The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by ctate:

Chicken pox vaccine is a curious one. It was developed in Japan in 1974, but didn't go into use there until 1988, and was not approved for use in the USA until 1995. I got chicken pox as a child in 1975 or 1976.

I was wondering why you didn't mention the later possibility of shingles in your writeup of why one would want to be vaccinated against chicken pox. It's bad.

The base incidence of shingles is roughly 5 per 1000 otherwise-healthy people per year. My brother had a typical episode a few years ago: no permanent damage, but a ring of rash around his torso (following a nerve line) accompanied by pain and hypersensitivity such that the weight of a bed sheet was agonizing.

1 in 5 shingles patients (!) develop some degree of neuralgia along the affected nerve line. That's some degree of permanent pain. More rarely there can also be impairment of nerve function. If the nerve line ran across the face, there can be some degree of facial-muscle paralysis. Sometimes the nerve line is a trunk for the eyes; blindness is a high-risk complication in such cases. Deafness is a risk in the parallel situation involving the aural nerve lines. Etc.

I wish they'd had varicella vaccine when I was a kid.

Though I've been dwelling on the west coast beers so far, I just remembered that I'm quite fond of a brewer in that other Portland, the one in Maine: Allagash, who make a variety of Belgian-style beers. I've had the White a number of times; it's yummy yummy. It's confirmed as a fine choice of beer to go with lobster rolls.

JK@85: Tsk tsk! America has oodles of great beer! It's just that (almost) none of it is made by the old-time standard gigantic conglomerates like Anheuser-Busch or Miller.

The real love is in the regional and local brew companies. Here in Northern California, for example, we're blessed with North Coast Brewing Company, one of the best in the country. Their "Old Rasputin" Russian Imperial Stout is just incredible. There's also the Anderson Valley Brewing Company, maker of the utterly delightful Boont Amber. Then there's Pyramid's Berkeley alehouse, Lagunitas, Rogue in Eugene, Oregon... and these are all producers big enough to ship at least regionally. There's also the glorious renaissance in brewpubs and local breweries that has occurred in the US since the 1980s. Remember when "microbrew" in the US meant either Sam Adams or Pete's Wicked Ale? How times do change!

If the big boys start making decent brew, then that's fine, but I have to say I'm not hurting for good alternatives.

If I may shamelessly self-reference here for a moment...

Chimay cheeses are excellent as well. I wrote up a minireview of the Grand Cru once upon a time, along with a few other cheeses; you're welcome to take a gander.

Also, which of Chimay's three beers showed up in your store?

(The other day I had lunch at a delightful Provençale restaurant here in Berkeley where they have several of the outstanding Belgian-style beers by Unibroue on hand. Blanche de Chambly is a fantastic summer beer....)

Roger @ 335:

That's Gur Pbyq Rdhngvbaf ol Gbz Tbqjva and oh my ghu that's brilliant.

Mary Dell @ 336:
Hard to squeeze that in without being entirely blatant about it. Hrm.

"A precocious alien child-warrior rises as a desert tribe's prophet, then holds the galaxy hostage out of his love for them!"

Well now.

Alien child, warrior, prophet... EMPEROR!

4. (community effort) Qentbafbat rgp

"Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum sonatur."

Born at the very end of 1969 (happy birthday to me, a few days ago!) -- my earliest political/current-events memory is the Carter vs Ford election in 1976. I knew there was a presidential election going on, and it was important enough for my schoolteacher to be taking a fake vote in class, but I didn't know anything at all about the politics involved. This seems to have been at a point when I was a bit older than many people were in their earliest political memories. Maybe I was just sheltered: I certainly had no interest in non-cartoon TV at that age, and my parents tended to watch the 11:00 news, after I'd gone to bed.

Oh! Here's one that pushes the date back a few months: I distinctly remember going to the bicentennial fireworks display in my home city. I was also aware enough both to know that it was the bicentennial (and what that meant!) and to be able to compare it in memory with previous July 4th fireworks. I was six and a half years old for this one.

Of course, the most fun in digging into one's forebears is finding entertaining names. Among mine, my favorites so far are "Hermanus Shook" and "Bassingbourn Throckmorton."

(Variations in spelling make this fun/tricky. "Hermanus" is possibly a variant spelling or degeneration of "Hieronymous," for example.)

