It's like the sudden discovery that your parents were young once too...

The linked picture reminds me of the results of my cousin's wedding photo booth. My parents got a good picture, a sweet picture, and then two ridiculous pictures because they didn't realize how long they'd have to kiss to make them all kissy pictures. Then we got into a competition with the other side of the bride's family and ended up cramming eleven of us in there. We won.

Totes adorbs. Definite Gilbert & Sullivan vibe in the postcard.

Incidentally, HLN: Local woman is now entitled to write "MPH" after her signature; is gratified when favorite professor says "you would be really good at x" job, which coincidentally happens to be exactly what local woman would like to do after imminent grant-funded one-to-three-year research position ends.

The couple on the right..."I don't really want to be photographed cuddling in the sight of God and radar, but I love you." "I know, honey, and thanks for standing up here anyway."

These pictures and the linked ones are such fun.

Lila @4 Congrats! Best of luck with finding job x after the research position ends.

FUN FACT:

New York City's area code is 212. (I'm sure there are overlays now, and area codes for outer boroughs.)

Why?

On old-style rotary phones, it is the area code that took the least time to dial, in terms of number of pulses.

Congrats, Lila!

Stefan Jones #7: I had a friend in NYC whose phone was one of the most likely to be dialed by kids whose parents put the phone lock on the 3. Her number was all ones and twos. Fortunately, she was very sweet-tempered.

"Wohlgeb." for "Wohlgeboren", lit. "well-born", an honorific title for low-to-middling titled aristos, probably equal "The Honourable Miss Anna Skokan" (is that an initial S?)

Signed under photo "mit Grüsse," i.e. "regards".

Schönbrunner Strasse is a bit southwest of downtown Vienna; probably more suburban at the time.

Could these have been actors in a current play? The fact that their names are printed in the photo suggests that the photo is a publicity shot of some kind.

Yup. Gettke was almost certainly Ernst Gettke, actor and director. Between 1893 and 1907 he was the director of the Raimundtheater in Vienna.

Hansi Niese is also recognizable in her Wiki photo:

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hansi_Niese

There is no entry for a Schweighöfer of the right age, but there seems to be a long family of actors by that name. Joachim (b. 1936) was the son of Willy (b. 1906), who were both actors and directors, so we may be seeing Willy's father (grandfather? talcum powder?) here.

And there is no separate page for Jenny Reingrüber, but she is listed on the page for that surname as "Jenny Reingruber (1881–nach 1902), österreichische Theaterschauspielerin," sc. austrian actress.

David θ121:935: Long ago there was a picture of a pornstar who had been linked to a member of the British royal family, and the headline next to it said "Student Sets Teacher On Fire!"

A friend clipped it, omitting the real headline about the pornstar and the real story about the malevolent pyromaniac student.

Lila 4: Congraduations!

Stefan, #7: Interesting. Detroit's area code, when I was growing up there, was 313. Houston's is 713. I wonder what could be deduced about city sizes by looking at their original area codes?

14
Los Angeles: 213
San Francisco: 415

Area codes with a 0 in the middle are more recent.

Washington, D.C. are code is 202 and always has been. So "1" in the middle may not be an indication of older area codes.

The original area code for all of Connecticut was 203, the original area code for all of Colorado was 303. I think it is area codes with neither 1 nor 0 in the middle that are newer.

Yes, area codes originally had either a '1' or a '0' in the middle. But the '0' takes a lot longer to dial on actual dial telephones, so it is very plausible that it was the biggest cities that got the '1' for their area code. (Atlanta's is 404.)

Mary Aileen @18: Which is why none of us could ever find Atlanta....

RIP Madeleine LeBeau, 92.

Who?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HM-E2H1ChJM

"Vive la France!"

Tom Whitmore (19): ::snerk::

Lee, P J Evans:

I had heard (but have no source to hand) that LA got 213 because it was not only big but far away from New York. That is, they tried to give nearby cities quite different area codes, to reduce ambiguity.

Breadcrumbs back to Open Thread 211

22
I'll buy that. It makes a lot of sense. (805 is in California. 806 is in West Texas.)

For the interesteed, the North American Numbering Plan wikipedia entry is a reasonable place to start for information about how area codes (and the rest) came into being ...

I totally needed this, today. _{(Though in the back of my mind I would worry about rabies.)}

Grumpy that I missed the Nebulas. Grumpier that it was due to apathy on my part. But Twitter is making it sound like everything went well. I'm very glad that C. J. Cherryh finally got made a Grandmaster.

(Warning: Old telco guy geeking about old times below.)

North American Numbering Plan Telco notation
- X is any digit 0-9
- N is any digit 2-9 (which had letters on them)
- Y is 0 or 1
Long-distance dialing originally used numbers of the form 1-NYX-NNX-XXXX, and the area codes for big places got faster-to-dial codes with small digits and Y=1; places with smaller populations got stuck with bigger digits and Y=0, and N11 codes were special. Notice the exchange format NNX - that was originally two letters and a digit, where the two letters were part of a more memorable word, e.g. PEnnsylvania-6-5000; I forget how many pairs of letters had mnemonics, but it wasn't the full set of 64, and the letters didn't include the Q or Z.

As the numbering space filled up, various techniques were used to get more
- Using all the NNs, even if there weren't good mnemonics, which was part of the reason we got rid of the letters in the ?60s?early 70s
- Splitting area codes to use more NYXs (they weren't all needed at first.)
- Filling up or re-balancing the XXXX and X-XXXX space (more later.)
- Allowing NXX exchange codes (which required more modern telephone switches in those area codes)
- Allowing NNX area codes (which required more modern switches or complicated hackery everywhere, so that took longer)

The silly piece - there were also lots of meetings, mainly in the late 80s, to deal with the problem of "Where do we put the Q and the Z?" - the switches didn't care, it would be irrelevant except people were starting to use touch-tone pads for banking-by-phone and building them into ATMs, and wanted to be able to enter names or text, and putting them in order messed up things like "press the key once for the first letter on it, two for the second, three for the third", so some people advocated putting Q and Z on the 1 instead.

Now for the even geekier part :-) The first telephone switches were called "step by step", because they used electromechanical relays that handled one digit at a time, connecting on to the next step if there was one, instead of dialing the whole number and then doing something with it like modern switches. If the first digit was 0, you got the operator. If it was 1, it connected to a long-distance trunk (which originally got you a toll operator, later a toll switch, and remember that calls in your area code might still be long distance, so it used NYX vs. NNX to know if the next digits were an area code or not), and otherwise it would make a local call, which might be 7 digits, or might just be 5, because digits cost money and took time to dial, so why waste them if your exchange was the only one within local calling distance; they standardized on the 1+4 digits for local exchanges to keep things from getting too complex in larger areas, but that space might not all get used, especially in small towns and mom&pop rural telcos.

When phone switches became electronic and had things like memory in them, many of those constraints went away, and the "1" got repurposed as a country code for North America in international dialing (later for most-of-North-America, because Mexico moved into the Latin American country code zone when it was modernizing.)

Back in the early 80s, we were trying to find better ways to connect the government's AUTOVON network to the regular phone network, and I proposed encoding some of the special features into the middle digit of the area code, but fortunately that didn't get adopted. (AUTOVON had another row of touch-tone keys for signalling priority calls, so generals could always get through and majors usually could and enlisted grunts might get dropped if there was an emergency going on or the international trunks were too full, and it had its own separate phone switches located way outside of major cities that might get bombed.)

My parents had the same phone number from about 1960-2000, originally with letters, later with numbers, though the black dial wall phone eventually got replaced with a wimpier touch-tone. Unfortunately, after my dad died and my mom moved out of the house into an apartment a mile away, it was just across the exchange boundary and she had to change her number. Still area code 302, though; Delaware has under a million people, so they're unlikely to fill it up even with cellphones and faxes and whatever.

@Bill: Good crunchy backgrounder. I'd learned some of this in a "cybernetics" course in the mid 80s.

My childhood home number was in the ORiole 6 exchange. The 1960s phone books listed the names. MAD magazine would occasionally print a parody phone book with satirical exchange names. Humor you'd have to explain to kids, these days.

@oldster Wien Geschichte Wiki has a Felix Schweighofer (no umlaut) who was acting in comic light opera in Vienna at the right time. https://www.wien.gv.at/wiki/index.php/Felix_Schweighofer

@ mercy #31--

Thanks for that. Now I see that the umlaut in Else Schöller's name is very prominent, so its absence in Schweighofer's name is not to be overlooked. So my conjectures about the Schweighöfers were irrelevant. That's grand, mercy.

@oldster #32 -- I love this kind of historical puzzle!

This is wonderful and fascinating. Thank you, oldster and Mercy!

Xopher @ #13: the Toronto Sun has long had a tendency to juxtapose a headline with an unrelated photo on its front cover. Given the Sun's tendencies, it's frequently a headline about sex crimes with a photo of one or more women in bikinis.

@ Mercy #31 --
He's certainly got the comic light opera expression down pat!

Bill Stewart (28): That's fascinating. Thank you.

I'm pretty sure that using letters stopped by sometime in the 1960s, at least in Atlanta. I was born in 1963 and would have learned at least my (family's) number by the late '60s; there were no letters in it that I ever heard. When I encountered letters in phone numbers in fiction later, it was an odd and exotic old-timey thing that they used to have in foreign places like New York.

28
I remember they stopped using letters around 1964 or 1965 - we moved to a different city in 1966, and I don't remember getting the number in word-form (although I think it would have been 'CYpress', based on others of the time, for '29x').

Glad you enjoyed the answers, Abi. It's a testament to the power of the Internet. It would have taken me a lot of work to assemble these clues from the postcard into a coherent picture, prior to the Web. It would have required a trip to Vienna, at the least.

On phone numbers: contrast the Marvelette's 1962 hit (written by Marvin Gaye) "Beechwood 4-5789" with Wilson Pickett's 1966 hit (written Eddie Floyd and Steve Cropper) titled "634-5789". That pair of titles brackets the transition.

When I moved from Austin (512) to Pittsburgh (312) with my cell phone, I discovered the flip side of the "very distant cities have similar area codes to reduce confusion" thing. Namely, I had the apartment rental company show up suddenly at my door with strangers to view the apartment without warning TWICE, because each time they read my phone number (512-XXX-XXXX) and instead of calling that went "Oh, this is obviously an error," called the 312 version, got no response, and simply shrugged and came by.

I was not pleased with that company. But they were far from the only ones in the city to make that same error. It got to the point where every time I gave out my phone number, I'd make the person I was giving it to repeat it back to me, just to make sure they were getting the area code right. That helped about half the time.

I grew up in a city with 5-digit dialing, so we didn't use letters in the prefix because we didn't use the first two digits at all (except for calling home from far away, which I never did).

312? When was that? Pittsburgh and environs have been 412 since I can remember.

Chicago has, so far as I know, always been 312.

Stefan Jones @7 et seqq

In Turkey, Istanbul is 212 for what I presume is the same reason (and Ankara is 312)

312 is a little village in Illinois called Chicago.

HLN: Area man learns that he has become a great-uncle. Younger brother has turned into proud granddad. Mother and baby look extremely happy (as far as may be ascertained by trans-Atlantic photography).

HLN: Local homeowner has entered the "guest bedroom" in his house and removed approximately half the clutter, which was filling 85% of the floor area (with a further 10% occupied by bed).

The removed material has been sorted through and categorized for further, more organized storage, or removal from premises. Many dynasties of dust elephants were greatly disturbed. Their emperor was not available for comment.

Local homeowner is reported to be exhausted but proud, rather as one is after childbirth. "It'd be good to get a few more things done today," he told a reporter, "But if this is all I manage, dayenu. [epithet redacted] but it's good to actually get that all out of there."

In related news, approximately 8 boxes of children's clothes in good repair, sized between 3T and 6T/small, and shoes in a myriad of sizes, are now in search of loving owners. If none specific volunteer in the next few days, they will be sourced through a thrift store. Some items expressed joy at returning to the place of their birth to be returned into the great Circle of Life and get worn by another kid.

Ah, 412 instead of 312. I've been away from Pittsburgh (and thank god for that) long enough that I forgot the specifics.

Some time ago, I read an article about barbed-wire telephone networks, eventually going into what was necessary to call long-distance into them. Quite a lot of convincing operators that it'll work.

I've twice bought handsets for cellphones that resembled proper wall phones, but neither worked right. I miss the wall-mounted rotary phone. And the phone that replaced it, which was a big cordless deal that lasted years. None of the ensuing phones have been any good.

This is all in my parents' house, anyway. I have an aging cellphone meant for aging people.

Even as of the early 70s, people in my neighborhood were still using the letters for exchanges -- PY1-XXXX. And there were occasional signs and business cards still preserving what PY stood for, IIRC "Plymouth".

And I went to various summer camps and such where 5-digit numbers were still used internally.

Another couple of items via Boingboing, found via Jacque's squirrel link:
Postcards from Google Earth (stitching together the many images that go into their database is not always seamless)

Jet Powered Hoverboard flies 380 meters.

(I'm putting a couple more items into other threads here, according to topic)

Re: Phones: Larry Josephson at WBAI in the late '60s used to give the station's phone number as VAmpire 6-0880 (he had stopped doing that by the early '70s).

We lived in Queens for a couple of years in the mid-'60s and the number we were issued was AR4-something or other; when we moved to another state, we got an all-numeric number which was pretty obviously the digital equivalent of the name of the town.

I remember when all five boroughs were area code 212.

I can just barely remember when local phone numbers were only 4 digits long. Then they went to 7 digits, but the prefixes were always and only either 486 or 487. So you gave your number as "6-NNNN" or "7-NNNN" and everybody knew what you meant. They added a 481 prefix as the population grew, so local numbers were "6-NNNN," "7-NNNN," or "1-NNNN," but then cell phones became available locally and the whole system went cockeyed (grump grump).

Jenny, #53: The area where I grew up had 3 exchanges, but they all started with 88 -- so I remembered numbers by the last 5 digits, as you describe here. 88 was TU, which stood for TUxedo, but I never heard anyone use the word, only the letters.

I'm willing to trade the ability to know where someone lives from their area code for the convenience of never having to change my phone number again even if I move to another state. (OTOH, I do have to say that the last 4 digits of previous telephone #s make great PINs, easy to remember but not trivially obvious.)

UK phones: I found it quite exciting when I was living in Somerset to discover that many of the local phone numbers were only ten digits - the five-digit area code, and then five. I hadn't seen that before. It's usually always eleven total digits.
I do think there's been a change in habits from giving just the local number, on the assumption that everyone who might call you lived within the same area code (and therefore did not need to dial it) or would know the nearby area codes by heart, to reciting the whole thing. Mobiles may have affected that, since you can't omit the first five digits of a mobile number and succeed in calling it.

One of the big changes in Sweden was ushered through "sometime in the 70s", when you no longer needed to wait for a second dial tone whenever you were making an out-of-local-area-code call, but instead could just dial all the numbers in sequence.

Then there was the quite involved juggling required to merge the "surrounding Stockholm" area codes into the Stockholm (08) area code (basically to free up the entirety of the 07xx prefix for mobile phones).

This required first changing all the 6x yy yy numbers in the 08 area code to 66x yy yy numbers (the old numbers worked in parallel for a while, then worked after a recorded voice announcement telling you how to do the conversion yourself, then stopped working). Once that was done, all the 5x yy yy were converted to 65x yy yy (following the same pattern).

Once all of that was in place, the 07aa xxx yy numbers were turned into 08 aa0 xxx yy (well, there were SOME cases where they were turned into aa1, aa2, aa3 or aa4, but I cannot recall the specifics; these were basically places that had ended up in a given area code because it was borderline more convenient to cable things that way, rather than being sensibly related by administrative subsubregion or anything).

When I stayed in the south of England in the spring of 1991, my hosts' house was still on a local exchange. I recall them answering the phone with "[VillageName] 543."

James Harvey, of this parish, may be able to tell us when this ended. Since it was his parents' house.

UK phones: I take a lot of telephone messages at work, and there's a very clear divide between people who give the whole number and people who say "Leeds [rest of number]" instead of spelling out the area code, or who omit the area code completely. The divide seems to be both regional and generational - the people who just give the local part of the number usually sound both older and Yorkshire-born. Which would make sense.

I have also observed that fewer people these days seem to have their phone number by heart. Not having to remember all your friends' numbers is an amazing advantage of the mobile phone, but I find it slightly strange that one wouldn't know one's own number.

I haven't known my landline number for ten years, because I've moved house every one of those years. There has been no advantage to knowing the landline - anyone I actually want to be able to get in touch with me needs my mobile number, which has a high chance of being the same by Christmas. I haven't even plugged a phone into the current line - I don't even own a phone of that sort - the only people who would call me on it are trying to sell me something.
A landline doesn't really belong to a person. It belongs to a house. And if you don't belong to the house, if the house is a temporary arrangement... your mobile is more natural and reliable.

Craft @ #58:

I would not be able to give you the number of any of my work phones (one mobile, one desk phone) without checking. I never, ever, call them so why would I need the number? I do know my home number (I got lucky enough to get a memorable one) and my private mobile number (15 years with the same number...), but in both cases do I need to reach for them, mentally.

Open Threadiness, of the Hugo-Award-Winning-Novel (no spoilers) variety:

I just encountered the song "L'homme armé" in a very unexpected place. My mind was already well on the way to being blown, before that.

The first phone number I learned, for the place we moved into when I was five, was "RE9-nnnn" (RE9=739, but I learned it with the letters). That was in 1968. My parents changed to an unlisted number in 1976, which we were given as "545-nnnn"; I suspect that exchange had once been called JAmaica5.

The cell phone number I've been carrying around for years (through two cross-country moves) is in one of the overlay area codes that didn't exist when I was young, 646.

Despite having a phone number that announces itself as "New York" on cell phone displays, I think things like "why is someone calling me from Albuquerque?" when I see an unknown number. ("Albuquerque" turned out to be a person at my physical therapist's office, in western Washington, using her cell phone rather than the office phone.)

Rural England here. We were still getting 3-digit telephone numbers on new lines in 1960. Because we didn't get a telephone before my brother was born. The GPO monopoly was still running. The electro-mechanical exchange was at the top of the hill and served two villages. The code for the exchange was 065 27, and there were special local dialling codes to adjacent exchanges.

When the System X digital exchanges came in, the 3-digit numbers became 6-digit by adding a 3-digit prefix, and the exchange code was changed to 01652, which covers a huge area.

"0" was the signal for making a "trunk" call, and some of the big cities had very short dialling codes. London had the STD code "01", introduced in 1959, and the London exchanges were coded according to their name, the letters marked on the dial, which became a 7-digit number. Famously, Scotland Yard was WHItehall-1212.

The zero was originally the code used to connect the call to a human operator, who would then set up the trunk connection.

My grandfather was a little awkward about such things, and the family business was run without a telephone until after he retired.

"Q" and "Z" were not assigned to numbers, while the "1" was not linked to any letters. Somebody did have the bright idea of linking the letter "O" to the digit "0". On a mechanical dial, sending precisely-timed pulses, the "1" was one pulse, the "9" was nine pulses, and the "0" was ten. When the emergency-number system was set up in the UK, the number "999" was chosen because there was almost no chance of a line fault producing that pulse sequence.

"999" started to be used in London, in July 1937. The European standard of "112" is also recognised now.

The thing i miss about POTS is how dependable it was. It was a rare occurrence to dial a number and not have it go through.

Yeah, we can do a whole lot more with VOIP and wireless, but we can't reliably do the thing we made the original telephone system for -- call someone and get an answer.

Craft (Alchemy)@58: one still occasionally sees telephone numbers on vans that give only the name of the town and the local phone number, eg Anytown xxxxxx. Outdated and inconvenient, but if that's the way they want to do it... there may be a bit of folk memory involved about the old 'very local' dialling codes that used to exist—up until I think the 90s it was possible to dial Bradford from Leeds without dialling 0274 (as it then was) for Bradford; you could dial a special short code (was it 9? 89?) before the Bradford local number. Don't know if this affected the cost of the call or if it was just a useful shortcut.

When I used to answer phones for a living we used to get calls on Saturday afternoons to our free 0800 number from people who had slightly misheard the audience phone-in number for BBC Radio 4's Any Answers. They usually didn't listen to our gabbled "hello this is $myname at $company how may i help you" and they launched straight into their polite middle-class thoughts on animal welfare and the EU.

I hated telephones then and I still do now. I used to wake up occasionally in the middle of the night thinking I'd just heard the incoming-call headset bleep and I'd reach for my bedside mobile phone to deal with a non-existent customer. (See: Acoustic shock.)

I remember when making a phone call in the morning (at Peak Rate) denoted either substantial wealth or having to deal with a real emergency.

One of the volumes of Brian Aldiss's memoirs, either Bury My Heart at W.H. Smith's: A Writing Life or The Twinkling of an Eye, or My Life as an Englishman, has a picture of a van belonging to either his dad or his uncle before the war. The phone number on the van is, I think, Dereham 3.

The telephone discussion finally prompted me to look up one of the changes in London telephone numbers that I watched in stop-motion, as an occasional visitor: the shift from 0171/0181 xxx.xxxx to 020 xxxx.xxxx via the sort of phantom exchanges of "0207" and "0208". Apparently, the "0207" and "0208" exchanges never had an official identity; but to an outside observer—and apparently to many residents—there seemed to be a two-stage conversion.

I remember when making a phone call in the morning (at Peak Rate) denoted either substantial wealth or having to deal with a real emergency.

In the mid-70s, while my boyfriend-now-husband and I were in college, we had several quarters where I was living at home working on a co-op program while he was at school. Phone calls were always after 11:00 when the rates went down, and calls to me needed to be answered immediately so the ringing didn't disturb my parents who would be asleep by then. There was the night the damned phone kept ringing and I couldn't succeed in answering it because the cord to the unit I was trying to answer had been (I later discovered) chewed through by our new puppy, but the downstairs phone still worked just fine...

Heads up for those interested in issues of Hugos and Puppies: there’s a discussion of EPH and further proposals on File 770.

On telephones etc, I just got a book today which had a piece of notepaper from Ferranti in it, and the telephone number 031-332 2411, and "Telegrams Ferrant Edinburgh - Telex 72141"
The book it is in is copyright 1978, I'm kind of surprised telegrams were still hanging around then given that email was growing at that time.

I just read some of "A brief history of the future" by John Naughton, and was amazed at how much of our current information network stuff was invented so long ago.

{insert obligatory Gison quote about the future being unevenly distributed}

The book in question that I aquired is called "Design and manage to life cycle cost" (I have a weakness for old management books, they are often clearer and more accurate than modern ones).

guthrie @70, I started in my current job in 1987. The company still had a telex machine, and did not have an email address until probably the early 1990s. It didn't buy its own domain name until (if memory serves) the mid- to late-1990s.

@Craft no. 58: I've read one too many scary articles about people who lost their phones while traveling and had no idea how to reach anybody anywhere. I have my important phone numbers written down in a separate location, and also memorized, and I'm drilling my kids on their important numbers as well.

All Knowledge, etc: I bought an 8-lb roast instead of a 4-lb roast and I wish to slow-cook it. Recipe is for slow cooker, 4 lbs.

Anyone got any ideas about this? Heat transfer isn't really helping here.

Update: The question is moot, as the 8 lb. roast will not fit so I'm going to have to cut it in half anyway.

Sandy B, it's nice when a problem solves itself....

My first "real" job was with a computer "mail order" place. Most orders were placed by phone; email as a commercial thing was years away. The web literally did not exist.

There was a Telex machine; a gadget the size of a portable typewriter that took rolls of thermo-paper. It sat on the desk of a lady in the accounting department.

Incidentally, that was the job that taught me to talk on the phone. I still have a nice phone voice even though I'm shy and stumbling face to face. I learned many, many area codes; I've forgotten most of them, 29 years on.

I no longer remember the phone number of the house I lived in, in New York, but I remember my grandparents' phone number, also in New York, because my mother drilled it into me; Independence 13938. You picked up the phone (perhaps you dialed zero? I'm not sure) and a human voice said, "Number, please." This was long before area codes; (I'm guessing) 1950 or so.

It's astonishing that I can still recall that number. I am probably the only one who does.

