I thought it was "delenda est". However, I hasten to say that (1) I have never studied Latin and (2) I got that formulation from the title of a Poul Anderson story.

Also, first?

I have to say, looking back at the past couple of months, it's been an adventure, some of it the hobbittish sense, some of it an indefinable sense (the amount of time one spends in one's own head on a trip of this sort is incredible), some of it on a, "Wow...: sense.

And lot of it in the little moments with people sense. I've had the chance to meet a number of people I'd not have been able to plan to meet; some might perhaps never have been in the same city at the same time; or when such occasions arose, not conveniently.

So, "sumer is afaden out" and I'm homeward bound.

And, from abi's third link, the lovely URL http://www.happytellus.com/.

Doc Smith would be proud. I'm not sure I've seen our planet called "Tellus" in modern English by anybody other than him before.

Ever read Poul Anderson's short story "Delenda Est"?

@Lee #1:
delenda est is the passive periphrastic form, indicating a translation like »is to be destroyed«.

deleta est however, is the standard perfect form, indicating a translation like »has been destroyed«.

Hence, I suspect, Abi's choice of form.

So if a troll yclept Carthago shows up and then flounces, do we get to say "Carthago bahleeta est."?

Carthage—Phonecian Carthage, that is—was destroyed in 146 BC. It was reestablished as a Roman city by the Julius Caesar. (There was an earlier Roman refoundation in 122 BC, but it didn't last.)

So before 146, yes, the saying was Carthago delenda est: Carthage must be destroyed. Cato's catchphrase was as twisted a piece of genocidal warmongering and affirmation by repetition as anything we've seen in more recent times.

From 146 onward, Carthago deleta est, Carthage has been destroyed, though they held off the mightiest army in the world for three years after having surrendered all of their weapons. There's no archaeological evidence for the popular tradition that the ground was sown with salt, but the sack of the city and the sale of all of its inhabitants into slavery was sufficiently emphatic.

(I love many things about Rome and her people, but this episode is not one of them. Can you tell?)

abi @ 7... I love many things about Rome and her people, but this episode is not one of them

"All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?"
"Brought peace?"
"Oh, peace - shut up!"

Cabiria, a piece of retro-justification, and the first use of the tracking shot.

Serge @8--another dissenting view, via Tactitus: ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant--"Where they have made a desolation, they call it peace"

One of the frames in the slideshow on the Love146 site (the open bird cage with the blue bird flying away) reminds me of the Karla Bonoff song "Never Stop Her Heart". I think the song captures the feeling I get from that image.

In that photo on happytellus.com, is that an ancient Carthaginian computer up there, or was the site airconditioned at one time?

Controlus altum deleta est.

Serge @ 8:

As Jules Pfeiffer said, "Peace in our time, or we wipe them out."

Here's an open-thready kind of query: I'm planning to visit New Orleans in mid-October. Anyone recommend a good hotel to stay at? (I'm planning to pick up some AAA guidebooks, but I figure it couldn't hurt to ask here, also.)

Reposted from the previous:

Attn Lee, Eclair, others: This is just to say

that i have firmed up
my plans for attending
The Grand Masquerade

(and thus the miniature
Gathering of Light in New Orleans)

which
you probably thought
I'd forgotten about
completely

Forgive me
I'm a terrible procrastinator
I have no excuse
But I will be there.

(Have registered for convention, though not yet for any of the scheduled events. Have a room at the Crowne Plaza. After con, will be staying with parents in Metairie for two or three days. Scheduling train for arrival on 22nd, undecided about leaving Tuesday or Wednesday morning the following week.)

Also I owe y'all an email. Yours is sitting in Thunderbird's list of open tabs, waiting for me to take a moment to answer.

Wow, talk about your coincidences, crossposting* with David Goldfarb on the subject of New Orleans hotels.

I wish I could help, but my knowledge of the place is from growing up there, and I don't know the hotel scene at all. Usually I stay with my folks.

Once I stayed at The Quarter House as part of a time share exchange; it was comfy, had wi-fi, and was situated on block 100 of Chartres (corner of the French Quarter). No idea how doable it is as a place to reserve a few nights at in the normal way of hotels.

Where I'm staying in September is purely determined by the convention I'm attending. Haven't been there before. Rate for the con is $99 a night; it's probably significantly more expensive under usual circumstances.

*or, indeed, posting without bothering to read anything until after I posted. Which is sort of like crossposting, except for the small difference that I could have helped it if i'd paid attention. I'm a twit.

#10 — I am trying not to remember the Tom Holt novel in which, when the dinner courses have come out of order or some such, a character is justified in saying "They have made a dessert, and they call it peas."

"When I hear the word 'custard,' I reach for my spoon."

However, the destruction of Carthage got Rome Iberia. Which made the career, not to mention the fortune, of many a mighty Roman whose name comes rattling its chains down the road of history.

Or something.

I'm still studying old school styles of slavery. That book we're doing and all.

But open threadness hyperlocality: I was gifted with an entire basket of homegrown basil, rosemary and other herbs, tomatoes and corn. And pear apples, though those came from yet another source.

Love, C.

My sister told me that my going-on-13 niece wanted a Barnes & Noble gift card for her birthday.

I feel hope for humanity.

So, I just got back from being instructed in how to inject Gremlin with insulin. First dose with her dinner in about 10 minutes. I'm probably more stressed than the cat....

Hyperlocal news: individual attempting to download photos from Gmail to iPhoto; cursing Gmail's default folder setting for said downloads (it's cleverly titled "downloads") and seeming lack of capability of creating new folder name for each batch of photos one's desirous of downloading.

And... shot given, without incident.

Question of ethics and practicality. I haven't given this matter much thought and I would like opinions from those who have.

Ticket reselling is (I believe) legal in New Jersey, but not in New York. There's an event my wife and I wish to attend, but the good seats are only available in singletons at this point because we're late ordering.

What are the thoughts of Fluorotariats on the ethics of buying resold tickets? And, if ethical, how does one find a reliable seller thereof?

There's little room for laughter nor for wit
in a beige room with a good downtown view
learning that not all good comes with the new,
and breathing in the scents of bile and shit.
You learn then all the signals of hard grit,
but night and day someone must turn the screw.
The pain will come as much as you are due
and you must sleep now for a little bit.
Love is sustained upon a sea of tears
though brotherhood itself may seem to fail
in curtest questions. Still you can draw breath,
surprise yourself that you withstood your fears
and are arrived to laugh about this tale
since by a hair you walked away from death.

Welcome back, Fragano. We missed you.

Fragano Ledgister #25: Welcome back! I hope you're recovering well!

TexAnne #26: Thanks.

David Harmon #27: Recovery is a truly shitty process, that's all I can say.

Fragano! Welcome back!

@24 In general, I view laws against ticket reselling to be a particularly bad form of interference with markets. Unlike things like drinking water and emergency care, just about anything that has tickets is an entertainment item, a definite luxury. As such, people are entitled to value it how they will, and not necessarily at what price the first seller does. If the ticket was originally sold for $20 to someone who values it at $25, if I want to buy if for $40 because I really want to see THIS show, what business does the state have interfering with us?

I certainly understand there are problems when a reseller could buy all the tickets available, for example, and then raise the price on me. But if I don't buy the ticket, the reseller is stuck with something they can't unload at their inflated price. Of course, if the venue auctioned the tickets instead they'd get the missed value in that exchange instead. But I don't think regulating the ticket prices of entertainment is a valuable occupation of the state.

(In short, go for it. The reselling place I have heard the most chatter about is Stubhub, but I think that's sports focused. Personally, when I need to buy tickets its to a local sporting event with sellers ready to take cash standing around outside the entrances.)

abi @7, I'll probably always find it kind of odd that the best known libertarian think-tank of our time is named after a man who is best known for successfully advocating the use of government force for the genocidal destruction of a wealthy, thriving and prosperous mercantile city.

Welcome back, Fragano!

Hyperlocal news: woman reads comment in Anthony Bourdain blog, spends time she should be working Googling for name of 1960s travel show to find out if it was in black and white.

"The theme song was 'The Happy Wanderer,'" she reports, "and I know it was hosted by a husband and wife who did the traveling (later joined by their son). The name? Arghhh."

Insanity expected soon...

DDB at # 3: C.S. Lewis used "Tellus" or maybe it was "Tellurian" somewhere in his DeepSpace trilogy.

Serge @√-1:
Carthage is cornmeal mush? I don't get it.

It's dolenda not polenta.

From 145: ddb, #910, the WashPost does that, too. When articles are finished, they get posted online with the date that the article will be in the paper-paper version.

I have just returned from my first convention in twenty years (7th UK Discworld Convention) and the feelings of ecstatic happiness of having gone, are battling with the crashing sadness of the return to the real world.

Making Light, as usual, makes things that little bit better.

David Harmon, #23, good for you and Gremlin!

Fragano Ledgister, #25, lovely poem and I'm glad you're home!

A friend is on a difficult vacation with her in-laws (and husband). The in-laws are constantly saying bad and inaccurate things about Muslims and she'd like to know of a good book, perhaps by a non-violent Muslim, about Muslims in general. Any ideas?

Fragano, welcome back. You've been worried about, prayed for, and much missed.

One thing I think is safe to say: Ex-Carthaginians did not take too well to the expression "salt of the earth".

Delurking to say welcome back, Fragano!

Fragano, we missed you!

(Well, it's much better than having hit you. Which I'd hate doing.)

Fragano, welcome home!

One of Heinlein's alternate Earths in Future History was "Tellus Tertius". I certainly like the name better than the Marvel-style "Earth-3" construction.

Welcome back Fragano! Here's to a smooth & speedy recovery.

BTW, are there plans for Fluorospherians to meet at Aussiecon 4? We're leaving for Melbourne this afternoon for our first Worldcon, followed by a family vacation & a much needed break from work.

jnh @ 35... That'd be one his tales of the Tin Pot Roll.

Bon retour, Fragano!

Fragano, good to have you back.

Look at the thank-you page of MK Hobson's novel "The Tin Star", which was released today, and you'll see a name you're familiar with.

Squee!

Adding to the chorus appreciating your return, Fragano (and quite a good poem that is).

Fragano, it's good to see you back and hear your voice.

Serge @ 49... It's "The NATIVE Star", you nitwit!

Serge #49:

"The Native Star"?

Never mind. I see you got there first.

Fragano, welcome back and my best wishes for a swift recovery!

@25 - Fragano!

A more welcome verse I cannot think to find. Welcome back.

Welcome back, Fragano!

Office of I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream:

I have been reading multiple, contradictory, and what appear to me to be frankly insane comments on the Internet from bloggers, columnists, candidates for office, evangelic ministers, Glenn Beck, about Barack Obama's faith. (He's a Muslim. He's a secret Muslim. He's a Christian, but not the right kind of Christian. He's not really a Christian. He wants to institute Sharia Law in the United States. He's a believer in liberation theology.) Dear -- if you will excuse the expression -- God. It says, clearly, in Article VI of the United States Constitution, a copy of which has been sitting next to my computer since the day George W. Bush was sworn in as President ...no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States."

Why are they -- are we -- is anybody even talking about this?

/rant

And on the topic of things unexpectedly going right:

I bought a Tracfone back in '08 to use for Worldcon (at the recommendation of someone here, as I recall), and it was handy. But since cell phones aren't really a tech that I've really bought into yet, I let the activation lapse.

So come time to visit my friend Matt for his wedding, would be good to have a cell again. But wait! Phone won't activate.

So I put in a customer support query and...

I have to say, they went the distance. Turns out the SIM had expired, so I needed a new one. But their projected delivery time would have been during or after my trip, so no joy. (I'd put off activating the phone because I anticipate using it for another trip in October, and I didn't want to have to buy more airtime.)

I'm not used to actual customer, like, service, so when the emails started coming, I responded politely and just sort of brushed them off.

But the service staff persisted, and even went so far as to call me on my home phone last night. How the hell often does that happen? I began to think maybe they were serious about this.

I get home from work this evening to find a FedEx package sitting by my door. Inside: a SIM.

So, zippo-bango, I'm ready to text. I figured the least I can do is give them a little Google-juice, so I'm posting here, as well as over at my LJ.

57
He's a Christian, but not the right kind of Christian.

That, unfortunately, is the closest to sane any of them seem to come. There are people out there who will buy that one, because that's the kind of thing they're told at church.
I've met people who believe that, that everyone who isn't a member of whatever particular sect they belong to will be going to hell because they don't believe in the correct way. (Some of them take it so far as to not go onto the property of one of those other sects, even if it's for a completely secular purpose.)

But there is one good point which both these churches have in common—they are both party churches. I think I warned you before that if your patient can't be kept out of the Church, he ought at least to be violently attached to some party within it. I don't mean on really doctrinal issues; about those, the more lukewarm he is the better. And it isn't the doctrines on which we chiefly depend for producing malice. The real fun is working up hatred between those who say "mass" and those who say "holy communion" when neither party could possibly state the difference between, say, Hooker's doctrine and Thomas Aquinas', in any form which would hold water for five minutes. And all the purely indifferent things—candles and clothes and what not—are an admirable ground for our activities.

YAY!!! FRAGANO'S BACK!!!

Oh, yeah. Lewis Magister. But what's making me crazy is 1) the contradictions in the politics, and 2) the cowardice of the Democrats. As I understand it, most of these folks who are attacking President Obama's faith, or lack of it, at the same time claim to be defending the Constitution (which by the way the President has corrupted by getting Congress to vote for things like the ACA and extended unemployment, presumably by clouding their collective minds with something he learned in a madrassah.) This is nuts.

Every Democrat in Congress, plus Bernie Sanders and Joe Lieberman, should be wearing a T-shirt with Article VI emblazoned on it. What's wrong with these people? Why are they not fighting back?

Lizzy I want to know what's in the environment in DC that most, if not all, of the politicians seem to have lost whatever minds they seem to have had.
(That, or there's a huge transparent dome over the place that's blocking all communications with the Real World.)

It's too bad the people most likely to believe this stuff (it's everywhere; the supermarket tabloid 'Globe' is particularly virulent) are the ones least likely to listen if you point out that Obama is more conservative in many ways than Nixon, and would probably have been a good Republican thirty or forty years ago.

Welcome back, Fragano! And best wishes for your recovery.

PJ@59, when they're saying "Obama's Christian, but not the right kind", they don't mean "He's the wrong denomination" (because after all, there are Mormons and occasionally Catholics in their target audience), they mean "He's from a Black church with a Black preacher who Hates Whitey and is in favor of Socialism!".

It's the Angry Propaganda Of The Month Club, and as long as you've bought one issue, it doesn't really matter if you buy every month's issue or send some of them back like you tried to do with That Annoying Record Club, they're just keeping you buying enough issues to be mad at Obama and the Democrats all the time, so they can send you a bill next November, and maybe getting some of your friends to sign up before then. And some months the issue isn't actually Obama himself, they'll slip in National Health Care or Cap and Trade, and if they've been overdoing it a bit too much, they'll throw in a heart-warming romantic comedy (Glenn Beck crying on the Lincoln Memorial steps with Sarah Palin in the background or something.)

Oh, wait, doesn't this belong over in the Wicked Vanity Publishing thread by now? A lot of the subscribers have been writing their own material for their Club, but still get asked to pay....

David Harmon @ 21 & 23 Yes! That's the first hurdle. The next one will be when Gremlin doesn't want to eat on time and you start getting nervous because you won't be able to give her the correct dose. My results indicated that a slosh of low-sodium chicken broth and 20 seconds in the microwave make everything more delicious. On another random note, start keeping Karo syrup in the house for potential hypoglycemia. I've been told it's a lifesaver.

Gremlin doesn't want to eat on time and you start getting nervous because you won't be able to give her the correct dose.

Or because it's after midnight and you KNOW what will happen.

David @ #14 - I'll be staying in the Place d'Armes tomorrow night (10 year anniversary? Where did the time go?) so I can give you a review of at least one hotel then. Otherwise, I would just have to recommend hotels.com. I've not yet been really disappointed by any of my bookings on there, and I like being able to check out the decor, and pick whether I'm feeling lavish or modern for that particular trip.

Re: TrishB @ 66 to David Harmon on Gremlin: I second the Karo syrup idea (honey also works). I had a cat (Matt Yower) who was diagnosed as diabetic at about the same time as I'd planned to be out of town for a few days; I boarded him at the vet's so they could figure out the proper insulin dosage.

One morning, a few days after I got home again--and was giving Matt his prescribed dose twice a day--I heard him howling, but couldn't find him. I finally traced him to my home office, where he lay on the floor, completely unable to do anything but howl.

A quick call to the emergency vet clinic resulted in my rubbing Matt's gums with honey (no Karo in the house) and hightailing it to the clinic...where the vet discovered Matt's blood sugar was so low it wouldn't even register. Diagnosis: the stress of being boarded had resulted in even higher blood sugar levels than "normal", such that the insulin dose the cat had been getting while boarded was about 4 times higher than what he needed at home.

Matt was fine, and it never happened again, but man, was it scary at the time. Dave, not to be alarmist, but you will want to keep a close watch on Gremlin while getting his dosage finalized. Had I known then what I know now, I would have been more watchful--might have saved both the cat and myself that early-morning scare.

Fragano: Welcome back to you and your poetry!

Bill Stewart @ 65:

When we had that discussion about the Tea Baggers here at ML last year I kept saying they were simply racists. I am not pleased to have been right.

Allan Beatty @34: Yes, Tellus is one of the names for Earth in Perelandra. Also, the human invaders of Narnia in Prince Caspian et seq. were called Telmarines.

W00t! Fragano's back!

Lizzy, do you ever read Slacktivist? This sort of thing has given me worthwhile perspective.

Lizzy L @57, the "religious test" language in the Constitution refers to explicit, legal qualifications, like a law requiring a prospective office-holder to swear that he doesn't believe in transubstantion.

If J Random Voter decides that, by gum, no Zoroastrian is going to get his vote, than that is entirely within the voter's legal and constitutional rights, regardless of what it says about him as a human being.

The reasons anyone is talking about this is because a great many Americans are bigots and xenophobes, and it's in the perceived best interest of the out-of-power political faction to stoke that bigotry and xenophobia.

What Bill @#65 said.

As usual, The Onion is dead on target:

Man Already Knows Everything He Needs To Know About Muslims

And this.

The reality isn't much less silly:
New Left Media interviews at the Restoring Honor rally

I didn't get very far into the video above. When the interviewer tries to get the attendees to provide actual details on what just what Obama had done, they can only flail around and spout vague generalities. (Communism, division.) Gullible dumbfucks.

I'm really, really tired of angry, ignorant people. And utterly disgusted with the political philosophy that both depends on anger and ignorance and whose policies seem designed to create more of the same.

Syd @ 69 Been there, done that. The emergency vet clinic knows me. Ten minutes after I hung up the phone with my regular vet at 6 PM one night, Pepper vomited what looked liked her entire 10 AM meal, and then fell over on the ground shaking and shivering. I carried her upstairs to the house, shoved Karo syrup in her mouth and took her to the E-vet, fully expecting hypoglycemia. Nah, her blood sugar was 440, and she was severely dehydrated from a UTI. Once you can get a diabetic pet regulated, they do wonderfully. We can't get there, and are still chasing an atypical Cushing's diagnosis.

Welcome back, Fragano!

****

I now have the photo I'd mentioned last week in the midst of all the dental discussion:

http://missmatchproject.blogspot.com/2010/08/week-22-half-empty-garten-and-katherine.html

I'm rather happy with how my half of the diptych turned out.

Yay for Gremlin, and for Fragano!

New Orleans hotels:

1) When I went to Nolacon in 1988, I stayed at the Monteleone and was impressed. It's a lovely old hotel, very fancy, very pricey -- but if you can afford it, well worth the money. And the rooms are large enough that we had 4 people in one and didn't feel cramped, which is not always the case with older hotels.

2) A few years ago, a friend and I took a trip to New Orleans and stayed at the Hotel St. Anne / Marie Antoinette, which is lower-scale than the Monteleone, but charming and quite comfortable. And my friend scored an amazingly cheap room rate on Expedia, so that would be something to check for.

3) A friend who goes to New Orleans semi-regularly recommended the Lamothe House Hotel when I was grumbling about not being able to find an affordable room for ICC. It didn't solve our problem, but it does look nice. She says this is her absolute favorite New Orleans hotel, and I trust her taste.

Fragano's back on the airwaves! Huzzah!

That's a Latin tie with the Lorem Ipsum text, not a Greek one, as listed in TNH's Particles.

"When I hear the word 'custard,' I reach for my spoon."

Whenever I hear the word "Culture" I reach for my knife missile.

Original: "whenever I hear the word "culture" I take the safety off my Browning." Hanns Johst. (Wenn ich Kultur höre ... entsichere ich meinen Browning!) Can anyone who speaks better German than me tell me if this works as a pun in German, as it almost does in English? (Browning = automatic pistol and also 19th century poets.)

Lizzy L @ 62... the Constitution (which by the way the President has corrupted by getting Congress to vote for things like the ACA and extended unemployment, presumably by clouding their collective minds

Obama really is Lamont Cranston?

Soon Lee @ 53... That was embarassing. First time am author mentions me in her book and I flub its title.

TrishB #66, Syd #69: I don't normally use Karo syrup, but I have honey and agave syrup (the latter in a squirt bottle). And yeah, I did cover that with the vet-tech (who did yesterday's training).

Today I'm actually going out on a hike, but Gremlin's only on the initial 1 unit -- tomorrow she goes in for curve-testing. That will involve a bus ride, which I'm not sure she's done before.

PS: The tech shaved off most of Gremlin's ruff (back of her neck), which looks pretty silly. I'll need to keep her out of the sun for a while, fortunately she's still wary of the 80-90°F heat outside.

Bill Stewart @65 Angry Propaganda Of The Month Club Love the description of how this works

Avram @73 following up on Lizzy @57 the "religious test" language in the Constitution refers to explicit, legal qualifications, like a law requiring a prospective office-holder to swear that he doesn't believe in transubstantion.

If J Random Voter decides that, by gum, no Zoroastrian is going to get his vote, than that is entirely within the voter's legal and constitutional rights, regardless of what it says about him as a human being.

