Don't give up on the Tale of Genji. There is an enormous sense of distance--a struggle to understand who these people are, what they are doing, and why--but it is very much worth it. Yes, it is like some science fiction in that regard.
In China, the tradition of regarding novels as unworthy goes back at least to the 14th century, if not earlier--about the same time when Europeans were arguing about elevated Latin literature versus the trashy vernacular stuff. Shouldn't read that Boccaccio, definitely not the Jin Ping Mei--as a matter of fact, I've seen 20th-century English translations of both that rendered selected passages in Latin.
>Fanatici non sunt, lectitant
You are using third-person verbs in Latin, where you have first person in English. Also, the typical modes of expression in Latin are rather different from those in English. A Latin motto might be more along the lines of Non fanatici, sed lectores, with the verb left unexpressed.
For dealing with aging, Old Man's War.
For help dealing with computer problems, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
For gender identity issues, The Left Hand of Darkness.
For sibling relations, Brothers in Arms, Mirror Dance, etc.
For shopaholics, Barrayar.
If you do use the epipen, the next thing you do is get an ambulance ride to the hospital. The epipen is intended to keep you breathing until the ambulance gets there. Read the directions carefully now, before you're in a situation where you have to use them.
If we're using Latin, the appropriate word is "sartor", of which I believe the feminine would be "sartrix". Interestingly enough, Googling this I found a page from the online Bosworth-Toller with entries for Old English seámere (m., tailor) and seámestre (f., sempstress, with the note that "though the noun is feminine it seems not confined to females"). This may be the source for the OED entry, but it would seem to give a pedigree for seamer as well.
Negative temperatures are possible under some special circumstances--but absolute zero is still the lowest possible temperature.
Temperature on the Kelvin scale is a unit of energy, and can be translated into energy units by multiplying by a constant factor (Boltzmann's constant). However, the coefficient that actually appears in the partition function, which determines how a particular temperature affects the states of a system, is the negative reciprocal of the temperature, -1/T.
Absolute zero on the Kelvin scale corresponds to negative infinity when expressed in terms of -1/T. This is the lower bound for temperature states. Positive infinity on the Kelvin scale corresponds to 0 when expressed in terms of -1/T, and for most ordinary systems this is the upper bound for temperature states.
For certain finite systems, however, -1/T can be raised above 0, leading to states with negative temperatures; these lie above all positive-temperature states, because -1/T is greater. The upper bound here is where the temperature approaches 0 from below, and -1/T tends toward positive infinity.
So there can sometimes be negative temperatures, but they are always hotter than positive ones. Isn't physics fun?
Tim @ 25: Yeah, I had a car like that once. The speedometer never worked right, but you could always tell if you were going too fast.
KeithS @ 868: No sooner do I write this, than a more traditional one comes in from "Dr.Tom".
A funny thing happened yesterday: I got a 419 spam email that came remarkably close to being written in intelligible, grammatical English. If the spammers learn to write, what will we do?
It's not quite that bad--remember the time his wife wrote an open letter to La Repubblica? It's not like Italians don't know that Berlusconi is a buffoon. I think many of them are just worn down. I used to think that Americans were cynical about politics--until I started talking to Italians about it.
It's amazing Berlusconi can still make a noise with all of the feet he has stuffed in his mouth.
Those floor patterns look like they could be the work of the Cosmati, who found a new use for all the fragments of ancient marble that were lying around in Rome.
A reminder, also, that St. Peter's, for all its grandeur, is one of the newer churches of Rome, and is not the cathedral of the city.
One place where the layer cake is especially evident is the basilica of San Clemente. Here's a description from their web site, but the neat thing is that you can go down and see all of these levels:
"In 1857 Fr Joseph Mullooly, O.P., the then Prior of San Clemente, began excavations under the present basilica, uncovering not only the original, fourth-century basilica directly underneath, but also at an even lower level, the remains of a first-century building.
At this third level there are two separate buildings. One is a brick building in the courtyard of which there is a Mithraic temple of the end of the 2nd century. The other is a more magnificent, rectangular structure, constructed around a courtyard.
In the 4th century, the ground-floor rooms of this structure and the courtyard were filled in to the level of the first storey to provide the foundations for a church in memory of Pope Clement. The courtyard of this new level became the nave of the church, while the rooms that once overlooked the old courtyard on either side were converted into the side aisles.
The completed basilica survived until about 1100 AD when it was found that the building was unsafe and should be abandoned. The fourth-century basilica was then filled in with rubble to the top of its pillars and on this foundation a replica of the old basilica was erected."
I scored over 300, but I can't say that I liked the quiz. It seems to consist primarily of mouthing various conservative and liberal slogans to see who salutes. Not what I would call progress.
170 puts me in mind of the Japanese restaurant that served deep-fried moray eel morsels. The patrons were known to exclaim, "O tempura! O morays!"
Deciding to go to house parties anyway, my senior year.
People named Cleon should be grateful that Aristophanes is no longer read much in school.
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