The photograph is almost certainly from the collection of Victor Leon, now kept at Harvard; it is probably one of the ones listed under "Niese, Hansi" (nos. 10,445 or 10,446) on this page. Which is to say, oldster and Mercy were right in their identifications, and it is a picture of various actors in Viennese Opera.

I immediately thought of the actor Matthias Schweighöfer too, but had forgotten he had an umlaut.

Ingvar M. @60: but don't you have to give your number to people sometimes? I suppose these days numbers come up automatically on the phone display a lot of the time.

Steve with a book @65: my parents used to have a landline that was one digit (one easily-typoed digit - 4 instead of 7, adjacent buttons) away from the local supermarket's enquiries line. Everyone in the family, including the kids, ended up knowing the correct supermarket number by heart so we could give it out to people. I can still remember that number even though we moved in 1999 ...

Jenny Islander @72: This comment prompted me to take stock of how many of my own important numbers I actually know offhand. Other than my own number the only one I can reel off reliably is my parents' landline - which is a good start, but I should probably commit e.g. my partner's number to memory. Thank you for the PSA.

Not about phones, Lila @61: it took me ages to figure that out; I think I only realised when I saw a literal translation of "L'homme armé" somewhere that was close enough for me to make the connection. Karl Jenkins' setting for the Armed Man mass always reminds me of those books now.

Craft @ #79:

My work number? No, I don't think that's happened this side of 2005. Home and (own) mobile number, occasionally. Most frequently "mobile number and name" as a means of identification at the mobile network store(s) (which, given that I only visit them very very infrequently, is telling).

There may have been occasional "type phone number into email or Twitter DM", so I shall count that as give out.

All in all, I communicate a LOT more by email or some sort of instant messaging than I do by phone, or indeed SMS.

My work phone number is on a post-it on my monitor, in case someone asks.

I should really get the names of my new manager and some co-workers on my phone. There's no receptionist any more.

candle @78:

Nice detective work!

It would have to be 10,445; there's no Metzl (woman) in the photo, and there is a Gettke (man). So 10,446 doesn't match.

Thanks, abi, and I'm sure that's right. I didn't do a proper check on which photo it must be because I didn't fancy jumping between tabs so much, and I'm supposed to be doing other things! It's nice to be able to pin it down, though, and sorry to have left the last part undone.

I agree by the way that the picture is nicely relaxed for (how I imagine) its era, and I really liked the linked image, which I had never seen.

Incidentally, my partner is taking up a new job in Amsterdam next February and we are making plans to move to Weesp (although I will continue to work in Ireland, which will be tricky). Any tips for moving to the Netherlands? We are currently in Germany, but I am English and my partner is Flemish, so languages and residence shouldn't be a problem.

That's to anyone, rather than just abi, by the way.

Also, can anyone tell me how to link to my old posts after changing email addresses?

candle (83): The usual method for linking comments from old and new emails is to make a pair of comments:

one using your new email address containing a link to your old view-all-by
one using your old email address containing a link to your new view-all-by

Thanks for shedding more light on the mystery, candle!

I see that both of the photos that you point to in that inventory were taken by a photographer named Hahn, which matches the note on the front of Abi's photo, sc. "Fot. Hahn".

Some of the other entries in that inventory also list which play or opera the photograph recorded or promoted. I wonder if there's a way to reconstruct that tidbit for this photo as well? It would tell us more about, e.g., why Schweighofer's character is self-satisfied and silly, why Reingruber's is reserved and bashful, etc.

I can't imagine not knowing my own phone number. Every time I go to a new medical provider they want my phone number. Every time I apply for a show they want my phone number. Many of the places where I order things online want a phone number. Several stores where I have loyalty cards look those up by phone number. Pretty much any time I fill out a form of any sort they want a phone number. It's still a standard question, even if they only want it as a backup form of communication.

For things like the loyalty cards, I provide the landline number, which doesn't get much use any more. If I think someone is going to spam me with advertising/begging calls, they don't get my phone number. But the idea that you wouldn't know your number because nobody ever asks for it is incomprehensible to me.

I've sometimes had to stop and think when I'm asked for my phone number. I don't call it, so it's not always instantly remembered.

If you like looking at old postcards you'll enjoy the long series of articles that begins here on the Poemas del río Wang blog. This is a great site, particularly good for Austro-Hungarian historical titbits but full of multilingual essays and good pictures—a great timesink if you have an evening to spare. The Trieste meridian. Hugo Grotius's apologia for the VOC.

The fear of transient academics.

DO read the comments!

Our local community association publishes a (very local) phone book. Many people are listed with 4 digits, but we now have mandatory 10-digit dialing. (Others are listed with 7 digits.) It's rumoured that 4-digit dialing actually used to work, though not in my time here. Soon enough we'll have two NPAs, so next year we might list 4, 7, or 10 digits.

Nearby, but outside that area, I know people, neighbours and sister-in-law, who have consecutive phone numbers and house numbers separated by 2. So I guess when the phone lines came in, the numbers were handed out in order. But in reverse sense of the house numbers.

When I first moved to this area in the 1980's the toll boundary ran along a road near here. I knew people who could, with a good wind, throw a frisbee from one house to the other, but it was a long distance phone call. Not until after municipal amalgamation was there a sensible local calling area, and I think we're still paying a small monthly surcharge to fund it.

Exchanges in cities also tend to separate similar numbers. I have an acquaintance whose number differs from mine only in the 2nd digit of 7 (or 5th of 10), but he lives literally at the other end of the city.

First comment with new email address, linking to my old view all by.

Last comment with old email address, linking to my new view all by.

Thanks all, and especially Mary Aileen for these instructions.

Having a quick look for what the production might have been, I find a different but very interesting report of Felix Schweighofer's multiple appearances on the New York stage in, I believe, 1899/1900:

"Haubenlerche, Dec. 14; Ein Blitzmaedel (A Telegraph Girl), by Costa and Millocker, was also given, when Herr Felix Schweighofer, the German character comedian, made his American debut, as Leo Bruller. This bill was repeated Jan. 1, 2, 3, 1900. Pension Schoeller (Schoellers Boarding House), by Carl Laufus, was also acted, with Schweighofer as Philipp Klapproth. He appeared Jan. 4, 5, and 6, as Stocker in Die Gypsfigur (The Statuette). On Jan. 11 Schweighofer varied his entertainment by appearing as a monologuist in a series of descriptive stories illustrating every-day life in Vienna. He was alone on the stage for forty-five minutes. He gave three sketches, in which he impersonated various widely different characters with remarkable skill. The remainder of the performance consisted of a one-act comedy Unter Vier Augen, in which Anna Braga was the principal figure, and Ein Vereinsschwester (A Female Lodge Member), a musical comedy in which Herr Schweighofer again displayed his skill. Jan. 15 Mathias Gollinger was played with Schweighofer in the title role; Jan. 18, Gebildete Menchen (Educated People), Schweighofer as Adolf. He appeared Jan. 23 in a one- act comedy Scheu vor dem Minister (Timidity Before the Minister), a short farce called Othellos Erfolg (Othellos Success), and the second act of Blitzmaedel, for his farewell."

Link is here.

Note also letters from Felix Schweighofer to Ernst Gettke, placing S. at least in Vienna in January 1903 (and in Dresden in March 1903): see no.3235 on this page.

And finally, this history of the Munich Gärtnerplatztheater suggests that the 1902-3 season saw a (touring?) production of Wiener Blut, with a libretto by Victor Léon, and a cast of four men and three women. Does the photo have to be of a theatre in Vienna? The fact that the card was sent there may suggest not.

This doesn't add up to anything conclusive. I can't see a way of reading Schweighofer's letters online, unfortunately, which might clear it up. And of course the postcard need not have been of a current production. But I'm going to turn off my historian's brain and pretend that this is enough to conclude that what we have is a promo photo for a production of Wiener Blut in the 1902/3 season, starring Felix Schweighofer and Hansi Niese. That's good enough for me!

The card isn't necessarily sent from Vienna, but the postmark looks like it says "WIEN" and the stamp is Austrian. Given that it was sent on 20 February, and the front appears to be autographed on 18 February, I'd guess that it was signed wherever the group was touring at the beginning of the year. Where it was sent from is hard to read.

Chasing down the indication "BKWI" on the photo side of the card, I find that it is the mark of the Kohn Brothers postcard publisher in Vienna (Brüder Kohn Wien).

Salomon, Alfred, and Adolf Kohn started a postcard company in Vienna in 1898. It was successful and innovative, featuring local Viennese scenes, building, celebrities, etc. Salomon and his wife were sent to Theresienstadt in 1942; he was murdered in Auschwitz in late 1944. Their daughter Minna had fled to England in 1939; she restarted the company on her return to Vienna in 1946 and died in 2003. Their son Walter also went to England in 1939; they were hosted by a British couple who were also in the postcard business. Walter Kohn studied physics in Toronto and then held a number of academic appointments in the US; he won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1998.

https://www.geni.com/people/Walter-Kohn/6000000014361507128

I wonder about the communicative intention of sending a photo of an opera-company. My best guess (founded on nothing) is that these cards were available in the lobby of the theater, and that one sent them after seeing the show, perhaps as a way of saying, "didn't we have fun watching that show!", or "I watched this show--you would like it, too!"

The name of the piece itself may have been left off for copyright reasons. Candle, I like your suggestion that the show was Wiener Blut--a light romantic farce set among nobility. A version of the operetta was filmed in Nazi Germany in 1942 and became one of the best-selling films of the era, taking in over seven million Reichsmarks.

Returned from Sweden last Friday. It was an excellent trip (there were some things that were less than good, but they're being wiped out in the remembering of it, as they probably should).

The Vasa Museum, in particular, was spectacular. I went in having nooo idea what was in there, paid admission, walked through the doors, look up... Holy ship!*

*(For those who do not know, the Vasa Museum holds a reconstructed five-story tall 17th-century wooden ship, dragged up from the bottom of Stockholm Harbor in the 50s.)

Of course, I also got my fill of many of the beautiful historical museums, and a good tour through the botanical gardens on my last, exhausted, day, and miscellaneous wanderings in Stockholm and Uppsala. And some of the manuscripts and books on display in the Carolina Rediva. Also, discovered to my delight that Eurasian Magpies are colored a bit like spats.

The two things I miss the most, however, are 1) the public toilets with sinks right there in the little stall room, and 2) cardamom buns! Cardamom buns, my goodness. Must find the time and space to make some yeasted breakfast pastry deliciousness.

Overall, a good trip; would do again. (Although I may be slightly allergic to the country...! I had mysterious hives up and down my arms and hands for 2/3 of the trip, which promptly vanished when I was in Boston waiting for my last connecting flight.) Next time: horseback tour of Iceland? :D

abi@94: Ah yes, I hadn't spotted the postmark. And the stamp is Austrian, of course. I'm intrigued (like oldster) at the sending of a postcard of an opera cast with only a brief greeting, and within Vienna. But probably, as oldster says, it was either a reminder of a joint visit or a suggestion for future viewing.

And I suppose I'm also stuck thinking of postcards as things to send from a distance, when probably it was entirely natural to send a card to someone in the same city. Perhaps it still is.

estelendur @ #97:

Most, if perhaps not all, of the ship you saw is the original ship, lovingly preserved after having been raised from the sea-bed nearby. So it's probably even cooler than you imagined.

The secrets of cinnamon buns are: "add a very small amount of coarse cardamom to the dough", "before sprinkling the sugar/cinnamon blend over the dough, you need to carefully butter the dough" and "don't make them too big".

Some people argue about the last one.

Ingvar M @99: Yes, I had in fact gleaned that information from the exhibits :D so awesome. They have some reasonably detailed explanations of the preservation process, and the trials and tribulations the ship's caretakers have encountered over the years.

Will mixing the sugar/spice with softened butter and spreading that over the dough work as well, or is there some chemistry that's lost if they're blended, or the butter is not melted, or what have you? And, if they're smaller, I can eat more of them, right? ;)

estelendur @ #100:

You want the bun douhg rolled as flat and thin as you can get it (this ups sugary cinnamony goodness per bun-unit). The classic method I'm aware of is "roll dough thin, butter it with soft butter, sprinkle sugar on top, sprinkle cinnamon". I know some people pre-mix the sugar and cinnamon, but I've always found it more convenient to do two passes (that way, I don't have a bun-only sugar/cinnamon mix taking precious space in the spice rack).

What I grew up with are buns where each dough layer is on the order of 5 mm (call that a fifth of an inch) once baked. That means you're (probably) aiming for half to a third of that pre-baking.

For me, the most vivid sensory memory of the Vasa museum is the smell of preservative fluids and the slimy feel when you accidentally brushed against the ship. But that was before the current snazzy museum was built, in the old temporary "we are not quite a museum yet, we're merely a temporary preservation building". And by "temporary", I think I mean 20-25 years. With my estimated 15 visits to the ship, only two have been in the new building.

Ingvar M @101: I did not get to touch the ship... probably quite sensibly on the museum's part. But they did have a piece of ship wood treated with polyethylene glycol* that people could touch. It felt waxy? But of course I've only had one visit to build sense memories in. :) So the primary memory is the visual. (The super fancy climate control system probably also cuts down on any smells! It was very comfortable compared to the 21C+ temps outside the whole time I was there.)

*The primary preserving agent.

Wow, that is very thin dough! o_o I might have to start by making an extremely *small* batch, because I really do not have counter space to roll out a lot of dough on and of course it gets bigger when rolled thinner...

Jacque, this reminded of your weasel help.

http://www.metafilter.com/159656/The-best-basket-in-China

Wow, I just realized that it was 40 years ago this summer that I visited the Vasa. As Ingvar says, it was still in a "temporary preservation building". I remember lots of sheets of translucent plastic over almost everything, and sprinklers set up to spray a mix of water and preservative to keep it moist. The plan was to gradually increase the preservative and decrease the water, so that eventually (today?) it could be exhibited without needing frequent dousings. The temporary building was not much larger than the ship, so it was impossible to stand back and really see the whole thing at once; the photos of the current museum look like it gives a much better view.

Bruce H: Oh, freakin' classic—I love it!

1. Attempt to open door.
2. Toss broom over fence to distract pandas from door.
3. Enter pen.
4. Extract broom from pandas.
5. Extract other half of broom from pandas.
6. ...

• Do not watch video at work, or
• Don hernia truss beforehand.

Yes, very much in the same spirit. For animals that (AIUI) are solitary in nature, they sure seem to have a lot of interest in what the humans are up to.

Meanwhile, in other news: Fun science geekiness in GIFs.

undeleted spam

re 28: Several of the Japanese WW II code machines (e.g. the PURPLE diplomatic cipher) used phoneco switches.

Stefan Jones @ 81: I don't have a phone at work. I use Skype (or similar) to have real time conversations with coworkers not in the office, when needed. Communication goes through Slack, and occasional emails.

Estelendur @ #102:

A flattened piece of dough, roughly the size of a baking sheet gives enough buns to pretty much fill the baking sheet (you probably want the snazzy wax-paper "bun cups", if you can find them). Memory from when I was assisting or being primary bun maker is that a batch of dough is ~4 baking sheets. This is, probably, about the same amount of dough as 1 loaf of bread, maybe 2. Not that "loaf of bread" is actually a very precise measurement, but, you know...

Jeremy Leader @ #104:

New museum allows you to see the ship from several tens of metres away. It's pretty darned awesome.

I am #@&$%&##! Microsoft installed Windows 10 without my asking for it. (In reality, I probably forgot to decline one of the popups they've been sending for a couple of months suggesting it.) I was wroth this morning. I declined to accept the terms and conditions, after which the popup said it would reinstall my previous operating system but "this might take a while." It took 15-20 minutes, I think.

But Mikey! Can't you let me alone?

Brenda Kalt @110: Word on the street is that Microsoft has decided to make Windows 10 a "recommended" update, which means that if you have auto-update for recommended updates turned on (the default) it will do that, and will most likely do it again. If you are on Windows 7, you can change this setting by opening Control Panel, going to Windows Update, and clicking "Change settings".

Ingvar M @109: Hm, not sure I've encountered these "bun cups", unless they are equivalent to muffin cups which it sounds like they might be. At any rate... *plots baking*

Re pandas: That is my mental image of what it's like having kids.

CAN'T ... STAY... MAD!

I haven't been able to get to MeFi for some reason. If anyone else is having this problem, have a different link or just Google "panda basket".

Lee, the panda video was featured on I Can Haz Cheezeburger this morning. So it's probably been slash-dotted.

estelendur @111: Thanks. I changed the setting.

"Thanks, Help Cat!"

also ps:
Does anybody have experience with the WayTools TextBlade?

PSA re Windows 10: Apparently Microsoft has decided that malware scammers are a good example to emulate. In their latest push to get people to accept Windows 10, clicking on the 'close' X in the top right-hand corner accepts the install. Remember that round of malware where clicking anywhere on the pop-up box would start the install? Yeah, so do I.

Emulating malware scammers or becoming one?

I hate Windows 10 with the burning passion of a thousand suns. Unfortunately, when the logic board of my beloved MacBook went up in smoke in the middle of my last semester of school, I had to immediately replace it with the cheapest thing available. I pretty much got what I paid for. Ew.

HLN: computer geekery department. Local Man is not going to rack-mount the server, but a cheap coffee table is a reasonable substitute. A bunch of cheap old hard drives, via eBay, are running as a RAID array, and it should soon be set up as a storage server, safely out of the way.

There are one or two things that local geek wants to try, but the Powerline networking is suddenly notworking. The Linux is coping with a WiFi dongle, but in some ways it could be awkward. Holes for ethernet cables may have to be drilled through walls.

Note to self: remember to get a spare key for the front bezel

Brenda 115: I installed the GWX Control Panel, which is for the less tech-savvy and lets you block, in one friendly interface, all the different kinds of W10 vandalism Microsoft has been inflicting on us.

Apparently W10 "phones home" a LOT, which means that if you have a pay-as-you-go bandwidth arrangement, it will be expensive to RUN, not just to download.

Ingvar M #99: I do something similar with chocolate-chip cookies -- use whatever recipe, but add 1/4 tsp cardamom. I usually replace the nutmeg, if any (the last recipe I googled doesn't even have spice).

Windows 10: When recovering from my recent computer troubles, I went for Windows 10 on purpose:
1) I figured it's pretty much inevitable, and since I was reinstalling anyway, I might as well catch up with the times. Still not happy with DVD playing being outsourced to the Micro$oft Store.
2) Lenovo shipped Windows 8 disks for recovery, and W10 was consistently described as way better than any version since W7.

I'm fortunate-- I have Windows 7 on an inspiron laptop which is incompatible with Windows 10.

They don't even try to load it.

candle @ #98: when probably it was entirely natural to send a card to someone in the same city.

I think I once heard a story about how someone's grandfather would send a postcard from his office if he knew he was going to be late getting home, so intra-city postcards may have been the text-messages of their day.

Sarah E @ 124 ...
That may well have been when mail delivery was twice a day...

Bruce, thank you for that video of pandas being as helpful as cats!

xeger @ #125

Twice a day?

In the heyday of the Post Office there was a collection in parts of central London every eight minutes.

(One of the Dr Thorndyke stories has someone sending a postcard to say he will be late for tea.)

The telephone existed but only for business and government (plus the rich) in those days.

The past was a foreign country.

The Invisible Man wasn't so fantastical.

Nancy Lebovitz @123: Doesn't stop Apple from telling me I need to upgrade the OS on our (2008 slab) iMac to whatever the latest OSX release is.

I don't think it'll run, folks; quit asking!

https://www.facebook.com/catoic/videos/1117201135005459/

Cat vs. man with book. I love the bit at the end where the man can't manage to control all the paws.

Sorry for the facebook link, but I can't find a direct link to the video.

Elliott Mason @129: I don't think it'll run, folks; quit asking!

In my case, it probably will run, but the only reason I'd upgrade is to support a newer version of Chrome or Pixelmator. I have no interest in moving into the Cloud. So quit asking! (This latest time, there was no "No, thanks" button. The only way I could make the dialog go away was to open the app store. >:-\ )

Nancy: Yes, I've had that conversation. :-) When it involved reading the newspaper, I was always astonished at Squeaky's ability to pinpoint the exact paragraph that I was trying to read, and lay on it.

...lie on it.

Oh, I give up.

Jacque, "recline upon it." <grin> (When in doubt, rephrase!)

Jacque @131: It's already slow as mud and hard to open stuff on the version we're running, which is about two versions behind the current.

And, yes, Chrome has been warning us for a while that it won't be supported if we don't upgrade, and we can't upgrade unless we bump the OS.

Still not doin' it.

The 8 Tribes of Sci-Fi

Because SFF has all these different branches and sub-genres, while other genres such as romance or mystery are cohesive wholes. Yes, he actually says that. *eyeroll*

The folks over on File 770 are having fun with this pinata. I can't help thinking that I'd love to see Teresa do one of her patented takedowns on it.

Jacque #132: I was always astonished at Squeaky's ability to pinpoint the exact paragraph that I was trying to read, and lay on it.

Well, yes. That's where you were paying attention, and Squeaky intended you to be paying that attention to him!

Elliott Mason@129: "Doesn't stop Apple from telling me I need to upgrade the OS on our (2008 slab) iMac to whatever the latest OSX release is."

Internet lists indicate that it *will* run. 2006-era iMacs top out at 10.6 or 10.7, but 2008 is after the OSocline for desktop Macs.

(Like "isocline", but... okay, sorry.)

This message does not constitute advice to upgrade.

(If you do decide to upgrade, definitely think about adding RAM.)

Anybody know whether Windows 10 plays nicely with OpenOffice? Due to reasons I feel no need to justify, my next computer is going to be "helpfully" pre-loaded with Windows 10, and that's all there is to it. But I refuse to use that thing they are calling the latest iteration of their word processor. I have used it and I will not use it again unless forced to by the school district sending me a form that can only be used in (spit) Word. Is OpenOffice going to run or am I facing a potential cheese error?

Xopher Halftongue @121
Cheers for the GWX link. I've been meaning to nobble Win10 nagging for a few weeks, ever since my partner spent several hours trying to get it running on her supposedly-compatible Samsung WIn7 ultrabook that is the same model as mine.

121
Seconding the thanks for that - I don't want W10 installing itself.

additionally, GWX fixes the bug that Microsft installed in its update system: if you have a third-party security program installed, they turned off update notices.
I'm now seeing those again.

Xopher Halftough @ 121: Thank you from me as well. Will be going onto several machines in this household (the ones running XP don't need it :-)).

Nancy Lebovitz @130: Oh yes, mine is very good at that as well. Sit on the newspaper while I'm trying to do the crossword. Lie down across my wrists while I'm typing on the keyboard - or stand between me and the laptop screen. At the moment she's curled up on the cushion that I placed in the top drawer of my desk for this purpose. I effectively lose the use of that drawer (and the ones under it, for rapid access), but that's better than losing a similar-sized bit of the desk, and if she can lie down on a cushion next to me then she will, after a while on my lap (the cushion not properly heated, but it is less likely to shift position or to get up to go boil the kettle for tea than I am).

130/143
Lying down in the middle of the bed you're trying to make. (At least once, I draped the sheet over the cat, until it decided to leave.) Lying down on top of the pattern you're cutting out, too.

You're all welcome. Now I wish I'd linked it here when I first found it.

139 Yes, W10 64 bit and Open Office get along.

Other free wp's to consider:

Abiword

Jarte

P J Evans @ 144 ...
> Lying down on top of the pattern you're cutting out, too.

Balancing on top of the sewing machine.
Balancing on top of the sewing machine and playing with the thread.
Balancing on top of the sewing machine and playing with the thread while the sewing machine is running.
Standing between you and the sewing machine (particularly while you're in the middle of sewing something)
Jumping on your legs while the sewing machine has power, resulting in unseemly effects...

(Indeed -- one of my cats isn't even vaguely threadsafe...)

David Harmon @137: Squeaky intended you to be paying that attention to him!

Not merely "paying attention to," but "looking at." What really cracked me up, though, was how clearly obvious he felt this was. Me: "Dude. Really?" Him: "Ah, very pleasant, isn't it?"

Interestingly, this attitude is not confined to the felines of my experience. When I'm snuggling Donkey, it is required that this be the only thing I'm doing. I don't get to read. I don't get to watch TV. Only snuggle. If my attention wanders even a little, he yanks on my shirt. "Okay, fine. If you're going to be that way, I wanna go home."

xeger @147: playing with the thread while the sewing machine is running.