It doesn't seem at all unreasonable to me to consider what a candidate's professed religious beliefs suggest about his/her values and priorities. It seems better as part of an overall view of the candidate and not a litmus test. But after all, I would consider it important if a candidate belonged to a sect that, say, believed that other religions should not be allowed to practice or that gays should be "deprogrammed" or that we don't need to help the poor because God has arranged that they get what they deserve.

It's annoying that the discussion goes on with so much heat and so little light. Although I must admit I try to stay away from most of it, which means I'm estimating by the shadows and echoes and makes me a poor judge of what's actually being discussed. But I hope someone is out there repeating what Colin Powell said back in the campaign: He's not a Muslim, but so what if he was?

Oh, and welcome back, Fragano, and best wishes for your recovery.

Clarifying my own @84 It's annoying that the discussion goes on with so much heat and so little light. In the public forum, that is, not here.

Sorry if I missed this before, but it was shown on TV here last night.
Did he say that? Did he really say that.
OMG. OMFG.

In Cato the Elder's actual words, the formula was "Ceterum autem censeo, Carthaginem esse delendam" -- "And furthermore, Carthage must be destroyed" -- which he appended to every speech. Not unlike, say, Glenn Beck.

fidelio #10: My baby brother lives not far from where those words were spoken.

Thanks for all the words of welcome. I am overwhelmed.

I must have read the Lewis use, but didn't remember it. It's conceivable I read it before I'd read Doc Smith, for that matter. The Heinlein is I'm sure a reference to Smith. Thanks to Allan Beatty@34 and Darth Paradox@44.

And while I'm late to the party, welcome back Fragano!

Carol Maltby @ 79 — It's greek (or greeked) in the sense of "placeholder text".

"Tellurian" was used a few times in old-school Doctor Who, as well. The instances that come to mind are "Carnival of Monsters" and "The Two Doctors", both by Robert Holmes.

Fragano: Welcome back!

Lizzy L:

I've found it interesting to watch the scattershot approach to propaganda these folks use: Obama isn't just a secret Muslim, or an atheist, or a member of an extreme, anti-white Evangelical church, or a follower of liberation theology--he's all those things at once.

I assume there's some logic to this--maybe in the right frame of mind, you're willing to just latch onto one of the mutually-exclusive choices and ignore the others?

David Goldfarb @ #14

If the budget stretches to it, or if you can get a good deal, Le Pavillion is absolutely beautiful, with great service, and free peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in the lobby of an evening.

It's easy walking to the French Quarter for sight-seeing, but far enough away that you don't get the French Quarter brouhaha at night.

And Fragano, we don't know each other at all, but I've missed you.

(Belatedly) Yay, welcome back, Fragano!

Open thready question: I'm visiting Chicago for a week starting Monday. On my current list, if I can afford them all: an architecture tour, the Art Institute, the Field Museum of natural history, the Adler Planetarium, and either the Sears or the Hancock Center for the view.

Does the Fluorosphere have any other recommendations for the fluorospherian must-see list?

Pendrift @97, the Museum of Science & Industry is also fun.

There are also walking tours from the Frank Lloyd Wright house in suburban Oak Park, and I recommend the Morton Arboretum in suburban Lisle, but those are harder to get to from downtown.

Pendrift @97

Wandering around the University of Chicago will make for an excellent day. Be sure to go to the Seminary Co-op bookstore (58th and University), a subterranean warren of academic books that goes on for miles. When you've spent all your money there, you can wander through the cloisters and see if you can find my favorite campus water fountain, which features a gruesome Pieta, and cool bubbly refreshment.

Across the street from the Co-op is the Oriental Institute where there are all sorts of fun things to look at, and a small but tempting gift shop.

There were (when I was a student there) any number of small hidden away places to get lunch on campus. The Classics cafe and the cafe in the basement of the Divinity School were particularly good.

And if you have a car and a mind to explore, you can drive out to Fermi Lab, set up a tour (private or group) to see the particle accelerator, AND see the buffalo.

Yes, buffalo. Doesn't everyone graze buffalo on top of their particle accelerators?

Carol Maltby @79: That's a Latin tie with the Lorem Ipsum text, not a Greek one, as listed in TNH's Particles.

Indicating blocks of copy with Lorem Ipsum is commonly called 'greeking' type.

When I worked mocking up ads for ad agencies, 'greeking' was drawing parallel lines to take up the space where the copy would eventually go in the finished product. Sometimes instead of parallel lines we'd draw out squiggles (think of an unbroken chain of upside-down u's) the height of each line.

@97 and 99

I'd second the Oriental Institute, it's really a hidden gem. (Full disclosure, my better half worked there while a student.)

And if digging through great book stores for a whole day sounds like your idea of a great vacation, there are three other great ones as you walk East from campus along 57th street: 57th Street books (run by the same co-op that does the Sem Co-op) O'Gara and Wilson and a Powell's.

And while you're in Hyde Park there's the Smart Museum (modern art).

Outside of Hyde Park see what's playing at the Music Box and if you go don't miss the outstanding Julius Meinl coffee shop just down the block.

Pendrift@97, about 15 years ago we had a large-group work meeting in Chicago, and went on the architecture boat tour. It was definitely worthwhile, though it helped that it was a beautiful evening and one of my coworkers was also an architecture geek.

Dan Hoey 79, Rob Rusick 100:

You've now got me wondering whether that's the origin of the phrase 'It's all Greek to me' (meaning, as is probably easy to guess) 'it's Double Dutch'.)

tykewriter @ 86... Does Beck think he's Heston?

praisegod barebones @103 — I'd guess that the phrase "Greek to me" would be more likely the origin of the term "greeked text". According to wikipedia, Graecum est; non legitur was used by medieval scribes, and "it was Greek to me" appears in Shakespeare.

Glad you are doing better, if not "OK", Fragano.

praisegod barebones @103

In Dutch, when something is incomprehensible, we often say 'that's Chinese to me' - which is a 'clever' joke far too many people make when I mention my chosen line of study. In their defence, I usually do end up having to explain what 'sinology' means.

Dan Hoey @105

Aren't 'greeked' texts like lorem ipsum derived from some actual Latin components? Funny fuzzy terminology.

Perhaps this snuck in under the radar, but the New Yorker is reporting what a lot of us have been wondering for some time now: who exactly it is that's backing the tea party "movement": it's Murdoch and our buddies the Koch brothers. Read the executive summary courtesy of Frank Rich in the NYT here.

Bombie @107:

In Dutch, when something is incomprehensible, we often say 'that's Chinese to me' - which is a 'clever' joke far too many people make when I mention my chosen line of study.

You have the sympathy of a former Classics (ie, Latin and Greek) major. ("Greek to you? Really? Never heard that one before!")

Serge, Joan Walsh refers to that quote in the article. Me I think he thinks he's the statue of feckin liberty.

Pendrift @97:

The Lincoln Park Zoo is run by the Chicago Park District, so admission is free. It's also accessible from public transportation (website says "CTA bus routes 151 or 156 both serve the zoo;" I had to look up the route numbers, but can attest that the bus really does drop you off right at the front entrance). Weather permitting, it's a wonderful way to spend a day.

I feel the need to do some minor kvelling.

I placed two poems in a rather good UK magazine today.

*glee*

Sarah S. (112): Congratulations!

Bombie @ 107:

Aren't 'greeked' texts like lorem ipsum derived from some actual Latin components? Funny fuzzy terminology.

tykewriter @ 110... I think he really is one of the skinless humans living under New York City who worship the Bomb.

Thank you for the Chicago tips!

Bombie@107, abi @109: And I'm a translator. Guess how many times I've heard "you must be a cunning linguist." Ha. Ha. Ha.

I think this article would be of interest to this crowd. He seems to imply that liberals can't be good storytellers, though. I just think the liberals in charge these days stink at it; FDR had some great stories to tell.

Pendrift, 116: I'm waiting for results for an admissions test to NYU's translation studies program (Spanish to English). What languages do you work in?

In #99 Sarah S. writes:

And if you have a car and a mind to explore, you can drive out to Fermi Lab, set up a tour (private or group) to see the particle accelerator, AND see the buffalo.

Pendrift, I'm going to be real busy next week, but if this tempts you, get in touch. Maybe something can be worked out. (higgins at fnal dot gov)

Fermilab is a wonderful place to see, but it's about an hour west of the Loop by car.

It's distinctly more middle-brow than other Chicago suggestions, but the one time I was there I had a good time walking State Street and visiting all umpty-ump floors of the Marshall Fields store (now Macy's, but still an historic place in American business history).

Chris Quinones @ 117 -

Part of the problem is that the sheer number of storytellers has increased, and they each want to tell their own version of the tale. Power and influence has been diluted quite a bit, and is no longer solely the province of the few.

George Schultz, the Secretary of State during the Reagan years, once remarked in exasperation, "The trouble with Washington is that nobody defers anymore!"

It's even more so now.

Bill Higgins @ 118... Fermilab is a wonderful place to see

Is it the lab where a guide pointed in one direction and said "Twenty miles" then moved is arm at a 90-degree angle and again said "Twenty miles"?

Sarah, #99: Last I heard, the Fermi tours had been shut down for security reasons. Have they relaxed that?

#121: A college friend of mine used that line once, in the guts of the giant linear accelerator at Brookhaven Labs.

Present were a gaggle of SF authors, guests of I-Con. You just know they got it.

Stefan Jones @ 123... I think I had incorrectly remembred your saying that. I'd have loved to be there.

@98, it's pretty simple to see the Frank Lloyd Wright houses and Unity Temple in Oak Park. You can take the Green Line El to Oak Park Avenue or the Union Pacific West Metra train to Oak Park. Both stations are within a half a mile of most of the FLW attractions plus the Hemingway museum (and several interesting restaurants and shops).

Bombie@107: Dutch isn't the only one. The fantastic Strange Maps had a post a little while back charting who uses what as their incomprehensibility standard. Sadly, there's no loops in there, although I like the Czech-Spanish-Greek-Arabic-Hindi chain of disapproval.

James E 126

From the notes below the map, I love the fact that the Esperantists say 'it's all Volapuk to me.'

121, 123, 124: I don't get it. [*]?

abi @109

Seeing the expressions on their face after an earnest "Yeah, I'm feeling ya! It's Chinese to me too -- thank god!" is often worth the price of admission.

James E @126

I've yet to encounter a mention of a 'heavenly language'. Now I'm kind of hoping this moment comes soon.

Loving the Esperantists 'Volapük' as well.

It ought to be interesting to see if Neal Stephenson's latest venture goes anywhere.

James 126: Why are there two arrows pointing from Russian to Chinese?

Mattathias #130:

So how is this radically different from Shadow Unit?

I must admit that I have sometimes made the over obvious pun to folks who have heard it too many times before. The pun detector routine isn't always called in the context of the obviousness filter (Aspieish traits are kind of hard to override).
I have on occasion managed to apologize before they managed to get their standard retort out.

joann@132: Offhand, not at all. Minor differences include publicity level and pricing structure. My gut instinct is that Stephenson is going to lose a bundle of money on Subutai, but time will tell.

Xopher@131: Disappointingly, it's a mistake (at least according to one of the comments in the Strange Maps post), not an indication that Russian has separate phrases for "it's all Mandarin" and "it's all Xiang".

After using an expletive, people in America (your truly included) will say "Excuse my French". Presumably, any association with my native language automatically makes anything classier. Oui?

Xopher @ 128... "Forbidden Planet"... The scene inside the monstrous well of the Krell machine and it turns out to be just a ventilation shaft for a machine that's 20 miles by 20 miles by 20 miles.

Bombie @129 re: heavenly language: Enochian?

Yes, I know there would be no reason for Chinese to have evolved a phrase about something most likely invented by Queen Elizabeth I's court astrologer. It does have the virtue of incomprehensibility!

I've upon occasion made what seemed an obvious pun to me (on someone's name) and had it be completely unexpected. The most obvious example was when I said to costumer Mary Jane Brogan -- "Oh! Your name's a pair of shoes!" -- which she insisted nobody had pointed out before. She may have been being kind, but if so she continued well after it would have been easy to let go.

Re Subutai: the next edition of the SF Encyclopedia ought to have a specific heading for Novels That Have An Awful Lot Of Interesting Extra Pseudo-Factual Stuff As An Appendix (or, in this hypertext age, As A Clickable Link). I loved The Lord Of The Rings when I first read it but was very much slowed down in the reading of it by my discovery (before I'd got very far into the actual novel) of all the cool stuff about calendars, writing systems, translation problems etc. in the Appendices, and it was difficult to tear my attention away from these to the story itself.

Serge #82:

I'm off to Aussiecon from this morning to meet Writers! Editors! Luminaries! The chances of not embarrassing myself are slim.

This post on Electrolite has comment spam lingering at the bottom. (Comments are closed there, of course.)

All knowledge is contained in Making Light:
My uncle used to recite an obscure quotation, and it went something like the following. Does anyone know where it came from originally?

It was a dark and stormy night outside the gates of Paris. I drew my rusty, trusty horse-pistol (which I had raised from a Colt) and fired. My opponent sank into his second's arms.

"Stop! You have killed a man!"
"A man?" says I.
"A man," says he.
"What was his name?"
"Zanzibar. You have killed my brother. We must fight."
[repeat]

Mary Aileen at 142: The Urls on said spam still work after all these years! (though they are in Japanese, so I can not tell whether or not they say something like "this domain name is parked"

Sarah S. #99:
"Yes, buffalo. Doesn't everyone graze buffalo on top of their particle accelerators?"

The Higgs Bison?

re: Subutai, and how it's just like Shadow Unit. Of course it is; a fictional form that spreads out into links and asides and fake livejournals is an obvious thing to try, now that people communicate that way in real life. Groups of people are going to keep playing with variations on this until we stop using http.

Eventually, somebody will even figure out how to get large numbers of people to read them; we'll know that happens because suddenly there'll be a Name for the form (the "smear?" I dunno...). Sometime after that, somebody will figure out how to make a profit, and we'll know THAT when sixty of the things, all about sexy vampires, come out on the same day.

Asshole Ugandan "wants to kill every gay person." I hope his fucking plane crashes.

So has anyone been following the latest major fail on the part of Livejournal? Just wondering.

Lizzy L. @ 57
I am strongly reminded of the young woman who, at an inter-denominational but predominantly protestant event, looked at me in honest shock and said "You're Catholic?! But I thought you were Christian!"

Xopher @ 147: You know, half of me dreads the thought that a splinter group of gay activists will go all Pink Pistols, decide it's us or them, and start answering violence with violence.

The other half relishes the thought.

Marilee @#38: No God But God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam by Reza Aslan is a good primer on the religion and the conflicts within it.

KayTei at 149, that particular encounter has never happened to me, but it's happened to people I know.

Avram at 73, I know that clause is usually interpreted in the way you describe, though I'm not at all familiar with any federal cases in which its application has been adjudicated. I haven't done the reading; I'm not a historian, and if there's material in the Federalist Papers or elsewhere which bears specifically on this issue, I'm not sufficiently schooled in the period to be able to refer to it. But the Founders (I believe) had more than a simple, legalistic intention when they put that clause in, and people who care about the Constitution, as Democrats should not be afraid to say they do, should also not be afraid to refer to it.

Pendrift: If he has the time, and you the means, Bill Higgins, Beam Jockey, might be induced to give you a tour of Fermi Lab.

152
They certainly had experience with membership in the local government-sponsored church being required for voting, let alone holding office. I believe Virginia and Massachusetts were both big on that.

Erik, #145: You just made me waste a perfectly good mouthful of iced tea.

Sara, #148: Oh, yes. I'm about 3/4 convinced that Zuckerman paid the LJ PTB to get this; it's got his style all over it. Someone somewhere on my friendslist described it as "stuff on MY blog isn't as much under my control as it used to be," and that's Facebook right down the line.

Didn't someone say something about some people having trouble ending a conversation?

http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/09/four-levels-of-social-entrapment.html

Lizzy L, #57, Tom Toles made a really good cartoon about that.

P J Evans, #63, almost all politicians want to be re-elected. There've been few who have been willing to vote the right way and get defeated the next election. I can't find the WashPost article on this (can only partly remember the names of two fairly recent congressfolk), but clearly, a lot of politicians want to stay in their seat of pride.

albatross, #94, and the interesting truth is that he and family have gone to a number of the larger churches in DC -- some mostly black, some mostly white, and one that's strongly mixed -- and haven't allowed cameras inside, because it would destroy the service for everybody. (There are the SS agents, but you can't keep them out.)

Sarah S., #112, Congratulations!

Erik Nelson, #143, I found one similar, but he doesn't know where it came from either.

Mary Dell, #151, Thanks!

Lee #148, I'm beginning to think the same thing myself. And it's alarming to me because I don't like thinking that way.

But...people are hopping mad and it's growing exponentially and yet there is virtual radio silence from LJ. There have been one or two buried responses from staff but nothing official to placate people. It's horrid customer service: the paid customers are killing their auto renewals and/or taking their money to Dreamwidth and posting to show it and LJ is seemingly doing nothing? That's nuts.

That alone should make them roll out some sort of big "Okay we hear you and are working on this and we'll have something tomorrow" post, but there has been nothing.

When paying folks are pissed and threatening to take there money elsewhere companies are supposed to listen, unless someone else is them BIG bucks. That's when companies show contempt for the folks shelled out the bread and butter prices.

It's either that or utter arrogance and stupidity.

LJFail: They have added an update to the original post, but it's their usual mealy-mouthed, 'Oh, darn. Was that a bad idea?' "We'll do our best to respond" doesn't exactly fill me with confidence.

And yes, I'm upset, too. Facebook is for just about everyone I know, and some family that I don't. LJ is for the things I will only share with trusted friends or anonymously. Why the heck would I ever want to mix the two?

Erik Nelson @145: **groan**

I shall have to inflict this on my SO, who works at Fermi. Too bad I didn't have it in my arsenal a couple of weeks ago when we were showing friends around...

Sarah S. @112: congratulations!

Chris Quinones @117: my diploma is in editorial and technical translation. It says English, French, and Spanish, but I work nearly exclusively from French to English. Is the NYU program a literary translation one?

Bill Higgins @118: email sent!

Linkmeister @119: a stop at Macy's is on the list. I have been strongly urged to purchase a box of Frango Mints there.

Ah, methinks I'm going to like Chicago.

EWrik Nelson @ 145...

OSCAR WILDE: "I wish I had said that, Whistler."
JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER: "Ah, you will, Oscar, you will."

On "It's all Greek and/or Chinese to me"... I very much enjoyed the incomprehensibility chart.

At dinner tonight, two of the people (a gringo and an Indian) were talking broken Chinese (which they've both been learning for restaurant menus and travel) about some restaurant, and one of the other people and I were saying "It's all Greek to me", except that her family's Greek and I studied the stuff in college, so Greek would have been relatively ok and it actually was all Chinese to us.

The chart indicates that Esperantists say "It's all Volapuk to me." One of the plot elements of William Gibson's Spook Country is the use of Volapuk Encoding, writing Russian in 7-bit ASCII using a set of characters that visually resemble the shapes of Cyrillic, which Russian computer people often did before consistent computer character set representations of Cyrillic were widely available.

I'd been a bit puzzled by seeing lorem ipsum in the context of greeking, however - I'd first encountered the other meaning of the term, which is the stuff you display when you can't or don't want to render the real end-product fonts you'll be using, typically because they're too small to be represented at the scale you're displaying (e.g. you're showing a 2 inch tall illustration of your page layout, so you might put the titles in 6-point font but everything else is greeked because you don't have fonts that small.) You don't use text filler, which wouldn't display any better, you use squiggly lines or fat gray lines or equivalent. One of the beauties of Postscript-based windowing systems is that greeking can happen automagically - a 1-point font uses one pixel per character on a typical computer screen, so everything comes out in just the right place.

Soon Lee @ 141... I wish you much embarassment at Aussiecon. :-)

Aussiecon (day one) was fun. The opening ceremony movie montage was played a tad loud for my liking, but the panels I attended were well worth the time. I even got to say hello to people like Patrick, Charlie Stross & John Scalzi.

Fannish squee quotient: high

Pendrift @97: As a lifetime Chicagoan and geek with a bent for history, I'd be very willing to volunteer for tourguiding duties for some of next week, if you're interested.

My limitations: I have to pick the kid up from daycare (downtown) ca. 5PM Tue-Thu. I have class 10-12 Wed and 11-1:15 Tue-Thu.

Email me offlist ( rybvfroq ng lnubb.pbz , only un-munged by 13) to set up more thorough details, if you like. I'm open to anything from hanging out through museum visits to full-on idiosyncratic architecture tours to showing you my favorite stores in town to buy _X_.

Ok... I've been completely away from real use of Lj for the past month and a half... what's happened?

Terry -- They've just added a new misfeature which makes it extremely easy to crosspost comments and replies to Facebook and Twitter, including replies to locked posts.

Terry Karney #167: Ok... I've been completely away from real use of Lj for the past month and a half... what's happened?

A new #privacyfail for LJ: FaceBook and Twitter integration that can bypass friendlocking. There's a significant customer riot going on as a result.

LJ/FB... I'm quite happy - especially now - that I don't use my real name on either of them.

Bill Stewart @ 163: It's all Greek to me.

In an economics class that was really a math class, the professor was giving us a bit of a dressing down for not keeping up on the problem sets. He said that if we didn't get the material down as he lectured about it, in a week or so, we'd look at the board and it would be all Greek to us.

We looked at the board, which was covered with betas, deltas, epsilons, and so on, and all began to giggle. He had the grace to give us a pass on that.

Sara E #148, Oh yeah. Actually I can't quite tear myself away from the epic post of doom with (at time of commenting here) 110 pages of comments in an approximate ratio of 90% furious or agreeing with same, 0.01% expressions of happiness, 0.99% expressions of bewilderment followed by explanations of why they should be furious, 4% eager and enthusiastic pimping of DreamWidth, and 5% requests for ginger kittens.

In other news, the headline in today's The Times read thus: Hawking: God did not create Universe

LJFail: Well, it doesn't exactly bypass friends locking. However, it encourages your friends who have access to the locked post to post their comments to their Facebook (and Twitter) accounts. Things they say, or things they quote, could violate privacy.

