's my eeeeee-lectronic filkbook, so I always have my lyrics with me, but also because I sometimes get twitchy if I 'have to' sit still and listen for long periods -- like at panels -- and it can really help my enjoyment if I can kip against a wall in the back of the room and play Civilization (or other turn-based fiddle game) to help me hold still.

Marilee @227 wrote about her letter to the editor protesting that their "lists of beach reads by scientists contains no scifi!!!eleventy!!" article is entirely science fiction.

You are completely right. For those who don't feel like clicking through to the full Newsweek article you linked, here are all the fiction picks in the entire article:

-- "The City and the Stars" by Arthur C. Clarke (1999).
-- "Red Mars," by Kim Stanley Robinson (1993).
-- "On the Beach" by Nevil Shute (1957).
-- "The Day of the Triffids" by John Wyndham (1951).
-- The space trilogy by C.S. Lewis, beginning with "Out of the Silent Planet" (1938).
-- "Kindred" by Octavia E. Butler (1979).
-- "The Sparrow" by Mary Doria Russell (1995).
-- "Dante's Equation" by Jane Jensen (2003).
-- "Oryx and Crake" by Margaret Atwood (2003).
-- "The Dresden Files" series by Jim Butcher.
-- "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley (1932).
-- "Flowers for Algernon" by Daniel Keyes (1966).

Atwood CLAIMS Oryx isn't scifi, and Dresden's more fantasy, but every single one of them could be mentioned on panels at any SF gencon without anyoen batting an eye. Their writer is either stupid, cluelessly sloppy, or trying to make a point.

Marilee #227, Elliott Mason #240:

Also, a couple of them predate the recognition of SF as a genre, but are nevertheless recognized as seminal. Clueless indeed!

Joy, #230: We routinely take our laptops (plural) to cons, but we're also dealers, and keep them at the table with us during the day (one of them runs our cash register, and the other is for looking up stuff online). OTOH, I see a lot of people running around with laptops or sitting in the public areas working with them. Good advice about making a full backup first, and not leaving it in the room during housecleaning time; apart from that, I wouldn't worry too much about room security.

240: That's really pretty weird. Even if someone was completely ignorant of SF, you'd think that titles like "Red Mars" and "The Day of the Triffids" and "Voyage to Venus" would make them think "hmm, these all sound a bit SF-y".

#240 : there seems still to be a certain snobbery among the more self-consciously intellectual novelists and critics:  SF isn’t proper “literary fiction”.  Hence Margaret Attwood’s eagerness to avoid the accusation of having demeaned herself by writing SF.  It’s not just SF – writing crime fiction (“detective stories”) used to be just as slummy.

Joy@230: I've been taking expensive camera equipment to conventions routinely since 1972, and laptops since probably 2003 or some such (when they became a vital photographic accessory for me), and have never had anything stolen, even when I leave bags sitting around in public (not, however, at random). How much these good results are pure luck, how much my skill in choosing when to hang onto stuff and when to leave it, and how much my choice of conventions, I could not say. Certainly there have been things stolen at many of these conventions; just not from me.

I've been traveling with more equipment than I can conveniently carry at once to more places than SF conventions, including internationally, and have never lost anything out of a hotel room, either.

On the third hand, it's insured. To use this stuff, I have to put it at risk sometimes, and I've gotten over being distracted by that (I still try to avoid being actively careless).

Enjoy your convention!

John Stanning #244: To which the proper response is: You're all just jealous of my jetpack.

When I take my laptop to cons, I leave it in the hotel room, plugged into the broadband. I've never had any trouble.

On the other hand, I don't have anything vital on the laptop. Making a backup before you go is an excellent idea, as are the other suggestions.

#246 : Oh yes!  Tom Gauld.

At the worldcon last year, I was going around the dealer's room when I realized that I was not carrying my laptop-containing backpack anymore. Had not been doing so for atbout 30 minutes. To say that my heart skipped a few beats would be an understatement. I quickly - very quickly - walked back to the area with tables & chairs next to the art show. There was the backpack. And, in it, my laptop. Money. Passport too.

Many thanks to everyone for the feedback on taking my laptop to a con. I'm feeling much better about taking it. I don't mind keeping it with me during most day events (as dcb says, I'd likely get twitchy otherwise) as long as I can lock it up in the room during the evening. I do indeed have "something boring and pretty mindless" I can do while chatting, plus I am a confirmed introvert, so will need to get away from the mob for a bit each day anyway, and figure I might squeeze in an hour or three on a project that's falling behind schedule.

I've got a recent full backup on my Time Capsule, and will update my documents-only backup on an off-site portable drive, so I suppose the worst that could happen is that I have to replace the computer. I also have password protection on, which may or may not add much security for the info (no truly sensitive stuff), but I do think I'll improve my (far too simple) password before leaving.

EClaire @ 232: I'm glad to hear that Greens restaurant is still wonderful. I must visit San Francisco again!

Benjamin at 225, there's nothing we can do about your present inbetweenish situation, but there are plenty of us Making Light folks in the Bay Area, and Berkeley is filled with interesting people/activities. I recommend you pay a lot of attention to your cat while the apartment empties -- she's going to be pretty freaked out as familiar things go away. Good luck during the move, and when you get to Berkeley, let us know.

Seconding what Lizzy L says about Berkeley (and the East Bay in general) being full of interesting people/things. In my experience, it's also full of interesting things that are enjoyable for introverts. (YMMV depending on your level of introversion; for calibration, I consider myself pretty introverted and occasionally mark weekend days on the calendar as "SEE NOBODY DAY".) Aquatic Park in Berkeley is a nice place to go for a walk or doze on the grass, with no more interaction required than a possible nod to one's fellow park-goers as they pass by.

Come to think of it, a number of my favorite places in the area are places one can go and just be without needing to interact much or at all.

Benjamin Wolfe:I'll second the "get out, get some exercise" advice. I often work from home and can spend the whole day in the house if I'm not careful, then wonder why I'm feeling twitchy. Not so much of a problem now I'm running, but today was a "rest" day on my running schedule and after 10 hours at the computer, I got the bicycle out and took that round the park (where I usually run) a few times. Feel better now.

Xopher #236:

Google is my friend. Yes, freeze distillation is also called jacking (I wasn't familiar with the term).

As to finding a yeast that can survive higher alcohol concentrations, it's exceedingly unlikely (I have a professional interest in it). Champagne yeasts can go to the high teens (% ethanol by volume), sake yeasts a bit higher, but they all tend to die off due to toxic effects of ethanol.

Interestingly, jacking is used to make 'ice wine' in New Zealand (though we are no longer allowed to call it that) by removing water from grape juice before fermentation; NZ winters normally not severe enough for grapes to freeze on the vines, the traditional way of making ice wine.

Re "jacking"... I haven't heard the term before, but it fits in with "ciderjack" being one of the few drinks that is usually made with the method. Returning to the original reason for discussing it, this is definitely how Brewdog make their high strength beers. Not sure about their Dutch competitor, however.

Soon Lee: "Champagne yeasts can go to the high teens (% ethanol by volume)"

About 10 years ago I was using one that according to the producer's data sheet could survive to 20%. I understand there have been further increases since then. But this is still definitely toward the high end of the scale that can be reached by fermentation alone.

The distinction between fermentation and later augmentations is somewhat important to home-brewers in the USA, because fermentation up to quite decent quantities per year is legal, but doing anything to concentrate the alcohol after that is heavily illegal (without a distiller's license).

Jules@256: I'm not familiar with the term "ciderjack", but I'll bet it's the same thing as "applejack", which I am familiar with.

This actually relates to your car "jack" etymologically, I believe. Apparently that term for a device to push heavy weights around using mechanical advantage predates the automobile :-) .

One of the advantages of jacking over distillation is that more sugars get left in the jacked beverage, and more of the less-volatile flavor elements. It produces a very different kind of beverage than distilling; it's also quite natural in certain climates and doesn't add to air or heat pollution.

I recall some discussion some time back about the possibility of a Making Light gathering at NASFiC.

Has anything been decided?

(Although, as far as I know, I won't have internet access at NASFiC. It isn't a matter of unavailability of WiFi. It's a matter of not having anything with me that can use WiFi.)

Michael I (259): I haven't heard anything about a Making Light get-together at NASFiC, but I was just about to ask who else was planning to be there. You and me, obviously, and I know Fragano is and that Serge can't make it. Anyone else?

Tom Whitmore@258: On the other hand, careful evaporative distillation can separate out methanol and fusel alcohols, whereas freezing leaves them in. So some of the details of your fermentation process become more important if you're planning to concentrate it by freezing later!

ddb #261:

Worse, actually, as the jacking process concentrates them too, increasing the likelihood of really bad hangovers, blindness, and or death.

We will not be as NASFIC, alas. But anyone else who is not planning to be there and happens to be in the vicinity of Springfield, MO can drop by and visit us at Barataria Faire. Tickets are $5, and the weather is predicted to be in the lower 90s and partly cloudy.

DaveL @213 (and other interested parties):

Hmm... Precipice trail, perhaps? Which I think is the trail with the most fixed protection (mostly ladder steps and handrails). The Beehive? The cliffs above Echo Lake?. A pretty meek form of via ferrata. Try the Hidden Vally Trail* in Zion National Park. The methods are far more generalized than just for climbing aids, and the techniques are pretty common. The holes are drilled with a star drill and hammer (as in "Drill ye Tarriers, Drill) or more modern drills, but it usually doesn't make sense to drag up power equipment. Hold drill against rock face, and beat with hammer, pull drill from hole to clear chips, and repeat ad nauseum, or until you hit your hand with the hammer. On the end of the steel rod cut a slot, put a wedge slightly in the slot, put in rock and hammer home. Wedge expands the tenon for a very tight fit. Alternately (and this is what you might do if you were fabricating pieces on site) heat they end of the rod until it is malleable, and hammer in hard enough to deform.
Nowadays they tend to be cemented in place.

* You know how, in old Westerns, you'd see folks inching along a narrow ledge on the side of a canyon? They are real. The trail was icy on the day that I solo "hiked" it - it did have a bolted cable for the amazingly scary part. Managed by the same US Park Service that has someone who threatened to throw me out of the Smithsonian for, OMG, walking down an escalator.

Michael I #259/Mary Aileen #260: Leave me a message via FB (well, Mary Aileen can, at least).

Lee #263: Drat!