Oh ghod. ::shudder::

Laying on the cabinet and trying to play with the needle while the machine is running.

This got him summarily evicted from the room and the door closed tight behind him. I've seen what sewing machine needles can do to soft, squishy appendages.

::SHUDDER::

I spent a while untangling a long phone cord and Isaac didn't hassle me. I spent a while telling him that he is a very good cat.

He bites (enough to hurt but not break the skin, we're working on it), but he could be much worse.

Having seen Keanu, I'm very grateful that he's an ordinarily good looking cat.

V guvax gur zbivr vf orfg rkcynvarq ol Xrnah orvat n uryy-png bhg bs snr.

Cannot retweet or reblog, so must quote: "If it's so normal and well intended, why don't men tell other men to smile?"--Abbi Crutchfield

Well, to be fair, my father used to say "Smile, Luigi!" to me whenever I was moping. I believe he got it from an old radio/TV drama, "Life with Luigi". Of course, the father/son relation is pretty far from the situation in question.

I've been told by other men (and by women) to smile more when I'm morris dancing -- it took several years for me to be able to get past the concentration on getting the steps right and just enjoy the dancing. Again, not quite what is being pointed to, but a bit closer.

Why do I keep getting phone calls offering me "unforgettable Caribbean experiences"? I had fourteen plus years of those. Including getting mugged at knife and gunpoint in Kingston. Is that what the robocaller meant?

Open Office has been mentioned. This is now controlled by the Apache Software Foundation, rather than Sun or Oracle. Most Linux distributions went for the parallel Libre Office, which started at a somewhat political fork of the code.

You would be hard pressed to tell the difference. Unlike another well-known office suite, you can be pretty confident that the file formats will remain compatible over time, though that suite may still be the best choice for dealing with the editing processes in publishing.

Some people I know prefer the Scrivener program for writing long and complicated works. I got a copy at a discount through NaNoWriMo. There's a test version, limited to 30 days of use, and it can handle outlines, research notes, and shuffling of text sections with ease. There are Mac and Windows versions. The Linux-specific version was good, but development ceased: they're making sure that the Windows version will work under WINE.

A good option for working with ebooks is the Calibre program. It's a decent reader and converter, but also good for making ebooks from word processor files.

These days, when the average web page is the same size as Doom, the chances are that you have plenty of disk space to keep all these installed. I replaced a 1TB drive last week, and the price was astonishingly low (Major UK hardware supplier, not suspiciously cheap "user-refurbished" from eBay).

The 1959 Mike Wallace Ayn Rand Interview: The refrain going through my mind for basically the last third of the interview: "Yeah...no. Assumes facts not in evidence." See also: "Not supported by the historical record."

To clarify: I'm referring to her assertions wrt capitalism and economics.

So apparently there's a 16,000 word opus out there that explains the true history of the Organization for Transformative Works and Archive Of Our Own, which is not at all about providing a non-monetized place for people to put up their fic but is instead about something else?

I have no link. Anybody hear about this?

Related to the particle about malachite, I give you tourmaline.

Happy news!

http://www.sciencealert.com/young-gorillas-seen-dismantling-poachers-traps-for-the-first-time

This is a verified observation of gorillas, approximately at the young teenage developmental stage, deliberately wrecking poachers' traps. This is awesome because adult gorillas can just smash their way out of the things (they're intended for bushmeat, not gorillas), but juvenile gorillas can be seriously hurt or killed if caught. Furthermore, the speed with which they operated and the willingness of the troop patriarch to let them tackle the things suggests that these kids have done it before.

Jenny: Now if we could just encourage them to set traps for the poachers....

More happy news: Mary Seacole is getting a statue. Hilariously, fans of Florence Nightingale are upset. The feud continues!

I would totally be into giving gorillas and chimps pistols.

Re: OTW, Jenny @158 -- I don't know about the article you refer to, but I just had need to ask for OTW's legal help. They were helpful, and got a lawyer in touch with me promptly. Problem is now resolved.

Stefan: Gorillas, maybe. Chimps, not so much.

Jenny @160 :It is good news (and impressive), but now I worry that poachers will see it as a reason to go after gorillas intentionally rather than as tragic bycatch.

Em @166: they already are, for bushmeat and body parts.

re 136: I've been running Open Office on W10 ever since being upgraded and have encountered no problems.

Coworkers discussing the relative merits of human breast-milk–based facials.

Must...not...engage.... ::grinds teeth::

My kids got squirted in the face with breastmilk all the time (breastfeeding two at once made for some powerful let-downs), and they did have beautiful skin, but somehow I think just being babies had something to do with that... (also it used to crud up behind their ears if I wasn't careful).

[GOL:BALTICON]

Any interest in a Gathering of Light at this year's Balticon?

Balticon is May 27-30 at the Renaissance Baltimore Harborplace Hotel near the Inner Harbor.

Lila #162: The soldiers whom Seacole aided honoured her during her lifetime. Nightingale appears to have been piqued. On t'other hand, I learnt about Seacole 47 years ago when I first read West Indian history so she's not been a secret to her own people, just to the people whose ancestors she served.

It's about time she got a statue.

HLN: local man has passed his six-month performance review with flying colours. The rental contract on his flat has been renewed for twelve months. It's nearly payday, followed by a bank holiday weekend. He has marigolds growing on the windowsill.

Local man is safe and sane for the first time; consequently he is immensely dissatisfied and working on a plan for world domination. We can only assume this is a positive sign.

HLN: Local resident had unexpectedly good medical experience, resulting in enormous roller-coaster-like happy mood swings. A thing that was "about 9 weeks from now" for the past three years*, turned out to be YESTERDAY, and it is glorious.

This time next year, he expects to have at least enough own-grown facial hair to be an incredibly skimpy mustache.

* Like commercial fusion power, which has been 30 years away for the past 60 years, etc. Many similar examples exist.

Elliott Mason @ #174:

Congratulations!

duckbunny: Congratulations!

Elliott: Megacongratulations! I know it's been a long, hard road. Can't wait to see you at WisCon!

Elliot: I just realized facial hair may be the one place guys get a ton of unsolicited opinions... I have one too and I am waiting breathlessly to deliver it.

Gratz, as the kids said ... a few years ago.

Congratulations to duckbunny and Elliott both

"Any interest in a Gathering of Light at this year's Balticon?"

Getting to cons with kids has been a bit tricky, but we actually might manage to get to this one, at least for a day. (Probably Saturday, but possibly Sunday-- we still have to work out when is going to work for us.) I'd love to meet with other folks from here who are going, either at an event or just informally. What's the best way to find out where and when might be good to meet up?

duckbunny and Elliott, congratulations!

HLN of my own: although local woman STILL does not officially have a job (hoops have not yet been jumped through by prospective boss), local woman was accepted into 2 research studies with a combined reimbursement of over $250. Plus 3 days' worth of free meals. So there's that.

Congratulations, duckbunny and Elliott!

Open Threadiness:
Illustrator Martin Panchaud has turned STAR WARS into one single long (really long) infographic (or is that a single-panel comic?). I think of it as a 2D vertical scrolling movie. It's stupendous.

And I can't stop watching Best fast workers. The skills on display are astonishing, though I suspect Occupational Health & Safety might be wanting to have a quiet word with a few of them.

The 'best fast workers" video really is worth a watch.

It makes me reflect on lost crafts and lost skills. Also, the mixture of efficiency and flourish that the humans display.

Many of the skills displayed--rolling out dough, slicing things, throwing things, etc.--could be programmed into a robotic machine, and probably will be before too long. But the humans who do them also frequently show some sort of flair or élan in doing it that one would not program into a robot--it is not strictly necessary to the task at hand. But perhaps it helps the human do it with greater satisfaction? Perhaps it helps us to feel that we are not merely robotic?

There is an element of play in it that makes it joyful instead of joyless. I'm going to miss humans when they're gone.

P.S. Elliott: and now I have Jonathan Coulton's "The Stache" running through my head.

[GOL:BALTICON]

John Mark Ockerbloom@179

I was thinking that the lobby of the convention hotel (Renaissance Baltimore Harborplace) would be the natural place to meet.

Another possibility is the "Atrium" near the registration table (see the map at http://balticon.org/wp50/hotel/)

As far as time goes, whatever time is convenient for everyone. I was thinking we'd all meet up and then go out for supper somewhere, but even that is flexible.

oldster @ 182:

Of course, automation was supposed to have reduced the amount of manual labor needed for everything, thereby leading to shorter working days and the ability to pursue other interests with more free time, all with the same or better income. Along the way, something happened.

Watching a show like How It's Made is both fascinating and horrifying. Some manufacturing processes are triumphs of automation. Then there's one where a laborer stands in front of a press for hours to repeatedly put a metal blank in, stamp it into a bowl, and then take the new bowl out and toss it off to the side for further work. The only reason to be sorry for that kind of job to be automated is that you know they're not going to find replacement work or income for the employee.

I think that's really the key. Sure, some people are temperamentally suited to monitoring a conveyor belt for hours on end, or punching blanks into bowls. For most people, though, I'd wager it's thankless, RSI-inducing, mind-numbing work with no rewards beyond a too-small paycheck at the end of the week. There's artistry, play, joyfulness, and a personal touch that can be taken in various jobs, but all those are far more likely to show up because the person wants to be there in the first place. I want the world to be a place where people are doing the things they want to do, not the things they have to do because there's no other choice.

This is also where I take issue with Mike Rowe. He's said that even in the worst of the recession, when he talked to the people at the various jobs he featured on Dirty Jobs, they all said that they would be more than happy to have another dedicated, hard worker who would show up early and stay late to get the job done. I can see at least two things wrong with that, right there.

One, show up early and stay late? I hope they're being compensated handily for that, because I know plenty of people who do not take kindly to being exploited. Additionally, there's a reason that unions fought so hard for an eight hour working day. Why make do with three employees, when two who are willing to show up early and stay late will do? Sure, they could be dedicated to the job, or they could be workaholics. Or they could be trying to prove their worth to management so they're not the ones let go when the next round of layoffs comes.

Two, the implication of laziness of unemployed people does not sit well, especially coming from a well-off man who can swan in, do a few days of, admittedly, unpleasant work, then swan out again, while making more in one week than probably the rest of the employees combined. It doesn't take into account that there are plenty of people who can't do the work. It doesn't take into account that there are plenty of people who don't want to do the work when they're required to put in more hours than reasonable. It doesn't take into account that maybe the perfect person who wants to do the job is on the other side of the continent. It doesn't take into account that management has been complaining about lack of workers for the last few decades, all while not actually hiring people.

Related to your comment about robots, flair, and satisfaction, there was a video going around a little while back, of a robot and Japanese swordsman Isao Machii competing in the thousand cuts. The robot was programmed based on Machii's moves. Machii was visibly tired and sweating at the end. The robot, of course, completed much earlier, and was not tired at all. There's certainly creativity and satisfaction in programming the robot, and in a human learning how to be an expert swordsman in the first place. But from then on the robot does what it does. I'm not sure what my point was in this last paragraph, but I thought it was a neat demonstration anyway.

Relatedly, when I searched for the video, the headlines were all over the place. On the page I linked, the headline is "Legendary Swordsman Isao Machii Trains Industrial Robot Motoman-MH24 To Become Super Samurai". Fair, although without mention of the actual programmers. Still, it's a headline. Another site had the more neutral "Watch This Robot Perfectly Mimic a Master Japanese Swordsman". Still good. Yet another site had the more sensational and much less fair headline "Watch Japanese Samurai Master Lose to Robot Swordsman in 1,000 Cuts Battle". It's a robot, duh.

I'm interested in a Gathering of Light at Balticon, but I'm not sure what I'd be able to make it to because I'll be there with the button business which means I'll be doing latish dinners.

Dealer's Room hours

I have no idea why closing is so late on Saturday and Sunday. I may close early if all the customers have left by 6, which I think they tend to do.

Anyway, please stop by the table and say hi.

A few years ago, my second job was grading standardized tests, exactly the kind of not-quite-automatable work that probably won't go away until we change the those sections of the tests.

I rocked that job. Seriously.

My primary job is the kind of thing people say 'must be so rewarding' while meaning 'I am not going to reward you with money'. It's not going to go away, but neither is it ever going to be paid as much as we say we value it.

Also, those people who say they'd love another worker to come early and stay late? They're probably not advertising for a worker. There are people in their town who would like that job, but don't know about it, because realistically, they're not actually hiring.

Economy. Blech.

Thanks for your thoughts, Keith S.!

Were the people who wanted someone to "come in early and stay late" management or the other employees?

Because one thing people in dirty jobs hate is the guy who comes in late, leaves early, and gets paid the same as them while not just doing less, but sticking them with the work of opening and closing.

Especially when that guy is the new kid who doesn't know what he's doing and wastes everyone's time.

(Disclaimer: that may be an exact description of Mike Rowe in that situation, but I don't know if the comments are aimed at him. )

Diatryma, #107: the kind of thing people say 'must be so rewarding' while meaning 'I am not going to reward you with money'

That kind of shit makes me so angry. My response to that would be, "You can't eat 'rewarding' or pay the rent with it. How about some tangible support?"

"Rewarding" is supposed to be something that happens on top of making a living, not instead of doing so.

Two deadly warning phrases in a job interview:
- We're all one big [happy] family here.
- We need someone who's willing to do whatever it takes to get the job done.
Either of those is code for "we're going to exploit the holy living shit out of you." I've been bitten by both.

Lee @ #190:

I've seen a writer (and, alas, I cannot recall who, or indeed where) say "You want to pay me in eyeballs? I've spoken to my landlord, and I can't pay my rent in those..."

Sandy B. @ 189:

It sounded like Rowe was talking to the front-line workers, although it could have been the managers too. The way he said it, it sounded like the sort of gripe that conflates long hours with dedication and doesn't admit to the possibility of abuse, rather than workers complaining about the lazy guy who never helps with opening or closing.

Lee @ 190:

Agreed, totally. Like how teaching is supposed to be morally rewarding, but god forbid those greedy teachers make decent money. Or working for a clueless or shadier non-profit (but it's for chaaaaaaaaaaarity!). See also the related abuse of conning people into working for 'exposure'.

Ingvar M @ 191:

I seem to recall a quote like that too, but I can't think of where. Alas, Google doesn't turn up anything useful.

KeithS #185: Sure, some people are temperamentally suited to monitoring a conveyor belt for hours on end, or punching blanks into bowls.

Actually, I doubt that. That sort of work is famously unrewarding and indeed boring; there are people who can tolerate such activity, but I doubt there are more than a few outliers who are actually "suited" for it.

What's happening in those scenes, is that the human is being inserted as a component, to provide one of those low-level capabilities that machines don't do well/cheaply, such as object recognition, or moving objects around without additional infrastructure.

David Harmon @ 193:

Admittedly, I'm going by a very limited sample size of a friend of a friend who reportedly enjoyed watching a conveyor belt for faulty items. Other than that, you're correct, I don't think that jobs like that are productive or satisfying, and I sincerely doubt that many people do.

I hope I didn't imply that workers in positions like that are anything other than components because they're cheaper than a machine, although I know I didn't come right out and state it. For the example I picked out from How It's Made, that process probably could even have been automated without much additional infrastructure, but the production rate meant that the human was still cheaper than the robot. There are some episodes you watch where the work is boring but fiddly and doesn't look easily automatable in one way or another, but that one wasn't one of them.

I have a friend who loves coming up for a weekend and sorting our comics, alphabetizing our bookshelves, etc. I don't pretend to understand, but it makes her happy.

There are a few people who legitimately love things that drive 99.7% (or whatever) of us crazy. There are more than 0.3% of those jobs, though.

(Separate, but related, example: million hour weeks in tech. Everything in tech. Programming. Working on games is the worst, where "the final product is fun" != "making it is fun" != "we are going to work you 100 hours a week 'to get you ready for the real crunch.'")

I really enjoy alphabetizing and merchandising bookstore shelves.

To the point that I volunteer to do it twice a year at my kid's school, running Book Fair ...

Yeah, there's a pretty big gap between 'people become teachers for the money' and 'people stop teaching because of the money'. And of course, 'you can't solve the problem by throwing money at it.' To which I must say, have you ever tried?

Diatryma@197: "you can't solve the problem by throwing money at it."

Analogous to the "money can't buy happiness". If there's plenty of money, and you have problems, sure, there are plenty of other factors to look at. But if you (or a system) are short of money, and have problems that could be addressed with more money, it's...unhelpful.

My response to "money can't buy happiness" is "true, but it's very good for eliminating some of the causes of unhappiness."

Sandy, #195: I can cheerfully stand in front of a display full of assorted similar items (e.g. bottles of nail polish, packages of small parts, etc.) for half an hour finding and fixing all the misfiled items. This doesn't mean I want to do that for 8 hours a day!

dotless i, #198: I consider "money can't buy happiness" to be one of those things greedy assholes like to say to keep the peons in their place. The difference between that and "slavery wasn't evil because it saved their immortal souls" is only one of degree, not of kind.

It's worth noting that both Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark have the superpower "ridiculous amounts of money". Which is really an amazing superpower to throw at certain kinds of obstacles.

Have now packed the car for a 4-hour road trip* to WisCon with one other adult and three children.

In a Honda Accord.

It's gonna be funnnnnn!

I have a backpack of car-amusements and a backpack of car-food, both of which have to live in the footwell with the non-driving grownup, plus a trash box in the back seat that one kid will have to straddle most of the way.

One huge suitcase for me and Beka in the trunk, plus the Strategic Food Reserve (in a cooler and a box) for digging into when we stop to change drivers and pee. Also two large rag-towels, for (among other things) spreading across the entire suite of backseat laps when they're eating their trip-starting watermelon slices.

This leaves about 60% of the trunk for the other family group's stuff, which I hope will be enough ...

But it's all packed! In the morning I just have to get myself and the kid dressed, pack her toothbrushing supplies and a stuffie if she wants one for sleeping with, and collect the charging gameboys and ALL my chargers and electronics.

Plus, of course, anything I've totally forgotten we need and will grab in a hurry.

But I hope there's not much of that, because I want to get on the road ca. 8AM, and it's nearly midnight right now. I plan to stay up for a singalong that goes till 11PM tomorrow ... Whee!

---
* Well, four hours if it's a physics-class road trip, with perfectly spherical cows and no need to deal with other cars, food, or bodily functions. IDEALLY 4 hours.

Elliott Mason @202: I remember family holidays with three small children, back when I was a small child. We used to go to self-catering places that didn't provide bedding. All clothes packed according to a strict list that required significant laundry to be done, but when shoved in a soft holdall could just about shove in the car (five t-shirts, one pair of shorts, one pair of trousers plus the ones you'll wear to travel. Two jumpers. Five sets of underwear. Toothbrush, toothpaste and hairbrush, but shampoo and soap are held centrally. No, you cannot have extra books in your bag. No, you cannot take a teddy.)

Which, once packed very carefully into the boot, left three children and all the bedding to be fit into the back seat. The trick is to have the children sit on top of the bedding. Indoor sleeping bags are slippery and uncomfortable but if you put the pillows as the top layer it's not too horrible, although it is hot.

We fought a lot over footwell space, elbows, and the way the eldest used to slobber excessively over the shared water bottle. We moved to a system where he had his own and the rest of us shared. Rucksacks full of books had to contain all your books for the week and somehow be fit around your feet, but you needed to do something with your brain on the trip.

It wasn't good. After Mum went back into employment and we needed two vehicles Dad starting driving a minibus to work.

My husband almost religiously objects to the idea of buying a minivan or ANY OTHER 6+ seats vehicle, despite that I regularly have 3 kids in the car (and may in future continue to do so, once Beka has school friends we'll be schlepping places).

I don't know why car backseats are generally sized about 6" too narrow to COMFORTABLY fit three carseats/boosters across the back. They're all about the same width, though some are extra-wide. This is a known variable designers could work around. If they cared.

Elliott Mason & duckbunny: my family were also aficionados of the self-catering/Bring Everything school of holidaymaking. I am one of five children. When I was a teenager my parents had a Ford Tourneo, which is the same chassis as a Transit van but with the van section full of seats. It carried nine. Alternatively, if you pulled out two of the back row, it could carry seven people and seven people's luggage for a fortnight.

I was the only kid who didn't get violently carsick when sitting over the back axle (the suspension had iffy moments), so on long journeys I got the solitary back row seat by default, walled in with bags. It was great - nobody elbowing me, my own snack box and water bottle, and I could pull a duvet out of the stack to nest in if I wanted to go to sleep.

David Harmon @193:

to provide one of those low-level capabilities that machines don't do well/cheaply, such as object recognition, or moving objects around without additional infrastructure.

I'm a bit hesitant at putting "object recognition" on that list. We're right at the edge there, where the answer to the question is very much "It depends on the problem domain". On specific sets of classes of images (the most famous is the ImageNet set with 1000 different types of images), the best algorithms do about as well as people. In some cases it depends on the individual human. What the algorithms aren't very good at yet is generalizing outside of their experience - ImageNet, for instance, has many breeds of dog, but the algorithm can't say "This is a dog, but not one I've seen before" - it will guess a few breeds that it does know. But I could code that part up pretty easily - look at the confidence in the best guess, or the gap between the first and second guess, and fall back to the next level up in the hierarchy if need be. (This is actually what I'm working on right now (as in literally right this minute I have a job running using Google's Cloud Vision API) - we want to be able to use all the levels in the underlying hierarchy, so we can say "This is a Labrador retriever, which is a dog, which is an animal.")

Cheaply, I don't know, but I'll note there are numerous companies out there that will provide automated object recognition in images, and AFAIK using the Mechanical Turk instead is not a popular solution (though I bet a lot of those companies use it to generate their training sets.)

Growing up, we had either an Aerostar (two kids in the back seat, one in the 'control seat') that took us on the big six-week trip that included New York, Washington DC, South Dakota, Washington State, and many places in between, as well as other summer vacations and trips to New York; or a big blue van, the kind with two captain's seats and then a bench that folded out into a bed. That was great for once we outgrew sharing a bench seat for reasons of leg. Any vehicle that lets at least one child be unconscious at all times will seriously help on long trips. That van got us from northwest Illinois to Key Largo in twenty-seven hours (Dad probably but not definitely slept in Georgia while Mom drove). And it taught me to drive something that handles like a zeppelin.

I tend to overpack my car, since I generally travel alone and in a Buick. When moving a friend to Pittsburgh, we did manage to cram a significant fraction of her worldly goods, including a mattress, in there, plus her, plus two cats.

I've been raised to drive, and living between airports, it's still often the best choice.

203
I grew up with 8-hour trips, three kids in back seat, plus whatever small toys we felt we needed. Stops made as needed for refueling of car and people, or other necessity.
(It certainly warped my view of travel. I still do 8-hour trips. But I'm driving, and stop when I feel like it.)

I grew up before people were seatbelt-conscious*. We had a huge 1970 station wagon, bought because you could fit most of a youth soccer team loose in the cargo area in back**. Most of our long trips we had a tent and camping supplies as well as six people's worth of clothes etc. We would put the back seat down and pack the entire back of the car level to the bottom of the windows, then unroll three sleeping bags on top of the load. Three kids would lie down in back for the trip**; the fourth kid would sit on the front bench seat between the two adults. We would swap out who was where after every gas/bathroom stop. Sometimes one adult would be in back to get some sleep before their next driving shift.

*although my mother was better than most, always insisting that belts be used in the front seat

**Now Jim Macdonald is going to reappear specifically so that he can kill me.

Mary Aileen, we must be about the same vintage. Although the trip I remember most wasn't a soccer team in the back, it was my high-school-age brother's music ensemble. Who were playing as we drove. My mother put the station wagon back window part way down so the trombonist had room to slide the slide.

My mother had an incredible tolerance for noise while she drove.

OtterB (210): We did a lot of singing on long car trips.

211
We played word games. Or games involving signs, or license plates. (If we needed to nap, it was 'sit on the floor with your head on the seat'.)