(There's nothing the original poster of the locked entry can do to prevent it; it all depends on the settings and actions of people who can read your post.)

(If you have not linked your LJ and FB or Twitter accounts, then you can't accidentally violate somebody else's privacy this way; the checkboxes for cross-posting will be grayed out for you. So if you haven't linked your LJ to your FB or Twitter, you don't have to worry about accidentally violating your friends' privacy this way.)

For awhile I had my LJ linked to my FB so that any unlocked post would show up on FB. It did not bring over any comments at all. Until I can control whether comments are ported (I prefer they not be, for my LJ friends sake as well as my own) I will just use copy & paste to add to my FB notes if I think whatever I've posted on LJ is relevant.

Sadly, it's a sign of how far privacy has been cavalierly chipped away that I'm pretty impressed with LJ rolling out these changes as an Opt-In, rather than FB's insidious "Hey Look, We Changed Your Privacy Settings!" which always leaves me scrambling to find out which idiotic hoops I have to jump through to not inform every person and their dog where I am/what I'm doing/my fasting blood glucose levels.

Serge @#170: Your real name isn't Serge? Hmmm. I'm going to guess that it's...Endeavor.

Mary Dell @ 175... My real full name, funny girl.

ddb, #173: I thought TexAnne had a good description: "It makes accidents likely and malice effortless."

nerdycellist, #174: The heart of the problem is that it's not opt-in. In fact, it's not really opt-out either; if your friends link their LJ and FB accounts, there is nothing you can do to prevent this from happening. Furthermore, people on FB who don't have LJ accounts can now comment on your public posts even if you have anonymous commenting disabled.

They just said, "Hey look, here's this new thing that can happen on your journal over which you have no control at all!" Which is why I think FB may have been the instigator -- that is their style, after all.

Mary Dell #175: Serge @170, Your real name isn't Serge? Hmmm. I'm going to guess that it's...Endeavor.

I would have guessed Polydeuces.

Pensnest #174 I too cannot tear myself away from the LJ epic post of doom. It just gets getting longer and longer. With people getting angrier and angrier that no one has said anything other the minor "we hear you and go vote in this poll that someone else set up."

That Dreamwidth has had almost 10,000 people join in the last twenty-four hours is both amazing and unsurprising given the amount of anger. I am pretty sure that someone will soon be putting up stats as to how many of those are paid accounts.

I've already deactivated my auto-renewal out of sheer disgust, but I already had a Dreamwidth account. I think they are going to get my money this time around.

I can't help but think in the LJ kerfuffle of some advice I was given years ago: Send nothing over the Internet that you wouldn't put on the back of a postcard.

Paranoid? Yes. But where intimate personal details are concerned, paranoia may be in order. At least Facebook's founder has the honesty to be open and frank about his contempt for users' privacy.

LJ's policy may yet prove to be an act of stupidity, not of malice, but what of it? Does anyone really think that in case of bankruptcy, any of the commercial blogging hosts wouldn't be compelled to seek value in satisfaction of creditors in any way they could?

Mattathias@180: Well, I do send stuff I'd never put on a postcard; but only encrypted. (Credit card numbers and such.) Yeah, I know that's not "perfectly secure", but nothing is. Handing my card to a waiter in a restaurant isn't perfectly secure either. I still do it.

Mattathias @180:
I cannot help but fear that, given the most recent example of how well your advice-giving seems to work, you might find that this comment is not well-received. You may not have intended a subtext of "you have only yourselves to blame for being careless," but it certainly came through. The people at LiveJournal who relied on its (historically good) protections* and are now feeling betrayed and vulnerable are unlikely to take that kindly.

Might I suggest—nay, insist—that you clean up the situation in the other thread, mend fences and come to understand how that one went wrong, before you start another fire in this one? You have some thinking to do about your relationship to the community and your manner of engaging people. I mean this most sincerely.

Omnes:
If your temptation is to argue or be irate, please rather flow around this as a river does a rock.

-----
* Riffing off of ddb @181 without necessarily asserting that this is what he meant, it's rather like having the encryption that protects your credit card details for online purposes being broken. Why were you sending that information anyway?

abi@182: please see #271 in the other thread.

ddb@181: as do I. Additionally, I'm aware that my footprint here is already in violation of that advice. Not making any attempt to preach from a high horse, only noting that the incident jogged a memory.

I am now even happier that I never signed up for FB.

Mattathias @183:

I did see it. I'm saying to make time for that before you light another fire in this thread.

I think that your most recent comment here does reduce the chances that you have lit such a fire. But you need to catch up with where the other people you've been in conflict with are at before you go further down this line.

If you don't have time yet, please either don't post here or watch your tone more closely. Because you've made a mess and not cleaned it up, and the people you've made it with (at, on) are reading this thread.

Bombie @ 129: The wikipedia article on Volapuk says that Volapuk is also the Danes' paradigm of an incomprehensibel language.

(It also says that it only has 20-30 living speakers. Time for a revival, perhaps?)

P J Evans @ 184: Ditto. And how! (I don't have an LJ account either).

#146: "LJ kerfuffle"

Hmmmm.

L.J. Kerfuffle's sounds like the name of a chain restaurant. The kind of place located on the edge of a shopping center parking lot, where office workers meet after close of business.

There's a significant difference between something being possible and that same something being easy. Yes, it's always been possible that someone could hack your LiveJournal account and access your non-public information -- or that someone who was mad at you might copy-and-paste sensitive information into a public forum. That's the price of having an online life.

What this change has done is to make it EASY for anyone -- because they were careless, or because they routinely crosslink everything they post and just didn't think about not doing it, or because they don't understand why you're upset and want to "prove" that you're mistaken*, or whatever -- to do the same thing. Instead of requiring even the minimal effort of copying, creating a new post, and pasting, it's all done with one mouse-click.

It's not the fact of privacy risk, but the LEVEL of it, which has been changed without warning and without any way to protect oneself against it. It's like having a new neighbor who routinely has outdoor barbecues during fire season; the risk of a fire has always been there, but this increases it exponentially.

* cf. people who serve you food containing an ingredient you don't want without telling you, because "if you didn't know it was there, you wouldn't know you weren't supposed to like it".

praisegod barebones @186

Then we better get started right away, because binos prinsip sagatik, kel sagon, das stud nemödik a del binos gudikum, ka stud mödik süpo.

That would actually make a nice entry on a 'things to do before I die' list: use a Volapük retort on a Dane calling nonsense.

praisegod 186: (It also says that it only has 20-30 living speakers. Time for a revival, perhaps?)

Oh, for gods' sakes, no! If you want to save a dying language, there are lots of natural ones with actual cultural content that will be lost forever; work on one of those.

Volapük is just another stupid artificial "international" language. Moreover, it's a failure even at that. Silly as I think Esperanto is, its creators at least understood that simplicity is a virtue when constructing a language you want people to actually use.

But even Volapük is better than Loglan, which as far as I know has never had any speakers. (Its inventor admitted that the ability to construct sentences in it was by no means equivalent to actually speaking it.)

Someone moving out of the apartment complex left a collection of canned food neatly lined up along the edge of a recycling bin. Obviously meant to be a "take me" pile. The cans are all new and clean.

I suspect the donor was an SE Asian. Water chestnuts, bean sprouts, coconut milk, "baby corn," "stir fry vegetables," straw mushrooms, and other goodies.

I'm thinking Thai food.

Any ideas?

Bombie 190

Yes, but: Ven lärnoy püki votik, vödastok plösenon fikulis.

Pensnest writes in #172:

In other news, the headline in today's The Times read thus:
Hawking: God did not create Universe

Brother Guy is staying here at the Nuclear Arms for a few days. He was asked by a Scottish paper for his reaction to this. So Kelley and I found ourselves reviewing the pithiness of various possible comments before he sent them off...

Stefan, sounds like you've got a situation that's crying out for a vegetarian green curry.

Mattathias @ 180: Regardless of my care about posting information I wish to remain confidential, I gather that the new cross-posting system allows people to bypass the former restrictions of anonymous commenting. I don't want random jerks to be able to comment on my posts without my being able to (in some sense) identify them and lock them out; that's why I don't permit anonymous commenting on my LJ.

Joel, there are apparently a couple of lines of code you can manually add to the CSS of your LJ to take away the option:

1. Choose the "Journal" menu, and select "Journal Style"
2. On the right side of the page, there is your theme and below that a link with "Customize Your Theme". Go there
3. Among the options on the left side, there is "Custom CSS", click there.
4. You will see a box with on the left written "Custom Stylesheet", and add:

.b-repost-item {display:none}
.b-repost-item, #fblo {display:none;}

P J Evans: #184: Likewise, I never signed up for either FB or LJ, and this sort of thing reminds me why not. One of my cousins is trying to friend me on LinkedIn, but I haven't signed up for that either. Dreamwidth sounds interesting, but at this point I'm generically wary....

Also, I'm just back from the vet with Gremlin again. She spent the day there to get a glucose curve, and it seems she's responding well enough to the insulin that I'm only to inject her once a day now.

Mr. Polowin@196: Boo on LJ then, for violating a longstanding expectation of control, and so much for any hope that the walled garden would stay walled.

Mark @ 197 -- Thanks; I've added those items.

I mean no insult to you, and every insult to the LJ team, when I say that that is not exactly an obvious or user-friendly way of disabling the new "feature".

Pendrift, 161: It's translation in general, but literary translation is an elective, along with legal, commercial, medical, etc.

Mark, 197: LJ wants me to upgrade my style to "S2," which I knew nothing about before this mess happened. Anyone have a reason why I shouldn't go ahead and do this?

David Harmon: I've had several diabetic cats over the years. They all seemed to stabilize pretty rapidly, and also seemed to learn really quickly that the shot makes things feel better.

If you're feeding dry kibble, a scoop of canned pumpkin on top often helps ensure the cat eats, and the added fiber is supposed to help generally with diabetes.

Chris, #202: No reason you shouldn't, and several reasons why it's a good idea; for one thing, tags don't work with S1 IIRC, and tags are amazingly helpful when you want to find that specific thing you posted 3 years ago without having to sift back thru your entire archive. I found the process of selecting and setting up an S2 style to be relatively smooth and intuitive; the hardest thing about it was picking a theme I liked from among the gazillion-and-one offerings!

More generally: I've seen several "fix it in CSS" offerings go by on my friendslist. The one I'm using is

.b-repost-item, FORM#qrform > TABLE[style="border: 1px solid black;"]:last-child TD[style="vertical-align: top; text-align: right;"]:first-child { display: none !important; }

Perhaps someone who understands CSS could look at that and see whether it does basically the same thing as the one Joel posted above -- and if not, what do I need to add/change to prevent people without LJ accounts from commenting via Facebook?

Joel: No offense taken. I am only an egg. I'm passing on a tip that was passed on to me; while I do have a bit of familiarity with how style sheets work, this bit [Thread Bleed Alert!] is Chinese to me.

Chris: Near as I can figure, S1 styles on Livejournal were rolled out long enough ago that certain features of CSS customization are not downward compatible to them. There are S2 styles that closely approximate the older style sets, however, so you're probably safe.

(and/or what Lee said. Someday I'll learn to refresh the thread on preview...)

Mark @197 - I suspect from my experiment with the lines of code you provide that the CSS solution will only work if people are viewing LJ comment in your style and if you've set your journal style so that custom comment pages aren't disabled.

Mine is set up so that custom comment pages *are* disabled (I haven't found one that I like) and I have set things up so I only see my friends' comment pages in my style, which is to say the basic LJ style (to avoid certain styles I find obnoxious). My CSS doesn't alter the basic LJ style (and if someone had things set up so they viewed my comment page in their own style, which is an option, my CSS changes wouldn't touch that either.)

The CSS fix is better than nothing, but it's not a complete fix, either.

Xopher@191: Silly as I think Esperanto is, its creators at least understood that simplicity is a virtue when constructing a language you want people to actually use.

I had a chat with an Esperantist at an educational materials fair I happened to go to in Paris ten years or so ago, and he said that a couple of the cool things about it were having a readymade international network of people you could stay with, and the fact that children who were taught it as a second language tended to progress to a considerably higher level in their third and subsequent languages than those who weren't did in their second and subsequent ones, perhaps because its extreme regularity gave them confidence. Though they may not have been a hugely typical sample set, it must be said. And apparently there's lots of poetry...

Naomi@207: That'd be my understanding. The various CSS changes are all instructing the client computer not to display various bits of text that have been sent to it, but the CSS doesn't cause those bits of text not to be sent in the first place. Whatever FB comments have been made are still sent to all viewers of the LJ page. Whether the client computer chooses to obey the CSS is entirely outside your control.

There are multiple ways for a person viewing an LJ page to bypass the CSS instructions, from using a browser that allows CSS substitution, to using a browser that doesn't obey CSS instructions at all, to viewing the raw source HTML for the page. Any of these methods would allow a viewer of the LJ page to view comments masked in the CSS.

Hey, kids, I'm now in Boston. It begins to look like Eric Nelson and I might be getting together either Friday (tomorrow) night and/or Monday night, somewhere in Central Square, with a possible stop at Pandemonium Books. Please chime in if you are (a) in the area and (b) desirous of joining us.

re names: There is a problem with a lot of the non-gendered names which end in a long "e" (terry, bobby, billy, etc.): They are homophonic, regardless of the sex of the named, but they are not homographic.

regarding esperanto and the acquisition of subsequent languages by children who learn it as a native language. The second is the hardest, after that, the sooner one started (as a rule) to gain the second, the easier (and more fluent) the person will be in tertiary, &c, languages.

oh... re Evelyn, the one which comes to mind for me is Evelyn Waugh.

Every time I read about Evelyn Waugh, I find myself thinking of Lucy Van Pelt - who is no relation to SF writer James van Pelt.

Terry @ 211: In my experience, "Bobbie" and "Billie" are feminine vs. "Bobby" and "Billy" masculine, but there are lots of females named "Terry" (e.g. Terry Farrell, who played Jadzia Dax on Deep Space 9).

Hyperlocal news: Blackberry limeade "delicious", claims Area Man.

Waugh is me.

David Harmon @ 199 - That's wonderful news about Gremlin. I hope she continues on her happy, healthy path. On the other hand, I found out today why we're having a hard time after all these months with Pepper's regulation. The endocrinologist called, and her panel results came back positive for atypical Cushing's and off-the charts aldosterone. She must go to the vet tomorrow to check potassium levels and blood pressure. It seems our almost weekly vet appointments may continue.

So the Zanzibar thing (which I've never heard of before) is a repeating loop?

That would require an infinite number of brothers named Zanzibar.

[puts on thinking cap]

Aha! Clone-brothers, on a planet originally colonized by a single individual, a cranky old genius named Zanzibar who despised all people except for his own company. Add in a home-cloning kit, with lots of extra refills, and you eventually end up with an entire planet populated solely by guys named Zanzibar, all genetically twin brothers of each other. And all prone to get into arguments with visitors from other planets.

That's the nice thing about science fiction: You can explain anything!

Terry Karney @ 212: oh... re Evelyn, the one which comes to mind for me is Evelyn Waugh.

And his or her wife or husband, Evelyn Waugh. Seriously.

Xopher: you don't say why you think Esperanto is silly, but most of the time when I hear that it's followed by complaints about how impoverished it is compared to a natural language. But as I understand it, that's part of the point; it's meant to be a universal second language, one that reduces the penalty for having a minority language as one's native tongue by being easy to learn, and not belonging to one culture.

That may be a bit optimistic, but I don't see it as silly.

Question. Les (my housemate, Best Roommate Evah! (Calif. Edition) points out I have made a tactical error in timing. I arrive in Reno on Saturday evening.

The Man is Burnt Saturday.

Leaving Reno for SF is going to be something of a mess.

So... should I lay up a day in Salt Lake (I have no desire, whatever, to be in Reno)?

Should I leave first thing Saturday (and so beat the rush [which seems dubious, but I don't know if the Citizens of the Playa are the sort of laggards at packing up I can imagine myself to be)?

Is taking a more southbound route out of town (skipping down 580, and skirting Lake Tahoe to pick up 50, and so to home) a reasonable thing?

Or have I screwed the pooch and am looking at hours of stop and go traffic, no matter when, nor how, I leave Reno after Saturday night?

Terry: I've only driven back from BM on Monday, but it's really grim. I think I've given up on 80 every time, and hit the back roads, which takes just as long but is much more pleasant.

I don't know if Sunday is as bad. You might want to consider taking 50 and stopping at Carson City instead--it's very fast through Nevada, and would avoid the Burning Man pain traffic until Sacramento at least.

TrishB, #217, I'm so sorry -- I hope Pepper gets better soon!

Hyperlocal news: Lake of Pineapple-flavored GoLYTELY^® Discovered in Eighth Circle of Hell, Claims Area Man.

Word seems to be that leaving Sat. Morning is safe. I think I shall still take the southern route, as being more scenic.

As to names... I've not met many females who use a "y", whereas "ie" and "i" are quite common (it's probably the "e" sounding name I am most likely to note the spelling of).

erp... I meant Sunday. The problem with this sort of travel is one loses track of the days.

Hyperlocal News:

Graduate School is Lots of Work, Says Area Man

(Area man also notes that he is busy, but happy - even if he is responsible for 90 students in the single most popular undergraduate class at Cal. In addition to his own coursework and research.)

Area man has also found the time to bake for his new lab twice this week, and will be teaching Espresso 1 to his labmates tomorrow.

Earl Cooley III @ 224: Hang in there. This too, shall pass.

Here's an interesting interview with an editor at e-book publisher UnTreed Reads.

Adrian Smith 208

Esperanto is silly in that its rather self-delusional in that it believes itself to be 'ethnically neutral' and 'universal'. Its vocabulary and grammar are based only on major European languages - even its phonology uses sounds which are only perceived as distinctive by native European language speakers.

Benjamin Wolfe @227: Area man also notes that he is busy, but happy - even if he is responsible for 90 students in the single most popular undergraduate class at Cal. In addition to his own coursework and research.

Inquiring minds want to know ... what IS the single most popular undergraduate class there?

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess it's not calculus, with which I am currently struggling. My professor is reasonably supportive, but also has quite a few sardonic byways into comments like, "If you're really struggling to understand what I just did on the board, you probably need to drop this and go do Precal again, because I'm not spending three weeks on review." Only snarkier.

Today's snarkiest comment (delivered after attempting to explain a problem involving completing the square and then graphing the result, for a quadratic equation) was, "And I know most of you have failed calculus more than once, so you're staring at me like you have no idea how I did that, but you know RIGHT off the top of your heads that the derivative of it is [whatever it was]."

I helpfully pointed out to him, while handing in my homework, that he was my very first calc teacher and therefore I had no bad habits. I also volunteered for his statistics that *I* had failed *precal* 4 times, and then passed it ... two years ago. :->

Should be fun. I'm not totally underwater; I think with sufficient addressing of myself to the material (if the kidlet leaves me good homework time this weekend, especially) I can get comfortably ahead and keep a cushion, even with the abysmal textbook we're using -- it's written like a man page, not a help file, if that helps any of you visualize. Luckily, I still have two previous Precal texts and my husband's college Calc test sitting around, and THEY are actually possible to learn from with just the book, a pad, a pen, and a calculator. I have to use the assigned text to get the homework questions from, but for studying I have other resources.

Lee 204, change your comment settings to registered Lj users only to block Facebook/Open ID and anon.

Bombie@230: Well, I'm sorry you feel that invalidates the two advantages the person I spoke to mentioned. I mean, some Esperantists may still make such claims, for all I know and cannot be arsed to Google. But there seem to have been substantial numbers in Asia at one point, potential phonological issues with "holding elections" or whatever notwithstanding. I would say the community (as opposed to the language itself) probably *aspires to be* "ethnically neutral". Doesn't really sound to me like many of them seriously imagine the whole world coming to speak it and ascending into some universal nirvana of peace and effortless communication.

TW, #232: I've already got that in place. Somewhere in the multiple analyses I read today ISTR seeing that OpenID would be treated like a registered user. But I could be mistaken, or have misinterpreted what I read.

I collected my mail this morning and found a package from the Netherlands. When I opened it, I found this. My very own steampunk journal, lovingly crafted by abi, with impressions of clockparts and wooden type on calfskin, hand-marbled endpapers, eelskin headcaps, and pages aged with coffee and tea.[1]

Squeee. Thank you ever so much. The Boomderedux video for our hosts' anniversary was a labor of love from everyone involved, so I truly wasn't expecting this.

My presence in the Fluorosphere has been scarce these past few months because meatspace got in the way: my ex-partner and I called it quits after eight years, and it took a while to see well enough in the fog of uncertainty to make out the shape of my new life. But Making Light was and continues to be a haven, even—and especially—when I read in silence.

So now I'm in Brussels, and life hasn't looked this bright in years, and I walk with a spring in my step again, and I'm going to write all about it in my shiny new journal once I stop sniffing the pages, and I just wanted to say thank y'all for keeping me sane and being you. Fluorosphere, you rock.

[1] Description lifted from abi's note

Adrian Smith @233

I was commenting on the original idea/set-up of the language. Esperanto is (fairly) universal in usage, but very European in nature.
By no means I meant to invalidate the wonderful community that Esperantists have build up - at one point my mother was fairly proficient, and got quite some pleasure from communicating within this community*.

Really delusional was the plea of Chinese anarchists in 1907 that the Chinese language be abandoned entirely, as a language unsuitable for modern times, and that Esperanto be established in its stead.

As to the second point, I wonder if it's something inherent to Esperanto that makes subsequent language acquisition easier, or if big part of the reason can be found in the conditions under which Esperanto is usually acquired at a young age (i.e. growing up in a family with an interest in languages, and in that language in particular). Would acquiring a second language other than Esperanto under similar circumstances give similar results? Just scientific curiosity here, no Esperanto-bashing.

-

As an aside (re: holding elections), when people in America (or any other country, for that matter) act 'funny' and speak 'Eastern' (either Chinese or Japanese), do they substitute every l for an r, or vice-versa?
Just curious. In Belgium we omit the r, not the l.

--
* which is not to say that, had this not been the case, I would have invalidated their community. Just an anecdote.

As an aside (re: holding elections), when people in America (or any other country, for that matter) act 'funny' and speak 'Eastern' (either Chinese or Japanese), do they substitute every l for an r, or vice-versa?
Just curious. In Belgium we omit the r, not the l.