TexAnne @ 115

After watching a new department chairman snooker a junior professor out of tenure because he had severe migraines and couldn't be relied on to attend faculty meetings, I too find academic politics leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. It didn't help that the said chairman pushed me out of the staff position I had held for 4 years because he "didn't have the funding to keep me fulltime." (translates to: "I have my own people I want to move into these positions.")

Well, with everything packed, exercise was not lacking today - moving the vast majority of one's worldly possessions into a cube constitutes exercise in my book. Roped a few friends in to helping me load (with the traditional gift of beer after), so loading took an hour or so. Rather warm for it - 98 here in Nashville today - but not too bad.

The cat is only mildly freaked out - I think having all the boxes piled in my living room freaked him more than the mostly empty apartment (right now, he is just sitting on a paper bag, sleeping). In terms of my own worries about introversion and being overly solitary, I still have three days at the lab, which will go by all too quickly, and then I just have next Monday and Tuesday. I will, I think, wander down to the chain bookstore about half a mile from my apartment to kill time on at least one of those days.

I have to say - I am really looking forward to getting out to the bay area. The weather here this week is just emphasizing this desire.

Benjamin@267 - remember to bring some really warm clothes with you, so you've got them before you unpack the rest of the moving. Berkeley gets annoyingly cold at night, especially in the summer microclimates.

Good to know. It will be a novelty after a Nashville summer.

Bruce StM, 266: Whoo, wrongful dismissal much? And of course academia's set up so that people can't win if they sue.

I'll be at NASFIC and would love to know if there's a ML gathering.

An aside: I am truly pleased to be leaving today's 106 degree temp in Little Rock for the balmy 92 degrees forecast for Raleigh tomorrow. My washer and dryer are in a non-air-conditioned room off my carport, which is why I've been putting off until evening the washing of the last few items I was planning to pack. I just stepped out there and it's still a sauna. I'm thinking I've got plenty of clean clothes. :-)

Benjamin, it's been a cold summer. 55 degrees and foggy in the morning for weeks. Whether or not your neighborhood warms up in the afternoon depends on the microclimate you happen to inhabit. I second Bill Stewart's advice.

Addition to advice on Berkeley weather: warm blankets. Wool is good.
(Those fleece things they sell are also good, if you don't have a wool blanket; try a craft store for the ready-cut throws, generally sold in pairs.)

Mary Aileen @ 260... Serge can't make it

...and is bummed about it. Luckily there is local affair Bubonicon and I'm very much ready for some con time. Of course, guess on which weekend my employer decided to deploy our merger-related work. Luckily, my involvement with that mostly as a consultant (meaning they all came to me to ask how the system worked before they started changing it around) and hopefully - HOPEFULLY - my cell phone won't go off at a time when I'm enjoying non-work life for once.

55 degree mornings sound lovely, after ending up with the (maybe) second hottest day of the year to load my worldly possessions for shipment. My desire for cooler weather aside, I will make sure to have somewhat warmer clothing to hand when I pack.

Joy, my laundry room is a fairly loosely finished back stoop and I've decided to do laundry only at night so the dryer will work when it's 'cool.' I'm in Kansas City, MO.

Weather Channel keeps teasing that the temps are going to go down to the 80s during the day Real Soon, but I'm skeptical.

We have an ancient house so the A/C is zoned, window units in the most-used areas. they're working wonderfully but not totally keeping up. I hope it gets cooler out.

Open-thread stuph --

Some of you may recall my writing about rebuilding my MacArthur Harp.

I finally got around to putting up a post on my blog page about that effort, complete with pictures.

At the end of the post is a You-Tube video so you can hear a sample of what the harp sounds like.

Bravo, Craig!

Elliott Mason, #240; David Harmon, #241; ajay, #243: That was actually the WashPost and one of the other weird things is that their main critic is Michael Dirda, who has a Pulitzer Prize for litcrit, and is an SF fan. He attends the local con. You'd think the author would have checked with him, or something.

Marilee @ 279 -- I've seen a few too many cases where relative newbies actively avoided having their work reviewed by a friendly local expert, to say nothing of consulting with the expert while the work was in progress, so as to "prove themselves". The usual result is a load of avoidable mistakes.

Craig R.@277: Thanks for the pointer, I enjoyed reading and seeing the pictures of the rebuild.

Reading between the lines, was part of the decision process that you might as well try the repair yourself, since professional repair would be close to the price of a new instrument? And hence, if you messed it up, you'd be no worse off financially? I ruined a film scanner on that basis some years back (and now have a better scanner); looks like your repair worked better than mine.

Remember that I mentioned that the Canadian government was going to make returning the long census form non-mandatory?

Treasury Board President Stockwell Day says the government will go ahead with its plan to spend billions for new prisons, suggesting statistics that show crime is declining in Canada are not accurate. On the other hand, they're firm believers in the statistics that say that crime is under-reported.

I'm reminded of a quotation I found while I was doing my Ph.D. research, from one of the big names in the field of computational chemistry, in a big paper in a prestigious journal:

We have therefore decided to use a few adamantane values which do not affect much the outcome of the parameterization in fitting the force field. And these values are probably experimentally accurate. However, the values which we cannot fit we do not think are experimentally accurate, and unless convincing evidence is presented to the contrary, we will continue to believe that the force field here gives results more accurate than those experimental results which are in conflict with them.

Joel Polowin @282: Our local head of the teacher's union has complained (in the face of massive budget-related layoffs) that the school board agrees with her that the 'what teachers are amazing' statistics are completely subjective to the principal's preferences/whim, and therefore not to be used for merit pay, but somehow the same board thinks the other end of the same dataset (what teachers the local principals hate) is perfectly accurate.

Considering over 95%of all teachers in this dataset, even in failing schools, get a rating of 'excellent' ... it is well-documented (but not believed by the school board) that principals use bad performance reviews as a tool to get teachers they personally dislike, or teachers who call the principals on bad behavior, in trouble.

And those teachers are now being fired en masse for being 'bad teachers'.

Elliot Mason @ 283... bad performance reviews as a tool

I am shocked, shocked!

Serge: In general, the US system has no good workable way of separating teachers who are objectively bad at teaching from those who are objectively good.

There are two competing methods (sometimes used simultaneously), each with a fatal flaw.

Method 1: Quantitatively evaluate the students before and after the term; teachers who improve their students' scores more are 'better' than those who do not.

Fatal flaw: Strongly influenced by non-teacher factors involving the students' preparedness, parental involvement, dedication to their classes, etc; also leads to 'teaching to the test' and sabotaging the entire term's actual learning. Many good teachers can improve a badly-behind class 'less' than bad teachers improve a class of gifted kids, and the raw number-crunching can't tell the difference.

Method 2: Qualitatively evaluate the teachers while they are teaching, by putting a classroom monitor or other judge in the room. Sometimes done by the principal of the school directly.

Fatal flaw: Extremely vulnerable to corruption and grade inflation/deflation. Unless some rigorous outside group with no stake in the results is used for evaluating (which, to my knowledge, has never been tried, at least not in Chicago), it becomes a Prom-Queen-style popularity contest. At best, the evaluators try to make their school's stats turn out well; at worst, the evaluators rate their friends highly and their enemies at the bottom.

Elliot Mason @ 285... I wonder how this is handled in other countries. Yes, I am from another country, but I left a long time ago.

That being said, my response was also based on my own experience in the corporate world. ("Sure, you upgraded our job scheduler, streamlined the 1000-job flow, got rid of the obsolete tasks, but it was just one project, which is why you get a mediocre rating of 3 out of 5.")

Serge@286: Teaching is extra problematic because success in your training is utterly unrelated to your later success in the classroom. There was an interesting Malcolm Gladwell article on the subject; he compared teaching and professional football quarterbacks as two fields of endeavor where the person doing the scouting has to almost guess randomly as to whether the prospect will excel in their chosen field or flop.

Prop 8 decision coming down today.

Waiting is hard. Whichever way it goes, it will be appealed, of course.

Lizzy L @288:

We know who won -- the Plaintiffs -- because the Defence has filed a motion to stay, even before the Judge has issued his decision. Apparently, a draft of the decision was given to both parties in the suit so they could have their statements prepared...

Elliott Mason #285, 2877: It's also problematic because (1) properly evaluating the kids is labor- and resource-intensive, competing with all the other things schools need to spend money and time on, while (2) properly evaluating the teachers requires someone (lots of someones) with comparable teaching ability, and if there were that many spare teachers around they'd be in the classroom. (Not to mention the question of evaluating the evaluators.)

An additional issue is that while we know a lot about what needs to be done to teach kids, most the schools have decades-old "routines" which ignore all that, plus many teachers whose training is outdated. Then too, proper teaching is itself resource-intensive, and requires not only stocking up on teachers with modern training, but empowering those teachers against both interfering parents and disruptive administrators.

And then there's those religious groups for whom genuine education is an existential threat....

The very best thing about miso soup is the convenction cells...

DDB (# 281)
In re: Harp repair --

From the inquiries I made of a couple of luthiers, the estimates I got put the repair in the range of $300 to $500 (US)

At the time, Lark In The Morning still had some stock from one luthier that they were pricing at $300 plus shipping. Since that time, they now carry from a different instrument maker, and their asking price is $500.

I have seen prices listed on the web from a couple of instrument makers ranging from $500 to $1500. Since it's not a "popular" instrument, there is a limited supply of luthiers who are willing to take on the effort.

So, it *did* work out OK for me.

I might be willing to tackle that again, but only for instruments that I might have gotten for $50 or less. My stress levels would be a lot lower :)

Overall, there were some costs -- I had the "heat gun" (nee hairdryer) and the straps. I did pick up additional clamps (I already had 4, I picked up an additional 4).

Of the remaining "ingredients," the Gorilla Glue was about $4. The most expensive component, however, was a full set of replacement strings. They ran to an average cost of $3/each, and I needed 24.

I could have used up some of the spares I keep on hand, but I wanted to just get a full set for this project.

286 Serge: Oh, sort of like this?
In case he/his server decides to break all the links again in the future, June 16, 2008.

Mycroft W @ 293... I love it! My one consolation about that former manager is that her incompetence (if not her lack of appreciation of my work) eventually bit her in the you-know-what.

Hmm. FilmCritic.com has no logon of its own; to comment there you have to connect your comments with something else you're doing on the web.

I want to comment on Scalzi's column, but I'm not willing either to let people from FilmCritic.com go right to any of my existing accounts OR create another separate Google account just to comment on FilmCritic.

Why can't they have their own godsdamned accounts? Bastards. Is there any easy way to comment there without this crap? Anyone know?