P J Evans (212): I don't remember any formal games like that, but we did sometimes try to make words or phrases out of the letters on license plates. (Ours were LFT, Looking For Trouble.) On one trip, my oldest brother started trying to see how many states' license plates we could spot, so we all kept our eyes out for new ones. As well as scanning the other cars on the road, we walked around looking at the parked cars at every stop. We found all but two, missing only Hawaii and either Nebraska or Nevada (I forget which).

We also helped navigate and read signs. My second brother became our map expert. And we watched for interesting sights along the road. (Oh, look! Horses!)

I'm of similar vintage to OtterB and Mary Aileen. Games included License Plate Scrabble (double word score if the first and last letters of the plate were the first and last letters of the word; triple score if the middle letter was the middle letter of the word. There Was Debate over whether doubling the middle letter in an even-length word counted for the triple), and a Volkswagen spotting game: the first person who spotted a VW beetle said Bang! A Volkswagen bus was the occasion of a "Spider-Bang!" (I think this actually started before Amazing Fantasy 15 introduced Spider-Man to the world; certainly before he was a well-known character). (Spiders were seen as big bugs....)

The family road trip game was mainly the alphabet game with road signs, and a Geography game where each player had to say the name of a place that began with the last letter of the previous player's place name.

I also remember counting horses - a white horse counted 5 - but that was, I think, just me.

"I love my love with an 'A' because" - it got interesting when you got to Q, X, and Z.

"Money can't buy happiness" and "you can't solve the problem by throwing money at it" both strike me as being statements that are reasonable approximations of reality in some places, but not others.

Some problems can indeed be solved by money. If you're constantly broke because your low-paying job is insufficient to pay off your student loan debts, probably increasing your salary by 50% will actually make you happier, at least assuming *that* is enough to eventually get you out from under your debts. If you're a well-paid professional whose main money problems stem from overspending, then increasing your salary by 50% probably won't make you much happier over time--you'll end up with a bigger house and a nicer car, but in basically the same life.

The same thing holds for something like public schools. If your school is a one-room schoolhouse with no books and a leaky roof, money is probably exactly the solution to your problems. But many of the worst schools in the US spend a huge amount per pupil, by both US and international standards. I would not expect a 50% increase in the DC school system's budget to lead to a substantial improvement in school performance, in anything except dollars spent. Their problems are probably mostly not insufficient cash, but rather bad management, a bad reputation that convinces parents with any resources to keep their kids out of the system, and lots of poor black students who don't do well in school or on standardized tests. Those aren't easy to solve with cash.

duckbunny @ 203
... Toothbrush, toothpaste and hairbrush

Luxury! We had to share the same tube of toothpaste, and like it!

Did a bunch of road trips as a kid, generally involving a day or two of driving at each end of a holiday. "I spy", spot-the-latest-number-plate, and competitive counting of cars of nominated colour.

albatross @217:

bad management, a bad reputation that convinces parents with any resources to keep their kids out of the system, and lots of poor black students who don't do well in school or on standardized tests. Those aren't easy to solve with cash.

One of these things is not like the others. Really not like the others, in ways that I'm finding really powerfully wrong. Leaving aside, to the extent that I can, the fact that you've just listed vulnerable children at the sharp end of our society's problems as some kind of difficulty in themselves.

In-school nutrition programs, after-school study spaces, good counseling and mentoring resources are all things you could spend cash on with good results. And if some of the cash didn't go to the schools but to the families—providing economic security—or the neighborhoods—improving infrastructure, providing jobs—I suspect it could do very well there too.

Academically struggling kids from communities suffering generational poverty and discrimination aren't some kind of force of nature to be cited as an insoluble problem. They're people in need of assistance, much of which is either best delivered in the form of money, or in the form of things money can buy.

abi 219: In-school nutrition programs, after-school study spaces, good counseling and mentoring resources are all things you could spend cash on with good results.

We prove this every day at The Jubilee Center. All the kids who go there do their homework first thing, with extra tutoring from certified teachers if they need it, and are fed a nutritious meal before their parents pick them up. Between they have various fun activities. If we had more money, we could help more kids, and do more for the kids who do come there.

In this case throwing money at the problem does help; our summer students have higher scores in reading and math at the end of summer than before (and as most of you know, kids typically slide by quite a bit over the summer).

Unrelated AKICIML question: A person at WisCon was asking if anyone remembered a cartoon show that featured a purple mole (the animal) and a badger (proper) who weasel-help a sheriff or ranger out with various crises. She said there was a lot of humor around the mole being blind, and the badger giving terrible descriptions of the situation.

She said she watched it in the late 70s–early 80s in Malaysia, but swears it was an American cartoon, though none of her American friends remember it.

I certainly don't. Do any of you know what she might be talking about?

abi:

The kids in the DC public school system aren't problems, they're kids who need and deserve an education. We have no disagreement there.

People mostly judge school systems based on stuff like test scores, graduation rates, and whether their graduates are prepared for college. When people say the DC public school system is a mess, they mean that it does poorly on those things. And on all those measures, black kids do a lot worse on average than white kids, and poor kids do a lot worse on average than not-poor kids. I linked to a bunch of data (from the New York Times) about this a month or so ago.

This is one reason why the idea of penalizing schools with bad test scores breaks down--you mostly end up penalizing schools with poor black and Hispanic kids, and deciding that the schools with mostly well-off white and Asian kids are somehow great schools.

Can you change the black/white school performance gap by spending money? Can you fix whatever leads to poor kids doing worse in school that middle-class kids? Maybe so, and it would be worth spending a hell of a lot of money to do so, if we knew how. But I don't think you can do it just by funding the schools better. I think you're looking at some much more fundamental social changes there. And my very much non-expert impression is that nobody actually knows how to do that on a large scale. That really sucks, but as far as I know, it's true.

And so, my prediction is that if you increase the budget of the DC public school system by 50%, you will see relatively little improvement in the measures I described above.

albatross--

When you say that the problems of the DC school system probably aren't lack of money, but bad management, a bad reputation, and children with problems that extend outside the school, does that mean that you don't actually know what the problems are?

The first step in solving a problem is knowing what it is. This reminds me of doctors who take one look at a patient and tell her "You need to exercise more and lose weight" without actually asking "what's wrong? Why are you here today?"

Maybe the patient would benefit from exercising more. A lot of people would. But even if that's true, it won't fix a broken ankle or a bacterial infection.

Bad management is a cause (in the same way that staphylococcus bacteria are a cause), and some of the results include leaking roofs and lack of useful textbooks. "Fire the bad manager" isn't enough, you also need to fix the roof, fix interior damage caused by the water, and buy new textbooks. Money may not be enough, but those aren't problems you'll solve without money.

The set of problems that money alone won't solve is not the same as the set of problems that can be solved without spending money.

#221: Wow, I thought I knew cartoons, but that doesn't ring any bells.

Well, there's Deputy Dawg, which had a purple mole and other critters, but no badger: http://terrytoons.wikia.com/wiki/Deputy_Dawg

If that's not it, might be worth asking on Twitter.

Playing bridge today, we told our opponents that we play a 12-14 one no trump opening. One of them told the other, "Over that we do Hamilton." So I said, "Ah: we open one no trump and you get up and start rapping?"

Elliott, #204: IYDMMA, why is your husband so vigorously opposed to buying a vehicle suited to a type of load that you expect to be carrying regularly for the foreseeable future?

"Will it comfortably hold 4 adults, a couple of bags per person, and 2 guitars?" was one of my primary criteria for car-buying from my mid-20s onward. I knew what it was going to be expected to do, and planned accordingly.

Re travel games: I was an only child and my mother hated to travel -- the only significant trips we ever took were the annual pilgrimages to visit my maternal grandmother, until we moved to her city when I was 14. I don't remember any formal travel games until I was an adult traveling with friends rather than family. I still like the license-plate game where the numbers on the plate tell you how many things are in the trunk and the letters tell you what kind of thing they are. NPC 372, for example, would be "372 non-player characters".

abi, #219: Thank you.

albatross:

Your arguments here feel out of focus; you're kind of half-agreeing with people while phrasing it as disagreement, and not as clear on your own ground as you usually are.

I was going to ask if you were all right, but of course, I know there's a level on which you probably aren't yet. So I'll just say that after every Mass I go to, I stop and light a candle for my friends who have lost parents lately. You're on that list, explicitly and by (internet nick)name.

Albatross, Abi, the family statistician has worked on school exams, and they're a lousy tool for judging the quality of schools. There's a certain sort of person wants hard numbers, and exams and testing are about the only way of getting them.

What's happened in England is that the numbers are being used to assess performance, and the low-reanked schools are being pushed into organising on a new model that is essentially libertarian and capitalistic, and may not work. There are already things going wrong.

Abi has had the chance to compare schools in Scotland and the Netherlands, and has told us of some of the differences which don't seem to have any relation to exam results.

Where are the best schools? Oddly, it may be Flemish Belgium. Most of the stats for Belgian schools are dragged down a bit by the figures from Walloon Belgium, the headline figure are good, but hide that difference. It's like Scotland and England without an obvious border.

What I see from politicians, too often, is somebody grabbing a theory from one particular source who happens to agree with their politics, and who in on the fringe of the educational science community. An untested theory, a book of worse, and flattery.

If you want to see what testing, and schools which get students into elite universities, can lead to, may I direct you attention to the word "Bullingdon". There's a famous photograph, and when you figure out what those clothes cost you know talent doesn't have a lot to do with it.

They're the people telling us that hard work, and exam results, beat money.

Bollocks!

[GOL:BALTICON]

Michael I: Thanks for proposing this. I'm going to try heading down today (Saturday) with family, though with 4 of us with varying temperaments, interests, and crowd-tolerance I can't guarantee whether we'll be there and/or up for supper. I'm guessing there may well be a message board near the registration; I'll check, and possibly post, there if it looks like we'll be around for dinner.

Nancy: I'll also stop by the button table to say hi. (I think I may have met you briefly at an event long ago, but not since I moved to Philadelphia.) Hope the business is going well!

Family road trips! That really brings it back. We drove all over the place. Four of us kids, two parents, and sometimes Mom's mother and sister, who both loved long drives. Many states, national parks, billboards, and motel pools.

Did it again last month. I drove two days up to my sister's in Escanaba, and then she and I and my 90-year-old Dad (91 now) drove three days to Colorado, enjoying the trip as much as possible. Seriously, we avoided interstates for the majority of it, and we detoured to see things, and we dallied. It's pretty exciting for me to be on a trip where you see something and the driver immediately takes steps to help you get the photo.

So we visited my sister and her orbit (and my old chums) in Colorado, then we flew to visit the other sister in Washington, rented a car, and indulged in the same kind of slow-paced adventuring, spending a day driving from Olympia to see the Sound.

The cars were roomy and fairly comfortable. They were Toyota Sienas. The one my sister rented was a newer version of her car, so it was almost the same but with neat little things to discover, like a fish-eye mirror for seeing the back seat. It also had the back-up cam, which was always gripping viewing. Both cars have good versions of all-important ABC, or Advanced Beverage Control. I drove one time, across a parking lot. Just my sister's car, never the rental. Being responsible for that piece of metal may have taken a year off of her life. She was so glad to check it back in, unscathed.

Then we flew back, and spent some more time in Colorado before driving back to Michigan, after which I drove back to New York. Ten days destination motoring (plus at least two more meandering once we were there), four of which I drove by myself, listening to radio dramas and music. It was surprisingly tolerable, as most of my drives turn out to be. I seem to enjoy a mix of utterly familiar commutes (like the two days to Escanaba) and the bombardment of brand-new sights, like the cement prairie dog in South Dakota. It towered above me, and real prairie dogs hastened from one hole to another at its feet. At the Denver airport, I learned that the world's largest cement prairie dog is in Kansas, so I still have something to look forward to in this life.

Right now, I look forward to mowing the lawn. Hoo.

I had a 2008 Toyota Sienna, and it was a good highway cruiser. I traded it in last year for a RAV4 which gets better gas mileage and still is able to hold my telescope gear. Still, I miss some of the creature comforts of the Sienna.

Stefan 224: That could be it, but I won't know for sure until/unless I can check with her.

Stefan 224: That could be it, but I won't know for sure until/unless I can check with her.

KeithS @ #185:

The thing I noticed about that video was how much work the robot's handlers still had to do themselves to make sure the thing to be sliced was sitting in the path that the robot's sword was programmed to traverse.

According to that famous authority, I Read It Somewhere On The Internet But I Don't Remember Where, there have been studies done showing that people who find job satisfaction working on a production line aren't so much temperamentally suited for boring repetitive work as they are temperamentally suited to inventing ways to make it less boring: little private challenges and games to make this half-hour of identical widgets different from the previous half-hour of identical widgets.

Not unlike children on long road trips inventing games to play with signs and licence plates, come to think of it.

Having spent many years doing things like quality control (for data entry-type stuff) and also a couple of years doing assembly-line type work - yes, you do invent things to keep it from being really boring. It also helps if you can talk with the people in the nearest seats, and if you can have piped-in music (with real disk jockeys or news readers, because 'no talk rock' is no fun on a line: you want to be connected to reality).

I remember an article by Daniel Pinkwater. I'm pretty sure it was in the collection Chicago Days, Hoboken Nights. He described how he coped with an assembly-line job: he bought a book of poetry, and every day on his lunch break he would memorize a new poem, and then spend the afternoon repeating it back to himself, along with other poems from previous days.

As a result he...lost the job. Because he was all happy and smiling while he was working, when everyone else was miserable. This creeped them out. They wondered if he was dangerously insane.

Pinkwater. He was.

I passed time on the assembly line by figuring out how to do things faster while not missing any details. I didn't much mind the job, but it was only temporary. One time I was applying for a factory job and set a new record putting nuts on an array of bolts. Then I dropped the whole thing.

My usual road game is doing the alphabet on signs. Over the years, I've honed the rules to suit myself and make it possible to get through a game in a reasonable amount of time (sometimes several hours). My two personal rules are:
(1) Use of rolling billboards, aka trucks. This requires judgement: a big sign on the side counts. Fine print stuff, like operator number and all that, is ignored like license plates and car logos and whatnot.
(2) The EX exception. The English language, for some reason, is not littered with beginning X, so for years, I've permitted myself to count ex- words as X words. In fairness, these words are no longer E words, which makes E a bit more challenging.
I usually go from Z to A, starting a game when I notice the word ZONE on a sign in a construction area, most times. I used to play the game in competition with my sisters on family drives to the city. Now it's a form of solitaire that can occupy just enough of my attention without making me get lost or run into things. When I'm a passenger, it's an activity that keeps me somewhat engaged with the outside world. (I get carsick easily enough, though crossword puzzles are okay.)

#236: Fishwhistle.

I have that collection in audio form. Pinkwater reading that particular piece is just wonderful. Well, pretty much anything in that collection is wonderful.

"Eat pudding."

Eat pudding. Not too much. Mostly chocolate.

To me, the most tedious jobs are ones that are dull, but still require just enough thought that I can't think about any other topic while doing them. I'd rather stuff envelopes than, say, fill out paperwork for the same length of time.

Yeah. The truly mindless jobs can at least allow interesting thought.

When I worked at CopyMat I dreaded litigation document copying for just that reason. Unstaple this bunch of receipts, lay some of them out on the glass, make two copies and set them aside; lay out the rest of them on the glass, make two copies; restaple the receipts and put them in the right place, staple the copies and put them on their respective stacks. You can't just do it on autopilot because you have problems to solve, but the work doesn't actually provide any intellectual stimulation.

Sarah E That's about right.

I don't even—wut

(Not unrelated to Kip W's @238.)

#221- has to be Deputy Dawg. It wasn't a badger, it was a Raccoon named Ty Coon, Moley Mole was a creole mole, and there were also Muskie the muskrat and some other cotton pickin varmints.

(2) The EX exception. The English language, for some reason, is not littered with beginning X, so for years, I've permitted myself to count ex- words as X words. In fairness, these words are no longer E words, which makes E a bit more challenging.

Wait. You only allow the letter if it's at the beginning of a word? This is a new variation to me. Our version only requires that the letters be in alphabetical order -- e.g., if you're on U, and you see "Venus," you can count the U but have to wait for another V.

Open Thready for the knitters (Yarny?): Her son grew up... so she knitted a new one.

#221, #246: I could imagine someone who has never seen / heard of a raccoon mistaking one for a badger.

The person who first told me about this cartoon was very excited. She says "Vincent Van Gopher looks and sounds just like the character I have in mind."

So Stefan wins the prize!* Thanks, Stefan!

*There is no prize.

HelenS
I'm still basically playing the way it was presented to me when I was a kidling. I've even thought how interesting it would be to play by different rules (such as yours), but never followed through on that. Possibly because the process of submitting an amendment is long and onerous, and there's no way of knowing whether the gods of the game would even hear my petition.

Lee @226: This gets into a domain where he can sense things I can’t (like a bichromat versus a tri- or tetracromat).

There is a factor called “fun to drive,” and another factor called “steers like a pig”. The former precludes the latter, and vice versa; they appear to occur on a single-line spectrum. (Other spectra exist, some of which I'm better at perceiving). There is realm between them on the spectrum called “handles decently and does its job”.

I am completely unequipped to grok at any level what “fun to drive” is like, because to me, driving is always a mildly stressful chore that involves a very specific set of focussed cognitive tasks. I can perceive the very outlier ends of “steers like a pig”, but don’t really mind it excessively (and my “handles decently” range goes further out into that end than his).

According to him, any vehicle specced for more than 5 adult passengers*, and any vehicle over a certain total length, is “steers like a pig,” which is completely unacceptable if he has to drive it more than a couple times a month**.

Minivans both “steer like a pig” and are, apparently, prone to rolling over to an extent that is completely unacceptable.

On the gripping hand, of course, for financial reasons we need to drive the car we have until it becomes utterly uneconomic to repair, because it’s paid off and our budget is beyond tight.

—
* Not that such vehicles actually CARRY 5 adult passengers comfortably, for the same reason you can’t get 3 carseats or boosters amicably across the back seat. The carseats are actually within an inch or so of the usual range of widths of human shoulders. This has been experimentally verified in the vehicle under study.

** It could be argued, by someone who wished to register logical arguments, that he doesn’t actually drive the car we HAVE more than once or twice a month as it is. This angle has not yet been tried, on the grounds that it may well be ineffective. It has previously been admitted that if minor car modifications (steering wheel cover, etc) aimed mostly at the comfort of the driver are desired by the more-frequent occupier of that seat, they should be purchased and applied even if the minority-time driver finds them redundant or unnecessary. So perhaps the line of argument should be tried after all.

Separate from but not completely unrelated to the conversation Lee and I have been having, I just completed a road trip.

Short one. 2-3 hours each way (Chicago to Madison).

We did it with two adults and three kids in a Honda Accord.

It required careful packing, the trunk was UTTERLY full, and I didn't get to provide snacks and amusements in quite the way I prefer, which led to somewhat suboptimal toleration of conditions by the back seat inhabitants.

I did print out scavenger hunts, which looked a GREAT deal of fun to me, but never got any takers. By the way, Google image searching for "car scavenger hunts" brings up some great options, and a few that are just repetitive and not much fun. One was an alphabetical list of the kinds of make/model words one often finds written on the backs of cars in chrome, for crossing off -- one can certainly write in any one sees that were not already on the list -- and counting the final total at the end of the trip.

I couldn't, for reasons of trunk Tetris, bring my violin, guitar, or my enormous bag of song lyrics, any of which I could have used on a couple occasions, but on the whole, manageable. For the adults. It verged on Cruel and Unusual for the kids a couple times, especially on the return journey when everyone was exhausted and utterly out of cope with one another -- well, the back seat inhabitants surely were.

It didn't help that of the available Electronic Amusements, two were completely inoperable for the return trip, necessitating a lot of "goose/grain/dog" type dilemmas and negotiations, which had to be brokered and guided by the front seat.

I also realized that a big part of my childhood road trips, that many other people who have done road trips might find macabre, was attempting to identify, at speed and without distracting the driver unduly, the rough species of any roadkill passed*. We also kept an eye out for raptors and other fence-sitting birds.

--
* On the return trip, when I was driving, I spotted at minimum two deer of varying time-since-impact, one brown something smaller than a deer but far bigger than a bunny -- possibly very large raccoon? --in a remote rural area, plus several birds.

When I was a youngling, we did a trip of over 300 miles for family holidays. This is a long way in England.

Part of the solution to car sickness was for me to do the map-reading.

My father said I was good at it.

Elliott, #252: SUVs are prone to rolling over in an emergency-maneuver situation. Minivans are not, because the center of gravity on a minivan is much lower. It sounds to me as if he's conflating the two.

I will admit that my minivan is difficult for me to park in a tight space. My partner doesn't have this problem, so I know it's not the car, it's me.

Our 2000 Toyota Sienna proved to be the ideal vehicle for family road trips (2 adults, 3 kids) because it allowed spacing passengers such that no one was seated immediately next to anyone else (there is a gap between the 2 front seats and between the 2 middle seats, and we could leave 1-2 of the 3 seats on the back bench empty). We took it from Georgia to/from DC twice and from Georgia to/from Colorado once; youngest kid on earliest trip was 6, oldest kid on latest trip was 18. Plenty of room for snacks and playthings (no electronics) inside, with luggage divided between interior and roof rack.

That was also the single most comfortable car I have ever owned. I could either drive or ride for HOURS without my back hurting, which has not been true of any of our other vehicles.

Now that our kids are grown and my mother has passed away, we have no need of a minivan; but I sure loved it while we had it.

My experience when we shopped for minivans long ago was that different ones handled very differently. We test drove a couple that felt like trucks and others that handled more like cars.

I'm with Lila - I miss my minivan in some ways. My Prius is far more appropriate for my current urban needs. But when the kids were younger, I really valued the ability to give each of them their own turf in the vehicle for routine or road trips, and to load up a bunch of Girl Scouts and some camping gear as needed.

Not to trivialize gender identity, but I think, in the way some people feel gender identity strongly and others less so, some people feel "vehicle identity" strongly and others don't. Me, as long as it runs and I can park it, I don't care very much. Elliott, it sounds to me like your husband has a gut-level reaction that he is not a minivan person and is then trying to logic his way to that conclusion.

Kip W @251: the process of submitting an amendment is long and onerous, and there's no way of knowing whether the gods of the game would even hear my petition.

So: arbitrarily declare it to be a new game! "You know that old game we play? Well, this new game is very similar, but with these differences...."

Elliott Mason @#252:
I used to be a "never a minivan!" guy, but then my wife and I started a family. Her Altima was fading in reliability, and I wanted the best mpg possible, and we needed room for 5 plus bags. She didn't want a minivan either. I turned it into an engineering challenge, and found the Mazda5 got better mpg than all other 3-row 6+ seat vehicles. I then found it will take 40mph posted curves at 55 without wallowing. Also fits and parks same as the Altima it replaced. We can both see over it, too, so loading a roofrack is much easier.
Cons: probably the most rust-prone of the Mazda fleet, not made anymore (2015 last model year) and for this 6' guy might be 1" too little legroom up front.

Available with a stickshift, too.

Checking Ford Transit Connect Wagon for eventual replacement as my Prizm at 172k could die at any time. I'd get the 5.

Elliott Mason@252: I hesitate to ask this, because the vehicle has just been discontinued, but has your husband rejected the Mazda5? We have friends who regularly fit several kids with carseats into it, and it drives much more like a car (like a Mazda 3, specifically, with which it shares a base) than any other sliding-door vehicle I've encountered. It may not have enough luggage space to be a realistic step up for you, though, and given your car-buying schedule I don't know whether it's sensible to think about.

OtterB@257: The Mazda5 is/was an interesting test case for that reaction: it looks bigger than it is, and it has sliding doors, so for some people it immediately triggers the "minivan" histamine reaction. On the other hand, it drives like and has the footprint of an ordinary car, so we have at least one friend in the "must be fun to drive" camp who likes it. I think it was a particularly uncomfortable combination of characteristics for the U.S. market, though: too small for a "real" minivan, but got some of the negative emotional reaction of one.

Jacque
Ah, but there's no "we." It's just me. There's nobody to conspire with.

On a related topic, I keep thinking that Scrabble (-type games) might be as much or more fun if you could see everybody's tiles.

Elliot Mason@252: somewhere the question of "fit for purpose" needs to come into the vehicle decisions. Not being able to take your instruments to a convention seems like a major problem to me, and the level of imposition on the kids in the back also seems pretty undesirable.

