The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Roy G. Ovrebo:

Terry Karney @ #39: 40 lbs of cat litter (per regulation) to deal with the worse single spill we were likely to have.

We occasionally have vehicles blow a hydraulic hose at work. On one memorable occasion, the foreman came with a couple of 20 kg (I think) sacks of "Absol" (an absorbent that's indistinguishable from kitty litter). Sacks emptied onto spill, he disappeared, then came back on a forklift with a pallet of said absorbent.

Abi @ #47: Also, in my head everybody I haven't met has my peculiar mid-Atlantic accent.

Neil Willcox @ #49: In my head, most of you have my English accent* right up to the moment when someone uses an Americanism**, at which point they get a peculiar mid-American accent.

While in my head, anybody I haven't actually heard hasn't got an accent - their written word stays written. This could be because English is a foreign language and my accent is neither here nor there. It could also be because written Norwegian doesn't match up well to the spoken dialects, so you don't get used to making assumptions when you read.

Jim MacDonald @ 31: You'll be happy to know that the wingnuts used Berlusconi as proof that George Bush was the Best President Ever, since the Europeans were voting in people like Bush as their heads of state.

I remember when Bush got electedbecame president, Christian conservatives in Norway hailed it as a new dawn for Christianity and social conservatism. Let me just say that it didn't go as they wanted.

P J Evans @ #10: Teresa, should I know what 'single-malt olive oil' is?

A suspiciously brownish-looking olive oil with a peaty smell, perhaps.

Welcome home!

Stefan Jones @ 6: corporations and their CEOs are fundamentally honest unless tempted into irrational behavior by regulations

<libertarian>Don't forget that the regulations are made by politicians. They're evil because they'll do anything to get elected. You need to get rid of the politicians!</libertarian>

The corollary is that the people who have ambition to become political leaders would, if they were business leaders instead and only accountable to the shareholders, be benevolent. Thus, it's the accountability to the voters that causes them to be evil.

Sheesh, what's next? A goatse ad?

I feel sort of apologetic about using Adblock myself, because there's lots of site owners that probably need the money - but I wouldn't be clicking on the ads anyway...

Ginger @ 58: 1985 or 1986 outbreak of A(Taiwan)-68 (if memory serves me correctly); in that epidemic, anyone old enough to have been sick in 1968 was semi-protected against that virus in 1985-6.

Tied into:

B. Durbin @ 67: The 1918-1919 flu is thought to have been so deadly to healthy young people (instead of the more usual weak or elderly) because it induced a particular over-reaction of the immune system that inflamed the lungs. Nasty stuff.

I've also seen a theory that the reason older people survived the Spanish flu was that they'd already survived a related strain in the 1860s or 70s...


Myself, I had a cold last week. Bad enough that I regretted going to work, coughing and sneezing and a touch of fever on the first day. As soon as I start running a fever, I get aches and pains everywhere - the clincher for me is when moving my eyes gets painful. Not this time, though.

Haven't had the flu for years and years. (Knock on wood)

Ok, what's the "2.5" refer to? GM, Ford, half of Chrysler[1]?

[1] Chrysler did get swallowed bymerge with Daimler-Benz - though Daimler later sold out most of it.

Ok, what's the "2.5" refer to? GM, Ford, half of Chrysler[1]?

[1] Chrysler did get swallowed bymerge with Daimler-Benz - though Daimler later sold out most of it.

Debra Doyle @ 187: [on the World Last Name Finder]The high concentrations of Doyles in Ireland, England, Canada, the USA, and Australia didn't surprise me.

But the two clumps of moderate concentration in Argentina and India -- where the heck did those come from?

India - no doubt from the days of the Empire.
Argentina - Maybe from the Welsh immigrants

Interesting site, that. Searching my own last name, it's correctly shown with hotspots in the Norwegian west country and central mountains. Øvrebø is a pretty common placename wherever a homestead is higher in the terrain. In my case it's easy though - I still live there.

Chris @ 58: McCain was clearly aiming at the Republican base

Doctor Science @ 59: But why should he do that? The prize for the debates is the independent/undecided/lo-info vote, not the base.

Only if you're sure that the base is already with you. And the Republicans seem to be unaware that they might need votes outside the base anyway.

Charlie Stross @ 41: Consequently they're micro-orchestrated in advance, right down to the facial tics if the trainers can get them under voluntary control. And so it probably shouldn't come as a surprise to see that they're about as spontaneous as a Politburo 5 year plan announcement during the late 1940s.