Terry @ 155: I hear you. My latest issue is that I bought two pair of shorts for post-pregnancy sizing and totally forgot that when I go with shorts, particularly bermuda-length shorts, I *can* get them in petites so that the waist is at the correct height for me. ("Low-rise" would be correct were it not for the fact that those are cut to go around the hips. "Paper bag" is the effect and not pleasant.)

Right now I'm folding them over in front so the zipper doesn't undo itself.

Oh well, at least these didn't actually cost me anything due to gift cards & discounts...

Lori at 289: my understanding was that the defense filed a conditional motion to stay the decision pending appeal, but I didn't realize that meant that the judge found for the plaintiffs. Hooray for our side. I actually expected that. I'm very interested, however, in reading the decision to discover on what grounds Walker's ruling is based, what "facts" he accepts as support, and so on.

I can't speak for any woman other than myself, but I rather like how I look when I look in the mirror. I'm happy with my looks, and the few minor things I'd change if I could are, after all, minor. However, I am generally unfond of how I appear in most photographs. Really. Strongly.

Then I started using Photobooth on my Mac to take photos of myself, and I was surprised how flattering they all were. It was a little while before I realized that they were all mirror-images. I flipped them around the "right" way, and the photo got less attractive. I tried the same thing with a regular photo of myself, flipping it to mirror made it look better.

I also end up as profile more often in photos. I don't see my profile that often...even in the mirror it looks wrong to me. So I think that quite a bit of my dissatisfaction is due to seeing images of myself that differ from what I am used to.

Also, in the mirror, my face is animated. In a photo I might be caught and frozen in a weird expression.

All this has helped my own photography. For one, as someone who wants to not be in pictures, I try to be behind the camera as much as possible. For another, I am determined not to "publish" (for whatever value of publish) unflattering photos of my subjects. I try to get them in a good place to begin with, and any photos that aren't quite there get deleted.

Kayjayoh @ 298... in the mirror, my face is animated. In a photo I might be caught and frozen in a weird expression

Which one is it that prevails, in the case of a photo of you looking in a mirror?

Kayjayoh... Me, I like the photo.

#298-299: Kayjayo: Interesting, in that from that photo, you appear to have a particularly symmetrical face.

PS: Just curious: is your handle derived from initials KJO?

CNN is reporting that Judge Walker has overturned California's Prop. 8 on the grounds that it violates both equal protection and due process; and instructs that California may issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

Some good news: 40 U.S. Billionaires Pledge Half Wealth to Charity

From Judge Walker's decision:

Because Proposition 8 is unconstitutional under both the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses, the court orders entry of judgment permanently enjoining its enforcement; prohibiting the official defendants from applying or enforcing Proposition 8 and directing the official defendants that all persons under their control or supervision shall not apply or enforce Proposition 8. (p.136)

For any Fluorenes contemplating joining us for a Gathering(s?) of Light in Boston over Labor Day weekend, I've posted an entry on my LJ for discussion of plans thereof.

Lori Coulson @304 -- a very strong ruling indeed! Has the stay been granted?

Tom Whitmore@306

According to the AP, the judge has asked both sides to submit arguments by August 6 on the question of whether the ruling should be stayed pending appeal.

AKICIML: How do you know when your dried beans have soaked long enough?

"I'm wearing stays again."
- Carla Göteborg to Prof Lindenbrook in Journey to the Center of the Earth

That being said, yay for the Prop 8 decision!

#308: They've been soaking too long when little green shots pop out.

But seriously, I just soak them overnight to be sure. I've read four hours if you change the water halfway through.

TexAnne @ 308... IIf you hear someone say "Fi Fy Fo Fum", it's time to stop soaking them.

Stefan #310: They've been soaking too long when little green shoots pop out.

But those are the best part!

TexAnne @ 308 -Overnight at least, if you want their enzymes to break down the parts that give you gas. (This is also important for Crohn's, is why I know.)

What I stopped in to say, tho: Trilobite cookies FTW! If cookies or chocolate were on the menu, I'd make those!

A brief political bit: ColorOfChange.org is organizing a boycott of Fox News. They claim to have already made a fair dent in Beck's sponsors and other Fox advertisers. Hat tip to Field Negro.

Very happy about the Prop 8 decision today - I have the feeling that it will go to the supreme court, but at least it is a useful precedent.

Benjamin Wolfe @315 -- the Supreme Court might well choose not to hear it. It's something that they'd probably rather send back to the states.

The judge who made the decision is openly gay. The Prop. 8 folks knew this and didn't ask him to recuse himself. Is anyone else Machiavellian enough to think they did this in order to allow a procedural overturning of the decision rather than having it decided on the merits? Did their refusal to ask for recusal on an openly-known potential conflict of interest mean they agreed to accept his fitness to judge?

Xopher @295:

I went fifteen rounds with the thing a couple of days ago trying to comment on Scalzi's post of the previous week, because somebody needed a smack upside the head with a copy of John Stuart Mill. It choked on recognizing my OpenID and I finally gave up; don't know what I did wrong. But *if* you could get it to work, perhaps an OpenID that you already have would be sufficiently discreet for your purposes, or setting up a new one would be more acceptable?

I'm human. Does that recuse me from making decisions affecting other humans?

Not only that, the pro-Prop. 8 forces argued (poorly and illogically) that same-sex marriage weakens opposite-sex marriage. If they were right, wouldn't straight people have to recuse themselves for conflicts of interest as well?

TexAnne @ 308: Overnight works fine. Longer doesn't damage them, so I'll often put them to soak in the evening (when I'm cooking and thinking about such things), ready for cooking the next evening. I think they generally say at least eight hours. Note that if you're cooking soya beans, you need to cook them thoroughly before putting them into an acidic sauce such as tomato, or they don't soften properly (discovered the hard way).

Some lentils don't need soaking (but I don't know of any beans that don't).

Related query: My green lentils say boil for 30 minutes; how long do I need to fast-boil them before putting them in a casserole to slow cook (they will be cooking in a heat-retaining box for 4-5 hours)?

Tom Whitmore @ 316 - Why would anyone think that he should recuse himself in this case?

What I found interesting is that he was recommended by Meese and appointed by Reagan, while opposed by Pelosi and Kennedy. What a difference the years have wrought.

I will make a brief digression as to why "casting out (n-1)s" works for base n.

First, we all know that a base-n number is the sum of multiplications of a single-digit number and an (integral) power of the base (so, for example, 647 (in base 10) is the same as 6*10^2 + 4*1-^1 + 7*10^0).

Now, it's not always obvious, but n^a can be expressed as (n-1)*b+1 (where b is the base-n number 1, repeated a time). If we look at our example base 10, we can see that 10^2 = 9*11 + 1 and that this pattern holds true.

If we call the number 1....1 (repeated m times) rep(m), we can express a base-n number a (using _i to denote the i:th number, counting from the right and starting with 0) as one of:

sum a_i * n^i
sum a_i * ((n-1)*rep(i) +1)

The second of those can be re-written as:
sum a_i*(n-1)*rep(i) + a_i

And we can quite trivially see that the remainder of a divided by n-1 is the same as the sum of the individual digits (as the terms multiplied by (n-1) neatly cancel out).

Of course, this could probably use a more rigorous proof, but I suspect this is enough to illustrate the principle (for example, i am definitely glossing over moduli and how they operate in rings).

dcb #320: split peas also don't need soaking. For your lentils, my own guess would be to say "not at all", but I haven't played with slow-cooking, so I may well be missing something.

Idea for a netquiz, inspired by typo-fixing the above: What legume are you? lentil? navy bean? fava? Uncle Duke? :-)

Ingvar M #322: (where b is the base-n number 1, repeated a time)

<twitch> How about: "b is the sum of the powers n^0...n^(a-1), which is expressed as the sequence of 1's with length a"

The New Jim Crow particle (pointing to Leonard Pitts's article about Michelle Alexander's book) is 404. Fortunately, the article is all over the web, e.g. at the Reading Eagle.

Yay for the Prop 8 ruling! I still need to read it, but from what I've heard it's good and uses Scalia's dissenting opinion in Lawrence v Texas in a wonderful way.

Rymenhild @ 319:

Of course straight people wouldn't have to recuse themselves. Being straight isn't something special, you know, it's only gay people who are different. (Excuse me while I now wash my mouth out with soap.) See the recent Julian Comstock thread, and also this LJ post.

Late to the party here, but:

Its big brother, 144,000, is significant in a number of different religious traditions, and a favorite with apocalyptic theoreticians.

-- shouldn't this have been saved for Open Thread #144000, which I confidently expect all present to participate in in due course?

(I mean, we're 0.1% of the way there already!)

ddb@257 — I suspect that the term jack to mean ice distillation is a back-formation. Applejack has been around since the early 1800s, while this sense of jack seems to be a recent invention. Even the sense of "to lift with a jack" isn't attested until 1885.

Googling for applejack etymology, the only published hit I found was from The Gaelic Etymology of the Languages of Western Europe* by Charles MacKay, LL.D., 1877. He claims that the -jack is from Gaelic deoch, meaning "drink".
______________
* Or, in full, The Gaelic Etymology of the Languages of Western Europe and More Especially of the English and Lowland Scotch, and of their Slang, Cant, and Colloquial Dialects.

Not only that, the pro-Prop. 8 forces argued (poorly and illogically) that same-sex marriage weakens opposite-sex marriage. If they were right, wouldn't straight people have to recuse themselves for conflicts of interest as well?

Married straight people, certainly. Or people related to married straight people. After all, SSM is supposed to "weaken the institution of marriage". If the case was about some policy that would weaken another institution - IBM, say - you wouldn't give it to a judge whose sister worked for IBM.

KeithS @ 326... Being straight isn't something special, you know, it's only gay people who are different.

Brian: You're ALL individuals!
The Crowd: Yes! We're all individuals!
Brian: You're all different!
The Crowd: Yes, we ARE all different!
Man in crowd: I'm not...

I am inordinantly tickled that my link to discussions about my upcoming trip to Boston for my friend Matt's handfasting drops into the middle of a discussion of Prop 8's take-down.

Matt and Katherine very specifically put off getting married until Massachusetts legalized same-sex marriage, so that they would not be exploiting a freedom that was withheld from some of their friends. Then, when that finally happened, they went down and queued for marriage licences along with all of the gay couples.

Katherine made matching rainbow vests to celebrate the occassion.

I have some pretty cool friends, ya know?