I always took driving unusual (for me) vehicles as an opportunity, a fun challenge. Like rental trucks, including the biggest ones you can rent and drive on a normal consumer license. Had one for the move back from MA to MN that actually lacked synchro-mesh on the transmission, and I had to reconstruct the idea of double-clutching on the fly and teach myself to do it. It was the right vehicle for the job of the moment.

A quick check of some statistics seems to confirm Lee@255's remark that minivans aren't especially prone to rollover. It's easy to find examples with the same rollover ratings as sedans (including specifically the Honda Accura).

Another interesting choice is the Subaru line; they have a lower center of gravity than most things in their class because of the kind of engine they use (flatter, placed lower in the engine compartment). Their SUV-body vehicles (Outback, Forester) seem to have four-star ratings, same as the Honda Accura.

Side thought re "steers like a pig"... my partner and I have a running (minor) disagreement about the steering of our respective vehicles, both of which are minivans. He thinks the steering on my car is sloppy. Every time I have to drive his car I keep thinking, "Holy CRAP, the steering on this thing is twitchy!" I wonder if something along the same lines is happening here, that the two drivers prefer differing amounts of steering lag.

Once when I was driving (road trip, rental car, swapping drivers) a car he found near the low end of "fun to drive" (but definitely on that end), I was shocked at how touchy the gas pedal was. I had to retrain myself so I wasn't jackrabbiting constantly.

Data point on cars: my Suburu Forester is one inch wider and two inches longer than the Toyota Corolla it replaced. It sits significantly higher, so it FEELS like a bigger vehicle, but the footprint really isn't. I'm not a "must have sporty handling" person (I'm a "must be practical" person) so I can't speak knowledgeably regarding the handling, but it seems fine to me. For what it's worth. It only seats five, however, with a back seat fine for three kids but a little tight (not impossible) for three adults. Lots of cargo room in the back, and the split seats fold down flat if you don't have three in the back (can fit one or two with the wide or narrow part of the back seat folded down.) Roof rails for optional roof cargo. And it has all wheel drive, which for winters in Chicago is handy. (And the relatively small footprint for relatively large cargo space is a plus for finding parking spaces in Chicago....)

There's the steering ratio, how fast turning the wheel turns the actual wheels, and there's how much slop there is, how much you can turn the wheel without the actual wheels turning at all.

In a car with sloppy steering, I find myself constantly turning the wheel back and forth to push us a little one way or the other; it's a lot of work, and rather nerve-wracking, and leads to a less-clean track.

A car with just a different ratio I can get used to, especially if I'm not trying to do anything exotic with it (and, let's face it, there are very few moments when it's appropriate to do anything exotic with steering your car!).

No modern family-size vehicle (as opposed to flat-out trucks) in decent condition should have much of any slop; though possibly a more sensitive driver than I am would notice some, I guess. I don't think I've seen any large sets of measurements of actual slop to tell me objectively how common it is.

"Handles like a pig" and "Fun to drive" can overlap, generally in the fun but terrifying zone of muscle cars. Anything can be fun for a few seconds if you have enough horsepower.

I really like minivans for the space to exterior size ratio. There's nothing quite like a large flat floor to really suck up the cargo. (except, of course, full sized vans. Great if you want 13 mpg, otherwise not so much)

We're planning on a 2 week trip this summer in a 7 seater, and I'm really worried about the balance of space for cargo vs space for three boys who will get real tired of each other. While there are three rows of seats, there's not a lot of space behind the back row, so either they're sitting on top of each other in the middle row, or we'll have nearly no space for cargo. Roughly a backpack each, + some common stuff.

Re sign games, as a kid we used to try to find our names on signs, but my sisters complained whenever we were near Frederick or Fredericksburg.

It seems to me that "fun to drive" typically equates to feels like fast acceleration, quick turning, etc. A sports car is fun to drive because you step on the gas and you are pushed back into the seat, zooming past other, slower, cars on the road. "Steers like a pig" doesn't tend to have those features.

But they do make some SUVs which fit into the "fun to drive" category based on the above criteria. Car and Driver did a drag race competition (0-60, 1/4 mile, etc) head to head between a sports car and... a Tesla Model X SUV towing a trailer with the same model of sports car on it, and the Model X won. So an SUV which can out-perform a sports car in exactly the kind of thing which makes the sports car "fun to drive", and with a (predicted) highest safety rating ever for an SUV, it's safe, too. Too bad it costs $120,000.

via elise on Twitter, flight safety instructions Jabberwocky style

The problem with driving in wintry conditions is that even a two-wheel-drive car already has four-wheel braking (or, sometimes, not-braking) so you can wonder if 4wd gets you much extra safety.

I am not familiar with booster seats beyond having done some light investigating into what I'd need to take my then-three-year-old tinyfriend on a trip. Is there a way to turn the entire backseat into a booster? Some of the ones I saw were very much make-the-kid-higher rather than five-point harnesses, and my roommate has the foam for the couch she's building right across the room, so... long foam pad, slits for seatbelts, velcro on one site to cling to the seat itself? Then you have only the kids' shoulders to compensate for.

Another possible useful definition of "fun to drive"--which may be related to "doesn't feel clumsy" from my experience.[1] My wife's "feels clumsy" is heavily related to body roll, which varies both by model and by shock type. (We once replaced shocks on a vehicle and it "felt much less clumsy.") To feel body roll, go to a deserted road or parking lot, steer a steady curve like you'd use to change lanes at 20 mph or so, then switch directions abruptly. Do NOT do this at highway speeds. You'll feel the car rock, but some cars rock much less than others.

1) I am not a car person; I do not like cars, driving cars, talking about cars, competing with killer cars for road space (I'm a bike rider)....My wife used to participate in rallies and vintage racing.

Diatryma@271: There may be legal constraints on doing that sort of construction yourself, given that you're presumably not going to actually crash test the result in advance. On the other hand, where the age, height, and weight of the children are appropriate, these sorts of adapter vests come highly recommended. They move the seat belt down to the child rather than the other way around, so they don't as good visibility out of the car, but they're very compact.

Diatryma @271:

Is borrowing a carseat from the kid's parents an option? I know that for my own three-year-old I'd far rather lend a friend our carseat rather than rely on a homebuilt contraption. (Alternatively, there are regular carseats - not booster seats - that will fit most 3-year-olds for under $50, and as a parent I'd even buy one of those for a friend before relying on the homebuilt contraption.)

Jack-Dann-ism spotted:

"The sound of a wild snail eating Elisabeth Tova Baley"

Oh, it turns out to be simpler to borrow the entire car, given that I have only needed to transport the tinyfriends once. I was doing research on an in-case basis.

In hyperlocal news, I can report that I heard the meteor that went blooey over Arizona this morning, and it was very loud -- like extremely close and prolonged thunder. Haven't heard any reports of damage, just bright lights and noise.

Cygnet, wait, what? A meteor exploded over Arizona?

Arizona meteor

HLN: Local correspondent royally punked after complaining about Game of Thrones spoilers in an open cube farm. Local woman should have clued in after talk of "Arya's wedding."

Cassyb, yeah -- I woke up thinking we were having a thunderstorm, but that the thunder sounded weird and there was a really long time between the flashes of light and the really loud booms.

I honestly couldn't figure out what was going on.

Not damaging, just loud. I probably heard a sonic boom(s). They're saying no impact site.

http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-science/2016/06/02/phoenix-area-residents-report-boom-flash-light/85287648/

If you haven't yet seen the Google doodle today, it's well worth pushing the "Start" button...

#281 ::: Lori Coulson

Agreed. There was a period of boring google doodles, but I have hope for stable improvement.

Lori Coulson #281: It was, indeed, truly cool.

In hyperlocal news update -- that "meteor" was an asteroid ten feet in diameter and it apparently went right over our heads (we are in the area described, east of Payson). The bits and pieces that were left after re-entry may have hit the ground N. of Tucson.

"N. of Tucson" is mostly sandy flats that are already loved by meteorite hunters because meteorites are simply easy to find in the sand, so if it actually did come down in that area we'll be seeing asteroid bits on eBay shortly.

http://www.azfamily.com/story/32121280/nasa-flash-of-light-loud-boom-over-phoenix-skies-likely-an-asteroid?autostart=true

Lori Coulson #281: Was is supposed to show an animation? I just got a search for Lotte Reiniger.

285
Click the triangle in the middle of the doodle.

Dave Bell@270: A 4wd gets you stuck less often in the winter. If abused, it can certainly be used to drive into worse situations than one could have managed with less traction -- your remark about everybody already having four-wheel brakes is exactly how I have explained that to a number of people.

Eric@267, Buddha Buck@268: The historical American muscle car was all about acceleration, yeah. I classify that as "exciting" rather than "fun to drive", i.e. a brief adrenaline rush while you wonder if you're going to die this time.

We probably need less value-laden descriptions; I suspect people who care about "how a car drives" don't all want exactly the same thing. Some like precision and responsiveness, whereas some like the adrenaline rush (and there may be additional preference-clusters).

Later seasons of Top Gear were interesting in regard to that -- often they, or at least some of them, preferred a car that was clearly "less good", in that they didn't like the car that was capable of getting around the track faster. The old guy (remembered, Jeremy Clarkson; the one who punched the producer), was actually willing to admit that he was looking for excitement, rather than precision and controllability (what I think of as "quality" in a car). For cars being driven on a large empty airfield I can even see some of his point.

P J Evans #286: I was, but just got the search. I've now gone over to www.google.com/doodles and seen the Youtube version.

Very sad to read of Swarb's death, Patrick. An amazing musician.

Tom Whitmore@290: Yes, I'm very unhappy about that. First of the long string of musician deaths that's major to me personally.

Often, but not always, Top Gear was about cars that few of us will ever drive, driven at speeds that would not be legal on any road.

There's some impressive engineering, but Clarkson seemed to like driving at the limits, and enjoy the abnormal behaviour.

I did some fast driving, but I was starting with vehicles that were not a Bugatti Veyron. I was blasting through the twisty bits with a Mini, and gaining on the fast road cars of the time. I suspect a part of it was things such as being in the right gear.

No, I'm not talking fashion.

Anyway, I remember when the US version of Top Gear got started, and it took time for things to come together. The show format depends on the interactions between presenters, and on the viewers knowing their individual preferences. James May became known as "Captain Slow",but it was clear that he didn't want to drive in the style that Clarkson did. He preferred the precision. And that was part of why he praised different cars to Clarkson.

Will I watch the new Clarkson Product? I don't know. Will it be worth the effort of setting up? The Subsciption TV channels, satellite, broadcast, and internet, don't get the viewers the BBC can. Can the live performances that were part of the Clarkson brand survive on the back of the promised new show, without the viewing figures?

PNH @How Should America Resist a Fascist? More people should read about the rise of fascism in Italy, rather than in Germany.

I'd be interested in some pointers in that direction.

What do you feel are the most salient differences?

Dave Bell @ 270: The problem with driving in wintry conditions is that even a two-wheel-drive car already has four-wheel braking (or, sometimes, not-braking) so you can wonder if 4wd gets you much extra safety.

Consumer Reports looked at stopping distance on snowy roads in regular and AWD cars, with and without snow tires. Stopping distance was dramatically shorter with snow tires -- my memory is that it was half the distance. AWD didn't do much.

HLN: Local woman has been shopping for Father's Day cards and is feeling ranty enough to crosspost this from FB:

I very much wish that they made Father's Day cards that didn't assume all fathers are outdoorsy types who love sports and dogs.

Couldn't there be a few cards with a picture of a book-lined room, or musical instruments, or a garden, or a cat?

Couldn't some of the sappy ones that thank Dad for everything thank him for reading to the kid, or helping them with homework, or taking them to museums or concerts, or driving them to soccer practice, or sharing his love of gardening or movies or science or something?

Please?

There's an untapped market here.

#295: Around this time of year, some stores set up impulse-buy Father's Day gifts. I get the same feeling about them as you do about cards. Mixed in with "STOP DEFINING MY MANLY INTERESTS, STUPID PRE-WRAPPED GIFTS!" sort of feeling. Based on the selection, dads:

Grill
Golf
Have lots of neckties
Need galoshes

It's . . . Don Draper manhood.

Stefan Jones @296: There are enormous forces at work keeping the definition of manhood and fatherhood at the Dan Draper level that have been marshalled since about the mid-1970s. It started slow, but the backlash against the softening gender binary ramped up throughout the 80s, then in the 90s it started to deeply segregate the toy aisle (but it was still possible to find toys intended for all children to play with), and in the 2000s every bobdamn piece of infant clothing either had a baby duck or a truck on it to make sure you knew "which kind it was for," and green became a "boy color" and yellow a "girl color", and even rainbow items had to have a pinstripe of pale blue or pale pink "so you could tell".

Some groups are finding and chiselling wider areas of nonbinary expression, but the overall cultural force has been a history of repeated backlashes since even BEFORE Don Draper. It starts in enforcement in elementary school, doubles down in the tweens, and tends to be much more strongly forced by surrounding adults (who grew up 20-40 years previously) than by the kid's peers ... until the indoctrination sets in.

I am extremely hopeful for the current crop of adolescents, because Tumblr and its ilk lets them find each other and learn, early and well, that they are NOT lone freaks of nature who must tamp themselves into a wrong-shaped whole, but part of a nationwide and international subgroup who are perfectly healthy and normal.

Elliott Mason: Yay for pluralistic healthy & normal!

OK, I finally watched The Martian. I loved it, but there's something I don't understand. Why did they punch a hole in the roof of the rover and put a balloon in the hole? Was that for extra storage or something?

Xopher Halftongue @ #299:

It's not explained in the movie. Presumably it got cut for time or something.

In the book, the explanation goes something like this: The Rover's built-in life support is only designed to support short trips, so for the big trek he has to bring along the life support system from the Hab dome, which is designed to run continually for the whole length of the mission. It's also designed to sit in one place for the whole length of the mission, so it's bulky and doesn't fit through the door of the Rover. He gets around that by punching a big hole in the roof, putting the life support system in through that, and then sealing it up with Hab canvas. Once the system's running, the canvas balloons outward because of the pressure differential between Earth-normal inside and Mars-normal outside.

Ah, that makes sense. Thank you, Paul.

Elliott, for carrying kids, adults, and luggages on trips, if replacing the car with something larger isn't an option, would a roof rack help? Obviously it won't give you an extra place to put a kid (or dog, unless you're Mitt Romney), but it would increase your cargo choices.

I grew up in a family that had 2 adults and eventually 4 kids, and typically 1-2 trips a year from the east coast to Kansas City, which were managed by throwing us all in the back of a station wagon (usually 3 kids in the back seat and 1 in the cargo space, or 1 in the front seat.)

For about 30 years, I usually drove vans, which steered like an underpowered pig (the new one actually was underpowered, while the first one depended on how many cylinders were working), but they were still somewhat fun to drive, for values of fun including "Sure, you need to take N people or that huge piece of cargo, it'll fit fine" and "yes, the mountain road is curvy, but there's only a cliff on one side."

"Wild Child" by Calapine, a celebration of female characters in science fiction and fantasy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guYE2i8AjCg

Bill Stewart @302: That would help with fitting more in the trunk.

But on the gripping hand, getting three booster seats across the back not only means the kids MUST elbow each other constantly (and I'll let you guess how popular that is), but there is so little room to even GET to the female ends of the seat belts that adjusting the straps of same to fit across their laps in the safe configuration involves yanking in ways that traps the strap in the buckle. Plus trying to get them plugged in with a click involves an adult leaning in through the door and elbowing the outermost kid in the face while fishing around between the boosters and pinching adult fingers.

As a related note, I really, really hate Honda for putting the right-side-seat's female buckle LEFT of the middle-seat's buckle, meaning they're ALWAYS CROSSED OVER and almost impossible to unbuckle just one of them accurately unless you can actually see the buckles (and they can swing freely in space between two not-jammed-together hips -- which ALSO doesn't happen if all three are in use, but at least human bodies squidge more than hard plastic booster seats).

Even when I am carrying zero cargo in the trunk and merely have to cart three kids to the grocery store and then two more errands, the production number of getting them in and out and in and out and secured is a nightmare.

Oy... prepping for a two-week trip to Africa (Botswana) with family, one week to go, and now I see that my anti-malarial (mefloquine) has major indications for psychiatric effects, and is specifically warned against for people with prior diagnosis with depression or anxiety.

Elliott Mason: Here ya go.

Well, okay, maybe not. :-)

I am reminded: years ago, a German family visited to drop off their guinea pigs, which they were rehoming because they had to move back to Germany. Five kids, ranging in ages from two to seventeen. When we had the pigs settled and finished up our visit, they headed out to their car, trailed by mom and me. Now, granted, they had a pre-kitted minivan, and two semi-adults to work with. But even so, I was impressed. In the time it took mom and me to walk out of my living room, down the half-flight of stairs, and down the stoop to their parking place, all five were belted in and waiting for us. Boy, German efficiency, I'm here to tell ya.

Meanwhile: Matt Damon gets a Pirate Certificate from MIT after giving commencement speech

Elliott: I was just curious if someone had tried to solve this problem (we only ever had two boosters, which was much easier), and sure enough, there are products that might help...

Here's an example

304

It reminds me of my father's car, in which he installed seatbelts. Four of them. For five people.
The person in the middle of the back seat had half of each of the other two crossed over their laps. (He did this back around 1961 or 1962, so lap belts of the airplane persuasion were all that was available. They had enough length, barely, for a kid in the center.)

Dana @308: There are also seatbelt-positioning vests that have been crash-tested and count, legally, but as a matter of bodily safety you're supposed (by parenting commenters, not just manufacturers) to keep using boosters until the kid's femurs are long enough for their legs to hang down over the front edge with their butt against the seatback.

Also they cost $140 each, and I'd need three ...

Addendum, Dana @308: I've looked at your link (for a thingie to hold buckles up and oriented) and I'm pretty sure if I got two of them the seats WOULD NOT FIT across the car. We're actually slightly canted up at both ends anyway to get them in, and two of those would add nearly 2" to the total width needed.

We don't have that. The tolerances are too tight.

Because this is an Open Thread, and I need to say it: Today sucked. Big time. I hope tomorrow is a little easier.

And I hope Hillary Clinton wins California.

I would really like to see a woman president of the U.S. in my lifetime.

Hear hear.

Most sources (including the Wall Street Journal) are saying that she's clinched the nomination before today's primaries (a few more superdelegates on her side).

Just back from Phoenix, where apparently we were either not in the right area to hear the meteoroid go over or so exhausted from the con that it didn't wake us up. :-(

Mary Aileen, #295: At this point, I would advise making your own. Even a basic word-processing program generally has the ability to embed images now; find some appropriate artwork, add the text of your choice, and print it out on cardstock.

Jenny, #303: Thank you for that link. I'm going to have to watch it a bunch of times, with my partner to catch some of the ones I don't recognize!

Lee (315): I'll probably use a blank card; I have a few that would work okay. I'm just annoyed by the gender essentialism of the commercial offerings.

Tom at #314: I know. But actually winning the CA primary (preferably by a significant margin of votes) would be a total fist pump for her campaign as she pivots toward the general. I respect the Sanders supporters, but I want her to have all the weapons as she takes Trump on, because I want him annihilated.

(Though I think the biggest weapon she has is ready to go. His initials are BHO.)

After years of living in Pacific time, I'm used to knowing the results of an election no later than 6pm. Now that I'm in Eastern time, it's a real nuisance waiting until midnight!

jaetl@318: Yeah, that's why the east coast is so weird—they have to stay up until 11 to watch the ten o'clock news. :-)

Re Patrick's How Should America Resist a Fascist Sidelight: I notice that the article does not address previous instances of violence by Trump supporters against counter-protesters in any way. Even a "we shouldn't descend to their level" would have been adequate -- but it's as though those documented attacks never happened at all.

True, Lizzy @317. No disagreement.

Unrelated to anything anything at all: I just really really really want to strangle somebody today. I have a couple of specific candidates in mind, but any warm body would do in a pinch.

In addition to dealing with trolls on our HOA listserve, the chimney sweep I was going to hire (to come out today, when I'd rearranged my schedule to be here and therefore have a shortened weekend coming up) to clean and recap my chimney (now that the raccoons are out) bailed, because he didn't know the chimney access would be three stories up, and he didn't have the equipment to deal with that.

Call me crazy, but wouldn't that be something you'd want to establish before you sent a service tech out to a job...? I mean, how much of a surprise can it be that the top of a chimney on a condominium building is more than two stories off the ground?

"anything anything" anything! ::head explodes::

Back-to-back headlines at the Telegraph giving a capsule description of life in the 21st century:

First, a four-year-old boy who was internally decapitated in a car crash was not only saved by a smart bystander (who supported his head until the EMTs arrived) and her first responder husband (who got her in to him but did not move him), but is expected to make a full recovery. Not partial. Full.

Second, the last surviving 9-11 SAR dog was prescribed euthanasia due to intractable ailments--and sent off to the vet's between lines of saluting uniformed officers.

HLN: Local resident discovers it is surprisingly difficult for a person to give oneself a necessary medical injection. Amazing levels of flinch reflex are involved.

The local resident has previously overcome extreme eye flinch reflexes to learn to insert contact lenses, but is disadvantaged in this case because the injection is only once per week.

Elliott: I would overcome the latter issue by asking the prescribing doc to issue me spare syringes and a bag of saline, so I could practice on my "days off."

CONTENT WARNING: Needles and mention of self-injection of prescribed medication. Rot-13'ed to protect those who are utterly uninterested.

Jacque @326: V unq gubhtug bs gung naq gura jbaqrerq vs V jnf orvat evqvphybhf. V qb unir cyragl bs flevatrf (40, juvpu jbhyq ynfg zr zbfg bs n lrne sbe jrrxyl vawrpgvbaf). V cerfhzr V pna trg zber cerfpevorq nf arrqrq jvgubhg orvat vairfgvtngrq nf n cbffvoyr fhccyvre gb whaxvrf ...

Gjb jrrxf ntb V qvq vg jvgu n ahefr fgnaqvat bire zr (naq znqr fbzr ebbxvr zvfgnxrf, fb vg uheg n ybg sbe dhvgr n juvyr). Ynfg jrrx V qvq vg zlfrys, jvgu zl uhfonaq fvggvat orfvqr zr naq vagreiravat jura V znqr fpnggreoenvarq sernxbhg qrpvfvbaf va gur enzc-hc, ohg riraghnyyl qvq gur cbxr zlfrys. Vg qvqa'g uheg zhpu, evtug gura be yngre.

Gbqnl V fcrag 20 zvahgrf pbzcyrgryl hanoyr gb znxr zlfrys qb vg, qrfcvgr frireny snyfr fgnegf naq rira zl uhfonaq ubyqvat zl unaq naq gelvat gb cebivqr thvqnapr naq guehfg. Ur svanyyl gbbx gur flevatr naq qvq vg sbe zr (V fgvyy qvq gur npghny qryvirel bs zrqvpngvba, fvapr gung cneg -- jrveqyl -- qbrfa'g obgure zr, whfg gur chapgher).

V unq gubhtug bs gung naq gura jbaqrerq vs V jnf orvat evqvphybhf. (To rot or not to rot? Hm....)

I would say it's a very practical tactic. But then I would, wouldn't I?

All knowledge is contained in Making Light: I work in a porta-cabin. Most of the time this is fine, it's being used as a permanent structure, it has power and plumbing and carpets and so forth. The ventilation isn't great but the central heating is effective.

It also has a corrugated plastic roof, unshaded, which means the void above the ceiling is essentially a greenhouse. It's 21 Celcius outside today and currently 26.1 at my desk. It's not even noon. I was up half the night throwing up from how hot it was in here yesterday.

This is Not Good. I've borrowed the desk fan from next door and got that going by my window to drag some cooler air inside, and I'm drinking lots of water and dabbling it on my wrists and neck and face for evaporative cooling, and I'm barefoot in linen trousers and a short-sleeve cotton shirt.

Am I missing any obvious and straightforward ways to survive the next three months without constant illness? Whilst still fundamentally being sat at my desk doing my job in an acceptably professional manner?

duckbunny @329, is there any way to run an exhaust fan or otherwise vent the "greenhouse" space?