In the Philippines, r is substituted for an l when imitating the Japanese, and l is substituted for r when imitating the Chinese.

Bombie@236: Eh, sorry about my tone there then.

Really delusional was the plea of Chinese anarchists in 1907 that the Chinese language be abandoned entirely, as a language unsuitable for modern times, and that Esperanto be established in its stead.

Well yeah, but Chinese anarchists, they must have had some interesting baggage. There's a school of possibly ill-formed thought that the replacement of pictographic/hieroglyphic writing systems by syllabaries and then alphabets was a sound democratic development helping to make literacy accessible to the masses, and I can see how they could have wanted to ditch the characters. I'm struggling with learning Japanese at the moment, and *I* want to ditch them, though I appreciate that once you get a couple of thousand under your belt they make reading much more efficient, something pretty distant to look forward to there. Takes a huge investment of time and energy to get a whole society literate in a pictographic language as far as I can see. A mighty chunk of primary school here is taken up with these. Lovely.

As to the second point, I wonder if it's something inherent to Esperanto that makes subsequent language acquisition easier, or if big part of the reason can be found in the conditions under which Esperanto is usually acquired at a young age (i.e. growing up in a family with an interest in languages, and in that language in particular).

That's what I meant about it not being a typical sample set, but it's hard to imagine Esperanto's gentle learning curve not helping to some extent, for me anyway, and on the Esperanto Wikipedia page under the heading "language acquisition" there's something about a study showing that one year of Esperanto followed by three years of French was more effective than four years of French alone.

As an aside (re: holding elections), when people in America (or any other country, for that matter) act 'funny' and speak 'Eastern' (either Chinese or Japanese), do they substitute every l for an r, or vice-versa?
Just curious. In Belgium we omit the r, not the l.

Not sure, really, being married to a Japanese I tend to avoid people engaging in such pastimes. The Japanese sound is sort of intermediate, though maybe closer to "r", they don't believe in that labiodental action much, can't do "th" either.

Feh, not labiodental. Tongue. Whatever.

Adrian Smith @238:

I'm a student of Chinese myself, and I've wanted to ditch them at times as well (even though I've reached the point where I can read most kanji your link provided). Best of luck with your studies. I feel your struggle. The debate on romanization in China has a pretty interesting history (with most arguments being far less delusional than the anarchist one).

Chinese actually has both an L sound and an (approximately voiced retroflex fricative, I think) R-like sound (the main dialect does, at least). So while the Philippines are closer to the truth (because of proximity, probably), it's still not quite right. So Filipino does have an l/r distinction, then? Any clue if this has always been the case, or if this was influenced by Spanish/English? I wonder how many other East-Asian languages do and don't have this distinction.

I don't encounter too many people engaging in such pastimes, either. Luckily its usually limited to a 'clever' Chinese to me, and I get spared of childish 'l for r'-speech.

Also, Adrian Smith @238:

Eh, sorry about my tone there then.

No worries, not a problem. (But thanks for making the effort, much appreciated.)

So Filipino does have an l/r distinction, then? Any clue if this has always been the case, or if this was influenced by Spanish/English?

I know three Philippine languages (Filipino/Tagalog, Hiligaynon, and Kinaray-a and speak the first two fluently. There's definitely an l/r distinction in all three; to my ear, ls and rs are fairly evenly distributed in Filipino and Hiligaynon, while rs are more prominent in Kinaray-a. So I tend to believe it's always been the case, but I don't know much about the history of Philippine languages.

TrishB #217: Ouch, my sympathies! At least your vet believes in it -- the first story Google turned up for me was someone dealing with a vet school where they said "can't be Cushing's, the cortisol's normal".

Earl Cooley III #224: Nasty... (janetl #228: groan...)

Pendrift #235: Yay! Sorry about the breakup, but good to know you're doing OK now.
---
(Off to feed & inject kitty...)

Aaaand Lee is very smart: Same Russians own LJ, FB, Twitter.

In other news, Twitter's going to start requiring the use of one single link-shortener, and will log clicks.

Pendrift @ 235... We're here for you. Regarding the Book... When she gave me mine, Abi proceeded to point out all the flaws in her beautiful work. I made fun of the silly girl of course.

Serge @245: All I could think was "ooooooh, purty!

I took one semester of Chinese, and it was not the class I wanted it to be. I really think that, at that level-- or at least, at the level half the class was at*-- it's best to have non-native speakers, or at least teachers who can comprehend some weird, weird questions.

What really got to me was that pinyin, which I understood to be made up for convenience, has irregularities. -uei becomes -ui. -i is usually a nice familiar i-like-in-Spanish, but after sibilants, it's a placeholder for a sound that my teachers couldn't understand I wanted to hear on its own.

Well, that and basic class structure. I wanted vocabulary lists available somewhere, with all the numbers in order, all the colors in a group, all the clothes we needed to know in one nice batch, and while I could have made them on my own, it would have been more work than I was getting any reward for.

At this point, I can impress people by picking out my beef with broccoli when we order Chinese and they use characters on the containers, but not much else. And that bothers me; I like languages and don't like that this one escaped me, especially since most of the reasons can be framed and probably are that I approached it completely wrong.

*which is itself a problem: half the class was white and learning Chinese for the first time. The other half was Chinese and spoke a dialect with relatives and wanted either a refresher or a new language based on one they knew, like me learning Italian after Spanish. I was constantly complimented on my amazing Chinese skills when I knew I wasn't progressing at all because I was the best of the English-only Americans. Tip for working with me: I know when I suck, and effusive praise is not going to help.

#127, 163:

A few years ago I and a friend, both Esperanto speakers, were starting to learn Volapük. (I don't think either of us persisted long enough to become fluent in Volapük -- I didn't, anyway, though I learned enough of its grammar that I can puzzle out texts with a dictionary.) He expressed regret that he would no longer be able to say "Estas al mi volapukaĵo." I suggested reference to an older and less well-documented conlang, e.g. Solresol.

I'll be at DragonCon Sunday only, I think -- it would be nice to see other Fluorospherians if any are present.

Bruce Arthurs @ 218: "No, that was not Zanzibar, that was Zanzibar. There are 10 of us, all of family Zanzibar, each one named Zanzibar. Slight differences in how you pronounce. 'Zanzibar', 'Zanzibar', 'Zanzibar'... You are seeing now?"

Diatryma @247 said: What really got to me was that pinyin, which I understood to be made up for convenience, has irregularities. -uei becomes -ui. -i is usually a nice familiar i-like-in-Spanish, but after sibilants, it's a placeholder for a sound that my teachers couldn't understand I wanted to hear on its own.

It is my understanding☂ that Pinyin enshrines as The One Official Phonology a single accent of many, and that whether the pronunciation of any handy random Chinese person of your acquaintance looks logical in Pinyin depends on whether they speak in that dialect (iirc, Beijing?).

In particular, there's a whole phoneme in Cantonese that's spelled really weird in Pinyin, because it's not innately logical to it. I think of it as the 'shw' consonant, but I don't know what it's really called. I only know it from hearing it in the wild while tagging around after my grandfather.

Diatryma @247 said further down: I really think that, at [...] the level half the class was at -- which is itself a problem: half the class was white and learning Chinese for the first time. The other half was Chinese and spoke a dialect with relatives and wanted either a refresher or a new language based on one they knew, like me learning Italian after Spanish.

I cannot praise my Spanish teacher last semester highly enough for the yeomanlike way she coped with just such a situation. Our class contained, in unequal portions:
. (a) Young adults who had spoken some Spanish with their abuelas (and maybe watched telenovelas with them), but were illiterate in it and knew not from this 'conjugating verbs' thing of which you speak: they knew how to use the words correctly, but not why, or how it works.
. (b) People like me, who had taken some amount of Spanish in the past (for me, six months in grade school; for some, a couple of years in high school a LONG TIME ago or just rusty ago), who can buy things in it and ask for the bathroom, and maybe know some catchphrases by rote. Call us 'familiar with it,' or as the teacher said, "high beginners". We tended to have a decent accent and get the rhythm of how to put the emPHAsis on the right syLABble.
. (c) People with no previous experience whatsoever, had not even heard it spoken (like the girl from China, whose English was very good -- and it was HER THIRD LANGUAGE, with Spanish to be her fourth, because she wants to work in translating Chinese to Spanish). Many are standard Chicago gringos, and tended to pronounce Spanish both awkwardly and as if it were English.

After quickly separating out the members of (a) who belonged in the specific "I'm fluent but illiterate in Spanish" class our school offers, she did a really amazing tapdance between not intimidating (c) while still challenging and intriguing (a) and (b) with enough that ties into what we already know that we could start using it and attaching it to the existing body of language-knowledge.

She frequently said (after a brief digression through some more-advanced concept) something like, "And if that confused you, don't worry, it is only nice-to-know, not need-to-know. You'll do that in 103."

The most amazing part was when we hit grammar that suddenly made a phrase I knew by rote into SOMETHING I COULD TRANSLATE! "Vamonos" is the imperative form of the to-go verb, for example, or the underlying structure behind the sticker on the bus translating the English "Press here to open door" and so on.

I can read cellphone billboards! It's so magic and awesome.

I took four years of Latin in high school, but at the end I wouldn't say I was fluent. I could translate quickly, with my references at elbow, but actually composing sentences on the fly to say stuff? Not so much, even though one of my teachers did make us practice it. This experience is really my first with actually ACQUIRING another language, and I'm amazed at how hard I'm not finding it.

Of course, it helps that Spanish verbs so far are basically 1st conjugation Latin ones with a few letters swapped. Already memorized them years ago, bing! :-> Also, I was relieved and pleased to discover that Spanish nouns don't decline, they just have gender and number. Which is three times more complex than some of my (c) classmates knew nouns could be, but a WHOLE LOT less complex than Latin or Homeric Greek☮ get.

--
☂ I Am Not A Chinese-Speaking Person. But my grandfather was deeply involved in Stuff with our local consulate, and in fact had previously helped set up the Nixon-going-there thing♦, so I spent a lot of time as a small child around groups of native Chinese speakers. They mostly spoke English around us, but could be prevailed upon (usually the diplomats' wives, who were sometimes desperately bored) to sing nursery rhymes at the cute, precocious kid, or to (and this is a memory I treasure) teach me table manners the way they would if I were visiting at their home, and the same age of Chinese kid.

♦ I am related to a bunch of marginally famous people, and peripherally related to a few people of rather more fame (my uncle-in-law is the discoverer of the first Pre-Cambrian fossil to be found and identified as such; my father's first cousin has several Olympic gold medals ... etc). It was disconcerting to discover that my grandfather's funeral was going to be filmed by an official film crew of the Chinese government, with extracts to be shown that night in Beijing on the newscast. I'm presuming they aired the consul's remarks, and didn't bother with my own more personal eulogy, but I don't know.

☮ I took 1 year of Homeric Greek; the teacher gave me a pity B for working so hard, but despite being fascinated I was in way over my head. I did learn the alphabet pretty thoroughly. In fact, that was the year I started typing my Latin homework, because I accidentally handed in a whole page of exercises written in Latin, phonetically in Greek characters. Luckily, my Latin teacher that year also taught Greek, so he puzzled it out, graded it, and handed it back with a comment to the effect of, "Don't do this again, it took forever."

praisegod barebones @268 said: a few years back, we came heart-breakingly close to eradicating polio world-wide.

In addition to the Darfur thing, there are certain groups in sub-Saharan Africa who have been convinced that the oral polio vaccine is in fact a plot to sterilize minority ethnic groups by giving the sterilization agent to all their children.

Gotta love fearmongering racist idiots building a power base by terrifying people. The same the world over: here they claim Obama is a muslim facsist socialist terrorist who wants to give your money and women to poor blacks.

Elliott Mason @ 231 : The course in question - where the twice-weekly lectures fill Wheeler Auditorium to capacity - is Drugs and the Brain, taught by David Presti. There are on the order of 700 students, and if we had the GSI (TA) support and the space, it would not surprise me if demand to get in to the course would push enrollement to ~1000. As it happens, there is neither the space nor the support, which is how you wind up with 8 GSIs, each with ~90 students across three discussion sections.

Me, 117: (Why does it seem so unnatural to write "I, 117"? "Me" must be the vocative case in English.) I passed the admissions test, and enrolled in the intro course at NYU this morning. Classes begin in October. Yay, me!

Chris Quinones: it's not vocative. It's subject/object. If you append the implicit preposition, (i.e. to) it become plain.

I seem to have lost a comment: I opined that I'd expect children who learn Esperanto as a native language to be better at others. The general sens of things is the second language is the hardest to acquire, and the sooner one does that, the easier all the subsequent ones get.

Elliot Mason: I had a fellow student, in Russian, who spoke fluent French. In our first vocabulary test she swapped in french words, using Cyrillic. It, as one may imagine, confused the teachers.

Amusingly (she was a decent student, not brilliant, but better than I was) she'd gotten all the correct words, in French.

Diatryama: you may have been a very good student. I don't know that the level of acquisition you wanted was realistic.

I think my Russian quite weak. There were brilliant students in my class, folks who soaked it up and were truly fluent (one of my fellow students was a college instructor, in his civilian job, of German; he did fine). I was passably competent. I was not praised for my skill (quite the reverse, actually).

When I got to a Russian speaking place... I was shocked to discover I tolerably, not barely, competent.

I slacked my way through a couple of years of HS German but found once in Germany and Austria, I had no problem understanding people, signs, etc, and little problem communicating, even if it was obvious I was not a native speaker.

I've been slogging through the Rosetta Stone Polish stuff in addition to going through travel phrasebooks and I have to say that it's a ridiculous language. I'm going to keep going after I come back from Poland because I'm going to have to go back in order to see everything I want to see, and also, I refuse to be defeated by a language!

nerdycellist: How so ridiculous?

Mostly the huge consonant clusters. The nice thing about the RS series is that you hear the language constantly, but it's taken me months to realize that just because all the letters are there doesn't mean you have to pronounce them all.

(I did try to use "Ridiculous" in the place of "Insane" in an experiment to be mindful of the perjoratives I use. "Lame" is proving the most difficult to eradicate. "Insane" is coming in a close second. I don't actually think the Polish language should be held up to ridicule, especially as someone who speaks English.)

Elliott Mason, Diatryma

pinyin enshrines as The One Official Phonology a single accent of many

Yes, but that doesn't explain the inconsistencies. The language represented is that of Beijing. The accent is not quite -- Beijing accent adds an 'r' sound to the end of many words, which is not part of Standard Mandarin or the pinyin spelling.

I think the inconsistencies like pronouncing -ui as /uei/ or using the same letter for the completely different sounds in li and shi are more a matter of compression. Pinyin is more compact than the Wade-Giles or Yale romanizations, and there is still a fairly simple and completely regular set of pronounciation rules.

Chris Quinones @ #253: Me, 117: (Why does it seem so unnatural to write "I, 117"?

My immediate assumption is that it's because it's short for "This comment is addressed to/follows on from the comment made by ..."

Terry Karney @ #254: I seem to have lost a comment: I opined that I'd expect children who learn Esperanto as a native language to be better at others.

This comment? (#211)

(I searched for "esperanto" on your view-all-by page. Fewer false positives to deal with than searching the main thread.)

Diatryma @ 247: "What really got to me was that pinyin, which I understood to be made up for convenience, has irregularities. -uei becomes -ui. -i is usually a nice familiar i-like-in-Spanish, but after sibilants, it's a placeholder for a sound that my teachers couldn't understand I wanted to hear on its own."

Do you mean the -i in "xiang" or in "ri?" After x-, j-, q-, the -i isn't an individual sound as much as it is an artifact of the mouth shape necessary to make the preceding consonant. If you're doing the x- right, the -i is incidental and unavoidable. As for "zi, ci, si, zhi, chi, shi, ri," they have always seemed to me to be orphaned consonants, with just enough voicedness to carry the tone. As far as I can see, putting a "-i" there is just a typographical convenience more than an indication of pronunciation.

Pinyin's regularity is often compromised for typographical convenience, which is I think a questionable decision. Phonetically it suffers from the same unavoidable problem that English does--there are more distinct vowel sounds than there are vowels. Clodging is therefore a necessity, but then it goes and clodges even when it doesn't have to. Your example is a good one; what's wrong with writing "dwei" rather than "dui," to parallel "shei" and "wei?" I'm not sure "it looks nicer" is a reason that cuts it for me.

Elliot Mason @ 250: "After quickly separating out the members of (a) who belonged in the specific "I'm fluent but illiterate in Spanish" class our school offers, she did a really amazing tapdance between not intimidating (c) while still challenging and intriguing (a) and (b) with enough that ties into what we already know that we could start using it and attaching it to the existing body of language-knowledge."

Having been a language teacher with wildly divergent skill levels among my students, I am in awe of people who can pull that off. It's so hard not to end up boring one half of the class of the other.

Chris Quinones @ 202, Lee @ 204: as an early adopter of LJ, I am amongst those grandfathered into freedom to maintain a free account without ads. I have an S1 journal style (which, as has been noted, is no longer supported, though it still works just fine if you ask me). Do either of you (or anyone else reading this) know if, should I switch to an S2 style, I would maintain that ad-less free account?

(LJ offers "tags and choice of ad placement" as one of the inducements to upgrade to S2. Tags are nice. Ads, not so much.)

Chris #253:

Not "unnatural", just "ambiguous", because "I, 117" looks like a citation to the first volume of some multivolume work, page 117. (At least to me.)

Congrats on your admission!

Elliot Mason @250 -- a whole page of exercises written in Latin, phonetically in Greek characters.

Reminds me of those rinky-dink dictionaries they had for ring-binders. I had one in grade school which had the Greek alphabet displayed at the back. Cool! I thought, and promptly started a Harriet-the-Spy style diary that I wrote phonetically in Greek characters. Kept it up for several years, and got pretty quick at it.

Terry Karney @#221: Les (my housemate, Best Roommate Evah! (Calif. Edition)...

Ahem. Many sympathies for your plight. Woe to be in Reno when all the burners are passing through.

However, I must respectfully beg to differ, for, you see, it is I who has the Best Housemate Evar (Calif. Edition). Oh, wait, perhaps there are different divisions for Roommate and Housemate? It may be that we're both right after all.

nerdycellist @257, on not pronouncing all the letters. I found a similar kind of thing when I visited India. I don't speak any Indian languages, so I was fortunate to be in Bangalore, where many people do speak some English.

But I found that when I tried to pronounce an Indian name carefully [usually a location/street name], with all the syllables sounded out (and of course an English emphasis pattern) nobody could figure out what I meant. When we finally managed to come to an understanding, I usually found that they said it with a different syllable stress and what seemed like fewer syllables completely than my version.

So, for instance, something like Devarabisanahalli - I would say Day-VAR-ah-bee-SAN-ah-HALL-ee. When I finally figured out the pronunciation that made sense to a local, it would be more like Dev-rah-BIS-nall-ee.

So, I learned to generally pronounce as few vowels [especially A's] and elidable consonants [like H] as possible, and that seemed to make me more comprehensible to the locals.

siriosa @265--clearly, when dealing the "The Best_______", you need to break it down, by areas of the state, counties, municipalities, and neighborhoods, as necessary--this is why my housemate has Simon, The Best Dog in the World* (East Nashville addition) and a friend of ours has Newton, Best Dog in the World (Priest Lake Division).

*Nearly all dog owners (at least, nearly all those who deserve the dogs they have) have The Best Dog in the World. It's one of the givens of Life with Dogs.

Terry Karney, I had the same man teaching 4th and 5th years French AND 1st and 2nd years Russian in high school. It always amazed me that he never got the classes and languages confused (unless he wanted to), since when he announced at the end of the French III year that he'd be teaching Russian I the following year 2/3 of his French class signed up for it. That meant he saw an awful lot of familiar faces in both French IV and Russian I and again the next year for French V and Russian II.

oliviacw @266

I had similar experiences in Denmark. They often appear to be swallowing half of the sounds one sees written (Ask a Dane to pronounce 'gade', for example.) Written Danish is fairly transparent to me, which probably made the disconnect between what was in my head and the proper pronunciation even bigger. This made asking for directions really hard, somewhat ironically, as the average Dane's English is very good. Alas, street names and locations are in Danish, so I often ended up spelling out the name of the place I was looking for, and letting them point it out on my map..

fidelio @267 said: Nearly all dog owners (at least, nearly all those who deserve the dogs they have) have The Best Dog in the World. It's one of the givens of Life with Dogs.

I don't. Neither of my dogs are Best Dogs. However, my smaller beagle could probably be up there in the World Worry Championships, and the larger is probably at least locally ranked for Most Tolerant. Toddlers yanking on his lips gets, at most, a rolled eye towards the nearest adult and a silent "If you weren't too busy, you could make them quit?" kind of look.

Also, Open-Thready Link Relevant To Interests:

Remember that marbling-on-paper guy? Turns out you can marble on fingernails, too, because standard nail enamel is oil-based. It's so very cool it almost tempts me to wear nail polish, and that is cool indeed.

I bet you could do it on other surfaces that nail polish sticks to -- my mom always used garishly horrid polish colors to color-code keys, and this would be AN AWESOME way to do that. With several serious heavy-duty clearcoats on top to protect it, of course ... Or small round-bottomed plastic bowls? Nail polish sticks to plastic like a champ, once you alcohol-clean it (and perhaps sand lightly).

Relevant to a discussion here a few months ago, here's a comic strip that tells us where vuvuzelas come from.

I'm pretty sure my idea of my Chinese abilities was near accurate. I was the best not-already-speaking-it in the class, but at no point during the semester could I count to ten or spontaneously list three colors.

Heresiarch, it's the si i thing, the one that's pronounced s'z. When I asked-- and really, it's been two years, I am no longer benefiting from this grouchiness-- the teacher repeated that you can't have just a consonant, you get b-, b-, b-, you have to have a vowel so you get ba or ma or whatever. Which is why I still think that, at that level, people who do are not fluent in English are not the best choice for teachers.

Like I said, a lot of it's also that I know I could have done better. I could have worked harder, done more-- or really anything-- on my own, et cetera. I know people who would do that. I know people who *have* done that. So I attack the class with everything I have because the alternative is me being a faily faily failure with that at the same time as with grad school in general.