Attention all Making Light denizens attending NASFiC: Fragano and I are planning a Fluorospheric dinner expedition on Friday (August 6, tomorrow). Meet us by the party and message boards outside the dealers room entrance. We will be wearing our yellow Fluorosphere buttons that Lee was giving out at Denvention.

Lurkers welcome! The more the merrier!

Mary Aileen @ 232... Have a grand time at NASFiC, all of you!

me at #332: Meet Friday at 6:00 for dinner.

Thanks for the advice, everybody! I soaked them overnight and will probably let them sit until suppertime. I don't think they needed that much--lima beans bought in the pod from the farmer who grew them can't be *that* dry.

I'm going to saute them with pumpkin leaves and onions. Omnomnom.

Would anyone here be going to Aussiecon 4, by any chance?

Ingvar @322: Thanks for providing a helpful explanation that doesn't hurt my head too much!

Regarding the use of "casting out (n-1)s" for checking arithmetic: Since there are n-1 possible results in base n, the likelihood of false positives (where an error yields the same "checksum" as the correct result) is higher for smaller bases. In the extreme case, all checksums are identical for binary, so I guess casting out 1s isn't very useful.

salixulon #337: In the extreme case, all checksums are identical for binary

Not quite! A binary checksum is also called "parity" -- it's 1 if and only if there are an odd number of 1's in the number. This is actually used quite a lot, but mostly below the surface, in error-checking code and the like. A "parity error" can indicate that a character or packet needs to be re-transmitted, or that something's gone wrong with a memory chip.

Many of the older folks here (from 40's or so upward) will remember having to pick the correct parity scheme (and other settings) for a modem connection, before the standards settled down.

AKICIML: Does anybody have carry-on luggage guidelines that they like that they can link to?

I'm presuming the following items are out: nailclippers, nail file, 1.5" swiss army knife, 1.5" multi-tool...? (I figure I'll just pop these in an envelope and mail them to my friend.)

Jacque, #339: They didn't fuss about my nail clippers and file in my belt-pack when I flew out for ConChord. But pack all your liquids and gels in a Ziploc and have it somewhere easily accessible -- they want to do a visual inspection on that, and I had to dig mine out of my toiletries kit at the bottom of my bag, which was a hassle.

salixulon @337: And of course, casting-out checksums is closely related to Trachtenberg.

(I've never understood why Trachtenberg isn't taught as the default method for arithmetic.)

Jacque @ 339:

If it's an everyday object with a recognizably sharp edge or point, and it is supposed to be used for cutting or stabbing, it will most likely be taken and eventually sold on Ebay. Examples are knives, nail clippers, and even dull kiddy scissors. They might be letting up on nail clippers a little, but I wouldn't take a pair I cared about.

If it has a sharp edge or point, but is not recognizably used for cutting or stabbing, it may or may not be taken. Keys won't be taken. Knitting needles may or may not be. Nail files probably will be, but maybe not, depending.

Liquids must be in 3 ounce or smaller containers, and must all fit in a 1 quart (iirc) plastic bag. What matters is not the volume of substance in the container, but what the container is marked as. Toothpaste counts as liquid, and I have heard stories of almost empty tubes of toothpaste causing trouble because they were marked as 4.7 ounces. I did not try to confuse the person with issues of weight or volume when they had to ask their supervisor about my small can of shaving cream. The stores past the security checkpoint are very happy to sell you bottled drinks, but remember that if you have to change flights and that involves going through security again for whatever reason, you can't keep them.

Garrottes are, as far as I know, entirely acceptable.

Lee #340:

And the ziplock should be quart size, and the individual liquid/gel containers should be 3.5 oz or less.

(Do *not* get me started on my contact lens solution manufacturer, who, when given a chance to Do the Right Thing when they redid their packaging, not only made the bottles impossible for people to open in a sterile manner, but made them bigger than the carry-on limit. Where they'd been ok before. OTOH, they did make them round instead of flat.)

David Harmon @338: Right. I guess the context of my statement wasn't clear enough. I meant "all checksums produced by casting out 1s are identical for binary". As a long-time software developer (about 20 years beyond your criterion for "older folks") I'm well aware of the significance of parity values, computed as you indicate.

Jacque @341: Thanks for pointing out Trachtenberg!

Addendum:

The checkpoint dance goes like this:

Take ziploc baggie of liquids out of carry on and place in tray.

Take off your shoes¹ and place in the tray.

Also stick your keys, wallet, coin purse, hat, jacket, and (if you think the metal detector is set to ultra-sensitive) belt in the tray.

Stick your laptop in another tray. There are now signs up saying that you can leave the laptop in its case if it's one of the approved types of case. The sleeves are ok, not sure about which others are.

Zip up your carry on bag before putting it through.

On the other end you get to put everything back to its rightful place. Fun.

1. The joke, of course, used to be that we were all glad that the guy didn't try to put a bomb in his underwear. Now we've had someone try to set fire to his crotch and they still don't want to inspect our underwear. Yet more proof, as if we actually needed it at all, that the shoe thing was, is, and always will be entirely fucking stupid. Ahem.

Speaking of mathematics...

How do you keep track of the costs of taste, whether it's good or bad?
You don't.
There's no accounting for taste.

I had to throw out my packaged-but-not-in-ziploc-or-marked-with-volume ShoutWipe on the way back to Ireland (it was OK going to for some reason) and so naturally I dropped some kind of staining liquid on my bosom in flight and had to toss the shirt.

Idiots.

Tom, #316: The judge who made the decision is openly gay.

Where had you that information? It hasn't been mentioned in any news source I've been reading, although a couple of them have mentioned in passing that the pro-8 folks have made that claim. I'd be interested in finding an independent source that confirms it.

KeithS@345: And if you have sleep apnea, take your machine out of its bag and put it in a separate tray, and wait a bit at the end while they run chemical detectors over it. In the US, at least; one time someone in Montreal airport chided me for taking the machine out.

I always carry a backpack with me, so I generally put my keys, coins, and phone in an outer pocket of that. I leave my watch and belt on; so far I haven't had any problems there.

I have plans coming up that involve going through airport security four times in a two-week period. Not looking forward to that part of things. (And yeah, the shoe thing is just stupid.)

Lee@348 — It was on All Things Considered yesterday.

All the references I've checked online for the claim that Judge Walker is openly gay go back to a San Francisco Chronicle article. Wikipedia footnotes it to this sfgate.com article (despite the name, I believe "sfgate.com" is the online prsence of the SF Chronicle).

KeithS @342: <soupfail!>

Re: sharps. Hm. Think I'll err on the side of caution. It would annoy me deeply to lose my tools.

@342: Thanks for the dance-card. I'll print that out and put it with my boarding pass.

nerdycellist @347: Not disputing your evaluation, I'm told that a hack that can serve in those circumstances is club soda.

If you go through one of those virtual-nakedness scanners, don't wear a drawstring skirt. I had to get an ineffectual and pointless patdown because I thought they'd be able to tell the difference between cotton and det-cord.

Dan, #350: Thanks! Honestly, I'm amazed that the pro-h8 folks didn't make an issue of it -- but that would also explain why the ruling was so painstakingly detailed.

Also, what part of "the people can't make policy that contravenes the US Constitution" do some of these people fail to understand? Just because they managed to get a bare majority to vote for it in the first place (and that only with huge infusions of out-of-state money spent on lying scare tactics, AND a weak defense from the home team) doesn't make it either legal or right.

Brief reminder: Tiny Gathering of Lurking Specks of Light at noon tomorrow, Aug 6th, in the lobby of the Musecon 0 hotel in Itasca, with lunch to follow at a location TBD.

I will be there, with spawn in tow (she's now significantly bigger than in that picture, being 1.5 years of age in two weeks). The kid will probably be in a carrier on my back (which is very visually distinctive, for purposes of meeting up); if she's antsier than that, I may be chasing her about and a little less obvious to find. :->

I'm hoping another Fluorospherian lurker of my acquaintance who couldn't attend the whole con may also come.

Jacque @352 - thanks! The club soda cure for stains is one of those things I can never remember. I'll try and retain it for any flight in which I will not mind having a fizzy, damp bosom.

Since I have not changed blouse sizes in the last decade or so, I buy tops under the assumption that they will inevitably meet their end prematurely from some sort of food hitting them rather than just wearing out in the fullness of time. This understanding has saved me from much heartache.

I really wanted to bring a needle and thread on my next flight (sewing trim to a medieval gown so's I can have fancy pix in period clothing whilst in Gdansk. Yes, I'm a big dork) but the idiot regulations have quashed that. As far as Ineffectual Nudity Scanners are concerned, I'm fat so I will always get the Ineffectual Fake Pat-Down. Yay?

323 ::: David Harmon @ 323: Well, I'm guessing that if it says "boil vigorously for fve minutes, then simmer for 15", I still need to do the "boil vigorously" part, but I was wondering if anyone had any experience.

I was once fed a lentil lasagna in which, I'm presuming, the lentils had not been cooked adequately and I spent half the night rolling around the hotel room floor (rather elderly, not particularly nice carpet) with my guts cramping like crazy - then I had to pretend to be compos mentis the next day.

I'm trying to do more hot-box cooking because it makes sense - ten minutes stove top then into the box and leave for a few hours, instead of say an hour in the oven - much less energy used.

Jacque @ 352: If you're wearing a jacket/coat of any sort, it saves time to place all your keys, coinpurse etc. into the pockets of said jacket/coat while in the queue. Then you just put that through the scanner (plus the laptop, carry-on bag, shoes etc.

Nobody made a fuss about my embroidery needles, the one journey (four flights including return) I was carrying them, but I'd hidden one alongside the metal of my ballpoint pen, just in case.

Sounds like I'll probably wind up with three trays: backpack, laptop, jacket/purse/shoes. Ah well.

Oh yeah, that reminds me: any cautions about running things like thumb drives and digital cameras through the x-ray?

And will they twitch if I have a 4oz empty plastic Nalgene bottle in my purse, which I intend to fill with water once through security?

nerdycellist @ 356: Needle and thread you might be able to take - nobody made any fuss about my embroidery, a few years ago (good thing, since I really needed that flight time to finish embroidering my wedding stole). Of course, I couldn't take scizzors to cut the thread with - but there are pendant-looking things with recessed tiny thread-cutting blades to deal with that. Knitting needles, I've heard, are a different matter.

KeithS @ #345: Take off your shoes and place in the tray.