Any way of shading the roof, e.g. by a tarp suspended a little way above it?

A long shot, I know, but portable air conditioning unit?

duckbunny @ 329

Can you access the shed's "attic"? If you can, you can use my father's favorite weatherization material--double-bubble. It's about as thick as outdoor carpet, and is layered foil and airspace. Just lay it in the attic floor, and it will reflect a lot of the heat back out.

There are air conditioning units installed; they have been disabled by Estates as a cost-saving measure. My best chance long-term is probably to become sufficiently ill sufficiently often that I rate accomodations and the aircon gets powered again.

I don't think that's going to take long. The headache's back and I'm trying not to be sick. But I don't get my annual payrise if I have more than five episodes of sick leave in the year, I've been off three times over the winter, and I want that payrise. I do not want to lose it because I have been made to work in unsafe conditions.

It's hovering around 28C now. I gather that's probably not all that hot in the grand scheme of things, but I kept my flat at 17-19 over the winter. I would quite like to cry.

The suggestions I have have been made already, but an additional resource might be the Ask A Manager blog. They also have a very knowledgeable commentariat, and question-asking is anonymous. Alison'd also be able to advise as to what your employer is legally-bound to offer in terms of workplace safety, which might be useful.

If the management company disabled them, check out tenants' rights statutes (or the equivalent for working conditions) in your area. Most specify a numerical temperature range in which occupied spaces must be maintained, or incur fines and enforcement.

I work at a small-ish NHS hospital where Estates is an internal department, and the hospital is subject to the same budget gaps as the rest of our poor beleaguered service. So my department isn't going to get the aircon switched on just for the asking, because we can't, collectively speaking, afford cooling. If there's a specific need to make accomodations that might be different.

I'm aware of the relevant health and safety law, but it doesn't specify a maximum temperature - "reasonable" I believe is the wording. My managers are willing to be reasonable - the department head is the provider of the thermometer this morning, after I was doing badly yesterday, and they're trying to make sure my office gets its share of use of the fan - but I think they'll need some more evidence before they can make a case.

A fan has been stolen from the desk of a workmate who isn't present and I'm having a slightly better time of it now. Still trying not to be sick, but less cranky about it.

duckbunny: do you have space for a small cooler? If so, you could keep a bag of ice and several damp towels in it. Hang one towel around your neck to keep you cool; trade the warmed-up towel for a cold one periodically.

This is NOT intended as a solution to your problem, but to stave off headaches & vomiting while a solution is found!

Lila @ 336: ooh, I like that. I could stash an insulated bag under my desk and re-freeze ice blocks overnight in the wee freezer compartment of the office fridge - nobody else is using it. Expressions of gratitude!

duckbunny: If temp isn't sufficient evidence, is there some melty (candle, chocolate bar, &c) object you could set high in the room's airspace, and take before and after pics? Maybe with a watch in the frame to show time elapsed?

duckbunny, I hit this sort of problem back in the 1070s, and detailed UK law will have changed, but back then the school was covered by the Factories Acts, and they didn't specify a maximum temperature. It was about this time of year, and A-level exams.

Later experience, when farming, prompts me to remind you to drink more. Just plain, cheap, lemonade would be enough. There are also some "proper" sports rehydration drinks, which don't depend on sugar, but there's a lot of crap advertising surrounding that market. I have seen "no-calory" products on the market.

Your mention of vomiting does make me think of possible dehydration. But, if you think you might need salt, a packet of crisps is easier than hunting down something more obscure.

There's more info around than when I was at school, and more advertising. The advantage of that cheap lemonade, and a packet of crisps, is that it comes pre-measured.

duckbunny @329:

Are your co-workers similarly uncomfortable in the heat? People do have widely varying temperature tolerances, and whether or not your discomfort is shared might make the difference between "get another fan for duckbunny's office to use" and "turn on the airconditioning."

Dave Bell @399 -- I had no idea you were so old! When do you have your millenary celebration? (smiles, ducks, runs...)

Tom Whitmore...

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;

duckbunny@329--

Have you explored whether you are suffering from environmental toxins instead of heat?

Porta-cabins and other manufactured shelters often contain a lot of plastic--they may be composed largely of plastics. And when those plastics heat up, they can give off vapors and gases.

When they include wood elements, the wood is often assembled with or partly composed of formaldehyde glues. Formaldehyde and urea glues can both give off gases.

It may be those gases that are sickening you, as much as (or in addition to) the heat.

Could you call in someone from Environmental Health and Safety to monitor whether there are troubling levels of noxious gases in the Porta-Cabin?

Some of us can smell these kinds of fumes very easily. I cannot, but I still am affected by them--often with nausea, even though my nose is not sensitive enough to tell me what I am breathing in.

I don't raise all of this to make you paranoid, but because your description of your symptoms, combined with your description of your Portacabin, makes me think that the fume/vapor/off-gasing possibility is very much worth investigating.

Dave Bell -- you wrote that, back when you were a lad of 370 or so? Pretty impressive!

And you must have been Roger Zelazny, then, if Harlan was right.... (One of the long-lived folks from Gaiman's Brief Lives, I think.)

AKICIML: Is there a list somewhere of the specific animals that appear to have been subject to taboo deformation or "nicknaming" (can't remember the correct term) in the Indo-European language tree? I've only seen them mixed into a long list of Indo-European roots, and I'm sure I missed a bunch.

Jenny Islander, I have no idea what any of that means but it sounds fascinating. Could you explain it more?

Bank of America: still utter slime.

Summary: Single black mother receives a substantial settlement from a wrongful-death lawsuit. She puts the money into her account at BofA and has no trouble using it for a few weeks. Then a teller at a different branch from the one she normally uses decides that there's no way someone who looks like her could have a 5-figure account and puts a "suspected fraud" hold on it -- and it's been there ever since. She doesn't have any other accounts; she can't pay her rent or buy groceries because the bank is holding her money hostage.

Note that by virtue of the PATRIOT Act, any bank teller can make a decision like this, unilaterally, at any time and for any reason -- or, as in this case, none at all.

One more reason to go credit union.

@Diatryma no. 347: Please note that I am a philologist to approximately the same degree that I am a Pernese dragon. Anyway, here goes:

Philologists tracing the evolution of languages in the Indo-European group, which includes languages that arose in a broad swath stretching from India (or possibly China) to Ireland and from Norway to Sicily, have noticed that the names of certain animals don't change in ways predicted by phonological change in other words in that branch of the Indo-European tree. Phonological change is sort of like a constant, slow movement of light along a spectrum, except that it's the sounds in a language through time. You can sometimes see phonological change preserved in a written language. Consider Spanish, with its H that no longer makes a sound. At other times the spelling changes with the sound, or researchers can gather clues about the pronunciation from surviving poetry.

Generally speaking, if one sound changes to another or disappears in one word, all words like that word will change. Example from Wikipedia: In Middle English, stressed syllable + sound D as in dog + syllable ending in R became stressed syllable + sound TH as in the + syllable ending in R. In other words, modern "weather" was once pronounced "weder." All words following this pattern that were present in Middle English--"mother," "father," etc.--changed their middle Ds to THs. Words that came in later, such as "rudder," did not follow that pattern: phonological change had moved on to something else.

And then you have words that pretty obviously did not come in later. Really old words. A lot of them are the names of animals, and they can be traced all or nearly all the way back to their Proto-Indo-European roots, or to put it another way, they probably existed in the group of dialects or fairly mutually intelligible languages that spread east and west and south and north to become the branches of the Indo-European tree.

Sometimes these animal names change in ways that don't fit the pattern of phonological change. It has been hypothesized that local people would take to saying the name of an important animal in a peculiar way because saying the actual name might cause something bad to happen. They might change a consonant or vowel, or IIRC switch two syllables. Other times the name drops out and a euphemism is substituted. One language--I forget which--stopped using the old word for bear and replaced it with a word that originally meant "honey-eater." Since the kind of large-scale organized mayhem that can extirpate bears, or whatever, over a large area wasn't feasible at that time, this has also been characterized as an attempt to prevent something bad happening. Compare traditional Alutiiq reluctance to say the word "bear" when out in the backcountry, replacing it instead with "Grandfather." It's more polite and less likely to attract unwelcome attention.

I'm looking for a list of animals that actually had this taboo deformation or euphemism applied to them at some point. I've tried to pick them all out from the complete Proto-Indo-European lexicon, but I always get lost.

Forgot to mention that other words subject to taboo deformation include delicate subjects (nudity, poop) and numinous things (eyes).

Lee @ 348

Note that by virtue of the PATRIOT Act, any bank teller can make a decision like this, unilaterally, at any time and for any reason -- or, as in this case, none at all.

I just went through the legally-required anti-money-laundering training at work and this is a legal requirement (and it applies to insurers, like my employer, and credit unions as well.)

And the kicker? It's an equally-great violation of the law to communicate to the client, in any way, that there's an investigation or what it is that is suspicious (so, of course, there's no way to get the information that "here's where that money came from").

I'm rather dislike BoA, but in this case I think the laws they are required to comply with are the problem.

Jenny Islander@349

Pernese dragon

So you'll warn us if there is an approaching Threadfall?

One language--I forget which--stopped using the old word for bear and replaced it with a word that originally meant "honey-eater."

Russian.

English (and other Germanic) "bear" was originally "brown one"; the PIE root for the animal was *rkto, thus ursus, arktos in Latin and Greek respectively.

Jenny Islander @349: English may throw some confounds, because between it being the mashup of three languages that we call today Anglo-Saxon, and becoming proper Old/Middle English, most of the written-down, preserved longish text are FULL of poetic figures to avoid using a plain word for ANYTHING.

Because of this it's sometimes hard to figure out if they HAD plain, declarative noun for things like "ship", because there were a couple or several standard stand-in compound noun phrases used instead.

A lot of detail and examples of this phenomenon are available in this episode of the History of English Podcast: http://historyofenglishpodcast.com/2014/01/21/episode-37-seafarers-poets-and-traveling-minstrels/

There's a bit more in this one, which talks about the poems attributed to Caedmon, which are by some accountings the first ones in English to be preserved and come down to us:
http://historyofenglishpodcast.com/2014/02/17/episode-38-nobles-nuptials-and-a-cowherd-poet/

Alas, no transcripts that I know of, just audio files.

I rather like that podcast in general, but it's an enormous time commitment: it takes 28 hour-long episodes to even GET to Anglo-Saxon, because it starts with proto-Indo-European. :->

Animal names that have changed in the relatively recent past are ass -> donkey and coney -> rabbit. Neither animal seems particularly threatening (normally, though there are of course tales of threatening rabbits).

Carrie S @353: Interestingly, this etymological root connection means that the brown bear, whose Latinate binomial name is Ursus arctos, is literally the "Bear bear."

This has led to comparisons to Moon Moon, the wackiest, most deaf-to-appropriateness werewolf ever.

Content warning on Moon Moon: a lot of people refer to him as retarded, which I think is incorrect to how the meme is actually applied (though some assholes think it's exactly the same and make inappropriate memes on that assumption) Often Moon Moon makes "dad jokes" while other wolves in the picture are making expressions that look like human eye-rolling "Get THIS guy" reactions.

Also, some people familiar with the meme have used it in real life. A man in my acquaintances-of-acquaintances circle was trying to get his dog up onto the deck to go back inside and the dog kept insisting on taking a very difficult path that wasn't going to work. Finally, in frustration, the man said fairly loudly, "DAMMIT, Moon Moon!" and from three yards away, where a party was occurring, someone else called back, "Who invited Moon Moon?!?"

Ursus, arctos, etc: and therefore of course the areas around the poles of the world are the Bear Circle and the Circle Away From Bears.

the brown bear, whose Latinate binomial name is Ursus arctos, is literally the "Bear bear."

It could be worse, it could be Vulpes vulpes or Alces alces. :) (Somehow I am not surprised that Wikipedia has a page of tautonyms.)

the Bear Circle and the Circle Away From Bears.

That's charming (and true).

Carrie S. @359:

Don't forget Gorilla gorilla gorilla.

348
Worse, the withdrawals were under the publicly-stated limit ($10K) for reporting as possible money-laundering. They were the kind of withdrawal that you would expect for someone who know has the money to pay those bills that have been piling up.
And BofA does have the ability to clear it up: they know where the money came from, and they should have been able to fix it with a phone call or a fax.
BofA has a rep because of stuff like this.

Carrie S.: I wonder if the namers of "Vulpes vulpes" and "Alces alces" intended those names in the same sense in which we would say, "You know, not a bat-eared fox or an arctic fox; just a fox fox."

P J Evans @ 361

Where are you getting "[BOA knows] where the money came from"? On my reading, it was the customer's refusal to answer the question about where the money came from that started the problem.

A side note--the $10,000 limit is irrelevant here; it's the deposit, not the withdrawals, that is the suspicious activity.

Just to be clear: I really strongly dislike the current money laundering/terrorist financing laws; I think they are unjust and counter-productive. But when a bank is doing something that is legally required, I blame the laws--not the bank.

Lila: Very possible, since they are the red fox and the moose respectively. But there are actually a whole lot of "double named" species, way more than I would have expected (also including the rat R. rattus and the gazelle G. gazella.)

SamChevre, #363: BofA knows where the money came from because it was deposited by EFT and verified by them, as is clearly stated in the story. Yes, the customer refused to answer nosy questions from a teller -- but the bank ALREADY had that information.

One phone call would have cleared up the whole thing, and now they're telling her that it might take A YEAR to release the hold on her account. This is not "the bank doing something that's legally required", this is "the bank hassling a black customer in a way that they would never have hassled someone who looks like me". Time to call in the Federal Reserve regulators and the ACLU.

Lila @362: Matching genus and species names is a strong sign that the name may have been applied at the founding of the system, by Linnaeus.

He also really liked naming species "familiaris" or "domesticus".

Often the double-named creature would be what he thought of as the most obvious central member of the class (which means something native to northern Europe, if it's present there, obviously, because that's where he was based).

Anyone interested in some of these etymological and "Why on earth did they name it THAT?" questions could read through my mother's decade-long research project tracking down the original descriptions (the published paper where a naturalist characterized why THIS creature is sufficiently different from all OTHER creatures that it deserves a new name, and what he wants to name it) and drawing that information together, for all the herpetofauna of North America.

http://ebeltz.net/herps/etymain.html

Bank of America has explicit procedures for dealing with problems like these. (I know, I used to write procedures for them.) I'm wondering whether the internal procedures are actually being followed (I seriously expect they are being followed partially and in an inappropriate way). The appropriate group there to discuss it with is the Compliance and Control Office. And I'm completely willing to bet nobody has called them in, or discussed it with them.

Carrie S. @359: So our planet has a Bear-Infested end and a No-Bears end. :->

Lee @ 366

I mean something different than you do by "source of the funds."

Funds deposited by an EFT, and verified to exist, gives a "source of the funds" in terms of "what account did the funds come from/is this deposit real?"

The question that the AML rules ask you to verify a "source of funds" in terms of "what business activity generated these funds?"

Agree with Tom Whitmore--Compliance is the appropriate department. And I'll take the opposite side of Tom's bet--I will bet that the group who put the formal hold in place, and is doing the investigation, is the Compliance Office.

Dave Bell @ 339, duckbunny
Later experience, when farming, prompts me to remind you to drink more. Just plain, cheap, lemonade would be enough. There are also some "proper" sports rehydration drinks, which don't depend on sugar, but there's a lot of crap advertising surrounding that market. I have seen "no-calory" products on the market.

FWIW (apply all due medical cautions, yada) I use sea salt and potassium gluconate tablets at 1 ~500mg tablet each/50lbs body weight + min 8oz water when suffering badly from heat. I wouldn't recommend it for a sipping all day sort of thing, but as a solution to "feel woozy/can't get my head clear, no matter how much water I drink", it does very nicely[0].

[0] solution originally thanks to somebody that spends a lot more time in desert climates than I

SamChevre @370: my guess about Compliance is that they're dealing with a local-level compliance person, not the actual central office. Central is more likely to cut through on problems like this. And that's who I'm betting hasn't been called. The problem has not yet been escalated to the person who can solve it, rather than make it worse.

370
EFT from an insurance company should not set off alarms: the bank certainly should be aware that insurance companies require proof of identity before disbursing payouts, and should have been able to confirm that within minutes, as they have the record of the transfer and as they have the ability to contact the insurance company directly.

This is why I think they're doing something that is at the very least morally wrong, if not actually illegal.

Andrew M @355:
Animal names that have changed in the relatively recent past are ass -> donkey and coney -> rabbit.

Also cock -> rooster. All three were considered obscene (note that "coney" used to rhyme with "honey," and was slang for exactly what one might expect).

Jenny / Tim / everyone:

How can linguists tell between changes to the name for taboo or superstition reasons, vs. for other reasons (like people retaining a few words from an older language, or adopting slang terms as the standard word, or whatever)?

I know almost nothing of linguistics, so maybe this is a dumb question....

Yet another Hamilton riff on the opening number. Contains slightly more spoilers for Sweeney Todd than the original opening song.

On animal names: cool! And I would have expected the common animals to end up heavily shifted, the same way 'to be' and 'to go' usually are (n=2 on languages I know).

@Albatross no. 375: Not dumb at all. I think that for sound shifts that didn't fit the overall pattern of phonological change, anything could have happened. A clearly identifiable euphemism, or dropping a word that ended up sounding a lot like a a taboo word (coney-->rabbit as above), is more likely to have been a deliberate avoidance of the old noun.

I watched the "Welcome to Zootopia" sequence of, well, Zootopia, again.

I realized that this scene does for me what science fiction hasn't done for me in a darn long time: vigorously massage my Sense of Wonder glands.

albatross @ 375: I also know little about linguistics, but I do have a wild speculation: perhaps taboo/euphemistic substitutions tend to travel down the social hierarchy, and slang substitutions up?

Jenny Islander @ 378: "Rabbit" is also a euphemism; before being drafted as a replacement for "coney," it referred only to the young of the species. Or so I recall.

Tim Walters @380 (and others referenced) -- Hare out of place?

@379: While Zootopia isn't exactly Hard SF, it does strike me as applying some very SFnal ways of thinking to just how a city of talking animals is actually supposed to work. (Just look at the mileage they get out of *not* making all the animals about the same height alone....)

abi 227:

I'm still recovering from the shock of it, and I appreciate your prayers. It's a little hard to talk about, especially when I'm short on spoons, which is usually these days. (Spoon shortages seem to hit my social-interaction skills before they do my logical skills--I've been unusually productive at work lately.)

James 382:

I felt like Zootopia was pretty strongly SFnal in worldview, despite its rather strong and obvious intended message. They really tried to run with figuring out what the world looks like when all the mammals try to get together and live in a civilized peace. It made me think a little bit of some of the Uplift books, where you get the sense of wildly different species interacting (not just humans and their clients, but Tymbrimmi and Kanten and Thennanin).

Diatryma @377: Turns out be/go/do/have aren't MADE irregular (usually. Thanks, English), they've STAYED irregular.

Neurologically, we store conjugations of regular verbs in roughly one place per conjugation, and when asked to use several of them in quick succession (reading, say, "He walked to the store. He climbed up the stairs. He reached for the food. He danced all the way home."), only that one region lights up much every time you get to a verb.

But irregular verbs are all stored in their OWN places, separate from the regular verbs.

If a kid grows up with certain irregular verbs not spoken around them very much, they will default to conjugating them in a regular way. This is why English-speaking 3yo kids often say "I put-ed it away, I sing-ed the song, I rided the bicycle, I bring-ed you the ball" etc.

Certainly in English in the past sixty years, words that were widely known in not-ed conjugations have become more usually said with -ed, even in formal writing.

Because be/do/have/go are often the very-most used words in a language, they tend to keep any irregularity they have accumulated, because everyone uses them and hears their parents using them in all their weirdness from an early age.

See also why English language learners have such difficulty keeping straight when you use "a" and when you use "an", but most 6-year-old native speakers can't even imagine why it's a problem. They internalized the system, and now that's just how they speak.

Sandy B @376: Some of them are reading the lyrics off phones, to combat the reflex to sing the original words.:->

Elliott, that's sort of what I meant-- the common words pick up whatever's happening to the language, but don't get forgotten and default-regularized the way others do. And then English, with 'to go' being a combination of two verbs (which I think I learned here-- there's 'go' and 'wend' combined. Oh English.)

Certainly in English in the past sixty years, words that were widely known in not-ed conjugations have become more usually said with -ed, even in formal writing.

But 'sneak' has gone the other way, for some reason.

Andrew M @388: Technically the -ed group is the only regular conjugation English has, but several "seem" regular-ish to native speakers, that descend from much older Anglo-Saxon patterns.

Like sing/sang/sung (bring/brang/brung, fling/flang/flung?), which also slops onto sneak/sneaked/snuck.

People's brains look for a pattern and they KNOW it's not -ed, so they fall back on one that feels similar. Until they memorize the 'right' one, anyhow.

Re conjugation: and then there's declension. (Allen Sherman on YouTube, for those who don't like unlabeled links)

Elliott (389): Shouldn't that be sneak/snack/snuck? ;)

And then English, with 'to go' being a combination of two verbs

That's called "suppletion" and it happens quite a bit in the more common verbs. It's why some of the Latin ones like esse 'to be' are so extravagantly weird.

that descend from much older Anglo-Saxon patterns

Umlaut for the win! Goes all the way back to PIE. ("Laryngeal consonants don't exist? What makes you Sassure?")

Tom Whitmore: English nouns don't really decline. Even the pronoun declensions are withering on the vine.

Carrie S: I took Latin and Homeric Greek in high school.

Then, when I went back to college after dropping out, my four years of Latin didn't count, so I needed a language. I went for Spanish, and when I saw in the syllabus we were going to get to "irregular verbs" I braced myself and my brain was all, "Here we go: sum, esse, fui, futurus -- I'm ready!"

And then it's like checkbox irregularity categories, plus one category that's basically "we spelled it different so you can pronounce it regular in the main conjugation".

Really?!? That's it? Wow. :->

Also, the main conjugation in Spanish is Latin 1st without the extra Ts.

Why is it edited rather than editted?

albatross @384: what the world looks like when all the mammals try to get together and live in a civilized peace.

This is one part of why Zootopia bothers me: mammals (except for humans) already do live in peace (aside from the eating each other part which: how did they handle that in the movie?). (Don't mind me, I just have a twitch around having animals stand in for humans. More, um, "homocentric" than I'm usually comfortable with.)

Elliott Mason @385: But irregular verbs are all stored in their OWN places, separate from the regular verbs.

Oh, so that's why I bailed out of Latin when we hit the irregulars. Didn't have enough bandwidth available, I guess.

The existence of 'snuck' isn't puzzling; what is odd is that it's gaining ground on 'sneaked', when with most other verbs the -ed forms are becoming more frequent. (Another possible exception to the rule is 'dove'.) There was a major discussion of this on Language Log a while ago.

396
'Snuck' somehow feels more natural, more correct than 'sneaked'. (Speaking only for myself, though.)

As I recall, there was a very funny Art Buchwald piece about trying to conjugate wrought.

Google helped when all I could remember was that the writer's name began with B, but isn't helpful at all with finding the article itself. Anyone know the piece?

P J Evans (397): 'Snuck' sounds more natural to me, too. When Andrew M first mentioned it in 388, tt took me minute to realize that he was saying that 'sneaked' used to be the more common. I'm still not convinced he's right. (It's not that I don't believe you, Andrew, it's just that my inner parser is rebelling: "No, no no! It's supposed to be 'snuck'; 'sneaked' is the error!" :)

I think it's because "sneaked" is phonetically awkward in some way I can't quantify. It's harder to say; "snuck" is easier. Maybe "kd" is harder after a mouth-wide vowel like "ee"?

Elliott Mason @400: My brain immediately presented the counterexample of eke/eked: 'uck'? :)

"Snuck" sounds more furtive than "sneaked", of course.

There are some interesting answers to the question of "where did 'snuck' come from?" on the English Language Stack Exchange site. (Note that the KeithS who gives the accepted answer there is not me; I always feel a little weird when I see his posts.)

There is also a semi-related question on that site about how different variations of past tense forms arise, and I find Jon Hanna's answer about weak and strong particularly interesting. Also for his joke about the "hanged/hung" distinction.