Today's revelation: there is no way to frame me leaving grad school as a positive when I don't attack it. I can't find a sentence that doesn't translate, in my head, to 'I dropped out'. So from here on, I'm going to try to be a little more negative about the reasons I left. Because really, there's nothing a PhD would have gotten me that I didn't already hate.

Elliott #270, Dan #271:

The juxtaposition leads me to contemplate, oh ghu, just totally theoretically, marbled vuvuzelas. Eek.

ajay @80 (belatedly): Structurally the pun works in German as well as it does in English; I couldn't say how familiar the poet would be to a German audience.

My dog is not the best dog in the world.

Stefan Jones @ 275... That what Agatha the Cat Genius often does, when she's not enjoying popping a dove's head off. Meanwhile here is the best dog in the world.

I recently caught the coming attraction for the BBC's new version of First Men in the Moon. It doesn't look bad, just... lackluster.

What I want to hear is a composition for vuvuzela, kazuzela, and digiriduzela.

Play it at the zoozela.

Linkmeister@268, the Russian teacher at my high school also taught French 4/5, and was apparently quite good. (She also taught philosophy, and wasn't as good at that...) My junior high German teacher also taught French - her Brooklyn accent probably did much less damage to German, where an extra or missing R at the end of a woid just changes the case or gendah a bit, as opposed to throwing off whole syllables. Unfortunately, the school system adopted an early-retirement policy for teachers before I got to high school, so the old German native teacher retired and was replaced by a young American woman with no useful accent.

Clarentine, #262: I don't know, but I would tend to suspect not. However, the best way to find out about that is to ask someone at LJ. I opted for a permanent account quite a while back (as in, I don't think I've quite gotten the 6 years out of it that would balance what I paid, but I'm only maybe a year short), so issues of paid vs. free have been something I haven't noticed much.

There's a sneaky way to get rid of most ads. Figure out where they're coming from, and load those domains into your Hosts file with a destination of 127.0.0.0. This puts the ad itself into the bit-bucket, and leaves you with only a placeholder message that won't have Stupid Blinking Shit all over it.

Debbie, #264: Heh. I did that in college using the Quenya runes from the back of LOTR. I used it to write letters to my friends during summer break -- sent them an index key and they wrote back the same way. My parents snooped and got absolutely hysterical about "letters written in code", never realizing that they were providing evidence of why it was a good idea in the first place.

Bill Stewart @ #279, I don't know whether he got involuntarily retired or what, but later in life he maintained AARP's website for several years, or so he tells me via Facebook.

(Now THAT was a kick. Reconnecting with the best teacher I ever had via social media was not on my list of things I ever expected to happen.)

Serge @49/52 -

Thanks for your oblique mention of "Native Star". I saw a review on Tor that I only half-read because it looked interesting and I didn't want anything that might possibly be a spoiler. Your note reminded me, and I promptly used my one-paid-download-per-week budget and loaded it onto my nook. I can't put it down! (even if I haven't looked at the Thank-You page yet.) New Author to follow! Yay!!

Open-thready Hyperlocal News:

Treadle upgrade

St. Paul's Dome tea cozy

nerdycellist @ 282... When I first read MK Hobson's story "The Hotel Astarte" years ago, I knew I had made a Discovery. I'm glad that her first novel is allowing you and others that same chance.

nerdychellist: I'm of a mixed mind on RS (I've used it for maintenance on my russian).

As to the clusters of consonants... they are, and aren't pronounced. The are meant to be a single sound; but are making do with Latin letters, and the sounds aren't mapped well.

Russian has the same sounds, but (thanks be to St. Cyril) it has specific letters to represent them. I got nuts trying to read transliterated Russian; it's gibberish to me.

ghaahhh: cellist (says the boy who used to be half-decent on the bloody thing).

Today was a much better ride than yesterday, but it's still a tiring thing to be doing day in, day out.

Hard to explain; it's worth it, but I'll be glad to be home, and off the bike for a few days (and not on it for 5-7 hours a day anytime soon).

By the way, I've redacted John Stanning's quote of the malicious code on the previous open thread. We're still blacklisted by some anti-virus sites*, and we wonder if this might be part of the problem. We don't really trust the sites to be smart enough to figure out where code is executable and where not.

-----
* the lurkers report this in the emails†
† </earworm>

abi, did you guys just change something? The "see past x000 comments" pages now have white background and large print; I can still see which posts I've previously clicked. It was fine (blue background, small print) this morning. Don't know if this has anything to do with anything, but FWIW I'm running Chrome on Ubuntu 9.10.

Debbie @288:

Drat, this was supposed to all happen while everyone was asleep! It's taking a little longer than we anticipated, is all.

(What we're doing is removing some php scripts we used for including external files in html pages, then stripping the ability for html pages to call php at all. This should reduce our attack surface to the kind of exploit we've just suffered.)

It looks fine on FireFox. But really, abi, you know you can't do anything while EVERYONE is asleep. There are probably a couple of timezones with no Fluorospherians in them, but not many.

Terry Karney @285:

I wonder what language the good people of Gibber point to as their stereotype of incomprehensibility? Perhaps they say it's all Barbarian to me.

Xopher @290:
But really, abi, you know you can't do anything while EVERYONE is asleep.

Depends on my powers of hypnosis.

Copied verbatim from a weekend work-email flamewar I am trying to quench:

If he spreads negativity like this across a number of people, he gets an angry response from me.

I think we have a verb conjugation, but I'm struggling with the second-person form.

I respond angrily
you ???
he spreads negativity

Xopher, you underestimate the power of the Abiveld!

Open thready reflection on the nature of parenthood: it occurred to me earlier to recall what movies I've seen in the theater rather than renting them or summat. Apart from going alone to see Inception last month, I think the last film for grown-ups I went out to see was Eat Drink Man Woman.

Yeah, kids change your life.

I interrupt this open thread to make a plea for the kind thoughts, prayers, and local equivalents of the Fluorosphere.

A semi-estranged relative of mine (for which reason, no identifying information is included here) is waiting for a liver transplant. There are financial problems, there are need-to-move and pet-rehoming problems, and perhaps most difficult of all there is encephalopathy from the liver failure which makes the patient unable to understand why things like taking meds, answering the phone or the door, or sticking to a prescribed diet are important.

All kind thoughts, prayers, etc. much appreciated. Also, anyone in the Atlanta area who might be able to give a home to either an outdoor cat (indoors for 5 minutes max at mealtimes) or a very large, elderly dog, please email me (lila at markandlila dot com).

Thanks. Back to less depressing topics.

Dave Bonta offers a music review of Appalachian September. ;-)

abi, 293: "Responding angrily" feels like the second-person form to me, but I can't get the first-person right. How about, "I respond forcefully, you lose your temper, he spreads negativity"?

TexAnne @297:

Collected in the wild, it was first-person. Your humble ethnographer sticks with the original source in this context.

I could go for "give an angry response" rather than "respond angrily", but I still think there's got to be a second person in there.

Lila @295:

I'm inconveniently located for the livestock, but I'll say a word where words are said.

Much sympathy.

Lila #295: My sympathies. Unfortunately, I'm in the market for an indoor cat right now, not an outdoor one.

abi 298:

It may not be close enough for your present needs, but I suspect the past tense may go something like this:

I responded angrily; you have been known to be a bit short-tempered; he has a history of spreading negativity.

Or maybe: I responded angrily; you were a bit over the top; he spread negativity.

abi: much appreciated

Fragano: good luck with the kitty search; I hope you continue to recover swiftly.

abi @ 298: "You overreact," perhaps.

abi @289 -- I'm back from working in the garden, et voilà! everything's fine now. Now that's what I call service.

(I'm in your time zone. And a morning person to boot :-))

re: response, temper, negativity, it should be possible to reconfigure that thought into a haiku.

Today is either ironbutt, and all the way home (not less than eight hours saddle time, perhaps as much as ten), or laying up someplace between Reno and home.

There are advantages to both (money, time, less traffic for the former: Scenery, pace, no sense of rush for the latter).

So I pack with all good haste, head toward Reno, and see what comes of the day.

Joel Polowin @249 - Ah. That's gonna cause a little confusion. Mind if we call you Zanzibar, just to keep it clear?

Lee @280 - Come to think of it, I did something like that with some friends in junior high, with a vaguely runish-looking made-up alphabet (with a couple that stood for short, common words). As everybody else notes, we got fairly good at it.

A cousin of mine wrote to JRRT querying a typo she thought she'd found in the runes on the title page of he LOTR. She got a nice reply from a secretary. It was indeed an error.

Earl Cooley III @306:

I spoke in anger.
You went a bit ballistic.
He's always flaming.

Reaching deep into the backthread to reply to Xopher @191 (too many distractions this week)

To be honest, if I had any spare brain-cells available for language-learning they'd be best devoted to brushing up my Turkish. It would be nice to be able to produce sentences with (the local surrogate for)subordinate clauses which sounded vaguely grammatical.

If you want to save a dying language, there are lots of natural ones with actual cultural content that will be lost forever; work on one of those

I sympathise with this; but I wonder whether second-language speakers of a dying language could save it from dying. (I mean, second language speakers of the sort I would be, as opposed to mother tongue bilinguals)

There might be obvious exceptions for cases where a language has as it's specific role to be a widely-shared second language, like mediaeval Latin (I think I've been told Swahili is a bit like this too - does anyone here know?).

Usual disclaimer: IANAL.

Kip W @ 308: Very nice. May I borrow it?

Oh, sheesh, invented alphabets.

My best friend in high school and I made up a writing system*, which we used to pass notes that no one else could read. We both did a lot of private writing in it, too. I remember finding a musing of hers in it, on a desk she sat in two periods before me.

Later, I invented a cursive version, which not even she knew.

She's forgotten the whole thing now, but I use them both for references to passwords and other notes I don't want the people around me to understand.

I do sometimes feel like Calvin and Hobbes with their secret decoder ring, though. I mean, it's not like I'm hiding state secrets or anything.
-----
* we called it runic. Be nice. We were 15.

Earl Cooley III @306 said: re: response, temper, negativity, it should be possible to reconfigure that thought into a haiku.

Goodwill drops, presumed

malice rises as

squared inverse distance from self.

Not a very good one; I couldn't work in a seasonal reference.

That said, there are some awesome ones written by students installed in the south end of the Harrison red line stop in Chicago -- on skinny posters, vertically (words sideways) in the cavities of the pillars that line the platform. They all involve transit somehow. I presume the CTA held a competition. I remember a couple very strongly:

I dreamed the el stopped at Kyoto: cherry blossoms floating everywhere.

[first poster too damaged to read] take the secret stone from your pocket: throw it in the lake.

Unrelatedly, this thread's double-bitzer just passed. I keep trying to hit one, but am never home and online at the precise right moment, apparently.

Invented alphabets: I got warned off those in middle grades, by a book named iirc Alvin and the Secret Code, which pointed out that most such systems could be trivially broken cryptoquote-style. Much more recently, the game Aquaria uses such an alphabet for background graffiti; one I started "breaking" it and made a table of the letters, I was surprised how quickly I was able to read the messages directly, or close.

Linkmeister@281 - Wow, Mind Boggles! This was Herr Willi Einholf, jah? I never actually met him, though his wife was a bit younger and taught business* at the high school. Do we know each other, or perhaps I'd know a younger sibling of yours?

* "Business" was a set of courses for girls who were going to be secretaries or work in offices, on the non-academic track like advanced shop courses for boys in high school. I wish I'd realized what they were teaching, because in addition to typing, they did stuff like keypunching and getting to program the wire plugboards in the antique business machines that I'd used a bit in Boy Scouts (where we *weren't* allowed to mess with the wiring, just with the keypunches and paper-tape.)

David Harmon @313: Invented alphabets: I got warned off those in middle grades, by a book named iirc Alvin and the Secret Code, which pointed out that most such systems could be trivially broken cryptoquote-style.

Not if you do as I did when writing in English in Greek letters to practice my fluency in the character set. I transliterated phonetically rather than having a one-to-one letter mapping. Especially since Homeric Greek has rather different vowel- and dipthong-to-sound choices than English does. If you were building a confabet, you could deliberately build in such security features, as well as (as Kip W mentioned @308) adding in one-character shortcuts for commonly used words.

I used the term "writing system" rather than "alphabet" for a reason. Not that it's anything like uncrackable, even with the fairly short bits of it that I tend to leave lying around.

My main point of the Calvin and Hobbes reference is that I am morally certain that no one cares enough to put the time into cracking it.

(I used the phrase "references to passwords" intentionally as well. I don't write my passwords down, even in script.)

Terry@307, if your butt's had too much iron for the day, and you haven't left yet, there's a hot springs place in Carson City, a bit south of Reno. I haven't been there, looks like a swimming pool rather than a swimming hole out in the boonies.

Bill Stewart @ #314, no, the teacher I'm fondly remembering is Adair R. McConnell. When I was taking classes from him it was at Thomas Jefferson HS in Alexandria, Va. in the mid-1960s.

David Harmon #313: Invented alphabets: I got warned off those in middle grades, by a book named iirc Alvin and the Secret Code, which pointed out that most such systems could be trivially broken cryptoquote-style.

Alvin's Secret Code, by Clifford B. Hicks (ISBN-10: 1932350004).

Terry - presumably you can ignore my previous comment unless you stop in Reno for lunch and Wifi; I'd forgotten ML is on Eastern Time, and was wondering why you were online at noon instead of having left in the morning :-)

You've all heard of CNN, I expect.

They have a thing called iReports, where people can post news stories, including some pretty ordinary diatribes against the usual suspects of the day.

They're covering Dragon*Con as a special topic, in Atlanta as they are.

The reporting doesn't feel very fannish.

I've submitted a few reports, some of them passing the CNN vetting process, in my Second Life persona, and incidentally pointed one of their staff at GAFilk.

I don't think it's very likely you would get noticed, and the T&C on copyright to your text and pictures could be considered abusive, but it's a way of getting publicity.

abi @ 316

So "fish" and "ghoti" could have the same spelling in your system?

David, #313: Yeah, I understood about substitution ciphers and frequency analysis too -- but I knew my parents didn't. Security via enemy ignorance. :-)

abi @ 316... Last weekend, at Bubonicon, I met writer a woman who speaks Navajo and I asked her about WW2 cryptography that used that language. She revealed that the men had been from Magdalena, a very small town near the Very Large Array, and proceeded to explain how the cryptography worked. No wonder the Nazis had... ah... problems with that - besides the fact there weren't many Navajo speakers in the Fatherland.

Serge @ 324: That cryptography is central to the plot of Windtalkers, though I haven't watched the film and don't know if it's any good.

I just heard a guy on the radio refer to some art thieves not being the type to wear "baklavas."

Sigh.

Of course not. The traces of honey would give them away.

Linkmeister - I went to TJ in the late 80s, as it turned into the science and tech school. Small world.

Xopher #326: Not to mention getting into their ears.

eric @ #327, I've often wondered what the local reaction was to that transition. Merging the kids into Annandale HS, hated enemy that it was, must have been awfully difficult. And turning TJHS into a magnet school for "top-drawer" kids must really have ticked off the parents whose kids were judged wanting.

Greetings from Down Under! I'd just like to say that while PNH has many fine qualities, being any good at 'Just a Minute' is not one of them! I found the 'panel' at Worldcon very entertaining.

Pendrift @ 325... I've never seen the film, but I heard that's what it's about. By the way, do you know where I first heard about Navajo cryptography? In the early seasons of X-Files.

So. I'm moving to New Zealand next month^* and have started packing. After the first ten boxes of books I have come to the realization that paperback sizes are a whole lot less standardized than I had thought. This is annoying when you are trying to stack them neatly.

^* Not the bit that just fell down^#

^# Or the bit where Au Contraire was held.

Dave Bell @322 said: So "fish" and "ghoti" could have the same spelling in [abi's writing] system?

Depends whether you're saying that second word like "fish" or like "ghola", doesn't it. :->

I'm continually amazed by the soundalike borrowed words in our Spanish textbook that make perfect "have you been paying attention and practicing your phonics" shibboleths☂ for my classmates. Exempli gratia: los bluejeans, el suéter, la chaqueta★. Not to mention things like psicologia, matemáticas, and la guitarra that look kind of like the American spelling but are not pronounced anything like identically. The bugbear for me is words that are spelt very much like the English word they look like, AND have the same meaning, BUT have one less letter -- usually an undoubling of something doubled in English. Drives my internal typo-sensor nuts while I'm retraining it.

Lee @323 said: David, #313: Yeah, I understood about substitution ciphers and frequency analysis too -- but I knew my parents didn't. Security via enemy ignorance. :-)

As Bruce Schneier keeps explaining, security by obscurity is no security at all. And the same applies to childproofing: if it's only childproof because they don't know you keep something cool back there (or that, for example, the knobs on the front attach to drawers that OPEN), you've already lost. :-> I need to write a blogpost taking his laws of good security over into the childproofing realm, the parallels are hilarious.

Serge @324 said: Last weekend, at Bubonicon, I met writer a woman who speaks Navajo and I asked her about WW2 cryptography that used that language. She revealed that the men had been from Magdalena, a very small town near the Very Large Array, and proceeded to explain how the cryptography worked. No wonder the Nazis had... ah... problems with that - besides the fact there weren't many Navajo speakers in the Fatherland.

And then, Pendrift @325 said: Serge @ 324: That cryptography is central to the plot of Windtalkers, though I haven't watched the film and don't know if it's any good.

I rather liked it. I was shocked to discover that, starting with that film, Nicholas Cage actually gains access to more than two facial expressions (usually, previous to that, angry or woobie)! He must have levelled up or spent some XP or something. I was watching it for the historical subject and for the primary Native American actor (who's awesome, and who I had most recently seen playing Jim Chee in the PBS Hillerman dramatizations).

I cannot speak to the film's accuracy with any academic rigor, but my understanding is that they got the outlines at least right. According to it and to a PBS documentary I saw on similar topic, the trick to the cryptography is that not only was it a language the Nazis were exceedingly likely to have a native speaker of handy (and of which there were hardly any dictionaries made, at the time), they were using word parallels like 'turtle' for tank, substituting words that start with the right letter for the numbers, and generally being extremely figurative, metaphorical, and downright sidelong. The windtalkers also (with the acquiescence or ignorance of their higher-ups, I don't know) held parallel conversations, inserting nonmilitary gossip and jokes in the middle of their codetalking: passing news about other Navajos to each other and generally maintaining a sideband grapevine.

----
☂ A word that, incidentally, we have no idea how it was originally pronounced ... because of the nature of the writing system in which it is preserved.

★ We're on the 'clothing and colors' unit of Spanish 102. I know how to say pantyhose! Also, it's interesting where the lines between camisa/camiseta/polo/blusa lie. I now know that I generally prefer camisas in my daily wear (men's-style shirts with a collar and buttons all the way down the front, of a woven material). Camisetas are t-shirts, except in local dialects, where they're sometimes something else (a lot of Mexican-origin Spanish speakers call them las playeras, etc). Un polo is a polo shirt: a knitted-fabric shirt with a collar and a couple-three buttons at the neck. Blusa is most female shirts that aren't camisetas or something else specific. In Spain, just for those of you that have found this geeking fun enough to keep reading, 'los bluejeans' are actually 'los tejanos' -- "Texan pants". :-> Or sometimes 'los vaqueros' -- "cowboy pants". Mi profesora es de Barcelona, so she's very aware that (after her native Catalan -- meaning only her second language, Castilian) she speaks a minority variety of the language, and urges us not to imprint upon her accent.

Elliott Mason#333:
The bugbear for me is words that are spelt very much like the English word they look like, AND have the same meaning, BUT have one less letter -- usually an undoubling of something doubled in English.

That's exactly my problem with American.

thomas @ 332 : Best of luck - having just moved most of the way across the US, I have fresh memories of how lame the process is. The end result is enjoyable (or, it has been for me), but the process is backbreaking and not enjoyable in the least. Owning lots of books does not make it any easier.

On a less related point - but linked back to a topic of occasional discussion here on ML, I am making my first raspberry liqueur - I picked up three boxes of raspberries (~18oz by weight) today at Berkeley Bowl and the berries are now immersed in vodka in one of my cabinets. Given that I had half a bottle of vodka kicking around from refilling my homemade vanilla extract bottle right after I moved, the real cost of this project was just the $3 for the berries. Hope it turns out tasty...

Elliot Mason #333: In the part of Spain I'm more familiar with, jeans are generally "vaqueros" rather than "tejanos".

I'd translate "blusa" as "blouse" (but then my English is not the Standard Gringo variety), and "camisa" simply as "shirt" (though someone a generation or so older than me might be inclined to use it to mean "tunic" as well).

Elliot Mason #333: Let me add: What you have to watch for in Spanish are the faux amis the words that look so much like English ones but mean something very different. The classic ones are constipación, which is a head cold, and the verb embarazar and all its derivatives, which means "to become pregnant".

I remember, as a boy, reading in my mother's gossip magazine that the Queen "estaba constipada" and expressing consternation that something as intimate as this was being reported in the Spanish press. My mother patiently explained exactly what was meant.

Elliott @231: Friendly neighborhood math teacher reporting in.

I have great faith in your ability to sort the thing for yourself, but should you ever decide that one more person's explanation might help the process along, I'm always game. Send me a shout through LJ, eh?

Teachers who snark their students should retire two years ago. I occasionally snark my students' *parents*, to be sure, but never the students. They can make me sad, angry, and frustrated, frustrated, *frustrated*, but snark is just... not a response I have.

Elliott 333: the primary Native American actor (who's awesome, and who I had most recently seen playing Jim Chee in the PBS Hillerman dramatizations).

Adam Beach. He also played Detective Chester Lake on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.

Fragano @337 -- there's also danger if one is trying to take an icy caldo shower....

Belated thoughts on David Goldfarb's request for New Orleans hotel info @14 -

On the weekend that Katrina hit, my sister-in-law and her then-sweetie were celebrating an anniversary in the French Quarter. They stayed at a bed and breakfast called The Banana Courtyard. They, and several other boarders, had no good way to evacuate in the face of this unexpected disaster. The owners simply took these boarders with them to their own home on the northshore and took good care of them until things settled down enough for them to be on their way.