This isn't consistent, at least in Europe. You sometimes see a sign stating you shouldn't remove your shoes unless instructed to.

I invariably wear NewRock boots with lots of metal on them. They go in the tray no matter what.

and (if you think the metal detector is set to ultra-sensitive) belt in the tray.

It's been a while since I could keep my belt on though.

Oh well. I remember a newspaper notice from years ago. A certain infamous black metal musician got into a discussion with airport security because he insisted on wearing chain mail...

Jacque @ 358... any cautions about running things like thumb drives and digital cameras through the x-ray?

Nope. Never had any problem.

salixulon #344: In that case, whoops pardon my braindump. Yeah, mod 1 isn't terribly useful.

dcb #357: Eeep! OK, warning taken, (though that might also have been the cheese, unless you noticed crunchy lentils). Were other diners similarly affected?

Airline travel: The second most abusive aspect of the TSA is that the rules are not fixed -- they change constantly and get "interpreted" differently depending on the moods of the security droids.

Random: The summer heat here (central VA) is definitely giving way to thunderstorm season. I just got chased home from the supermarket by one, and it was clear and baking when I went into the store.

Nostalgia for the early posts? Nah, it's just me catching up, sorta.

B. Durbin @52 - It's because the subject of the photo has a mental ideal that she wants to look like. At times, she is able to look like that, in front of the mirror at the exact right angle. That's what she wants the camera to capture. Her friends only know that it's a good likeness and that she looks fine in it.

Admittedly, this is a theory, based on myself. (And now I see that Diatryma backs me up @97, in better detail.)

Steve with a book @118 - I believe that's so that 'stripped' copies of the book can't be resold. Retailers can tear the front covers off of unsold books and return those, in lieu of the entire book, to the sellers. What's left is supposed to be unsellable. It's sleazy for someone to intercept stripped books from the trash can and peddle them.

I take my CPAP out to run it through the scanner*. In New York and Atlanta they don't wanted to wand it for radiation, but the smaller airports I've flown out of do.

The cases that you can leave your laptop in are the ones that open out flat with only the laptop on one side.

*pain in the neck (*grumble* *grumble*)

On top of the wonderful ruling finding Prop 8 to be unconstitutional (and how!), there's more fantastic news:

The Supreme Court of Mexico has upheld marriage equality in the DF (Mexico City).

¡Viva México!

Kip W #363:

I've meant to bring this up before: I think there's also a sort of "grooming" involved, where there's this little kabuki play of girl photo subject knowing that she's supposed to say that she hates it (liking it would be bragging), thus giving other girls the opportunity to give her virtual hugs and reassurances. I know my senior picture was one of the best I've ever had taken, and I really did not feel as though I were allowed to say so.

David Harmon @ 362: Doubt it was the cheese - never had that sort of reaction to cheese, even after scraping the mould off before eating the rest. Guts not happy with undercooked lentils or beans is classic, I've been told. And I was the only vegetarian; the rest of the party were eating meat, not lentil lasagna.

Jacque @358, empty drinking bottles are fine. I always clip an empty plastic bottle to the outside of my carry-on, and fill it up at the first water fountain on the other side of the security checkpoint. But yeah, the really unfair thing is that they keep changing the rules on you and not telling you, or even having different rules at different airports. I'm dreading the day when they suddenly decide I can't fill my own little bottles with my favorite shampoos and things.

Re: Airport security

I flew in May (Cincinnati to Houston, round trip). My mom and I had no problems with bamboo dpns or my plastic crochet hook. Having socks in progress on the needles and spare yarn in the bag probably helped. Likewise, I had no problems with a cheap nail clipper in my carryon. It did not have an attached nail file, and was buried with my hairbrush, pills, and other non-liquid toiletries.

When we got to the security check in, we found out that anyone who was wearing flip-flops was allowed to leave them on when they went through the x-ray machine. Naturally, we were wearing sneakers so we'd be comfortable on the long walk to the gate.

My backpack (sans laptop and liquids) got a quick visual inspection in Cincinnati, and passed through Houston without a hitch. But my backpack is has been getting these since the mid 90's, probably because I cram so much stuff in there.

Does a poet with six fingers on each hand have a dactical advantage? How about a teacher?

Airport security: I forgot to mention--I've never had a problem with bamboo DPNs, bamboo circs, or tapestry needles. Except from idiot male passengers, who look at me in alarm. (But if guys like that want to be afraid of me, I'll be happy to let them.) No TSA or airline person has ever given my textile supplies a second glance.

Fun with vegetables: The lima beans are taking their own sweet time about cooking. So instead I'm braising pumpkin leaves as though they were chard. The vrilles (or whatever you call the little squiggly things in English) are yummy raw, and have a flavor that reminds me of something I can't place. Further bulletins as events warrant.

Jacque @ 352:

Soupfail?

Roy G. Ovrebo @ 360:

Europe, as far as I'm aware, hasn't been suckered into the sheer amount of airport inanity that we have over here in the US. They still have to enforce it for anyone travelling to the US, though.

Also seconding David Harmon's point that there aren't really regulations as much as guidelines, the TSA employees don't really get much guidance on the guidelines, and it's open to a certain amount of interpretation and abuse.

A further bulletin: OMG GOOD.

-caramelize an onion
-put in the pumpkin-leaf stems, salt, and sriracha; cover
-chiffonade the leaves
-put leaves in with some extra water, re-cover
-add lima beans when they're done cooking, with some of their cooking water
-adjust seasoning (by which I mean: MOAR SRIRACHA)
-leave the lid off, let the water boil away
-messe it forth, or eat from the pan if you live alone and are starving

The texture is unlike all the other leafy greens I've had. It's meaty like slippery vegetable, but fuzzy like baby okra, and not at all mucilaginous. I still can't tell what it reminds me of. Further experimentation is required! Especially since I found a Zambian recipe involving "pounded groundnuts," of which I have none. I'm going to use natural peanut butter instead. Same difference, right?

joann #366: Sounds like a Berne-style "game".

You know, keeping my photographs on the walls of my now very empty apartment was a very good idea. Yes, there is almost no furniture left (either it was shipped to Berkeley yesterday, or it has been or will be sold), but with the photographs up, it still feels like my apartment, rather than a sterile box. Makes me much happier.

Last day at my lab tomorrow. Sad to leave the people; excited to be leaving Nashville.

Wow. I've never lived in either one, but Nashville to Berkeley does sound like trading up.

KeithS @ # 372: Europe, as far as I'm aware, hasn't been suckered into the sheer amount of airport inanity that we have over here in the US. They still have to enforce it for anyone travelling to the US, though.

Well, the rules seem to be enforced relatively consistently in Europe (excepting stuff like shoes), but I have problems believing the US can be much worse, unless you have to strip nekkid to get through.

Roy G. Ovrebo @ 377 -- unless you have to strip nekkid to get through

I sometimes think that the only reason they haven't gone that far is the general level of body-phobia in North America.

jnh@370 — Teachers of the very young lose the advantage when their students grow another foot.

Amazing close-up photos of people's eyes here.

Dan Hoey @379:If the student were to grow a whole 'nother meter, it would be worse!

Xopher, I could not agree with you more. Very much trading up - I have been joking that I am moving across the country with a 2 year layover in Nashville (Boston - Nashville - Berkeley).

Reminder for Fluorosphereans at NASFiC:

Making Light dinner gathering tonight (Friday). Meet us at 6:00 by the message/party* boards. Look for yellow Fluorosphere buttons. (Links to my picture and to Fragano's in my 332, above.)

*"meet and greet"

Oh, and in line with all my nattering about moving, today is my last day at the lab. Very weird feeling - a bit melancholy, excited for what is to come and a bit nervous (both for my own future, and if I trained my successor well enough). Hm. Not that nervous for my friends here, but a bit nervous about the whole starting graduate school / teaching bit. Which is, I bet, a good way to be going in to things.

Now, to get ready for one last day in the magnet dungeons for the greater glory of the lab and the furthering of scientific understanding. I shall endeavor not to be eaten by a Grue.

377, 378
In National Lampoon's The Nineties, A Look Back (published 1990) there was a law passed that everyone had to fly without clothes.

Dan Hoey @ 379: I read your post and was somewhat puzzled, trying to work out where the third foot was growing from...

And on a totally different topic: is anyone else at the GBBF?

The tendrils of grape vines (and the leaves, too... except that I've yet to bite into a "tender" raw grape leaf!) are edible... for that matter, I think most legume sprouts are, I wouldn't be surprise if maple tree sprouts are (the seeds are edible, and of course maple sap is..) .. Never know that pumpkin leaves are. I know that squash blossoms are edible, and squash seeds, and pumpkin seeds... never had cucurbit family and related leaves, though, only the blossoms, fruit, and seeds...

What's this about Dorchester terminating mass market publication?
www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/44085-dorchester-drops-mass-market-publishing-for-e-book-pod-model.html

"...Dorchester Publishing has dropped its traditional print publishing business in favor of an e-book/print-on-demand model effective with its September titles that are “shipping” now. President John Prebich said after retail sales fell by 25% in 2009, the company knew that 2010 “would be a defining year,” but rather than show improvement, “sales have been worse.” [The returns rate is lower, but with bookstore reducing the titles they carry] "the company has had a difficult time getting its titles into stores... Dorchester [dismissed its seven field sales people but is keeping its] editorial team [and probably reducing] the number of titles released monthly ... from over 30 to 25. He said the schedule for 2011 is set and Dorchester has books in the pipeline through June 2012...."

I enjoyed the Music Metaphors particle. By the way, the URL was http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1XsMOP/www.gointothestory.com/2010/06/awesome-infographic-music-metaphors.html , which lets stumbleupon track it, and which is blocked by our censorware at work, but the real URL is just http://www.gointothestory.com/2010/06/awesome-infographic-music-metaphors.html which goes right to the article.

TexAnne@335 - fresh lima beans are just wonderful; I wish I could find them out here, but the closest we get are fava beans. I hadn't known pumpkin leaves were edible; I'd have tried that back in Jersey when I had a yard and garden and grew squash and occasionally pumpkins.

It would have been especially interesting to know if Chinese Long Squash leaves were edible - the one summer I grew them, I made the mistake of fertilizing them and leaving for vacation for a couple of weeks, and came back to find 1/3 of the yard covered in squash vines, baseball-bat sized squash up on the porch roof and hanging from ten feet up in the pine trees, making it dangerous to walk there.... We took a picture of a friend's kid standing next to a squash that was taller than she was, looking intimidated. Friend's husband was from Nigeria, and they cook mature squash there, so we were able to give some of the things away, but mostly we ate the ones that were still small enough to be zucchini-like, and composted the rest.