Re euphemizing words: Once upon a time, asyouknowbob, "pussy" meant "something very soft," as in a hare's nest or a kitty cat. Or female genitalia yes all right. So my MIL, who was a kid in the '20s, remembered playing Poor Pussy, a game rather like Duck Duck Goose in which It would wander among the other players stroking them and crooning, "Poor Pussy, Poor Pussy," until one of them was announced to be a Dog, who would chase It and possibly become the new It, and so forth. She taught it to her first grandchildren. She didn't teach it to the others, after she overheard them playing the game as My Pussy Hurts.

The growth of 'snuck' is a well-documented phenomenon. Obviously, once 'snuck' is established, 'sneaked' comes to seem wrong; normally when there is a strong form and a weak form, it's the weak form (e.g. 'runned' or 'thinked') which is wrong. If we made a concerted effort to introduce 'jamp', I'm sure we would soon come to see 'jumped' as wrong.

I still think it's a puzzle why this is happening, when other words like 'knit' and 'slay' and so on are going in the opposite direction.

Just some terms: When a word becomes regularized over time, this is called analogic change. Very commonly-used words are not subject to analogic change, because everyone remembers their forms.

This thread is the first I've heard of words being exempt from regular sound change! I'm astonished and delighted to learn of it.

While great irregularities often arise from words being exempt from analogic change but not sound change, that's not actually why the English 'be' is so irregular. It's a case of true suppletion: different forms of the verb come from different historical sources.

My brain, when conjugating 'sneak', is doing a tossup on the participle being 'snuck' or 'sneaked'.

Elliott Mason@393: heh, Homeric Greek. I've had Clyde Pharr's Homeric Greek on my shelf for years, saved for the months or years that I'm definitely really going to work through it. This will clearly never happen unless someone accidentally switches off the Internet and nobody has a backup. Maybe some day.

Steve with a Book @407: I took Greek sophomore year in high school (still taking Latin, second year) because I loved the myths. I soon learned to quit complaining that Latin was complicated, because just listing all the endings of ONE DECLENSION of verb in all their variations took an entire legal-sized sheet of the textbook. In about 10-pt text.

They had tenses I had no idea could even EXIST ... It opened my eyes. :->

I worked really hard, and was completely in over my head. The prof gave me a pity B when he knew I wasn't going to take the second year, to help my average and reward my effort.

Nancy Lebovitz @398: Don't recall Buchwald's take on "wrought", but Kevin Wald had a wonderful riff on "fraught".

Elliott: One conjugation, you mean. On the one hand, Greek has only one verb conjugation while Latin has four. On the other, Greek has a couple of tenses, plus a voice and a mood that Latin doesn't. (To say nothing of English.) The upshot is that a Latin verb has four principal parts, but a Greek verb has about eight.

One of my linguistics professors summed it up as "sound change, which is regular, produces irregularities; analogy, which is irregular, produces regularities."

(I'm not sure it holds true in all cases, but it sounds pithy, which is the main thing!)

Andrew M. @404: Something I've being seeing more and more lately is 'casted', as in "he was casted in the movie". This will always seem wrong to me, but if enough people accept it it will become right.

"Gifted" or "gift" as an active verb hits me wrong every time, but it is gaining popularity (at least among the advertising community.)

In open-threadiness: Is there a word for "pen-unanimous"? Like a vote which is allowed, at most, one "nay", or the State of The Union (attended unanimously, except for one member of the cabinet) ?

And 'coronate' as the verb associated with coronations. We have a perfectly good verb for that already, without needing to invent a new one.

Every time someone uses "casted" I correct them, and remind them that "st" verbs don't take an "ed" ending, tense is expressed by the modifier.

P. J. Evans: One of the Rosary Mysteries is the Coronation of Mary as Queen of Heaven. On the rosary DVD I have, it's obvious that the person reciting the Mystery doesn't know that the verb "to crown" exists, because when they describe the Mystery they say:

"Mary is coronated Queen of Heaven..."

I broke down laughing the first time I watched that section of the DVD!

P.J. Evens: that one bugs me a lot, and it seems to be taking over.

Open-threadiness: have the Hugo packets gone out? I'm in Ecuador, so I'm relying on it to be able to read everything.

Rachel (418): Yes, the Hugo packets are available now. I still need to read three of the novellas, but I'm otherwise done.

Lori Coulson @416, um, what about "Sam was a good chess player, but was bested by Jane"?

Is "bested" (used to mean "beaten") slang? I've certainly heard it a lot, usually in sports contexts. But sports does generate a lot of slang....

Lori Coulson @416,
The monk fasted for twenty years?

AKICIML: A while back, someone mentioned a clothing company that makes women's tank tops that are actually long enough to, like, tuck in. The company had a mascot that was something like a ground hog, who was thwarted in his efforts to oggle the woman wearing said clothes.

My Google fu is failing me, however. Anybody have a pointer?

@Cassy B: I would call "bested" an archaism, rather. Tolkien even uses "worsted" once.

'Bested' is fine (as is 'worsted', which paradoxically means more or less the same thing). 'Gift' as a verb has a long history in Scotland, at least (and has the advantage of meaning unequivocally 'give as a gift', as opposed to just 'hand over').

Thanks, Mary Aileen! I wonder why I haven't gotten mine yet.

Rachel @425

You should have by now received an e-mail with a link to the site and logon details. That is how you get to the packet.

If you haven't seen the e-mail, contact the Con.

J Homes

On AO3, you can subscribe to a story or a writer, and be notified when a new chapter/story is posted. Is there any way to subscribe to a fandom/tag/whatever*? I didn't see any obvious way to do it.

*not sure the right terminology here

You should have by now received an e-mail with a link to the site and logon details. That is how you get to the packet.

The logon details are the same as for voting, though, so provided you got a message notifying you of that, you should be able to access the packet. I never got a message specifically about the packet, and I have managed to access it without difficulty.

(I was going to say 'for nominating and voting', but checking the emails it looks as if I was a actually given two sets of numbers during the nomination period, one of which agreed with the voting numbers while the other didn't.)

Thanks so much, J Homes! I thought that link was just to vote - I didn't realize that's how to get the packet, too.

Mary Aileen @427: Yes, for a given fandom or tag. (If there's a way to do this for specific combinations of fandoms & tags, as a sort of narrower search function, I'm not currently aware.) If you look at the page for a fandom/tag, there should be a series of buttons at the top right of the page, just below the general header. They read Works, Bookmarks, Favorite Tag, RSS Feed. The last should get you a link that you can slot into your usual RSS reader.

Fade Manley (430): Thanks. But I don't have an RSS reader and am not interested in getting one. I'm looking for a way to do it in AO3, like their Subscriptions. From your answer, I'm guessing there isn't a way.

...I'll just have to remember to check occasionally for new stories.

I once fumbled during a coven briefing and said we would "invocate" the Goddess. General laughter ensued; I pretended to be very put out and said "Well, you don't have to crucifict me for it."

Here's a link to the AO3 Subscriptions and Feeds FAQ.

It confirms that email alerts are only available for users and works, with RSS feeds available for fandom, character, and relationship tags. (Also that, as Fade said, there isn't currently a way to subscribe to combinations of tags.)

Some browsers, by the way, have in-built support for RSS feeds, so it may not be necessary to obtain a separate RSS reader. In Firefox, for instance, the feature is called "Live Bookmarks".

I was thinking about this and realised that Rss feeds to email is probably a solved problem. One google, and voila!

https://blogtrottr.com/

will take an RSS feed and deliver it to your email, presumably in a fairly similar form to the subscription emails, since the AO3 RSS feeds I follow on tumblr are very similar. - An Example

You can set how often it sends them to you - for every fic posted or aggregated over the day.

That was the just top result for my "rss to email" google search, it looks like there's a bunch of services you can choose from.

And I might just be setting up some of my own to spam my email account with.

Lori@416: I'm afraid you're fighting a losted cause.

Steven desJardins -- maybe so, but I'll keep trying.

The rear-guard action I am fighting is for "might" as the past tense of "may," in counterfactuals like "if she had studied, she might not have failed the exam." I keep seeing, instead, "If she hadn't studied, she may not have failed," and thinking "but we know whether she failed."

If the question is "Why did she fail the exam?" then "She may not have studied" is correct if we don't know why she failed: maybe the exam was just too hard, or the study was wasted because the teacher didn't cover what they tested the class on, or the student made mistakes because she hadn't slept.

I suspect that part of why this useful distinction is slipping away is that it's fuzzier in the future tense: it's reasonable to say either "it may rain tomorrow" or "it might rain tomorrow."

Paul A. (433): Thanks for the information. I was not familiar with Live Bookmarks in Firefox. Question: how do you know there's anything new there? The point is that I don't want to have to check; I want to be told if/when there's a new story in this very obscure fandom (current number of stories: two, and one is just a snippet).

Aquila (434): Thanks. Setting one of those up is probably more trouble than I want to go to, but it's good to know that the option exists.

me@438: No, actually Blogtrottr does look pretty easy. Done.

Andrew, #424: I fail to see any meaningful distinction between "gift" and "give", or "gifted" and "gave". What I do know is that the current fad for using the "gift" forms arose from a popular scam ("gifting circles") and they therefore smell bad to me. I generally don't correct other people for using them, but you sure as hell won't catch me doing it.

Current language peeve: I'm on an estrogen-suppression medication. It's called "anastrozole". This makes absolutely no sense to me; why isn't it "anestrozole"? (This is actually a serious question, and if someone with medical knowledge can answer it I'll be grateful.)

Open Threadiness: Anatomy of an IT security violation. All it took was one manager deciding that following the established company protocols "wasted time".

Lee @ 440 - The Anatomy link reminded me of a story I heard years ago about a system manager who was asked how he handled security. Perhaps he was being facetious, but his reply was "No documentation!"

Another place I worked had security where a developer could not access the contents of any mainframe file that had the string 'pay' as part of the DSN. Even in development environments that were scrubbed of production data.

That same place would then print thousands of AP checks, and leave them on the half-door ledge to the office. Where anyone could have walked up and grabbed them.

440
Dear sweet Ghu.
Where I worked, they didn't even like us loaning out a keycard so someone who forgot theirs could get lunch or go on break without having a second person along. And they never, ever asked for passwords (although some people did allow another person to know theirs).

Lee @440: The crucial distinction for me is that "gave" might be a physical action or a transfer of ownership, but "gift" clarifies transfer of ownership without any corresponding payment or favor.

If I hand my sister a stack of plates to put on the table, "I gave her the stack of plates" is accurate. If I put the plates in a box and ask her to keep them in her garage for a few months while I sort out space issues at home, "I gave her the stack of plates" is still accurate. If we arrange for me to sell her the plates for $5, and she gives me $5 on Tuesday, and then on Thursday I come by and give her the plates, "I gave her the stack of plates" continues to be an accurate description of my actions on Thursday. But if I put the plates in the box, hand her the box, and tell her that the plates are permanently hers, no payment required, only then is "I gifted her the stack of plates" accurate.

Steven desJardins @ #435:

At least with some of the popular mis-spellings, one could be fighting a loosened cause...

Popping in briefly with an AKICIF question...

I need to solder wires to smallish pieces of stainless steel, for electronic purposes. What's the best way of getting a sturdy connection? Pre-tin the steel? Electroplate with copper first? Something else?

The project is a free-spinning propeller to attach to a bike helmet, with LEDs on the propeller blades. I'm rather proud of the design for the "sliding" electrical contacts.

(The personal situation here: we're doing more-or-less okay, not particularly well most of the time. Inge is unwell a lot. She's also dealing with a divorce [details deleted by request—Idumea Arbacoochee] We've got a couple of medical malpractise lawsuits going, with highlights such as "while she was getting increasingly delirious with sepsis, the nurses neglected to give her two out of four doses of antibiotics" and "when the doctor noticed that she was comatose, his response was to put in a non-urgent requisition to psychiatry". We have still managed to get out to a couple of conventions, and hope to be at Conterpoint in a few weeks.)

Anniversary of my broken ankle.

A year ago today I slipped and broke my ankle. Seven weeks ago today I stress-fractured my pelvis during the London Marathon due to complications of that (inadequate ankle flexibility, plus lots of running, plus office chair problems, resulting in pelvic malalignment, which, plus lots of running, led to the stress fracture.)

Looking at the positives: just over six months post-fixation of the ankle fracture I completed a 26.5 mile training run, a month later I ran an official marathon, and at almost exactly nine months post-fixation I completed a 34-mile hilly trail ultramarathon. I've also run a number of 20-25+ mile training runs.

X-ray at six weeks post stress fracture showed good healing, so I'm allowed to return to running over the next 4-6 weeks. I'm taking it very carefully to the eight week mark, just in case.

Hopefully the next year will include more running and no more fractures, stress or otherwise.

Vicki @437:

Thank you for fighting that particular fight. I agree that we're losing, but I've not given up yet.

As I said elseweb, "Truman might not have dropped the bomb" is a claim about a counterfactual (i.e. he actually did, but if, e.g. Japan had surrendered in 1942 than he would not have); "Truman may not have dropped the bomb" claims that there is a possibility that we are wrong to think that Truman dropped the bomb (Churchill dropped it! No one dropped it! It was all a hoax!). Very different claims!

Joel @445: I am not a pro about soldering, but I had thought that solder and stainless just don't mix. If you try to tin it, you will never get the solder to adhere to the stainless. No amount of scuffing, sanding, fluxing, will change it--if the stuff really is stainless, then it won't solder. But try tinning it and see how it goes--it may not be stainless (and it might not be stainless).

Lee @440: I fail to see any meaningful distinction between "gift" and "give"

A usage I picked up somewhere is to use "gift" as a verb, in a non-consensual/-grateful sense. "I was gifted this" meaning it's a thing I don't want, don't need, and really don't want to have to deal with at all, nevermind simulating cordial gratitude for "the thought."

Office Xmas party "white elephant" exchanges seem to me to be the cannonical application of the verb in this sense. And is why I don't participate; I've got enough crap to keep track of, thank you. Nevermind some tacky tchotchke that somebody received from their inlaw and was tired of dusting. (We have a rule at our WE exchanges: "No junk." Right. Like anyone can define for me what constitutes "junk.") (Wow, that turned into more of a rant than I expected.)

Anatomy of an IT security violation. I've been more than usually conscious lately of a human tendency to want to do things the way someone wants to do them, with that someone not wanting to be bothered with "how it's done." (Please note: I am the QUEEN of this tendency, and it's only in the last year or two that I've really started to look at it seriously in myself.) The culprit in the linked story probably was giving herself all kinds of props for being Efficient and Innovative and Proactive. The hazard, as she discovered, is in failing to consider that established procedure might be there for very good and specific reasons—or even that this might be a solved problem.

Another prime example is that whole Social Autopsy clusterfsck a while back.

Joel Polowin @445: Jeezus. Here's hoping things improve drastically for you-all, and soon!

dcb @446: Yay for improvement! I am yet again reminded of my karate instructor's immortal advice: "Be careful how you limp; you might screw something else up."

I went to the dentist Thursday to have a micron or two planed off the tooth adjacent to my new crown, because the absence of the cusp that broke off was causing various other teeth to crash into each other unhappily. Between that, and some nighttime teeth-grinding, I seem to now be re-equilibrated. (It never ceases to amaze me how tight those tolerances are. The dentist, after he finished the adjustment, said he couldn't even see the difference. The change in the way my jaw fit, however, was significant.)

Lee @440: IT link shared. My, that is ... special, isn't it.

Olster @447 -- The bits are supposed to be stainless steel; I queried the manufacturers specifically on that point. The device isn't going to be easy to dismantle to repair it, and is likely to get rained on occasionally. I want it to be corrosion-resistant, even when there's a few volts on it. It shouldn't be activated when it's wet, but accidents happen.

Abi -- It occurs to me that I was imprudent in posting the negative details about I.'s divorce. Would you please remove them from #445? My apologies, and thanks.

445
I think you can get solder that will work with stainless: ask at a jeweler or a machine shop, to be sure, because both are places that would deal with it. (Googling 'stainless steel' + solder is getting all kinds of hits, including how-tos.)

Joel @450:

OK. Good luck to you both.

P J Evans #451 - I recall the time served welder and metal basher at a place I used to work had to be sent on a course because he didn't actually have an up to date "I know how to solder metal together" certificate. Oddly enough the instructor ended up saying you lot know more than me, so tell me what you know.

His answer to stainless steel and a bunch of other difficult things was silver solder.

Lee@440: I fail to see any meaningful distinction between "gift" and "give", or "gifted" and "gave".

'If I give you a five-pound note, can you give me change in coins?' That makes perfect sense, but you couldn't use 'gift', since no one is getting an actual gift in this situation.

'Gift' as a verb is historically well-established in Scotland, and has been gaining currency in England for quite a while. Traditionally it's mostly used, not for birthday gifts and the like, but for something presented to an institution - 'this picture of Alderman Mugglebotham was gifted to the city by his family', etc.

It occurs to me that there is such a thing as a "corona", so maybe "crowned" and "coronated" could both be valid. But Google insists on "corona" being a brand of beer, so maybe not. Since it seems to be American beer I shall forbear from further comment.

455
I think it's nominally Mexican beer.

453
Hard silver solder is one of the things Google was turning up in that connection. It's one of the reasons I suggested a jeweler - they might be willing to do it, as they'd have the solder and the correct temperature iron. It might be less expensive than doing it yourself.

I recently, in trying to describe the two types of spun wool, explained that one of the forms was named after the town of Worstead England, and was pronounced like the non-existent past tense of the verb "to worst". I got comments on how surprisingly helpful referring to a non-existent word was.

#440 ::: Lee

It occurs to me that just having people following the rules all the time without exception might have its own failure modes, and that apparently a lot of people in the company had no idea what good security procedures look like.

How does this approach look?

Charlie Munger:

If you tell people why, they’ll be much more likely to comply. You might ask why that is so important? Well, again that is a rule ofpsychology. Just as you think better if you arrayknowledge on a bunch of models that are basically answers to the question, why, why, why, if you always tell people why they will understand it better, they will consider it more important, and they will be more likely to comply.

So there is an iron rule that just as you want to start getting worldly wisdom by asking why, why, why in communicating with other people about everything, you want to include why, why, why. Even if it is obvious, it is wise to stick in the why.

Buddha Buck @457

There's a recurring knitters' pun about "bested by worsted", which I've heard a few times. I think I saw it as a blog post recently.

Jacque @ 422: AKICIML: A while back, someone mentioned a clothing company that makes women's tank tops that are actually long enough to, like, tuck in. The company had a mascot that was something like a ground hog, who was thwarted in his efforts to oggle the woman wearing said clothes.

I don't know about a lascivious groundhog, but Duluth Trading Company makes comfortable clothing designed to be active in, and they claim to have an extra 2" length on most shirts to keep you covered.

I have finished both of Heather Rose Jone's Alpennia novels, and I am disconsolate that there isn't another one (or 5) published yet.

Janetl, as a long-torsoed woman who is too old to pull off the bare-midriff look, I appreciate the pointer to Duluth Trading Company. Thank you!

I detest low-rise jeans and dislike medium-rise jeans, but can no longer find reasonably-priced jeans where the waist actually comes up to my actual waist. Which irritates me. And makes the inadvertent bare-midriff look more likely...

Sandy B. @ 413, Lee @ 440 re: "gifted"

Back when searching Google Groups was simple enough to be useful for tracking usage, I did a little analysis on "gifted" and wrote it up. Brief summary: the recent fashion for "to gift" in the sense of "to give as a gift" seems to have become popular around the mid 1990s (at least in the corpus searchable by Google).

janetl @ 461

I picked a delightful time to drop by the thread! Thank you.

Heather Rose Jones: Thank you

Casey B. @ 462: Christopher & Banks has some jeans with a higher waist than most.

San Francisco Free Folk festival was yesterday. The last two years it's been a one-day event instead of two-day, and it was at a new (for us) middle school, so we didn't really figure out where to have all the random jamming, but it still went well.
(And there was a shape-note singing workshop, which included Idumea.)

Cassy B., #462: Have you tried Gloria Vanderbilt "Amanda" jeans? I also despise hip-huggers, and have found these to be consistently cut to sit at my natural waist... and they fit properly in both the waist AND the butt, which is hard to find. Look for them at Goodwill -- there are usually at least a few pairs on the rack there. Also, sometimes CostCo will have a table full of them, but the Goodwill ones are only $7.

Good to know I'm not the only one who wants jeans with the waistband at my waist! I think when I began to despair was in a shop with one style labled: "high-waisted: designed to sit just below your waist". ARRGGHHH!

dcb et multi alia, in re all pants being SO SHORTWAISTED nowadays:

Even the men's pants have "below-the-waist" as their highest option right now, if you can imagine. So annoying.

Of course, I'm also the weirdo now for strongly preferring to TUCK MY SHIRTS IN (which means shirts are cut too short to actually tuck well; they're cut to look nice when left out, which means they keep riding up my butt and coming out of the waistband). Leaving it untucked just feels sloppy to me, and in anything but the hottest weather, it makes my bellybutton icy cold.

One change that shocked me about a year ago but I'm starting to get used to is "form-fitting stretchy pants not being considered generally immodest."

It started with what some people call "the yoga-pants" craze several years ago. Yoga pants are basically non-shiny spandex leggings that get wider from just above the knee until they've got about an inch or two gap between the anklebone and the pant cuff. This meant that people's ... detailed rear topography ... was clearly revealed to view, and for a while the popular media and discussion was all about how horrible it was to wear these out in public. It was equated with having your actual naked butt on display.

Then there were "jeggings", which are non-shiny spandex leggings that are printed in a sort of trompe l'oeil** pattern (some brands more convincing than others) to look like you're wearing tight jeans from about ten feet away. But they're spandex leggings.

Now even plain black ones with no serious shirt-tail covering (just the standard "I can't tuck my shirt in" stuff) the butt area are considered utterly normal, as long as they're not shiny. Fairly conservative parents at Beka's school send their 8 year old (or 12 year old) daughters in wearing them, and nothing is made of it.

I'm old and grumpy and these kids won't get off my lawn or put anything off their asses. But I've lost.

--
** I am shocked and pleased that I typed that correctly. Though I did have to backspace parts, eye it squinting, and take another run at it. Still, when I googled to check, CORRECT! Go me. This is almost as satisfying as when I started being able to correctly spell rhythm on more than 80% of tries, for which, "Thank you, Speak and Spell!"

I confess I have never paid close attention to the height of the waist of my trousers, being generally preoccupied by the difficulty of fitting my hips and thighs with less than, say, six inches of excess waistband. I was in my twenties before I became aware of how much more comfortable jeans are when not skin-tight on the thigh.

If anything I think lower waists are slightly more comfortable for me, in that they stop before I have narrowed too much and therefore don't fit quite so badly. But I also wear men's shirts, which as a rule are designed to be tucked in and have length with which to do so. Women's work tops are always too short in the body, even untucked, and my torso is short.

It's not just me. It's not just people of my body shape. Clothes, off the shelf, just plain don't fit.

Heather Rose Jones (463): I first encountered 'gifted' as 're-gifted', meaning to take a gift you had received and give it to someone else (specifically as a gift, not just "here, I can't use this, do you want it?" or giving it to a thrift shop). Mid-to-late-'90s sounds about right for the timing. Speculation: 'gifted' could be a back-formation from that usage.

Elliott Mason #469: I thought the legging thing spread from the kids to the adults? Compare the lingerie-as-streetwear thing from back in the 80s, which didn't stick as a popular style, but there's still a lot more tolerance for such than there used to be. (Also, became a staple in "costume" events such as awards shows. :-) )

David Harmon @472: I first saw the backlash against yoga pants. At that point most kids (younger than late teens) weren't wearing spandex leggings as a wardrobe staple at all: either pants, shorts, a skirt, or possibly nylons-style tights.

Some people my age were still occasionally wearing leggings-and-tunic (or oversized shirt, etc) that went low enough to cover the bottom edge of the ... um, rump contour.

There was always a subset of "shiny leggings and crop top", but it certainly wasn't mainstream or respectable enough to wear to work.

I didn't see kids in a t-shirt-and-leggings on the playground until after I saw adult women wearing the style.