Very belatedly... I see that I touched off quite a flurry of sort-of-nastiness with my gripe about the Nebulas. Yikes. That isn't what I was hoping for.

I suppose I plead dangerous levels of naivete: I never once thought that one had to be a current, paying member of SFWA to vote in the Nebulas. If I thought about it at all, I figured something vague like "anybody who's ever been a member" or "anybody who's demonstrably eligible" could vote. Silly me, in retrospect.

#229: I was initially responding to the notion, put forth in #141, that the nebulas are more interesting than the hugos and possibly (though this wasn't stated, just implied) better than the hugos.

Actually I just meant "more interesting," specifically to me. I find that I like Nebula-only winners better than I like Hugo-only winners; YMMV. It might just be that a lot of Hugos have gone to books I dislike, so that award doesn't really provide me much guidance.

Charlie and Patrick (#47-49): as an outsider (i.e. reader) I'm chagrined to hear such badmouthing of the Nebulas. This doesn't make me happy.

I've always considered the Nebulas a more interesting award than the Hugos. If other SF writers' opinions diverge from the pay-to-vote popularity contest that is the Hugos, is that actually a bad thing?

Hmm. There are also common everyday objects for which the nomenclature is widely varied and nonstandard.

For example, those elastic loops used to tie back hair? I've seen and heard any number of terms for them, none used ubiquitously. Hair elastics, hair frobs, scrunchies, ponytailers....

Also, those white ostensibly-temporary concrete barriers that show up on roadways, particularly during construction. I grew up calling those "Jersey walls," although here on the other coast nobody's ever heard that term. They best we can seem to manage here is "concrete barriers" -- a name both cumbersome and boring.

Full disclosure: I saw Draco Concordans (#16) when it hit closed beta release, and contributed a few notes.

That said -- I was blown away. I knew the novel was good, but without something like A. Plotkin's liner notes I never would have grasped just how good.

Wow.

Damn, damn, damn, damn.

TNH (14):

I'm afraid I'm going to have to disappoint your cynicism.

But that's a good thing! I am much encouraged.

Oh, I'm far more cynical. I think of The New York Times Book Review as being "that thing where they advertise the best-sellers list." And I think of the New York Times Best-Seller List as "that thing that publishers pay to get their books listed on."

I figure I'm probably being unfair about the best-seller list. Probably.

Does anyone attempt to describe books' retail sales, not just sales to distributors?

Teresa (#14), it's a bit off the mark to assert that ASL is not "phonetic." Superficially it's obvious -- there are no sounds! -- but grammatically it's a more complex situation. The groundbreaking work here was done in the late 1950s by William Stokoe. He argued persuasively first that ASL is neither pantomime nor a gestural analog of English, and furthermore ASL has in some way all of the classic grammatical features of spoken languages: "phonemes," morphemes, the whole shebang.

There are regional dialects and "accents" in ASL, too.

I'm excited to hear that there might be a solid written ASL representation now. When I was studying this stuff briefly around 1990, there were a number of competing schemes, none of which were very good. The usual problem was trying to invent a notation more like choreographic record than like written language: making the symbols on the page resemble the gesture. Linguistically this is silly: the letter 'F' in no way resembles (or needs to resemble) the corresponding sound!

SignWriting (Richard #11) looks to my eye a bit too choreographic, although it also seems basically syllabic; this feels like the right approach to me. It also occurs to me that trying to represent the spatial classifier mechanism might be a core issue demanding at least some choreographic annotation, so maybe SignWriting really will catch on. I hope so; writing is the only really effective way to pass around knowledge.

WONDERFUL! I studied sign language and Deaf culture a little in college... this absolutely will to transform that world. Oh my.

Here are a couple of quick book recommendations for people wanting to know more about the social implications of deafness, and about Deaf culture. The books are both fairly old at this point, but in a way that's relevant because they cover a point in time firmly before the internet came into play.

Seeing Voices is by Oliver Sacks, famous for his book Awakenings and the movie made from it. It's a pretty good outsider's overview.

Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture, by Carol Padden and Tom Humphries, is a great look at many aspects of Deaf culture, written from the inside. Stories, jokes, memories... intimate and powerful.

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