Bill #390
The local-to-me garden enthusiasts have taken up growing record long gourds (after setting several pumpkin mass records.) Maybe you could get into that? It seems to involve construction of an appropriate environment, though, very tall frames are needed.

Those pale giant pumpkins always make me think that Bunnicula's been working overtime...

Alas, I'm now limited to what I can grow in pots on a balcony in a dry climate. I'm gradually getting more adventurous, but it's not like having real ground and summertime rains.

KeithS @372: As in: you owe me a new keyboard.

And belatedly:

Garrottes are, as far as I know, entirely acceptable.

And you know this how? 8-)

Roy G. Ovrebo @377: I have problems believing the US can be much worse, unless you have to strip nekkid to get through.

Just yesterday I had a vision: individual, sealed coffins, handled like packing crates. Much as one would ship through on a heighliner, only smaller. Leave us pray this is not one of my precog episodes.

Oh, we're back to talking about gardening? Great!

I went on vacation for three weeks without arranging for anyone to water the garden. I expected to come back to find my nine volunteer tomatoes, Fiona's beans and pumpkins, and Alex's corn all dead. But apparently it was really bad weather while we were gone; everything was thriving*.

So I spent this morning setting up a teepee for the beans, tying the tomatoes up (first green ones are visible, and the snails are keeping their distance now that I've removed all the cress from the area), and gazing in bemusement at the pumpkins. Between the tomatoes and the pumpkins, the weeds in that bed are outcompeted and have given up.

Maybe this weekend I'll get the right attachments to put our hose reel onto the outside tap, attach the power washer, and clean our paving stones. Might even dump out and power-wash the water butt, which is getting a bit rank (moss washes down from the bike shed roof, then sits in the water and rots. It's probably wonderful for the plants I water from there -- liquid compost! -- but it smells like pretty logic flowers.)

Then again, maybe not. I've already made two skirts, and I would like to relax before my second week of work†.

-----
* Even the blackberry by the water butt, which has responded to my very aggressive prune earlier this year by producing masses of still-green berries. Hopefully this year they'll be sweet, rather than the half-dozen seedy and flavorless things we got last year.
† Which, by the way, will probably be fun. The first week was, though I currently have a quirk in my user profile that's baffling three helpdesks. I gather that's a record‡.
‡ They hadn't encountered the Abiveld before. They're just lucky I didn't lock my whole team in a room like I did my first week at RBS.

Well we're still at least 3 weeks ahead of where we should be at this time of year. In one perennial bed I passed on my way to work the Japanese Anemones (Fall blooming) were in bud, and some of the buds are showing color.

At home, our daylilies are done, the marigolds which had been looking whimpy are suddenly going gangbuster, and the coneflowers* are chest-high!

Our fragrant flowering tobacco is hip high (again these plants rarely exceed 2 feet in height) and wonderful to smell at dusk.

Plus we have a pair of self-sown Datura who are taking over the front stoop. They are covered in buds with near a dozen opening each evening. Another night-bloomer, the frangrance is a combo of moonflower and spice.

The tomatoes are bearing well, and the Fall Gold Raspberry is loaded with fruit. My lotuses have been prolific this year as well.

All in all, a good if strange growing season so far.

*Much to the delight of the local goldfinches who conduct dogfights over the seedheads. Note: Normal coneflowers (or at least all the rest I've seen in my neighborhood) are about knee-high at maturity.

Keith @345:

Take off your shoes and place in the tray

This varies from airport to airport -- not the shoe-removal, which is consistent throughout the US, but the "in the tray" part. The last two times I've flown out of LAX (most recently yesterday) I have been instructed firmly that shoes cannot go in the tray but must go directly on the belt. I've not been someplace recently with a "shoes must be in a tray, not directly on the belt" requirement but it would not surprise me. The return flights, both times, have not cared.

Abi #394: They're just lucky I didn't lock my whole team in a room like I did my first week at RBS.

That really rates a [*]. (That's bolded, if you can't tell.)

Sigh.

Due to schedule constraints, I will not only have to go through airport security tonight, but eat in the airport.

I plan on de-shoe-ing, un-belt-ing, de-change-ing, de-watch-ing and etcetera while eating, so I can roll from food court to security line dequipped for the ordeal.

Stefan #398:

Austin's airport, built a couple of years before we (who's this "we"?) decided all this, er, stuff was necessary, is cleverly designed so that *all* the food is inside the security zone. This has unfortunate ramifications for people meeting flights that have been delayed, but would certainly improve your day today.

abi @394:
I went on vacation for three weeks without arranging for anyone to water the garden. I expected to come back to find my nine volunteer tomatoes, Fiona's beans and pumpkins, and Alex's corn all dead. But apparently it was really bad weather while we were gone; everything was thriving.
Since they were without and outwith het Abiveld for the duration, this is a surprise?
PLUS, you live in the Netherlands. If a neighbor saw them going dry during your absence, I'm sure they would have been watered (with the possible accompaniment of mild tongue clucking).

lorax@396 I've not been someplace recently with a "shoes must be in a tray, not directly on the belt" requirement but it would not surprise me.

Vancouver, yesterday.

Since All Knowledge etc:

Does the Fluorospherical hivemind have suggestions on the useful redeployment of conference bags? I acquire a few of these every year, and I can't productively use more than one or two.

The most obvious defect of these bags is that they are defaced with the names of a statistical conference and its sponsors, rather than, say, a cyclist and his sponsors.

Thomas, do you know any knitters or other textile workers? We never have enough project bags.

abi @ 394: They hadn't encountered the Abiveld before. They're just lucky I didn't lock my whole team in a room like I did my first week at RBS.

Is it story time?

lorax @ 396: I've not been someplace recently with a "shoes must be in a tray, not directly on the belt" requirement but it would not surprise me.

Huh. All the airports I've been in in the last couple years have had shoes going in the tray as a requirement. At least, all the security people at all the airports I've been in in the last couple years have had that as a requirement. I haven't been in any airport where they wanted shoes loose on the belt. I also actively avoid LAX for travelling.

Abi @ 394... How the heck can you tell that a snail is gazing in bemusement at the pumpkins - or gazing at all?

Abi @ 394... They're just lucky I didn't lock my whole team in a room

Hmmm. Did you ever work at Delos?

reposting this from the Cablevision thread, where I accidentally put it:

I just got back from a very nice dinner with Fragano and his wife and Michael I. (Joy Freeman came to the meeting-place and chatted for a while before we left, but she had another commitment that precluded joining us for dinner.)

We talked books and censuses and Latin America and race relations and multilingual puns, among other topics. A good time was had by all.

My gardener neighbor just handed me two cucumbers, with promise of more to come. (You probably know that story!) I was startled to feel little spikes on the surface, but those were breaking off even as I handled them. He said they were "burpless" -- I hadn't realized that was a hazard of cucumbers....

I did mention I knew someone who'd been cooking pumpkin leaves, and he was interested in the idea.

PS: I just googled up this PDF of an experiment where someone actually compared the "burpiness" (their word) of several varieties of cucumbers. It seems that various people can be susceptible or resistant to burping after eating cucumbers.

Trader Joe's sells these wonderful things called "Persian cucumbers." They're small, sweet, and delicious. I've been making salads with them all summer. Sooo good!

Deficit hawks from seventeen states celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act by cutting funding for the disabled.

Hey, just thought I'd mention what I've been doing on LibriVox: I've been working on a dramatic reading of Alice in Wonderland. This differs from the usual sort of reading in that instead of just having one person doing a whole chapter, you have one person taking the role of a character and voicing that character wherever it appears, with another person doing all the narration and speech tags and so on. I managed to score the role of Narrator. I just uploaded my last two chapters today -- of course, we still have to get 6 chapters worth of Alice, and various other more minor roles, and have the coordinator edit it together. But I expect it's going to be nifty when it's done.

I'm afraid I don't remember who it was here mentioned librivox.org, but thank you.

Thomas, #402, around here, the food pantries use them to make it easy to send food home with people.

Ok, by popular demand, the room-locking story.

When I joined the Royal Bank of Scotland, I was attached to a team that, for lack of space elsewhere, was sitting in a (nearly) disused server room. Like all such spaces in that building, it required an additional level of swipe* pass access to open the door from the outside. There was a button to press on the inside that would release it, of course.

We kept the door propped open for the benefit of visitors. But it had to be closed whenever it was empty, so last one out shut the door, first one in reopened it. We all had to get that extra smidgen of access on or passes in case we were the first one in in the morning or back from lunch in the afternoon.

So I trotted down to Security† and got that extra access added on. We closed the door so that I could check it.

Swipe. Nothing.
Swipe. Nothing.
Sswwiiipe. Nothing.

The guys inside pressed the button. Nothing.

Robert slipped his pass under the door to me.
Swipe. Nothing.
Swipe. Nothing.
Sswwiiipe. Nothing.

They called one of the Security guys, with super pass access.
Swipe. Nothing.
Swipe. Nothing.
Sswwiiipe. Nothing.

Turns out the electronics of the lock developed some kind of a fault during the morning, and whenever it was next closed it was just gonna be a problem. The final solution involved shutting down and restoring power to all the doors in the area. To the sound of fire doors closing on all the stairwells after their magnets lost power, my colleagues were released.

This was before I was a tester. Or, perhaps, before I knew it, and started getting paid for it.

-----
* This was before proximity passes, back when the canteen served fresh dinosaur, yadda yadda
† I liked the RBS security guys. I used to wink at the security cameras as I'd enter the building, just because. And after a while, one or two of the security staff would wink at me when they saw me. So they were watching.

Ooops, I started typiing this yesterday but I seem to have completely forgotten about the "post" bit.

David Harmon @ #324:

Yeah, that'd probably be better. I was looking for something short, descriptive and intuitively understandable for the lay-person (as it were).

salixulon @ #337:

Thank you.

abi @ #414:

I can't decide if that's a "hahaha" or a "ooouuuff!".

Abi @ 414... You should write locked-room mysteries.

Serge @ 416... Mind you, one problem with Abi mysteries is that they all have the same solution, just like Cardassian mysteries. In the latter case, the solution is that everyone is guilty. Here it always is Abidonit.

Open threadiness: Dog, smarter than owner, amputates toe.

Mary Aileen #407: Gail and I both had a good time meeting everyone. Light was indeed made.