Elliott, #469: Okay, that made me actually google for "yoga pants pictures" because I'd heard the fuss and not understood WTF it was about -- I had thought that yoga pants were just a type of leggings. Now I see that they're not, and my reaction is very mixed. On the one hand, isn't this what always happens when women start wearing something that reveals parts which were routinely covered up before? (cf. miniskirts, hot pants, trousers for that matter) And to the extent that this frees women to wear something comfortable and practical, I approve. On the other, it seems to be contributing to the general sexualization of everything worn by women -- where are the pictures of men in yoga pants? -- and if pre-pubescent girls are wearing them, that combination of concepts seems problematic.

Painted-on clothing seems to be desexualizing somewhat, is what I'm talking about.

Ten or twenty years ago, being able to see every contour of a woman's lower half was viewed as completely inappropriate for serious public appearances (like going to the grocery store). Even wearing pajamas was better.

But now it's much less ... charged? I notice that I'm often the most uncomfortable nearby person about it, because of my antiquated modesty training.

P J Evans @451: I did do some Google searching before I came here; none of the hits I was finding seemed easily applicable to the small-scale work I need to do. Before I went to the trouble of chasing down special solders or fluxes, I was hoping someone here might have personal experience to offer advice.

But on further viewing, I'm intrigued by Robert Murray-Smith's Youtube videos about copper nanoparticle gel. It seems to produce electrode-less electroplating. It'll still be a bit tricky to work with, but it should be manageable. I'll have to improvise some of the materials, and wing some of the measurements since I don't have access to a balance that's more precise than the nearest 1 or 2 grams.

It appears that copper sulfate is no longer sold in Canada as an algaecide / root killer. Okay, copper chloride = copper wire + HCl + hydrogen peroxide; should do the job. (The reaction processes there are kind of neat.) Ferric chloride = steel wool + HCl + H₂O₂ again. Ascorbic acid = vitamin C tablets.

#469 ::: Elliott Mason

I think the main reason jeggings and non-shiny spandex type pants are getting a lot of play for females is that shirt hem-lines are starting to get lower* (as in "below the waist") while some dresses are getting shorter (at least for younger girls I've seen in public in my part of the US). It's a workable, (read: fashionable) alternative to the shorts-under-dresses** solution to not showing actual underwear.

Plus, they're as comfy as sweat pants without looking as sloppy as sweatpants or as dated as knit fabric slacks (think up-scale sweatpants for office wear).

------
* I've been watching the series "Wynona" and I'm amused to see one of the main characters (and possibly the youngest in-story) wear cropped tops with very-high-possibly-above-the-waist-high-waisted "mom jeans". All I could think was "Well the last few years celebrated the 60's and 70's, now it's time for the '80's." My friends and I have been walking the local mall in too hot, too cold and too wet weather. We normally go to the park. Walking through the "fashionable" part of a department store to get to the concourse is a trip down memory lane for us.

** As a kid, I wasn't allowed to wear dresses unless I had shorts on under them. Shorts were not to be worn as short-and-paired-with-shirts out in public according to my very modest-minded father.

I rather like "gifted", because, as others have said, it makes it clear that the item was a gift and not a trade or anything else.

The one that really drives me up the wall is "burglarized", but I suspect that's regional difference that I have to live with.

Elliott Mason @ 475:

I think that Lee's point is not that leggings and yoga pants are inherently sexualizing, but rather that it's yet another round in the long-standing fashion trend of women's clothing putting women's bodies on display (implied: for men), but men's clothing not really putting men's bodies on display. For everyday sports and sports-adjacent clothing, men mostly have non-form-fitting, non-amazingly-short shorts.

There's probably an interesting paper to be written about how men's basketball and running shorts have become longer and baggier from what they were decades ago, but I wouldn't know where to start.

(I really wouldn't mind wearing yoga pants or leggings around from time to time, but they're not in fashion for men, and I don't want to deal with the hassle I'd get, so...)

Lori @ 416: Isn't "casted" used for the wrapping of a broken limb?

In the gifted/given debate, my connotation for gifted is "adjective: a special ability" or "verb, irregular (colloquial): to give (or sometimes receive) an unasked for, and possibly unwanted, item." My dictionaries just have adjectival form. Out of curiosity, I googled the synonyms and found verb "define alikes" for gift/ed: award, bestow, give, present, proffer, dower. However, those were at the end of the entry in what I think of as the "also ran" options. Given is "verb: past participle of give"; "adjective: specific/stated or inclination/disposed toward"; "Preposition: taking into account"; "Noun: established fact/situation".

I will say that I've noticed non-slang word definitions seem to start in the connotative realm and switch to the denotative once enough people form the same opinion and use it widely enough to cause confusion or discomfort. (i.e.Donkey/ass, gay, pussy, etc). I fully expect "to math/mathed/mathing, to adult/adulted/adulting," and so on to be added to the official dictionary in about 10 years. I can use geeky "adult as a verb" language around mundanes/muggles where they both understand it and don't give off negative vibe. Nouning verbs and verbing nouns is starting to go mainstream.

Is there a chance of a mourning/reactions thread for what happened at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando just recently? I don't want people to end up with comments about it just in their faces with no warning, but I have a need to process (and so might others).

I can do it elsewhere if this doesn't seem the right venue.

Quill @ 479

That's verbing the noun "cast." The actual verb "cast" is irregular/dependent: have cast, will cast, am cast. Will be cast. I didn't know about Lori @ 416's rule of "no 'ed' after 'st'." "Cast" is not to be confused with "casting call" which is a compound noun used in a specific field of work and is very much jargon.

481: I, also, would be interested to see such a thread.

Keith S@478: I had understood that 'burglarize' was standard American, while 'burgle' was standard British. (It was not always so; the word began as a back-formation and so was originally non-standard. When W.S. Gilbert wrote 'When the enterprising burglar isn't burgling', he meant it as a joke.)

Seconding Elliott's question @ # 481. ML is a much safer space for me than most of the other places where I can discuss the matter.

Speaking as a man of a specific body type, I prefer pants which are well below my waist (as classically defined, where the side of the body bends when you lean to the side).

A few of my pants do ride that high, but they have the problem that I must either cinch them uncomfortably tight with a belt, or they fall down when I exhale -- my waist is the widest part of my abdomen, not the narrowest. As such, most of my pants ride traditionally low, under my belly, not over.

I suspect that while that works for me, and other large men, the other reason for low-riding mens pants is that it allows the men to show off their abs better. This goes against the idea of tucked-in shirts, though. Fortunately (for me) large shirts, combined with a short torso, usually yields shirts easy to tuck in. It can be a pain keeping them tucked in, however.

High-waisted pants have made me consider suspenders instead of belts, but I haven't fully embraced that style.

My ex hit the previous round of yoga uptake, when yoga shows on TV either had tights and leotards or loose drawstring pants and loose tops. So to me, "yoga pants" brings up images of fairly plain-looking pyjamas, not skin-tight. It made me wonder what the fuss was about when the "yoga pants" controversy popped up.

As I understand it, "burgle" and "burglarize" entered the language at about the same time; "burglarize" may be a bit older. It certainly isn't a neologism of the stripe of "incentivize".

As for the nouning of verbs and vice versa, it's been very common throughout the history of English. Just start thinking of, say, body parts, and see how many of them are used as verbs or as the core of phrasal verbs. ("Arm" doesn't count; the body part is Germanic, the verb is of Latin origin. No relation.)

I have escripted the entrification that was requestified.

Ahem.

Here is a place to discuss the events in Orlando. Be gentle, OK? I'm kinda busy and it's going to be swoop-and-scold moderation more than gentle-nudges-every-second-comment stuff. But I get that it's needed, and I'm glad to provide it.

re 469: Being long-waisted and long-armed has been a lifelong curse in terms of getting shirts that reach both my ankles and by belt. I've never been able to wear polo shirts more than one washing.

I think the "tight pants" look is just a cyclical thing, because I can distinctly remember skinny jeans in the 1980s that, umm ... well, they were tight enough to show underwear lines if you weren't careful, and they were denim, so super tight. Guess was the brand of choice.

And then there was Hypercolor clothing ...

Elliott Mason @ 297: a less-hopeful view appears in the 12 Jun Boston Globe Ideas section; they think that even today the single-digit boys are getting pushed into binary.

Lizzy Lynn @ 317: I'm being slow tonight. BHO?

re the black BoA customer whose account was frozen by a stupid/bigoted teller: ISTM that the ACLU is too slow; does her state have Legal Aid? (The link no longer works.)

Nancy L @ 394: the rule I learned >50 years ago was that the final consonant was doubled only if the accent was on the final syllable. Current usage doesn't always agree; e.g. all the references I find insisted that a disk is formatted, not formated.

Sandy B @ 414: NESFA still "Harters" motions; the term originally noted a specific member (a wit, not a jerk) who would vote No so that less-important motions would not pass unanimously. He moved home a long time ago; these days it's overused by someone who has a singular opinion of his wit.

Hugo Retros question - A couple of days ago, I was starting to wonder if I'd missed the Hugo Reader Packet email, then read somebody's question here about how to unpack it and found that it had arrived in my email a few hours earlier. Now the Retro Hugo packet has arrived (though most of it you'll need to read online or find in a library rather than downloading.)

The nominees are here.

My question is about H.P.Lovecraft being listed for Best Fan Writer. Was he really eligible? Admittedly, if there was anybody who wasn't going to let a little thing like having been dead for four years stop him, it was HPL, but I'd have expected that to apply more to "short story or novel he'd submitted to an editor finally getting published" than to fan writing. Was this a posthumous fanzine by the other Cthulhu Mythos folks or something, or is it a mistake?

Jim Parish @487
"As for the nouning of verbs and vice versa, it's been very common throughout the history of English."

My understanding is that it's how English works. To put it in perhaps overly simplistic terms, in English, "noun" and "verb" are not types of word (as they are in say Latin), but roles in sentence structure, into which whatever word best conveys the meaning is slotted.

J Homes.

WRT parts of speech -

There was an article I read about swearing that related a story about an exasperated mechanic trying without success to use a tool to loosen a part on a car. After the umpteenth time he tried, he flung the tool down in exasperation and exclaimed "The fucking fuck won't fuck!".

Adjective, noun, verb.

Bill S., #492: I had the same question, and someone (maybe here, possibly on File 770) said that Lovecraft had such a backlog of stuff that things by him continued to be published for quite some time after his death, and that therefore it's very possible for work by him to have appeared in zines eligible for the Retro Hugo.

Steve C at #494

Since "Buffalo" can be a collective noun, adjective, and verb, any number of repeats of "buffalo" can be parsed as a an English sentence. See Wikipedia which credits this insight to Thomas Tymoczko.

And it suggests that other words, such as "police" can do the same thing. I bet John M. Ford could have come up with a few... Since (with different pronunciation) "Polish"/"polish" have the same three functions, it might be another, I can certainly parse one, two, three, and four repeats.

Henry Troup @496, "Fast" and "last" both hit for the cycle; they are nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs.

AKICIML: Say I wanted to learn piano, and my only option for practice would be a keyboard and headphones at home, because my house is very small. Do keyboards with a full piano range exist, and is there a technical term for such things? Also, are we talking hundreds of dollars? Thousands?

MENTAL ABNORMALITIES!
(Yet another Hamilton filk, with SCIENCE!)

#498 ::: Jenny Islander

They definitely exist-- try searching on 88 keyboard.

There are some at around $200, but they may need things like power cords or not have a headphone jack. There are a lot at $500 or so.

A couple hundred gets a rather decent Yamaha with five octaves of full-sized touch-sensitive keys and good sounds. I've seen full 88s for a hundred or so more—could try pawnshops.

The thread reminds me of my late friend Dave, who became legend with the utterance, "Fuckin' I'm stayin fuckin' here. Fuck you fuckers!" We miss him for other reasons as well.

Jenny Islander @ 498

To feel like a piano and have full piano range and action, you need three things: 88 weighted touch-sensitive.

We had a Yamaha Clavinova for years that met that standard. (Decided to replace rather than move, and bought a house with an included piano.) You can get an older used one for $250 or so around here.

Bill Stewart @ 492 / Lee @ 495: HPL could be a mistake -- an exaggeration of Freas and Silverberg getting two of the first retro-Hugos (for activity in 1950, when they weren't). It's more likely to be VD trolling, given the upset over Lovecraft's bust being displaced as the World Fantasy Awards trophy (on account of his vile and public racism). It's possible the Hugo committee should have ruled him ineligible, but that would have involved proving the negative that none of his ]fannish[ work was published in 1940. (I expect there was no significant publication -- 4 years is a couple of ages in fanzine publishing -- but something might have trickled in.)
      I have little regard for the retro-Hugos, and actively dislike awards for general activity rather than a specific work; but I've fought and lost that battle on a WOrldcon committee and won't be in KC or Helsinki to argue it further.

Steve C @ 494: Distinguo (thank you, James Blish). The first instance is a participle (derived from a verb) rather than a free-standing adjective. Yes, that's hairsplitting.

A question inspired by sleeping on Nancy L's question: when did the imperfect past of a method of execution change from "hanged" to "hung"? I remember the newer usage in a vulgar pun in 1975, and don't know whether the 1937 reference (near the end of Busman's Honeymoon) was general or merely a legal archaicism on par with white wigs and rusty bombazine.

Joel Polowin@#445:

I need to solder wires to smallish pieces of stainless steel, for electronic purposes. What's the best way of getting a sturdy connection? Pre-tin the steel? Electroplate with copper first? Something else?

What I recall from my days in aerospace/defense work (Gosh, 16+ years ago?), you need an aggressive acid-type flux to get solder to wet out on stainless. I think we were using lead solder at the time. What I have learned since then here in the semiconductor industry is that conductive epoxy is a thing that is much easier to use, especially for such low-current needs as LED's (Heck, Playdough is conductive enough for LED's...)

The project is a free-spinning propeller to attach to a bike helmet, with LEDs on the propeller blades. I'm rather proud of the design for the "sliding" electrical contacts.

Hmm. I'm not exactly sure why you need the propeller to be part of the circuit, unless you only wanted one wire along each blade and use the blade as ground. I'd be interested in how you managed the sliding electrical contacts. I'd be tempted to raid the slip-rings from a small car alternator, or use two small DC hobby-motor's commutators and brushes and just short all the segments together on each commutator.

cajunfj40 @504: I'm planning a plastic propeller with LEDs at the tips of the blades, with power provided from batteries on the main helmet or in a backpack or such. The propeller has to be as lightweight as possible so it will spin in the ambient airflow. A pair of fine wires will go along each blade, from the hub to the LEDs. Stainless steel bits at the hub and comprising the axle, transferring current.

Joel Polowin @#505:

cajunfj40 @504: I'm planning a plastic propeller with LEDs at the tips of the blades, with power provided from batteries on the main helmet or in a backpack or such. The propeller has to be as lightweight as possible so it will spin in the ambient airflow. A pair of fine wires will go along each blade, from the hub to the LEDs. Stainless steel bits at the hub and comprising the axle, transferring current.

Ah, ok, so not connecting to the blades - connecting to the bits at the hub and the axle. How are you transferring the power? Friction from sliding contacts could be as much or more of a worry than the rotational inertia of the blade/LED assembly. Sounds like a neat project! I'd be tempted to use a small hobby motor and piggyback the LED's on the winding, fed through a hollow shaft replacing the original armature shaft. Of course, that's cheating and turning it into a fan...

Open threadiness: The FBI doesn't have to tell you where it has put surveillance cameras, because national security. I expect that the eventual endpoint we will reach (sooner rather than later) will be that every public space is under constant surveillance. Perhaps this will result in less crime, but if it doesn't--even if crime goes up and the cameras never seem to help--we will keep on getting more of them.

This isn't just the result of an ideology of deference to the police and spy agencies (though that's a part of it), it's more fundamentally about technology and economics. Every police state in history would have loved to have this kind of capability, but it would have been too expensive to build and monitor. Between cheaper cameras and cheaper storage and monitoring software, that's a lot less of a problem each year than it was the year before. Private surveillance is commonplace and will become more so over time, I think.

Every horror like the shooting in the news now strengthens the argument for more of this, but it's economics that's really driving it. We'd have had this in 1980 if we could have.

We have no idea what this new world we're building will look like. Imagine a world where *everything* that you do except maybe in your own home is part of your permanent record, subject to be brought up if someone ever decides to do a serious investigation of you.

That time you drove home drunk even though you knew better, and got away with it. That time you lost your temper with a coworker and said unforgivably nasty things to him. That time you left a party with a friend and ended up sleeping together, and then in the morning both laughed and decided it was obviously a mistake and never talked about it again. All recorded, waiting for someone to need to know about them.

The people with access to all that footage may have a great deal of power, the ability to get almost anyone fired or arrested or shunned. Alternatively, maybe all that footage will lead to all but the worst things losing their impact--you won't be able to keep your frequent trips to the bondage club a secret, but your neighbor won't shun you for it because she can't keep her new one-night-stand per week secret, either.

It's honestly hard for me to imagine what that world will look like, except that in many ways, life will be unrecognizably different from what has happened before. I expect that criminal conspiracies will be easier to unravel, but also that they'll be easy to invent from whole cloth when they're wanted. I expect organizing any kind of protest movement in the face of the surveillance state will be really hard, because the movement won't have any privacy at all. (I suspect this is true now, in fact.)

I can't even imagine what effect it will have on art and religion and people figuring out their own beliefs and sexual/romantic drives and such. I keep wondering if the whole massive economy made out of "get a load of this idiot" articles will sooner or later cause all the weird, interesting folks (who ultimately generate pretty much all the interesting and worthwhile new things in the world) to die of scorn and public shaming. I wonder how much freedom anyone will have to have weird political or social beliefs, when it all goes into their permanent file, and maybe they end up at 40 in a job interview, explaining why they were involved with some weird political movement when they were 20.

I don't see any realistic hope of changing this. Surveillance gets cheaper every year, following Moore's law. Even if we somehow got control of various levels of government surveillance (not likely!), the private surveillance of ad networks and social media would still be there.

Open threadiness: The FBI doesn't have to tell you where it has put surveillance cameras, because national security. I expect that the eventual endpoint we will reach (sooner rather than later) will be that every public space is under constant surveillance. Perhaps this will result in less crime, but if it doesn't--even if crime goes up and the cameras never seem to help--we will keep on getting more of them.

This isn't just the result of an ideology of deference to the police and spy agencies (though that's a part of it), it's more fundamentally about technology and economics. Every police state in history would have loved to have this kind of capability, but it would have been too expensive to build and monitor. Between cheaper cameras and cheaper storage and monitoring software, that's a lot less of a problem each year than it was the year before. Private surveillance is commonplace and will become more so over time, I think.

Every horror like the shooting in the news now strengthens the argument for more of this, but it's economics that's really driving it. We'd have had this in 1980 if we could have.

We have no idea what this new world we're building will look like. Imagine a world where *everything* that you do except maybe in your own home is part of your permanent record, subject to be brought up if someone ever decides to do a serious investigation of you.

That time you drove home drunk even though you knew better, and got away with it. That time you lost your temper with a coworker and said unforgivably nasty things to him. That time you left a party with a friend and ended up sleeping together, and then in the morning both laughed and decided it was obviously a mistake and never talked about it again. All recorded, waiting for someone to need to know about them.

The people with access to all that footage may have a great deal of power, the ability to get almost anyone fired or arrested or shunned. Alternatively, maybe all that footage will lead to all but the worst things losing their impact--you won't be able to keep your frequent trips to the bondage club a secret, but your neighbor won't shun you for it because she can't keep her new one-night-stand per week secret, either.

It's honestly hard for me to imagine what that world will look like, except that in many ways, life will be unrecognizably different from what has happened before. I expect that criminal conspiracies will be easier to unravel, but also that they'll be easy to invent from whole cloth when they're wanted. I expect organizing any kind of protest movement in the face of the surveillance state will be really hard, because the movement won't have any privacy at all. (I suspect this is true now, in fact.)

I can't even imagine what effect it will have on art and religion and people figuring out their own beliefs and sexual/romantic drives and such. I keep wondering if the whole massive economy made out of "get a load of this idiot" articles will sooner or later cause all the weird, interesting folks (who ultimately generate pretty much all the interesting and worthwhile new things in the world) to die of scorn and public shaming. I wonder how much freedom anyone will have to have weird political or social beliefs, when it all goes into their permanent file, and maybe they end up at 40 in a job interview, explaining why they were involved with some weird political movement when they were 20.

I don't see any realistic hope of changing this. Surveillance gets cheaper every year, following Moore's law. Even if we somehow got control of various levels of government surveillance (not likely!), the private surveillance of ad networks and social media would still be there.

albatross@508: David Brin made an attempt to write about that kind of overly-open society, taking the best possible view (The Transparent Society, 1998). I think I can say that not everybody was convinced. (Non-fiction, I should add, since Brin is mostly known for SF.)

Still, the question of how things will play out is an interesting one, and people mostly abandoning old prejudices is certainly one of the more hopeful thoughts about it.

Combine that with computers that can parse the speech and recognize the faces, and we get another sea-change -- you can troll for useful hits anywhere, rather than having to know a time and place to examine closely (and slowly and manually). That's as much a data-transport problem as a software problem, and we're not ready to do either on on a large scale right now.

Will universal surveillance ever be proactive rather than reactive?

Why? Because there is good evidence that visible police patrolling in a place where crime is likely can have a deterrent effect. An example from the UK is the time-and-space combination when pubs and clubs are closing, which are known hot-spots for trouble. The passing of a visible police patrol has an effect for a while after they have left.

Those hot spots are currently found by examining historical statistics.

But I am biased. UK policing culture is different. We don't have routinely armed police officers on patrol. While some Police Services have experimented with having high-qualified Firearms Officers on patrol with closely-controlled weapons storage on their vehicle, havinf them, while un-armed, doing ordinary policing, arouses controversy.

We have a lot of surveillance in the UK, and it hasn't been predictive yet, but it doesn't feel so dreadful an idea.

Doing the same with American Police feels incredibly dangerous, and it isn't really about the guns they carry. Most countries in Europe have armed police, and of course they vary, but one large city in the USA can see more people shot and killed by their police in a year than the whole of Europe.

Anyway, here in Britain we have a right-wing government of a Political Party that, historically, has encouraged the Police in less than laudable behavior. Events such as Orgreave were complicated, but they do show how the usual model of UK policing (which worked in most places during that period) can be subverted.

I am not sure surveillance really works, but for a certain sort of authoritarian idiocy, it combines the "something must be done" attitude with a sense of power.

Sometimes the idiots, the other idiots, get shown on YouTube. I can see problems in surveillance handing you your fifteen minutes of fame as a conputer controlled, automatic, punishment.

Jenny Islander @498: I have such a set-up at home. As others have said, 88 keys, weighted, touch-sensitive.
Mine is a Yamaha P105 and I'm very happy with it. It has since been replaced by the P115; a new one will cost you some $600.

Too hot to sleep, am therefore online.

I have discovered a thing of beauty. In Lappkärrsberget, a Stockholm neighborhood that is dedicated to university student housing, there is a tradition. Every Tuesday at 10 p.m., you can stick your head out your window and howl your anguish to the heavens. I'm told that it gets more heartfelt as exam time approaches.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_rttgtyigc

Three a.m. and the horizon is already yellow.

Jo Cox, a sitting MP, was shot and killed this afternoon, not ten miles from where I am. I walked past the hospital where she was airlifted to on my way to work.

It's being reported that the attacker yelled "Britain first!" before shooting.

Britain First is a far-right nationalist group. It's also a slogan being thrown around by the campaign for Britain to leave the EU. Cox, like most Labour MPs, was vocally pro-Remain.

She was married and her children are still in primary school.

Fuck.

Beerexit and other ways to divide up Europe

This was the first murder of an MP in almost 26 years.

No-one has been charged yet—if that does happen, contempt of court laws mean those of us in the UK will have to stop talking about this—but in the meantime, the Southern Poverty Law Center has some suggestive evidence.

contempt of court laws mean those of us in the UK will have to stop talking about this

Huh?? How does that work?

Apropos of nothing except hamsters and cheering up, and in case this hasn't been shared around Ms. Teresa,

http://66.media.tumblr.com/bcdb29caf2cbc41a56195cfb51c58aa2/tumblr_o2od6zABK01s02vreo1_400.gif

It's a hamster skeleton steed!