I try to tell anyone looking for lodgings in the Quarter this story, because such kindness should be rewarded. No clue why it didn't come to mind when I first read the request.

praisegod barebones @310 - Certainly. Be my guest! Hm. It was practically dictated to me by others in the thread.

Elliott Mason @312 - It's a tough one to get all that in. Maybe:

To the furthest off
I impute the worst motives.
Good will falls like leaves.

Or perhaps a more direct approach:

To the most remote
The worst motives I assign —
In springtime, mofo!

What? I reach, man!

Elliot Mason @ 333... they were using word parallels like 'turtle' for tank, substituting words that start with the right letter for the numbers, and generally being extremely figurative, metaphorical, and downright sidelong

That's pretty much what that lady told me.

the primary Native American actor (who's awesome, and who I had most recently seen playing Jim Chee in the PBS Hillerman dramatizations)

That'd be Adam Beach. I think the first thing I ever saw him in was Smoke Signal.

Nicholas Cage actually gains access to more than two facial expressions (usually, previous to that, angry or woobie)

In Grindhouse, his role as Fu Manchu showed that he can also do diabolical laughter.

In case you missed this, Kanye West is saying he "bled hard" about his misbehavior toward Taylor Swift, and he's tweeting all about it:

NEW YORK – Hip-hop star Kanye West is still feeling the pain over his trophy grab from Taylor Swift last year — and he's expressing his pain all over Twitter.

West unleashed a torrent of emotions on his official Twitter account Saturday, acknowledging once again that he was wrong for jumping on stage, taking the trophy that Swift won at the MTV Video Music Awards and saying that it should have gone to Beyonce.

But the rapper-producer said that he has experienced enormous pain, been the subject of death wishes and suffered tremendous setback to his career.

Oh, fuck off and die, Kanye. Stop whining about YOUR pain. Even your efforts to "make amends" are selfish and attention-hogging (he wrote a song for Taylor Swift to perform, can you believe that?).

The only thing I want to hear from you is that you've stopped drinking. You're an asshole when you're drunk; you know this; you keep drinking and acting like an asshole; and you think apologizing all the time is enough. It isn't. Either get thee to AA or SHUT THE FUCK UP.

</rant> Sorry. That came up on my Yahoo newsfeed. I just wish this asshole would go the fuck away.

Xopher @ 326 -- Hey, if a couple of guys are dumb enough to disguise their faces with permanent magic marker... ("Or pinches her figger / Is painted with vigour / And permanent walnut juice")

As usual, I am in Xopher's camp. It would be lovely if a certain demented fool with a talent for public stupidity would just crawl back into his pit and STFU.

Or develop a functional prefrontal cortex. Not picky on this one.

I liked Kanye's team-up with Daft Punk. It's a shame people think they have to live the lyfe instead of just doing the art.

And it would be nice if Obama could be as honest in general as he was about Kanye.

Zelda @338 said: Teachers who snark their students should retire two years ago. I occasionally snark my students' *parents*, to be sure, but never the students. They can make me sad, angry, and frustrated, frustrated, *frustrated*, but snark is just... not a response I have.

I've had worse. Actually, my husband has had MUCH worse -- in our household, the extreme form of the impulse is called "Bernsteining".☀

In the main, the teachers I've had at City Colleges of Chicago have been uniformly supportive, and very interested in teaching☂ ... I don't really hold this against Dr. D. Apparently he gets a lot of people who took precal a very long time ago (and only got Cs then), but who are in a hurry to finish their coursework and figure they can just jump right into his class while they're still rusty on things like the quadratic equation (or how to divide by negative numbers or deal with them in fractions, in the case of some of my classmates).

If his snark continues past the point where everyone who should really be taking the prereq has left to go do so, then I might hold it against him. When he's not frustrated by being asked to explain the same thing for the fourth time this class, he's personable and interesting, and his examples are wonderfully geeky. He does a lot of starting his explanations (as with the definition of ellipses, or the concept of rational/real/etc numbers) with the Ancient Greeks and going forward to each new leap in understanding of the concept, which humanizes the history of math in a way that might intrigue people less already-hooked than I am. :->

----
☀ The eponymous professor taught a course at UIC in whose first class period he walked into the room silently, filled every board with dense equations, turned to the class, and said, "If you don't understand everything I just did, you don't belong in this class. Drop it now." My husband dropped, and took it with a different prof.

☂ While on my first semester of working at the school newspaper, I did the standard 'interview the new teachers' story. One of the crop had just been working at MIT in materials science (specifically, about how chemistry changes radically at the surface of an object ... if I'm remembering correctly how he explained it). I was a little shocked, and asked how he came to be working at CCC instead. He said, "It's simple. I got sick of spending all my time writing grant reports. I want to TEACH." I can certainly confirm at at UIC, none of the profs I had in any 100- or 200-level course were terribly interested in teaching, so if that's your gig I guess it can be frustrating to be at a big research institution? I know he took a massive pay cut coming to our little community college system, so he's got to be doing it from love.

I remember a math teacher in Georgia who was the opposite of the sarcastic, impatient guy. He was just so darn even-tempered and unflappable. I said at the time that if somebody had stood up and said they'd forgotten how to multiply two numbers, he'd have smiled and said, well, okay, let's just try some examples at the board and see if we can't just make some sense out of that.

Unfortunately, it wasn't enough for me. His class, somebody else's class, I don't remember who was teaching it, but after a decade or more of straight A grades in classes mathematical, I hit a wall with calculus. I think I was okay for the first quarter, but after that my test grades went A, B, C, D, and F. One more test and they'd have had to bring out a new letter. Through some oddity of averaging, I emerged from the class with a B-, but when I tried the next class, I couldn't even make out what was being said any more. And the youngsters (I was 23 when I started college) were just moving right along, even the ones who just seemed like silly airheads. Mortified I was, and never took another math class (though I ended up being secretary in a math department for a couple of years, down the line).

Joel Polowin @ 345
Thanks for sharing that link. It's amazing what seems like a good idea at the time.

Just saw that the 2012 WorldCon is going to be Labor Day Weekend (what a silly turn of phrase) in Chicago. Here's what I posted in response to a musing that going up against Dragon Con isn't wise:

"2004 WorldCon— Boston. 2004 DNC— Boston.
2008 WordCon— Denver. 2008 DNC— Denver.
2012 WorldCon— Chicago. Incumbent Democratic President from Chicago... what are the odds the date will be moved?"

I swear, somebody who is doing the scheduling for the DNC is a science fiction fan, since all of the DNC conventions were scheduled after the WorldCons were...

Elliott Mason @ 349: On the subject of math teachers who are nasty the first day:

I showed up to my 4th term of calculus, and the professor regarded us with a rather cold eye. He handed out a syllabus that spoke of more than usual homework, no opportunities to make up missed tests, and so on.

I showed up on the second day, to find that about a quarter of the class had dropped. The professor greeted the survivors cheerfully, and proceeded to do a great job. He even held special study sessions before tests, in addition to his regular office hours. It turned out that he didn't want to deal with people who would only show up to class sporadically, and come in after every test arguing that he'd graded them unfairly. Rather a dirty trick on the other professors, of course.

Elliott @349: I had a band conductor in HS who was clearly very burnt out, and he took his dissatisfactions out on us in the form of some real nastiness from the podium. Some of it might have been witty, had there not been actual human beings on the receiving end. Then in college I had a choir director who also made fun during rehearsal-- but he made fun of the mistakes, not the people, and it was all of that clearly affectionate sort of teasing. ISTM that the solution to the problem your prof is facing is an opening-day test over the prerequisites, not for part of the course grade but just to identify those who aren't prepared, both to the prof and to themselves.

The prize "bad math teacher" story in my family was a professor my father had at Northwestern who spoke effectively no English, but was the only instructor for a required course. He did not lecture and he did not keep office hours. He would walk into the classroom, turn his back on the class, write equations on the blackboard with his right hand, erase them with his left hand as he went, and walk out at the end of the hour. Dad bailed and took his master's at American U instead.

Kip W @350: I'm a private tutor, so it's explicitly my job to be that guy. When my kids ask me whether calculus is hard, I always say I don't know. There are a couple of concepts in there that are just *different* from most of the linear progression of math taught in HS. Whether the course is hard depends on how readily you achieve brain-wrap on those concepts, and there's not much way to predict who will take to them. My job is to keep turning them on their sides until we find the angle from which my students can grasp them. I'm still working on finding more ways beyond just the way I personally think about them; every student I work with makes me better.

I found calculus a better fit for my brain wiring than any math I'd done before. I had a VERY hard time with math in grade school, and I had struggled with algebra, but somehow calculus came (relatively) easily.

To anyone studying trig or calculus, I recommend reading A Tour of the Calculus, by David Berlinski. Back when I was taking math in college, I did fine, but I was always more in the mode of recognizing what type of problem something was, and pulling out the recipe for solving that problem. I didn't feel that I understood the underlying theory.

A Tour of the Calculus tells the story of the various mathematicians who built up the theories and techniques that come together in the calculus. Each concept is explained clearly. It's very readable. I wished I'd had something like it when I was learning math.

re Windtalkers: As I understand it they were purely in the Pacific theater, and the movie... well let's just say there were Navajo who used code, and wordplay and all sorts of things internal to the language in question; but that's about it for historicity.

janetl: The ways in which things do/don't work. The tone of that book left me flat. I'm interested in the subject, but that bit of stuff didn't work for me, for all that it seemed tailor made to meet my needs, and wants.

Linkmeister @329, wrt TJHS[+ST]: eric @ #327, I've often wondered what the local reaction was to that transition. Merging the kids into Annandale HS, hated enemy that it was, must have been awfully difficult. And turning TJHS into a magnet school for "top-drawer" kids must really have ticked off the parents whose kids were judged wanting.

Wow. Talk about your small worlds-- I went to TJ for one year, as part of the small 12th-grade group that was the last one before the "real" first graduates of TJHSST who'd entered as freshmen. IIRC about half of my cohorts were students who'd started at TJ before it was magnetized, and stubbornly refused to transfer to Annandale; the rest of us had transferred in for the year from other high schools in the area.

As a result, I have no high school diploma. As I mentioned, TJHSST didn't regard us as "real" graduates; the three of us from McLean High received notices that we weren't eligible to attend the graduation ceremony there, either.

I did get a head start on learning to interpret proton NMR spectra that year, though purely from handouts-- there may've been a real NMR in storage that hadn't been set up yet.

Julie L @ #359, now that was nasty of McLean.

I went to TJHS as a member of its first 4-year class, starting in 1964 and graduating in 1968. My family and I left town three days after graduation and I haven't been back since. I have had a ton of correspondence in the past three months with my Class of '68 schoolmates; they held a 60th birthday party at St. Albans Church in Annandale in June. I couldn't attend, but I set up a photo album at my Picasa account and received about 150 pictures.

There's apparently still residual ill will about that whole deal. The early TJHS students keep separate Facebook and Classmates pages from the TJHSST and don't like being lumped in with the later ones in any way, shape or form.

I'd love to have been a fly on the wall of those Fairfax County School Board meetings when that all went down.

Xopher @355: May I study your brain? (Not that I would know what to look for...)

janetl @356: Noted with thanks.

Linkmeister, eric, Julie L.: I went to a science-tech HS in Maryland in the late 80s. It was run as a magnet *program* within an existing school. That led to some town-and-gown sorts of tensions, but no monkeying about with trying to convert the whole school. (The irony is that the location was chosen because it was a nearly all-black school and the ST kids were supposed to "integrate" it. But when you do a merit-based magnet program in a county that's overall about 40% black, guess what? The kids who get into the program aren't all white.)

Joel Polowin 345

You mean, no-one told them about the juice ?

There was a lovely review of a calculus textbook many years ago by the mathematician Underwood Dudley, in which he asked why calculus textbooks are getting so damned big. 250 years ago they were the size of The Pilgrim's Progress and now they're the size of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. I think it was this one but I don't have access to JSTOR. And in the past few years things have clearly got worse, with textbook writers issuing pointless new editions every year or two to scupper the second-hand market. What, exactly, is the point of calculus, that so much effort should be expended in teaching and learning it?

A more recent, and non-paywalled, article by the same author looks at the question of why it's so important for everyone to learn algebra.

There's a lot of food for thought here... 'Everyone' seems to have the opinion that mathematics is very important while being very vague on what maths 'everyone' should know, and in the US, calculus seems to have emerged as a weird shibboleth or proxy for What Everyone Should Know About Maths. I did a hell of a lot of mathematics once upon a time, and I got a lot of benefit from it, but have to admit that a lot of the 'real-world' justifications for doing maths are actually specious. It teaches you logical thinking, yes, but there are other ways of doing that that would be less cruel to those who loathe maths and just can't do it. I did A-level maths in the days when it seemed to consist entirely of knowing how to spot the right substitution to use in order to do an integral. I was marvellous at this for two years, then went on to do maths entirely distinct from calculus and never wrote an integral sign again. What did I get out of this? Memory training? An ability to concentrate?

Good and bad maths teachers? I dare say that most maths teachers are Worst Maths Teacher Ever to some of their students and simultaneously Best Maths Teacher Ever to others, with the split having little relation to ability in the subject.

Xopher, my youngest daughter had the same experience. She did OK in math up to 12th grade, but calculus MADE SENSE. She got an A in AP Calc and scored a 5 on the AP test.

She's a freshman at Georgia Tech now, and wants to go to Mars. I wouldn't bet against her.

Somnus deleta est.

xeger @ 365... Not getting much somnus because of your job?

Serge @ 366 ...

Indeed -- but as an added bonus, the changing weather seems to induce frenzied activity on the part of the Insomnia Fairy...

Steve with a book, 363: Since I have access to JSTOR...

On pp. 890-91 of the review, Dudley writes: "Why do we need 1000 pages to do what L'Hospital did in 234, Loomis in 309, Thompson in 301, and the text I learned calculus from, used exclusively for four whole semesters, 14 semester-hours in all, in 416? There are several reasons. One, of course, is the large number of reviewers of prospective texts. No more can an editor make up his mind about the merits of a text, it has to go out to fifteen different people for opinions. And if one of them writes that the author has left out the tan(x/2) substitution in the section on techniques of integration, how can he or she do that, we won't be able to integrate 3/(4 + 5 sin 6x), how can anyone claim to know calculus who can't do that; isn't the easiest response to include the tan(x/2) substitution? Of course it is, in it goes, and in goes everything else that is in every other 1000-page text."

I'm appreciating this discussion, as I did very well in math through high school but floundered through calculus, barely passing. (The fact that the class was held at 7 am may not have helped.) Someday in my copious spare time I'd love to try again with a different teacher.

Elliot Mason @349: Ah, yes, Bernstein.

Looking at the Wikipedia article on him, their first section is about the results of his Unix Security Holes class in 2004. The results sound very impressive -- lots of new security holes discovered, a bit of controversy about how the details were published but in the end everythings better because of it -- but a bit of insider information brings the entire affair into a slightly different light.

At the time this happened, I was one of the maintainers for a piece of software called NASM. NASM's a development tool, an assembler. You'll find a copy on the CDs of most Linux distributions, and it's also installed on a lot of Windows machines too, primarily by games and operating system developers.

The first thing to remember about NASM is what it does and how it is used. You take a text file that contains instructions that form a program, it reads these, and outputs code in a form that the processor can run directly. Then, in every situation you can think of that isn't artificially contrived for the purposes of breaking this assumption, you *run the resulting code*.

One of DJB's students found a bug in NASM, a classic buffer overflow. He produced a source file that, when assembled, caused NASM to execute his embedded exploit code. This flaw was then released in a public security advisory by DJB before any of the NASM development team had even seen it.

That's the controversy you see a reflection of in the wikipedia article, but it isn't clearly described: DJB released the details of these flaws, some of which were much more serious than the NASM one, directly to the public, rather than to the maintainers who could fix them.

But this wasn't what got to me about the entire setup. What did was this: the NASM bug was classified as a remotely-exploitable code execution vulnerability (which DJB calls a "remote control" vulnerability). Why is it classified as remote? Because you might assemble something somebody sent to you by email.

IMO, this basically trivialises the whole idea of classifying a bug by what situations you can exploit it in. I mean, is having a shell installed on your computer a vulnerability? Somebody might email you a shell script, and you might decide to run it.

After this, I decided to simply not believe anything he said about computer security without researching it myself to see if he was right.

To Jules @369, in re Bernstein: Aside from his teaching abilities and social skills interfacing with developers, let me also add that it's apparently no peach trying to be a servermonkey (or network admin) on his network. How do I know? That's what my husband does for a living now, for UIC ...

Apparently when there was a relatively recent rejiggering of how the firewalls/networks/etc scheme was going to work, campuswide, Bernstein threw the next thing to a hissy fit, because HIS special SNOWFLAKE machines need to have blah blah bloo bloo specific unfettered access to the internet at large, and how DARE you filter him or limit his CREATIVITY? Only in geekspeak and not fluttering-drag-queen. :-> It amuses me to transpose the idioms while maintaining the emotion.

For a dude who's supposedly so into security, his everyday behaviors on UIC's networks end up compromising a WHOLE lot of other people's machines on a daily basis. He finally had a trunk line run from AT&T to his office to plug his personal network into -- and is forbidden to cross-connect that network to UIC's wires in any way. If he wants to maintain his own sandbox, fine, but it quits being their problem anymore, y'know?

When the netmonkeys are volunteering for duty in the dorms with the frosh (who do stupid things they've been TOLD not to do and then get upset when their internet suddenly doesn't work anymore) to get out of dealing with Bernstein, that's telling, I think.

Earl Cooley @ 347, whenever this subject comes up, I think of Alice Cooper, who once said something to the effect that he tried to be Alice Cooper 24/7 for about a year, and realized it was going to kill him, so now he's only Alice onstage.

At home, he is in fact a redneck family man.

Zelda @354 - There was a computer science teacher in Georgia whose English was decidedly flavored by his nationality. He was famed for how difficult it was to understand him. A number of students got together and tried to puzzle out a word he had used repeatedly in class that day: "ba-rank-ee." It turned out to mean "blank."

Calculus was different for me in that I couldn't derive any of it via any logic I knew. If I forgot sines or tangents, I could draw a little unit circle and reason out which was which. Calculus seemed to be pure memorization of reverse recipes. Could not cope.

I'm inhaling the anime Gankutsuou as fast as the DVD library can send me the discs.

If you don't know it, it's more or less The Count of Monte Cristo -- but, as TVTropes.org would put it, In Space!. Which means that one can't be entirely confident that any given part of the plot will turn out the way it did in the book. It also means that they get to do some clever stuff in the way of concrete metaphors. (There's a scene in the book where the Count wishes he could have torn out his heart the day he set his course for vengeance, so that it would not trip him up at inopportune moments. His counterpart in the anime... does not have this problem.)

Also:

In the book, the duel is pistols at dawn. In the anime, it's swords. Swords wielded by humungous mecha. Of course.

Another thing:

When Dumas was plotting The Count of Monte Cristo, he originally had the Count appear fully-formed, mysterious, with his backstory to come out gradually as events progressed. Then he decided that he wanted the reader to understand and sympathise with the Count, so he added a bunch of chapters at the beginning explaining exactly who the Count was, where he came from, and what he was up to.

The anime goes back to Dumas's original plan. They don't want you to understand the Count, to know how far he should be trusted or whether sympathy is appropriate. It's a given that they've monkeyed with his origin, but it's not immediately apparent just how much...

paul a 373

Are giant fighting robots mainly a Japanese thing? Or did someone else do it first?

I would say that the robomecha of Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow are Japanese-influenced. Kind of like Gigantor on steroids, with better production values.

By way of Linkmeister (with thanks):
Lois Bujold interviews Miles Vorkosigan, touching on the subject of her latest plans for him...

Arrgh, now I can't wait!

Erik@375:

There's precedents in a lot of SF imagery elsewhere (War of the Worlds, for starters), but the development as a full-blown genre of its own seems to have been independent. And apparently aficionados might regard Gigantor/Tetsujin 28-go as not quite counting as part of the genre, owing to being remote-controlled instead of having an onboard pilot. These distinctions are Important.

Susie@368: thank you, yes, that's definitely the article I was thinking of. I remember Dudley's book on Mathematical Cranks being very good—all about the eccentrics who would bombard mathematics departments with their typewritten rewrites of number theory and geometry in the pre-internet days.

(Presumably, before calculus became regarded as the default mathematics qualification-to-have, it was geometry... it's sobering to look at geometry textbooks of a hundred years ago and not have a clue how to do even the easier exercises.)

Before I came across the ideas of higher mathematics properly, I'd been prepared for many of them by watching Open University programmes on BBC2 on Sunday mornings. A lot was above my head, but enough sank in. I particularly remember the shows for MST204 Mathematical Models and Methods... conical pendulums and simple harmonic motion and all that. Can't find it on YouTube, but at least there's this Hugh Laurie parody of the genre.

Re the Bujold - Vorkosigan interview:

I can't claim credit for hunting it up. Brad DeLong found it somehow and linked to it.

Clifton (376): If you *really* can't wait, the eARC is available from Baen. I succumbed, even though I don't care for ebooks.

Hyperlocal news: Wirth's law has apparently caught up with area man's hardware a few weeks ago; area man fairly pissed off.

Clifton Royston @ 376: Thank you for that link to the "interview" of Miles Vorkosigan. Wonderful!

Mary Aileen @ 380: Oh, man. Knowing that there's an electronic book ARC of Cryoburn for sale is going to be a struggle for me. I don't have any hardware that's good for reading. Can I hold out until November? Gah!

I discovered, and consumed, the Vorkosigan saga earlier this summer. I recently gave David Weber's Honor Harrington series a try, for a fix of space opera, and it fell far short. YMMV, of course.

janetl (382): I ended up reading it on my computer. Now I'm waiting for my paper copy so I can re-read it in comfort.

All this, and no one's mentioned Mary Gentle's ASH yet?

Fragano Ledgister, #337, when I got a regular x-ray a couple of years ago, the sign in the dressing room was both American and Spanish, so I figured out what embarazar (or some type of it) meant.