Thomas @402, your local library might want them to have on hand for their book sale. I know our library employees get a call about a week before our book sale to bring in all their spare grocery bags.

Abi #414 : classic story!

Perhaps I’m the only old fogey* who read the line “The guys inside pressed the button. Nothing.” and thought “bad, bad, BAD design.”  Where there’s no way out of a room except through a locked door, surely the lock should fail safe – it should always be openable from the inside?
__________
* It’s so long since I was in the US that I can’t remember whether “fogey” is in USian slang or only British.  If the latter, can someone give an equivalent USian word?

John Stanning @ 421... The design makes me think of the typical Michael Crichton plot setup.

John, 'fogey' is used in the US, though not as frequently as a generation ago.

John Stanning @ 421 -- That was my reaction as well. I don't know if I count as an old fogey yet, though for the last few months I've certainly felt like one, too much of the time.

John Stanning #421: Oh, totally... to the point where I wouldn't even say it was Abi who locked them in. Besides the matter of locks failing closed¹, where was the manual override?

¹ And I'm sure the local fire marshal would have something to say about that!

Xopher (423): Only us old fogeys use 'fogey' in the US?

(The more I see that word, the wronger it looks.)

Mary Aileen #426:

Maybe it's the plural that's giving you trouble? Would you feel any better if it was "fogies"?

joann, you’re right, the OED says this meaning of ‘fogey’ is originally from Scots dialect, and the Scots examples (1790 and 1821) spell it ‘fogie’, plural ‘fogies’.

Second of four meanings:

A disrespectful appellation for a man advanced in life; esp. one with antiquated notions, an old-fashioned fellow, one ‘behind the times’. Usually preceded by old. See also Young Fogey.

John, 428: What's the etymology?

For women who are fogies, I've heard "fogette" a few times. But "biddy" is more traditional.

Mary Aileen @ 426...

If you're an old fogey, I dare not think what I am.
("Decrepit?")
Shush.

The OED’s etymology is unconvincing:

Possibly a subst. use of FOGGY a. in sense 3, fat, bloated, or in sense 2, moss-grown. Cf. FOGGIE and FOGRAM.

FOGRAM is closer:
A. adj. Antiquated, old-fashioned, out of date.
B. n.
1. An antiquated or old-fashioned person, a fogy.  So fogramite, a fogy; fogramity, an antiquated thing; also, a fogy.
(but also)
2. Naut. slang. (1867):  Fogram, wine, beer or spirits of indifferent quality; in fact, any kind of liquor.

The walk-in cooler at my old lab had a bright and cheerful sign on the door: YOU ARE NOT LOCKED IN! It did get tense once or twice when someone flicked the light off from the outside, but knowing that the door opens helps a lot.

Apropos of nothing, I just got a spam purporting to be from one "Therese Nielsen", which starts out as:

Hey bud!! Do you want an improved future, go up in money earning power, and the praise of all?

(And it goes on to offer me degrees from prestigious universities based on my present knowledge and professional experience.) This seems like a very disturbing sort of alternate reality I've slipped into. Or possibly this is just Teresa's evil doppelganger? I find this remarkably disconcerting.

Open threadiness:

There has been an ongoing attempt, often surprisingly successful, by the military to control coverage of our wars. This McClatchy piece describes the games being played by the military authorities at Guantanamo, pretty clearly to make it as hard and unpleasant as possible to report on the military commission trials being carried out there[1].

In this post, Glenn Greenwald talks about the mechanisms used to keep embedded reporters in line. It's striking how effective this has been at controlling the coverage of our wars.

Obviously, this means those who do an end-run around that control of information need to be silenced. Following a link from this article gets you to this op-ed by Marc Thiesen[2], proposing that we kidnap Assange and use our "defensive" cyber warfare apparatus to shut down Wikileaks[3].

This tracks with the old Bush administration program of setting up Pentagon shills as military advisors for the big media companies. This seems like all part of the same strategy. Of course, that's all over now.

The result of all this is that our media-provided picture of our wars (and probably all sorts of domestic stuff, too) is heavily controlled, filtered, and influenced. Well-connected people are openly threatening violence against those who bypass that control in too overt a way. (Rather like those "patriotic hackers" who shut down the Al Jazeera English language site during the beginning of the Iraq war, or like the couple of times Al Jazeera offices have been "accidentally" bombed since then.) What you think you know about these wars is very likely reality mixed in large measure with bullshit. (I can see a bunch of places where the official story is bullshit, but how many others am I missing?)

Our political debates are shaped by this controlled and filtered coverage. Our policies are twisted by them, because decisionmakers are influenced by the same media, and are also subject to public pressure from those who have few or no other sources of information. And so, we're blinding ourselves. Our decisions are almost guaranteed to be bad ones, based as they are heavily on deception and propaganda and bullshit.

[1] If these look suspiciously like the sort of show-trials old Communist regimes used to engage in, held at a gulag in a remote location, that's just a sign that you are insufficiently patriotic.

[2] Thiesen is best known for his enthusiastic defense of war crimes committed by American and allied personnel. It's good to see that along with advocating for torture and murder, he's also a fan of kidnapping. Perhaps when he has outlived his usefulness to the powerful in the US, he could go to work as Kim Jong Il's press secretary?

[3] Why, this might almost make you suspect that the PR blitz about cyberwarfare over the last few months is less about protecting us from jihadi hackers causing our nuclear plants to melt down, and more about ensuring the government can silence or cut off US access to unwanted sources of information.

Arggh. I wrote a longish open thread post full of URLs, but now the gnomes have it for review.

Hey, kids,

I need to borrow your brains.

I'm thinking about doing a podcast series, interviewing creators and experts about their creative process. I need a clever name for it. I am seriously fried at the moment (Big Life Drama, manic side of bipolar cycle, not enough sleep), and the best I can come up with at the moment is "Process Weenie."

Um...help?

Jacque, maybe something with the word "wonk" in it?

Tossing out ideas for Jacque in the spirit of brainstorming

Process Podcast
Way of the Wonk
Dream, Think, Do
What Were They Thinking
How do they do that
Turning ideas into reality

Jacque @ 435: Xiphoid Process?

Ingvar M. @ 415: I have to say that this layman was confused by your description and understood David Harmon's instantly.

Slacktivist talks about Omelas and Uvebfuvzn. Ripped me up when I realized what he was getting at, is why the rot13.

Bruce Cohen @440: I think you mean this link.

The one that you linked to is also well worth reading though, including the comment thread.

Brooks Moses @ 441:

Right, I must have gotten the links switched somehow. Both posts are well worth studying; there's much under the surface in both of them.

Brooks Moses @ 441:

Right, I must have gotten the links switched somehow. Both posts are well worth studying; there's much under the surface in both of them.

The post of my enemy has been disemvowelled
And I rejoice.
It has undergone lossy compression
and is read no more.
What avail him now his puns and sonnets,
The praise expended upon his delicious recipes,
His translations from the Greek?
His post now consorts with the bad boys
The trolls, spammers, robots and kooks,
The Argics of the world of Moveable Type,
The vanity publishers and Nigerian widows,
The glibertarians.

Sn nw pst f mn cld b dsmvwlld ls
Thgh nt t th mnmntl xtnt
n whch th chstsmnt f dsmvwllng hs bn mtd t
T th psts f my nmy,
Snce n th cs f my wn pst t wll b d
T msclcltd phrs, trmnlgcl rrr
Nthng t d wth mrt.
Bt jst sppsng tht sch n vnt shld hld
Sm slght lmnt f shm, t wll b ffst
By th mmry f ths swt mmnt.
Tmpr th chclt nd fll th tb wth br
Th pst f my nmy hs bn dsmvwlld
nd m gld.

Thomas #444-445: Cute....

Sauna endurance contests are a hideously bad idea.

This probably isn't going to mean anything to most people here, but Robert Aitken Roshi, an influential American Zen teacher died on Thursday of pneumonia and old age. I can't recap his whole life, which had some amazing turns, so I'll just say that he helped me find my way to Zen practice 30 years ago and gave me the Mu koan, which has slowly shaped me over many years.

As far as I could observe, Aitken Roshi had absolutely no fear of death, only an engaged curiosity about what it would be like. In a Dharma talk he gave once on death, he quoted Zen master Bassui's letter to a dying disciple: "This death which is no death is like a snowflake dissolving in pure air." I can't find anything more to say than that.

#444-445 Thms
RFLM

Thomas: Very cute! And a rebuttal to those who say that disemvowelment makes gibberish of a post, as I was able to reconstruct every word. (Admittedly a couple of them, such as "merit" and "temper" took me a little time.)

David Harmon & cucumbers:

My parents drove me and my brother up to college for what was going to be my frosh year. They decided to make a long trip and go camping in Yellowstone as a loop before going home. So they took the dog as well. We drove straight, about an eighteen-hour trip. This is not that story.

The relevant part is that the cucumber vines went nuts just before this trip, so my parents stripped the plants and took them with us. I was left at my dorm with a grocery bag full of cucumbers. So in a typical fashion, I went down the hall that night, knocking on doors and saying to anyone who answered, "Hi, my name is Bernadette. Would you like a cucumber?"

I file that sort of introduction under the category of "fair warning."

B. Durbin #451: "Watch out for her, she's got cucubits!" :-) Certainly, that'll tell you who else has "been there"....

I forget who it was who warned that leaving your car door unlocked this time of year poses a risk of returning to find your car stuffed with zucchini.

Sane new paste if many clad by disemvowelled loose
Thigh ant it the manmantle extent
no which the chastisment f disemvowelling hose bin mated at
To the pests if may enemy,
Seance on the ucase if my wen pest at well be do
To misclaculted opheris, tramunilogicle arorur
Nothing it ode with mart.
Bat jest sipping that seach on vent shield held
Sam sleight lament if sham, to well be uffasate
By the memory if thus swot moment.
Tamper the chiclet end fell the tb with br
Th pst f my nmy hs bun dsmvwlld
end m geld.

The New Jim Crow particle may be 404 (as mentioned upstream), but it is still in Google's cache, and the original is on Miami Herald's website.

Bruce, Brook, thanks for both those links.

C. Wingate #454: Excuse me a moment while I retrieve my eyeballs from the floor!

joann @366 - I'm just back from a weekend trip out, but yes, I would imagine that this is true as well. I remember that I really hated my sophomore picture. When I was given a yearbook to sign, the first thing I did was draw a black rectangle in front of the eyes of the picture. For my senior year, I simply didn't show up for a studio-type portrait at all, and instead would sign one of the other photos of me in the book. There were two or three (maybe four) from plays I was in, one with the newspaper staff, and one with the speech team. I was pretty happy with that.