Zelda, #354, my band director (former Marine Band director) in three years of junior high and senior high was very difficult to me in the beginning. We had just been transferred to the Pentagon and I brought my clarinet to school the first day and he wanted to know why I did that. Then he wanted to know why I came in from the back of the auditorium instead of backstage. Then I started challenging my way up the line and when he saw I would beat the current first chair (a boy), he handed me an oboe and told me it fingered like the top of the clarinet. He didn't mind when I challenged to first chair oboe (formerly also a girl). He was, however, particularly happy that I could play snare when we marched.

I was given a copy... when I finished Diplomatic Immunity. One of the better aspects of my breakfast with Lois, (only 4 days, and a short lifetime ago) was that we didn't talk about the books much at all (in fact, the closest we really came was to discuss some quirky fortuity in aspects of the Russian she didn't actually intend to use).

I started reading it today (I am not a big fan of e-books), in Word.

janetl, only until October.

the trouble with calculus is that dy/dx means something before dy means something and dx means something.

My third-semester calculus teacher (the class where we met multiple variables) described calculus as where you learn arithmetic. (You do so much of it, you see....)

This is the community most likely to know how to figure this out:

This is a Mongolian drinking song that, for some reason, has become a favorite of my extended family. We know when to sing HEY! We do not know much else. I've been charged with hunting lyrics, and have found an English translation... but that's not going to work for singing along with the CD, or for my mother potentially teaching it to her kindergartners.

So. Does anyone know the Mongolian lyrics? Failing that, does anyone know Mongolian well enough to copy down a rough phonetic version we can annoy Washington, DC with over Thanksgiving? I can't do more than a really, really babbly almost-German transliteration.

Teka Lynn @ #384: All this, and no one's mentioned Mary Gentle's ASH yet?

I considered mentioning it, especially after Bruce's comment @ #11, but I decided not to for some reason I don't now recall.

Erik, #388: You mean like this?

janetl @ #382: Can I hold out until November? Gah! I discovered, and consumed, the Vorkosigan saga earlier this summer. I recently gave David Weber's Honor Harrington series a try, for a fix of space opera, and it fell far short. YMMV, of course.

Sharon Lee & Steve Miller are the cure for what ails ya. (IMNSHO)

I suggest you start with Local Custom (currently in print in the omnibus The Dragon Variation); it has enough sequels to keep you going until CryoBurn comes out, and they're all in print. The Agent of Change sequence is probably more Vorkosigan-ish, but it's temporarily out of print and the new edition isn't due out until after CryoBurn.

Paul A. @ 393: Thanks! I'll check them out. Maybe literally.

P J Evans @ 389:
Ah, yes, arithmetic. It was in economics classes in grad school, that professors began waving a hand and saying "and then, by simple algebra" and jumping to a conclusion that involved calculus, trig, differential equations, and matrices.

I think calculus made sense to me because I learned it at the same time as economics, and economics is all about rates of change, maximum output or revenue, and minimum cost. I don't do well with abstraction-for-abstraction's sake, but I do like grabbing a tool and using it for something. I struggled when I got to differential equations and found that a problem involving eigenvalues could have more than one correct answer. The horror!

304
What got me when I hit differentials (twice, and the second time was worse) was the lack of pictures. (One of the reasons I'm in the job I'm in is because I can put pictures together so they make some kind of sense.)

Openthready historical knowledge: We've been going through old slides shot by my grandfather. A roll that was developed in 1964, labeled "Canada Expo," is full of photos of what looks for all the world like Epcot Center: big prickly geodesicy dome, boat rides, overhead trinaci, etc. By cars in the shots and fashion, I definitely believe the 1964 date. There are also photos in the same roll of doing touristy things around Toronto (Queen's Park, etc).

Anyone have any idea what event might've happened in Toronto in 1964 that would look like that?? The Expo was in Montreal, and besides, it was 67.

P J Evans @ 395:

The thing that got me back into math after leaving school was that I discovered that there were mathematicians who believed in the use of diagrams, especially that there were topologists and geometers who used drawings to show how things were shaped and how they fit together. This was considered heresy by most mathematicians through most of the 20th century (I'm giving you dirty looks, Bourbaki!), but there were a few who tried to keep visual mathematics alive, most especially H. S. M. Coxeter.

I disliked calculus because as it turns out I am a rather concrete thinker, at least mathematically. When I work to solve a problem, I want something that I can visualize in the real world. Solving an equation simply to get another equation was....less than satisfying. I'd rather get an answer like "2". I always liked the applied chapters better than the theoretical ones.

Diatryma @390

I think I've found the lyrics (as images: part 1 and part 2). Alas, they're in Mongolian, so a) I'm not 100% if I actually found the lyrics, and not just some random text b) I've no clue how to pronounce what's there. I'll keep looking if I can't find someone who can transliterate it to something useful.

Zelda #354:

I had a teacher like that for Discrete Math long ago. We were lucky to have relatively straightforward material which was well-covered in the book, because this guy's English was so bad, I don't think he could have successfully ordered dinner. (I remember in one lecture filling in enough of the sound:concept codebook to work out what sounds he was using for "matrix" and "graph.")

albatross:

Re: DBJ

I know Dan, and he does some *really* good work in cryptography. He's also rather famous for his abrasive public persona, though he's pretty nice in person.

Bombie at 399: Thanks! How did you find it? I had been googling obvious things and came up with not a lot, just English lyrics. And while I can't tell a thing about the Mongolian lyrics as written except that the two images are not the same, I may as well join in the hunt for phonetics.

Diatryma @402

I googled for the lyrics in Chinese, and had some luck. A friend of mine who's in China has asked a Chinese friend whose parents know Mongolian, but no guarantees they'll be able to transcribe it to something we can work with. Will keep you up to date.

Elliott Mason @ 396 -- I'd say that a big geodesic dome and "Canada Expo" make it pretty definitively Expo '67. Those domes aren't exactly common. There's one in the Toronto area now, the Cinesphere, but that was built in 1971.

Joel @404: That's what I thought, too, but the cars are definitely earlier than 1967, so are the fashions (there's another roll that we KNOW is Montreal in 67, so I can compare directly) ... and my mother is clearly not those three years older (there's quite a visual difference between 8 and 11, at least there was for her). The slide casing itself is stamped 1964 by the developer. It is a puzzlement.

Unless it really IS Epcot and somehow just got mixed into the box with the Toronto slides? ... No, Epcot wasn't built till the 80s, and looking at photos of it, its big silver ball building wasn't nearly as poky as the one I have photos of.

They have a great shot, btw, of standing in the Queen's Park doorway and shooting down a street that nowadays has VERY different buildings on it (plus, this is before they built the statue my Torontonian husband insists should be titled "Gumby Goes to Heaven").

I disliked having to futz about with set theory before getting to the good parts of calculus.

Bruce Cohen @ #397:

His disdain for pure mathematics
And his unique geometrical insights
Left him well equipped to face those demons down;
He saw that infinite complexity
Could be described by simple rules,
Used his giant brain to turn the game around....

(Jonathan Coulton, "Mandelbrot Set")

Eliott @ 405 -- Any chance of some of the shots being from the 1964 World's Fair in New York City, with the rest of the roll being from Toronto?

Joel @408, Eliot @405 - I would put in my strong vote for some images being from the 1964 World's Fair in New York, too. Walt Disney designed several attractions for that World's Fair, including the "Small World" ride, "Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln", a GE audio-animatronic show about the history of electricity, and a skyway peoplemover. All of these were later moved to Disneyland (in some form or other).

Earl Cooley III:
I disliked having to futz about with set theory before getting to the good parts of calculus.

Yes, it's like another iteration of the New Math. Mathematics educators keep trying to force set theory in where it isn't wanted or needed. I think the term "foundations" is to blame -- they don't realize that in mathematics you build the foundations last.

Thinking of a function as a curve should work until you get to proper proofs with epsilontics, and most people never do.

Earthquake in New Zealand, no dead reported, Christchurch hard hit.

Eliot @405 - How about trying a Google Image Search on "canada expo dome" and compare what you saw with what comes up? The labels should give you a specific thesis to test.

'epsilontics' - I like that!
(It isn't really needed for most stuff, anyway.)

PJ@395, differentials without *pictures*? Some math book authors are simply criminals, and in those cases the teacher should be fixing that by drawing them on a blackboard.

Bill Stewart #414.

The textbook author may well have intended the pictures to be drawn on the blackboard. I am reliably informed that Walter Rudin, when teaching introductory real analysis from the famous 'baby Rudin' textbook^*, put in all the pictures and heuristics that are notable by their absence from the book.

^* This is a compact introduction, ie, ot is bounded, and it is usually closed.

Joel Polowin @408, oliviacw@409: Good suggestions that it's the 1964-in-New-York, more-photos-of-Toronto (probably same summer vacation timeframe). The family that took the pictures was based in Manhattan. I cannot rule it in or out; I do know that a quick google image search is turning up nothing like what's in the shots I have (and that the shots i have do not contain any of the still-extant bits popularized in Men in Black, etc -- the big globe and the UFOs-on-sticks, etc).

KipW @412: Great thought (google for 'Canada Expo dome'). Still no conclusive in-or-out indicators.

I'm very tempted to project them on the wall again tonight and photograph the projections to stick of Flickr so I have something concrete to point at when I talk about it. Right now that would be about eighty times faster than scanning the slides properly, and accurate enough for the needed purpose, however kludgy the solution is. It's not nearly as kludgy as some things my family members have done to get around obstacular paths, but it still makes me feel like an illustration labeled "UR DOIN IT RONG".

Elliott Mason @ #416, it may be wrong, but it may also be expedient. If the goal is simply to get identifiers on a page, photo-to-Flickr would seem to be the quickest.

I attended the NY World's Fair in 1964-1965 (one summer of the two; not sure which) so I might recognize something.

Maybe it's just me, but 'VVD' makes me think of social diseases.

Argh. Wrong thread. Feel free to delete.

Ah, calculus. Where my mind was opened to what math really is (and why I wanted to go into Engineering). I'd been doing brilliantly in math studies before then, but that's because it was just "learn the trick, pattern out the problem, turn the crank and get the answer". Algebra, Euclidean Geometry, Trigonometry, the works. Even differential calculus was another turn the handle game.

But there was no handle for integral calculus - or, rather, there were 30 or 40, and you had to be able to figure out which club to pull out of the bag. And I hated that. I wasn't good at it, I never had to do it before! But I learned, and it became fun again (but much more work).

Then I hit differential equations, and my mind exploded again. But I went into Electrical Engineering, and was told "you can either solve simultaneous differential equations, or transform them and solve simultaneous algebraic equations in the complex domain" (oh, and that despite what you were taught, it's e^jπ + 1 that equals zero) and "never" saw calculus again.

Until I took a communications theory course and learned that 100% of the volume of an infinite-dimensional hypersphere is on its surface, or that while there are some functions that are not universally discretely integrable (like the normal curve), if you can get the limits to either 0->∞ or -∞->∞, it's easy.

And then I looked at my (then) GF's real analysis book (from third year math), and got three chapters through it before I remembered why I got into Engineering.

It's my understanding that a renal calculus is no fun either.

420
That's so you don't confuse current with reality. Or something like that. (I had basic circuit analysis. Laplace transforms are interesting.)

During high school, I took at least one calculus course at a local college; iirc, I did enjoyed it and did fairly well. But for some reason, the credit didn't transfer properly when I actually started college, and so I had to retake the same intro calc class(es). To my horror, I discovered that something had happened to my brain and I couldn't do calculus anymore; I recognized having seen the concepts before and remembered being able to understand them, but that was all. It felt a bit like living the second half of "Flowers for Algernon" :|

Julie, I feel your pain. I took calculus something like six times to get a C-grade (kept taking incompletes...) And I took my final grade after graduation and while I was an employee of U. Kans.

The weird thing is that I can do equations if they have a point. I took a biological statistics course and had to beg to get into it because I had not passed Calc. I was able and capable of doing the math required correctly. Apparently Math theory is not a strong point in my brain...

Thomas @ 410
"I think the term 'foundations' is to blame -- they don't realize that in mathematics you build the foundations last."

This really doesn't work for me. My mom taught college-level remedial math -- she used to note that she had a huge number of students who thought they were very bad at math, when they had just been taught by people who can think in the way you describe -- so her students had never been given the big picture, and couldn't figure out how anything fit, so couldn't progress smoothly. But people who are "good" at math are the ones who influence how it's taught, so everyone else just gets dismissed for not being able to learn in the expected style.

Myself, I found the whole "memorize these equations and just apply them the way we tell you to, whether you understand it or not" approach to be extremely frustrating, and only got through my highschool math courses because I could come home and have my mom re-teach stuff in a way I could understand.

As an adult, I'm quite good at math, to the extent that it is relevant to my life and work. But I made sure I'd never have to do any jobs that involved anything past Algebra and Arithmetic, because that's the point at which my inner models completely broke down, and I stopped being able to see it as anything but a formalized sort of codebreaking. I still have trouble getting from that codebreaking to ... anything real. Because it's just a series of memorized abstract equations that fit together in ritually prescribed ways, for no particularly comprehensible reason at all.

I breezed thru the algebras, geometry, trig, etc. I hit calculus, calculus hit back. I made it thru three semesters, but it was a struggle.

Then went on to differential equations. What the teacher said made sense, and I wrote copious notes. Somewhere between class and homework, the notes stopped making sense at all. I have no idea why notes I took in my own hand stopped being understandable by the end of the day. I never took the final, as I felt there was no point in sitting thru two hours of total confusion.

In the same semester, I took linear algebra and felt right at home. I attended class thru the mid-term, missed most of the classes after that, took the final and still got a B in the class. I love matrix algebra.

425
FWIW, most people never have to use calculus on the job. It's a nice tool, though, for when none of the others will work, and for some things nothing else will work.

So this is going on in the Boulder area.

Jacque and I live in Boulder proper, on the east side of town, well out of the danger zone. But someone on another blog mentioned that those of us in the area should check in and let everyone know we're OK. So here ya go.

I hurt for everyone who's had to evacuate and doesn't know if they'll have a house to come back to--or already knows they don't. This is dreadful. It's not the closest a fire has been to where I live since I've lived here, but it seems to be the most dramatic (from an "not in danger but close enough to appreciate it" point of view). I can't remember even the Wonderland Lake fire having this sort of effect, filling the sky with smoke and spilling ash as far away as Erie before--and that one I could actually see the flames from my bedroom window.

I remember I gave up on higher mathematics when I picked up a textbook my cousin the math professor wrote, looked at the first page, and said to myself, "I can tell he's applying group theory to something, but I can't tell what he's applying it to."

Lin D @ 426:

Oddly enough I had a great deal of trouble with matrix algebra because it was taught to me as a bunch of operations to apply to matrices to get other matrices or numbers that I had not much use for. Then I came across the theory of algebras on continuous vector spaces and that made sense, and was beautiful to boot, and it explained what I had been doing with the matrices. I still have trouble with calculus because a lot of it is just tricks that you use to manipulate one expression to turn it into another.

KayTei,

That's not what I meant about foundations. The topic called 'foundations of mathematics' is a set of formalizations that were reverse-engineered in the 19th century to provide rigorous proofs for calculus (and then other areas).

Initially the problem was deciding exactly which functions have Fourier expansions. The previous answer was "all functions" and there was a straightforward explanation of why this was true, which worked fine as long as you didn't ask precisely what "all functions" meant. It turns out that the previous proofs worked as long as "all functions" meant "all piecewise C2 functions", which is general enough for practical purposes. The question of exactly which functions have Fourier expansions is still open, although Lennart Carleson won the Abel prize in 2006 for a large step in tidying it up.

Proofs at this level of axiomatic rigor are a long way from having explanations of why things fit together as they do. The C19th formalization was necessary to handle edge cases ("monsters", as they called them then), but makes it harder to understand what is going on in the more straightforward cases. For the more straightforward cases the explanations used in earlier times by people like Fourier are much more helpful.

Now, I do occasionally work in problems where the more esoteric bits of calculus crop up [convergence of probability distributions on non-separable spaces, for example], so I do need to know the formalizations. People who only need, say, tensor calculus for physics or engineering, can work with more natural and straightforward explanations and they generally do.

The worst problem with trying to put set-theoretic constructions in pre-calculus is the same as the problem with putting toy set theory in the primary-school New Math -- that you don't do it right, because at that level you can't. The only point of the Dirichlet set-based definition of a function is to allow specific types of formal reasoning. If you aren't going to do those types of proofs (and you aren't, in high school) you don't gain anything except complications. It's a waste of everybody's time and mental effort that could have been spent on learning something interesting, or providing explanations that actually explain something.

This seems to have turned into a rant, but if no-one asks about any of my other trigger topics, like the Wilcoxon test, I may be able to go back to placidly lurking.

thomas #431: It's a waste of everybody's time and mental effort that could have been spent on learning something interesting, or providing explanations that actually explain something.

Thank you.

Ok... can anyone tell me (apart from being obnoxious) is the reason for Google.com having that version of the logo?

Terry @ 433: I think it's part of an effort to forestall antitrust issues, by making the page come up so slowly that more users default to using Bing. At least it's worked that way for me this evening.

Elliott Mason @416: There was a geodesic dome at the 1964 World's Fair, although it doesn't feature as heavily in the online images as the Unisphere; Wikipedia says it's currently in use as the aviary for the Queens Zoo.

Terry Karney @433: Ok... can anyone tell me (apart from being obnoxious) is the reason for Google.com having that version of the logo?

Some guesses from PCWorld. Possibilities include Google's birthday and the anniversary of the invention of JavaScript.

thomas @431: The worst problem with trying to put set-theoretic constructions in pre-calculus is the same as the problem with putting toy set theory in the primary-school New Math -- that you don't do it right, because at that level you can't. The only point of the Dirichlet set-based definition of a function is to allow specific types of formal reasoning. If you aren't going to do those types of proofs (and you aren't, in high school) you don't gain anything except complications.

However, if you don't, you get things like my calculus teacher snarking at all of us that we were taught 'stupid lies' in high school and not to put any such thing on our papers now that we're doing REAL math. He claims the 'stupid' explanations and notations (not all of which fit thomas' description above -- things like drawing intervals on number lines using [ and ( as endpoints instead of solid/round dots) are counterproductive, because they neither make the math easier to learn nor prepare you for college math.

He may not be the most reliable source, but he's at least an anecdata point ... this week, we're doing problems from PDF copies of chapters of a textbook that he wrote intended to teach future elementary school teachers math, so at least he's tried to tackle the problem. Or something.

... it's not the best book I've ever seen. The text reads like he lectures, which is both a good thing and a bad thing.

googled "google logo"
It's their 12th birthday

Then again, I should have read the whole news article. They don't know for sure, either.

(caffeine... need caffeine)

Ordinary math was a sequence of pairs of operations; in each pair, the first first one was simply algorithmic (mechanical), whereas the second one required creativity (guess, test, retry as needed). The first pair was addition and subtraction, the second was multiplication and division, the third was differentiation and integration.

But geometry, in 9th grade, was where I first met what I think of as "real" math -- because that's where we first proved things.

My father was involved with the School Mathematics Study Group, and we spent the summer of...1963, I think...out at Stanford where he was working on writing that set of New Math textbooks. Also they asked for kids of the people involved to volunteer to test some of the examination materials, so I can claim a very small piece of messing up the New Math program for myself (I do not regard myself, even then, as at all typical of elementary school math students).

I was taught differential calculus with epsilon-delta proofs, and that worked well for me. I then (due to scheduling issues) switched to the "computer-assisted" track for integral calculus, and barely got through the course (that is, I got a B). I finished off the calculus sequence with multivariate differential and integral, and never went beyond that in calculus. I liked abstract algebra better, and really loved the (undergrad) foundations of math course.

At Carleton, "applied" math courses actually meant "theoretical basis of applications in <field>". I discovered, in linear algebra, that there is in fact nothing uglier than the theoretical basis of mathematical applications. Never did take to linear algebra.

Never had one of those "memorize the equation" courses; would have hated it I'm sure. I've always hated memorization (though I made an exception for foreign language vocabulary; I didn't really like it, but it was so clearly relevant to learning a foreign language that I couldn't argue with it). While I guess we were expected to memorize the quadratic equation, we derived the quadratic equation; made more sense after that.

I knew I was destined for computers anyway, from before I went to college. I thought I might do computer grad school, but I was tired of school by the time I got out of college; and wanted to stay in Minneapolis, and wanted to earn money, I guess.

The closest thing I had to "hitting a wall" in a math course was in an advanced group theory seminar I took senior year. I liked the class a lot, did well, got an A in it. Frequently, before class, I chatted with another math major who I didn't know well. One day, after I'd spent an hour and a bit the night before dealing with the problem set we'd been assigned, he glanced at the clock and said "I'd really better take a look at the problem set before class", and proceeded to glance at each problem, think a few seconds, and write a couple of words in the margin next to it. Went through the whole problem set in two minutes. Don't even remember his name, so I can't check if he's famous.

I did really well in math for many years; I considered majoring in math until I decided that chemistry was more interesting, part way through first-year university. My "wall" came in a third-year math course in mathematical transforms and boundary-value problems. The course was divided into roughly-equal parts on Fourier transforms (which I'd learned about the previous year), Laplace transforms, boundary-value problems, and Bessel functions. I found the first three parts moderately challenging but within my abilities... and completely bounced off the Bessel functions. It was quite a shock. I still don't know what the problem was/is.

The final exam was of the form "here are 8 problems, do any 6", with two problems from each of the four sections. I omitted the two on Bessel functions, ploughed through the other six, and ended up with an A+ in a course where I was completely failing to grasp a full quarter of the material.

Open thready readiness to throw my laptop through a fecking window:

For the past several days it has been irregularly uninstalling and reinstalling something - sometimes every few seconds, sometimes not for several minutes. No window pops up, no nothing. The only indication this is happening is the nerve-grating two tone sound signal and, if the device manager is open, the list refreshes. I've been up and down the device manager trying to find something that's changing and I can't find a damn thing. The noise is driving me nucking futz. I'm tempted to just disable the sound signal and carry on, as it doesn't seem to be doing anything, but I have no idea what changes may be occurring under the hood. Is there a way to access an activity log that will tell me WTF?

The first thing we'd need to know is the name and version of the operating system you're using, Mark.

Yes of course...chalk it up to being seriously burnt out after playing a three-day gig. I'm running Vista with SP2.

PJ Evans @427 -- you may not have to use calculus on the job, but I use it all the time when navigating around a city that I only vaguely know. Or don't you consider the Intermediate Value Theorem part of calculus? In many cities there are non-continuous roads, but it's still remarkably useful.

Tom: But do you actually work out the problem, or just do the "stuff"?

From what I've gleaned of calculus, I use it all the time when driving/riding, esp. as it relates to changing lanes/predicting future positions.

But I couldn't, to save my life, write it up as an equation, integral, fluxion etc. I just "solve for Xeno" and drive on.

:>

There was an article a while back about how Frisbee dogs do the math too.

I don't prove the problem, but I use the theorem, Terry; and often consciously, like checking that the conditions (continuity, especially) are met. And "solving for Xeno" is, in effect, doing calculus; so is looking at rates of change, which is pretty common in many workplaces (when one is tracking sales, for example).

The pragmatic uses of everyday calculus are often ignored.

Tom: You, at least, have/understand the theorom. I just know that looking at a car doing "x" velocity, at "y" angle means; all things remaining as they are, a space will (or won't) exist in points "a,b" at time "z"

Earl: Adair (The Physics of Baseball, a truly great read; now in it's third edition) discusses how fielder's analyse the flight of the ball from the bat. It's really interesting, I think most where the problem of observable [which I started to typo as obversable] angle has a huge effect on whether they can get to the ball.

The stuff on the shortness of time in committing to a swing (about 1/10th of a second) and the things which have to be computed in that moment (type of pitch, velocity, point of release, angle of break/drop) is pretty amazing too.

447
It isn't consciously using calculus: it's just 'what we do'.
(Do you ever find yourself muttering 'check your closing rate' at someone who's coming up a little faster than is wise?)

ddb (439): geometry, in 9th grade, was where I first met what I think of as "real" math

My older brother, who is now a professor of mathematics, once told me that geometry is the only "real" math taught in high school. Everything else, up to and including calculus, is glorified arithmetic.

I had real trouble with geometry (got through it by memorizing proofs) but did pretty well with the rest of high school math. I never took anything past calculus, though.

Terry Karney@448: "But you have a distorted notion of physics! You grew up in a one-gee field." (Castor or Pollux Stone, to their father, on the topic of baseball; they had just proved the calculations required were impossible, their father pointed out that he had played it.)

(Their growing up in a 1/6g field gives them just as distorted a notion of physics, anyway.)

I graduated high school with fabulous test scores in everything but math, and only remedial sophomore level geometry under my belt, which was the bare minimum to graduate. That teacher (whose name is unfortunately forgotten) was the first one to treat my "I don't understand" questions without snark or anger, and would actually go back and show me stuff using 3-dimensional objects. Maybe if he had taught me sophomore year I might have graduated with some trigonometry or calculus.

In real life, I use basic algebra and arithmetic and am much better able to balance a budget, do rough currency conversions and multiply or divide a recipe than other friends who had a little more math. Still, conversations about numbers make me glaze over.

P J: I don't know that it's not doing calculus. For all that Stephenson gets beat up on for the "as you know Bobs" in his work, I got my first real feel for what calculus does from The Baroque Cycle and the way I look at things like closing rates (which is how I think of that issue), and "collapse zones" (which is how I think of my following distance) has changed for that.

Now I have to eat something, and do some calculus to get myself to the shop; and talk about some maintenance on the BMW, and then to my lunch date.

Mary Aileen@450: There's a great bit in Heinlein's The Rolling Stones (which I just cited a different bit of to Terry) where Roger Stone shows his "unheavenly twins" around a chart of the fields of mathematics, and they find all the engineering math they knew so well off in one little corner.

We did some basic abstract algebra in highschool, though, which I consider to be real math.

nerdycellist: I got through basic algebra. When I was machining, I had to use some trig-functions, (tolerance call-outs, esp. for holes, required it. If I had the formula handy I could probably still determine the true center of a hole. [I'd really like to get a copy of the Machinery's Handbook again; and yes I know it can be found online, that's not useful to the way my mind works])

And now I really go (exit, stage left; in a swirl of flouncing shirt)

I'd argue with your 449, P J Evans, because I know people who don't have that particular bit of information and don't use it. The Intermediate Value Theorem says that if a function is continuous between two points (x1, y1) and (x2, y2) in the X-Y plane, it will cross every value between x1 and x2 and between y1 and y2. What this means practically, for navigation around a city, is that if I know an address I'm looking for is within a general square area of the city, I can drive until I cross the road it's on and then figure out which direction to go along that road to get to the address, assuming the roads are all continuous. This really helps me find things. Others who don't think in this way often have trouble finding things, or assume they're lost when I know about where I am.

Tom #456:

I wasn't aware that this even needed explained. Which explains something (or the other) about me.

I've meant to mention this here before: This is a diary written by a stroke-sufferer with aphasia, who is an academic linguist, and writes unedited, so he can track his progress. It's fascinating --well, for me -- because he suffers from aphasia much the same way I do; but I think anyone who thinks about language would find it fascinating (psst: Teresa? Xopher?).

http://aphasiadiary.wordpress.com/2010/08/29/he-doesnt-put-it-past-her-and-she-doesnt-put-him-past-it/

Tom Whitmore @ 456 -- And assuming that the units are numbered in monotonically-increasing or -decreasing order. Though that may come under "figure out which direction to go".

Tom Whitmore @ 456: You have clearly never navigated in Washington County, Oregon, or Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Scraps 458

Mighty interesting, thanks for sharing. Aphasia is, while regrettable, also really fascinating. I've read of some arresting cases of multi-linguists suffering aphasia before. Fascinating stuff.

Mission accomplished: Pendrift and her friend Dave have now seen Fermilab.

I read somewhere (long ago, in a galaxy far, far away) that dogs can run near perfect intercepts*. Even when starting on land and ending in the water. Get The Stick is an imperative.

*Well, some dogs at least. I've seen counter examples (but it may have been a vision thing). But, without actually measuring, I've certainly seen at least close approximations.

Stuff like catching a ball is not in any sense performing a calculation -- it's a table lookup, drawing from experience of "a ball going at this angle will end up about there in this amount of time".

Imagine putting a skilled outfielder in a significantly different gravity field. If what he does is fast calculation, he ought to be able to adapt immediately. Does anyone here really think that's what would happen?

If we perform calculations when we walk, we ought to be able to adapt immediately and smoothly to an unexpected change in the friction of the surface we walk on. That's not what is observed.

David Goldfarb@464: Certainly Heinlein was essentially making fun of the idea that athletes performed calculations when catching a baseball. (The twins' objections to playing baseball on the moon also included more practical ones, like the risk of the ball breaking your helmet).

Dick Seaton's life is saved in Skylark Duquesne by gunmen familiar only with Earth being instantly transported onto Seaton's ship -- which was at a lower gravity for some guests. Their first shots went high, and they didn't get second shots. So Doc Smith agrees with you.

O/T publishing goodness: Headline Fail

David Goldfarb: I am not sure, from the report that solving calculus problems involves getting better at guessing, that the categoric statement that it's, "a table lookup" is accurate. Esp. sense the amount of information changes. It's not a static, x leads to y. Watch an outfielder changing his motion of travel so as to complete the intercept, or the stunning bits of jumping/diving catches made and I think there is (though no more consciously than most people driving a car) solutions being worked out; not merely guessed at. Yes, experience will make it easier to negotiate the guesswork stage, but that's what my friend the mathematics textbook editor says happens with people "doing" calculus.

jnh: Dogs love to intercept motorcycles. You have to fool them. One slows down and then, when the dog is getting close, opens the throttle, a lot. Do it too before the dog gets close enough, and she will still make the intercept. It has to be late, and it has to be sudden. They are aiming for where you will be, not where you are, and gradual increases in speed get accounted for.

Earl Cooley III #446, jnh #463, inter alia:

Actually, individual nerve cells (and small clusters of same) do integrations and differentials as primitive operations. This gets used in, e.g., the visual system for edge detection and the like, and I'm sure it also gets used elsewhere. Of course, that's analog computation....

Back when she went to dog parks, my Belgian shepherd did an amazing intercept of another dog.

A whole trail of smaller dogs was chasing each other around the park, one after the other.

Kira, all lit up and happy, "went round" and slammed into the lead dog, Bruiser. Sent the little guy flying. He was dazed but OK.

Linkmeister, 466: Journalism fail, too. Buried ledes are pure distilled evil.

David Goldfarb @ 464:
Stuff like catching a ball is not in any sense performing a calculation

I think this is true, and the notion of the brain calculating touches one of my hot buttons.

it's a table lookup

I don't think this is true, based on my reading about nerve and brain function and the classes on neural networks I took a few years back¹. Humans compute the flight of baseballs (and rocks thrown at game animals) and dogs compute the flight of Frisbees by changing the position and gaze direction of the eyes (measured by proprioceptive senses that monitor eye muscle movement and head movement) to match a canonical position / direction while moving the hands and arms to other canonical positions. The actual computation that's done involves climbing a vector-valued landscape to a minimum (or maximum?). There may be more than one canonical eye position and hand position; the climbing algorithm allows finding the canonical position that's closest to the current position. That's how catching works; throwing is more complicated because the computation is done in parallel by a lot of neuronal circuits and the signal to let go of the missile is the sum of all the computations normalized to a threshhold. This allows neuron firings, which might be accurate in time to tens of milliseconds, to be used to control the required sub-millisecond accuracy of a high-speed throw (the accuracy of the sum increases as the square root of the number of circuits).

¹ I had a long argument with a couple of mathematicians I used to work at Tektronix Labs while walking back to the hotel from dinner in downtown Albuquerque some years ago. They were impressed by a paper that described programming a robot arm to play pingpong by solving the equations of motion of the ball and the elastic collisions with the paddle. I was adamant that this was not the way human beings played pingpong; I was taking one of the neural net classes at the time, and reading several books on real and artificial neurons. This has been a hot button for me ever since; one of the reasons I have a great deal of trouble with the glib description of the brain as a digital computer.

David Harmon @ 468 -- There's just something a little bit weird about the idea of individual nerve cells with little teeny math coprocessors.

David Harmon @ 468:

It's been awhile since I looked at vision processing, but I think the edge detection and so on uses sums, differences, enables, and inhibitors, rather than integrals and derivatives. IIRC the primitive operations are light detectors, dark detectors, and edge detectors at various angles¹.

¹ The complement of first stage processing cells in the optic nerve and the first level of visual cortex is formed in early infancy, based on the kind of visual features the eye is exposed to. Experiments with new-born kittens showed that environments rich in horizontals and verticals resulted in visual systems poor in detectors for other angles.

Mark @441:

I can't tell you why it's happening, but I can report that the same thing happened to my Vista-running laptop two weeks ago.

I solved it by shutting down the computer, then removing the battery for 10 seconds. Apparently, this "resets" the device manager (or appeases the laptop spirits, possibly). I hope it works for you!

Bruce @471: This was a problem I had with Douglas Adams in, I think, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, where he describes the human brain calculating the ballistic path of a thrown object. I was impressed at first, but after a while I realised that it seemed contrary to my experience of throwing things (badly), which was all about moving this complicated, multiple lever, my arm, and releasing the object at such a time that it would arrive at the target. Working out parabolas seemed to have nothing to do with it, and indeed seemed like a needless complication. It is an awesome achievement for our species to have figured out how to throw things, but it's got nothing to do with the brain doing ballistic math, as far as I can tell.

David Goldfarb: As to your hypothetical: Given the phsycial ability to move in the different gravity... I don't think it will be immediate, but the skills needed to do any new task, even a related one, aren't things we pick up immediately either.

But a fielder can get to where a football is going to be, even though the information (and the quirks of flight) are different; never mind he has not the muscle memory to complete the catch.

Personal example. Hit a ball toward me, I can make the catch. Tell me to get it to second (or have the runner rounding first) and I'll put it into the glove of the guy covering the bad.

Don't even try to hand me a basketball. I can't do it. Free-throw line, static shots, I hit about 30 percent. From the field, maybe 2. Lay-ups (supposed to be the easiest of things), don't happen. I can't figure it out.

Then again, I never said the fielder was "calculating", I said the process by which the act is done (and the surprising number of variables which come into play; no small number of which Bruce (StM) brought up [and which Adair goes into, at length]0 was amazing, and the amount of information being processed was prodigious.

One of the things I am amused by (which is why I used Xeno), is how much of what calculus does is really either after the fact explaining, or not relevant to the world at large, because waiting for the brain to work the problems; as math would put the doing of the deed out of reach (a sort of centipede's dilemma, safely change lanes now, or do the match to see if it will be safe to move the car to there... by which time all the variable aren't in the same place, and one has to start over again).

Actually, an awful lot of what's going on with catching slower-speed balls and the like is just what led to calculus -- it's looking at successive approximations and correcting when that approximation goes outside certain parameters. It's not numerical solution of equations, but it is a form of solving for two sets of vectors reaching a coincident point in space-time. It's more showing a solution by demonstration than by calculation. Doing it with faster-moving objects is a matter of practice, and failure; changing one of the parameters (like gravity) makes very little difference in a slow-moving scenario. There's plenty of time to observe that there's something weird happening and objects are not moving as predicted.

Formal computational calculus is an attempt to write out just how we do this. It's about rates of change and areas under curves -- successive approximations -- and the question of whether it actually describes what's going on is still somewhat debated (there are people who don't believe in infinitesimals or limits, and they may be right in a strict physical sense -- space/time may be quantized). But for all everyday purposes, it works at least as well as Newtonian mechanics, which does a pretty good job.

Joel, #472: Like they need little teeny hooks for microfiche?

Tom Whitmore @ 456, Joel Polowin @ 459: I grew up in an area (King County, WA) where theoretically streets and building numbers were named according to a very logical grid. It worked - most of the time. However, I grew up in a suburban development built in the 1960's - when you entered the area, you found yourself in a maze of twisty little roads, mostly alike. I routinely had friends get lost while trying to find our house. I recall once my parents ending up telling someone how to drive to the nearest store (a 7-11), and they drove over to meet them and lead them back to the house.

You see, the county naming/numbering scheme required a change in the street name whenever it approached a different alignment point on the grid. So, the street I grew up on - which end to end was a bit over a mile long - went through five different names in that length. 327th St, 30th Ave, 325th St, 39th Place, and 40th Ave. Most of the "Places" in the neighborhood were cul-de-sacs, so don't ask me why this street became 39th Place when it was a through street at that point. 39th Ave branched off (via a hard left) from 39th Place and ran for just under a quarter mile before dead ending into 328th St, where 40th St also dead ended.

I bow to those with greater knowledge of neuroscience than me. (Which latter really isn't all that hard.)

In re New Orleans: I've gone with Lee's suggestion of Lamothe House for a room. Now I need to work out two places for dinner -- I have one restaurant already planned (the one Neil Gaiman has mentioned on his blog) but we'll be there three nights. I gather there are lots of good choices, but I figure it couldn't hurt to let people here give me ideas.

The continuous function (the street) has several different names over its run, oliviacw -- which (if the streets are actually named after the grid, rather than arbitrarily) makes applying the intermediate value theorem work better than following street names, if someone's got a good basic inertial guidance system (which I do, and others I know do not).

And Terry's last comment slipped in before my last one, but they're entirely independent (and seem to be saying approximately the same thing, to me).

@479 oliviacw

You do realize I had to go look at google maps and find this place, don't you?

http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Maine&ll=47.309689,-122.376044&spn=0.007027,0.027466&t=h&z=16

Tom: I think so too (the saying the same basic thing).

I like to think of them as differently elegant (then again, I'd like to think I can manage elegance, so...)

Bruce at # 473: It's been awhile since I looked at vision processing, but I think the edge detection and so on uses sums, differences, enables, and inhibitors, rather than integrals and derivatives.

Think of those as highly pixelated integrals and derivatives.

Tom: The inertial guidance in that part of Tacoma would have to be pretty good.

In a related vein, one of the things my GPS (Garmin, Oregon 450) does, which drives me batshit, is to make a point of telling me to change streets, when two roads become congruent. So if, e.g., Wyo 41 and I-80 are convergent, it tells me to "stay right onto Wyo 41", when, in fact, I don't need to do a damned thing.

This has caused me (in SLC) to miss a turn, because I-80 is discontinuous through SLC (one has to get onto the 215 Loop, past the Airport). I'd forgotten this, and traffic was dense, so I headed about ten miles toward Ogden (on the Friday of Labor Day weekend) before a sign came up showing me, for certain, what my inertial guidance had been telling me, for about eight miles, was correct, and I could then manage to get off the road and turn around.

Which was why I saw the Bonneville Salt Flats about ten minutes after their best light.

oliviacw@479

I didn't have to use google maps to place your neighborhood -- I grew up a few miles north of you. 39th Place was probably so named for one of two reasons: either 39th Ave was platted first or it lined up better with the grid if both were platted at the same time. Where I grew up the neighborhood had been platted as two smallish subdivisions, the older got all the 'Avenue' names, the newer got 'Place' as they did *not* line up in most cases.

Microsoft Word question: I have Vista and Word 2007 or whatever it is that changed everything. I tend to have things open in my task bar for days or weeks at a time.

Lately, many of them have been converting to read-only. Unprompted, usually unnoticed until my ctrl-S habit picks up. Is there any way to make this stop?

Bruce #473: As Alan Beatty notes at #484, successive sums and differences are the basis of integrals and differentials respectively. An analog system doesn't need equations to accumulate, or report change to, a stimulus, and that's what neurons and their simpler structures do.

Idgecat @486 - my sympathies, it was a dreadully boring suburb to grow up in. At least my parent's house was within fairly easy walking distance of a bus line - no small feat around there.

Thena @482 - I do know I gave enough cues for it to be easily discoverable. I was wondering how long it would take someone to find it!

In defense of the planners, though not of the numbering scheme, it's a very hilly area and a lot of the curvy streets make sense topographically. It just would have been a lot easier to deal with addresses if we'd lived on, say, Oak Street, with continuous addresses along the whole length.

David Harmon @ 488:

Yes, you're right that derivatives and integrals are implemented by difference equations in digital computer programs. Those are very familiar to me because they're the basis (pun intended) for many of the techniques used to compute curves and surfaces in computer graphics, an area I worked in for some years. However, I'm not comfortable saying that the brain is either a digital computer or an analog computer; at some levels it's digital (the output of a synapse is a very non-linear function of its input voltages in the voltage domain, and a complex function (I intended that one too) of its input frequencies in the frequency domain). At other levels it's analog (many subsystems of the brain compute analog values mapped to basins of attraction of input values). At the very highest level the brain's architecture looks like an analog computer: it runs in a constant cycle of transforming (sensory) inputs into (motor) outputs.

A lot of the non-local connections in the brain seem to be parts of 2 dimensional maps between layers of neurons in different areas; these maps seem to form spontaneously during the initial wiring of the brain in the first few months of life. There's a fair bit of research into the creation and operation of these maps, but AFAIK little is known about how they work together to implement high-level cognitive functions.

Incidentally, if you've been following the arguments between Ray Kurzweil and P. Z. Meyer about Kurzweil's predictions of the timing and nature of the Singularity, you should be able to see in the paragraphs above why I agree with Meyer that Kurzweil really doesn't know jack about the human brain, and that he has no credibility with me in discussions of simulating same.

David Harmon and Alan Beatty:

Rereading my last comment, it could be interpreted to be a criticism of what you two posted; that's not what I intended. I've been thinking about the brain a lot in the last few days because of P. Z.'s takedown of Kurzweil, and it bubbled over when I read your comments. Sometimes the thoughts have to come out, will we or nil we.

One of these days I really should write a blog entry about the effect of existential angst on Singularitinism and Tiplerian eschatology. Short version: Kurzweil is afraid of death and Tipler can't deal with the Problem of Evil, but neither one of them can accept an orthodox (pun intended) religious solution to their unease, so they have to create a pseudo-scientific one.

Remember how well the Cambridge (Mass) police reacted to (supposedly) terrorist high-tech? Well, the Orlando (Florida) police went them one better (via Whatever, which linked to a local news video that didn't load in my browser).

Request for suggestions for this Sunday (12th Sept) in Amsterdam. Abi, anyone else. I'm arriving at Schiphol Airport this Sunday, 09.20, so probably 10.30 by the time I've got my luggage? I need to be back at the airport to catch a 4pm coach to Harlingen for the ferry to Vlieland (I'm going to a conference there). How long to get to/from central Amsterdam? Anything sensible I can do in the time available - less than 6 hours including travel time? I could go the zoo, but I know I'll be there for a conference in a couple of years anyway. Anywhere I can go buy some decent beers (to bring home, and maybe to drink there) on a Sunday? Suggestions for where to just wander around, sit down, have a tea and a bite to eat? I'll have luggage in tow, but not heavy (probably a wheeled backpack, so I can shoulder it for a while if necessary). Or is there sensible luggage storage at the airport (actually, I might be able to leave my luggage with the conference organisers at the airport).

Bruce Cohen #490: Non-linear functions can still be analog... the brain is analog ultimately because it's based on the continuity of physical processes, rather than constraining (all) its operations into the abstract schema of discrete transitions. How it manages to construct comprehensible large-scale operations and transformations from all that small-scale tangling is one of the great Mysteries of our age.

Agreed that Kurzweil is full of it, for basically the reasons you mention, plus a few more. (e.g, just because we build a smart machine doesn't mean we're going to put it in charge; also, he doesn't understand modern manufacturing either.)

Bill Higgins @462: That, to date, was the coolest place I've visited. Thank you ever so much for finding time to show us around; you are an awesome tour guide. (Hear that, Fluorosphere?)

Pendrift #495:

You're quite welcome. I'm sorry we didn't get a chance to talk more, but I'm glad I was able to meet you.

Pendrift @ 495... Bill Higgins is also an awesome person. Period.

Pendrift: He is an awesome tour guide. Next time I make it to Chicago I need to get there early enough to see the bison.

dcb: I commend Amstel (not Light). When Heineken (under the management of van Munching and Co. Importers) decided to enter the light beer market, they contracted Amstel to make the beer.

The requirement was they had stop selling regular Amstel in the states. Amstel is a much better beer than Heineken.