Looking back on it, my parents probably paid the fee for my photo. There was some collection of mandatory fees for things I would never do that year, amounting to about $35 that we couldn't afford. They sent the money in with me the first day. Other parents objected and were told they didn't have to pay, but of course we weren't allowed a refund.

Erik Nelson @385 - It's an understandable mistake, but that book wasn't from National Lampoon, it just had some of the same contributors. It seems like I'm recounting the "Wøødi" strip from that about once a year.

Jacque @436 - "From here to AHA"?
"The old drawing board"?
"Watching the wheels turn"?

Inspired by Thomas @444-5 et al (recent enough I'm not going to put another link in this post and risk purgatory):

This Is Just to Say

I have removed
the vowels
that were in
your last post

and which
you probably
intended
to be read

No regrets
you were offensive
so rude
and so smug

David harmon @453: I'm coo-coo for cucubits! Coo-coo for cucubits!

Earl Cooley III @437: maybe something with the word "wonk" in it?

Yeah, I was pondering "Process Wonk."

OtterB @438: Jesus, do you shit rainbows, too? Wow. Those are great.

Tim Walters @439: Xiphoid Process?

You made me laugh out loud and scare the guinea pigs. Of course, I initially misread it as "Xophoid Process," which would be an altogether different kettle of greeps.

Presuming kind permission on your parts, I have copied these over to my LJ post. (And the results of this query are amply demonstrating the challenge outlined in this post....)

Okay, now to go catch up on the rest of the thread. (Where the hell was I, anyway...?)

OtterB @438: Was thinking about something else when your "Turning ideas into reality" prompted me to think, "Hm, I think we'll be discussion less the aspect of 'turning into reality,' and more just wallowing around in the process of ideas themselves." Sort of mental masturbation, you know.

And then this popped into my head:

"Jacquing Off"

Erm. Don't think so....

Um.

A recent computer science paper looked at weakness in the implementation of 'private browsing' modes in current browsers. They also did a survey of the frequency of use by buying ads on a range of sites that contained code to detect the 'private browsing' modes.

They note: We found that private browsing was more popular at adult web sites than at gift sites and news sites and say browser vendors may be mischaracterizing the primary use of the feature when they describe it as a tool for buying surprise gifts.

Who would have guessed?

Kip W #459: Of course, if you have enough cucubits, you could try to make a quaquantum comcomputer....

abi @394: (moss washes down from the bike shed roof, then sits in the water and rots. It's probably wonderful for the plants I water from there -- liquid compost! -- but it smells like pretty logic flowers.)

BAD, abi! You made me scare the guinea pigs again.

Do logic flowers have square roots?

joan @397: Thank you.

Hm. "Plucking pumpkin leaves." Hm. There's a nice start for a tongue-twister....

SERGE !!!!!

Gargh. That was supposed to be a </b> after "leaves."

I'M LEAVING NOW.

Argh.

Really.

Thomas @ 462:

I guess The Register called it, then. They've been calling it porn mode from the beginning.

Jacque @ 468:

Wilt you, really?

Let's all tell her to stay, men. She's a pistil, that one.

Anther we were, waiting for her return....

Just out of curiosity:

(1) Why does Making Light’s front page sometimes cause Windows Media Player to try to play something from ijwwegksgw.com (hosted in Russia at 188.243.231.96)?  I’ve seen it do this on two PCs this morning, but only the first time on each PC, so maybe it only does it once for each IP address?

(2) What does the following piece of Javascript do, at the top of ML’s front page?

[code redacted in case AV scanners really are that dim — AS]

Will nothing stem this tide of verbiage? Weed best get back to our roots to have any oak of surviving.

Yew know thistle come to no good.

Jacque @461

And then this popped into my head: "Jacquing Off" Erm. Don't think so....

Grin. Yeah, that's the danger of free association. At least in a work environment, one has to keep some filters running.

I'll have to pop over to your LJ and see what else you're getting.

In a post here earlier today – held for the ivory tower, presumably because I quoted a weird piece of Javascript that occurs at the top of each ML page – I mentioned that on two PCs that I used today, going to ML’s front page caused Windows Media Player to try to play something from ijwwegksw.com (hosted in Russia).  On this third PC (using IE7, the first two had IE8) refreshing a ML page caused “Windows Help and Support” to pop up, saying it couldn’t find the page I asked for.  That behaviour has stopped after I blocked ijwwegksw.com.  WTF?

"We are doomed!"
"DOOOOOMED!"

A normal day in the world of Agatha Heterodyne.

John Stanning, my computer threw up an AVG Threat Blocked window for that URL. I don't know what it is, though.

Patricia Neal has passed away.

@476 & 478: I got a version of the Window Media Player message, too (and immediately stomped on the URL with AdBlock, which labeled it as a "frame" named ijwwegksw.com/contacts, FWIW).

David Harmon@408: I first learned that people associated cucumbers with burps from the name of a particular variety -- "Burpee's burpless". Those were a European-style cucumber, skinnier and smaller seeds, and didn't need to be peeled before use. Still my favorites for eating and use in salads.

The same site was triggering a 'you need to install more plugins to run this page' warning in my Firefox. Until I blocked it. :->

That Media Player message is becoming really annoying.

I may be a gum-chewing IT dimwit maintaining ancient code, but by God, I'm still needed.

John Stanning@ 476: I got a warning from AVG as well, when refreshing the front page of ML.* I closed down the tab running Making Light, re-opened in a new tab, and it's not making any more fuss.

* Danger: AVG Active Surf-Shield has detected active threats on this page and has blocked access for your protection.
The page you are trying to access has been identified as a known exploit, phishing, or social engineering web site and therefore has been blocked for your safety. Without protection, such as that in the AVG Security Toolbar and AVG, your computer is at risk of being compromised, corrupted or having your identity stolen. Please follow one of the suggestions below to continue.

URL: ijwwegksgw.com/contacts/
Name: JavaScript Obfuscation (type 1556)

Process name: C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer \ iexplore.exe
Process ID: 29000

Baking geekery meets Star Wars and Muppet geekery

Steve C.@484: It's amusing, even pleasing in a perverse way, to see how the old IBM architectures are hanging on.

I switched from IBM to DEC mini-computers in 1970, and haven't looked back. Well, I did take a few DOS/VSE courses in 1979 when an employer was looking at switching to IBM (they did, after I left, and it was a disaster, and they eventually switched to yet a different mini-computer vendor), but I couldn't stand it, it was so primitive. And so I've never worked on a System/360 or any of its derivatives.

Amusingly, that article mentions CS students being interested in Linux, but doesn't mention that Linux runs on IBM mainframes. I'm sure it's not what the customers facing this support crunch are running, so it's not directly relevant to the article, but still amusing.

Yup, looks like ML has been hacked. Fortunately, Microsoft has got a security clue over the last several years and media player asked before running questionable content. The site is now added to the restricted sites list in IE.

When I have time later, I may figure out how that snipped of script works just for the mental exercise.

Weird. It's okay when I open ML, but the warning comes up when I refresh. Any ideas why?

Stave #484 : hey, maybe I can go back to being a programmer?  As far as I can make out, code that I wrote 40 years ago would still work on IBM’s latest mainframe!  Can any other vendor match that?

Even back then, IBM’s hardware and OS had security built in that Intel and Microsoft took years to only partly achieve.  For example, it was practically impossible for an application program to modify the operating system.

John @ 490 -

I'm thinking that if I freeze myself, I'll be thawed out in the year 9999 to work on the Y10K problem. :-)

Windows Media Player let me cancel out of the questionable file others have posted on, then for some reason Adobe Reader stopped working, then Firefox crashed.

I let Firefox send an error report, restarted, and everything came back OK. I also blocked the whole domain in AdBlock. My antivirus is up to date, so I hope nothing's been damaged.

Has someone ever written a steampunk story about what happens when all the Babbage engines reach the first minute of January 1, 1900? If I had any talent, I'd write it, along with "A Brush with Atomic Death in Gay Paris", set in 1893, and in which Toulouse-Lautrec, Marie Curie and Albert ("The Kid") Einstein prevent atomic armageddon.

Re: rogue scripts at ML:

I never noticed anything, but looking in my Noscript menu, I find a new pair of entries which would let me "[Temporarily] Allow ijwwegksgw.com". I don't think I will.... (Noscript under Firefox FTW!)

Fluorospherian awesomeness: there is a new web-based TV show (shown, so far as I can determine, exclusively on Hulu) called The Legion of Extraordinary Dancers. It is awesome for two reasons.

First: Each sub-10min episode is like a tiny art film, with really interesting storytelling through the cinematography, etc.

Second: It's a superhero story, superficially not unlike Heroes in its setup, only all special-effects using-one's-superpower sequences are replaced with intensely danced choreography. It's remarkable, and beautifully symbolic, and I found it powerful as heck. As well as pretty.

Their homepage; a list of episodes available through Hulu. The story starts in the first one, "The Tale of Trevor Drift", but if you want to glimpse the pretty and the premise, I think "Robot Lovestory" (episode 01.03) is a better tempting-tiny-portion.

Apparently three 'seasons' have been filmed and are in the can; as of this comment the first eight episodes have been 'aired' through Hulu, and new eps go up every Wednesday.

PS: WHOIS indicates that "ijwwegksgw.com" was created July 29, 2010, with the registrar "Moniker Online Services" (www.moniker.com). The only contact listed is one "Jolene Kave" (magic@columnist.com), with a Detroit address and phone #.

Elliott: Woo-hoo! Sounds like the story I've been waiting for all my life without knowing it. Dancing superheroes!

abi @414:

"Do not meddle in the affairs of the Abiveld,
for your are entertaining, and easy to catch."

TexAnne @ 497... What? You never saw that late-1970s issue of Fantastic Four that began with Ben Grimm dancing disco? Yes, he rocked.

(Of course you probably weren't even born.)

I also got the threat warning from AVG and NoScript concurred. NoScript also showed a "chrome:" URL which is a known vector for certain drive-by download attacks, particularly on IE.

On looking at the source for the page, there is indeed some very suspicious looking JavaScript in the header of this page. At a glance, looks like it is decrypting a binary string into a Javascript function and then executing it.

Odds are pretty good that some visitors to this page have had their computer infected with serious nasties.