Yeah, I know they've got it down to an art. It's only about the conservative party and the ultra-ultra-conservative party trying to attract the last few voters they can without offending any of the voters they've already got. But I was still hoping for McCain attacking Obama in a fit of rage or something, not a non-happening that made them both look sedated. Using two separate phone interviews and some clever editing, you might produce a more exciting debate than this.

There's always the Biden/Palin debate though, unless she suddenly gets ill and can't participate. Let's hope he doesn't make her cry.

Sean P. @ 8:

I was hoping he'd say something along the lines of "Unlike Senator McCain, who intends to lean on his greater foreign policy experience, I intend to build a team of capable people and lean on them."

Wasn't it only a few years ago that a US president said that?


I had the debate in the background. My impression as a foreigner: With McCain's 250 years of foreign policy experience and having, apparently, travelled the world, he of course had the upper hand going into the foreign policy debate. Obama on the other hand had the upper hand going into the inevitable economy debate. I noticed McCain talking about (and never to) "Senator Obama", while Obama talked to (and about) "John".

I had been hoping for a bare-knuckle fight. McCain got in a few jabs about Obama's not having seen the world, Obama got in a great jab about McCain's not wanting to meet the prime minister of Spain, but other than that they were both insufferably dull, like a pair of clockwork talking-points machines. Neither of them won, but maybe Obama didn't lose.

Let me also raise a toast to this holiday.

My cousin is currently staying with my parents - her aunt and uncle. Her biological mother is dead and she's not on speaking terms with her father and stepmother. (Step- being a key prefix in that relationship, I'm not blaming my cousin.) A few days ago her boyfriend threw her out of the house with their toddler daughter. She doesn't have money, not having got a job yet after having the kid. She had nowhere else to go.

So yeah, my parents rock. A lot of others don't.

Jörg Raddatz @ 18: [On "kindly"] As a non-native speaker I would have taken it at face value and read it as "please" or even "it would be kind if you ...". I might definitely have used it that way. Ah, the pitfalls of language.

Yes, that one might have tripped up me too. There was an earlier thread here that taught me a bit about inadvertent racism.

"gefälligst". Originally it meant some close to "if you would like" - a "Gefälligkeit" is still a favor or a courtesy. But today there is no other possible meaning than "don`t even think of not doing this or hesitating".

Sounds like "vennligst" in the Scandinavian languages. Literally "friendliest" or perhaps "kindliest", but there's nothing friendly about it. The word is only ever used for conveying orders, usually in sign form and implying menace and dread. "Vennligst do not spit on the floor".

Abi posted: 112 is the Europe-wide emergency telephone number

And, if anybody isn't aware of it - 112 (and 911 actually) can be keyed in on any mobile phone without opening the keypad lock. And you can call it even if you can't connect to "your" network - and even if you don't have a SIM card in at all. (I presume the phone will have to search up a network though).

This means that if you really need to you can borrow a phone, any phone, even though you don't know the user interface for that particular type, punch in 112, and reach emergency services.

(Of course, this also means your phone may call 112 by being jostled in your pocket, but that's just a minor downside.)

Another reason your work software is old and quirky: the company won't upgrade till the latest version is proven not to be a piece of shit. Vista is a very good example of something that shouldn't be adopted early.

Scott H. @ #32: I'm actually more worried about the public policy implications of natural language processing. Historically the degree to which privacy can be invaded has always been implicitly constrainted by technical limitations. You always had to have a human listening in on the other end of the bug. I don't think that's a safe bet anymore.

These days it's relatively convenient to turn spoken words into ASCII. Warrantless wiretapping doesn't appear to be going away anytime soon. I personally think that natural language comprehension--some degree thereof, anyway--really is inevitable, probably sooner rather than later. What happens when it's technically possible to mechanically monitor every conversation everywhere always?

How far has natural language processing got by now anyway? I know you can get a computer to transcribe your carefully enunciated language of choice, but how does it handle "real speech" with accents and foreign languages?

Susan @404 on MZB's Thendara House:

the HR computers (and personnel) in the Amazing Far Future Great Terran Empire could not handle the idea of a woman having a different last name than her husband. I am no great defender of the Evil computers wreak upon people with nonstandard surnames, but this was a solvable problem at the time the damned book was published (1983) and made the book feel dated from the get-go.

I guess MZB had never heard of e.g. Iceland - just one of the places where last names don't Work That Way.

Matt McIrvin @112: I've heard that people trying to learn the language of the country they've moved to often use closed captions for the deaf when watching TV, for the same purpose.

I like to have English subtitles when watching English-language stuff on DVD - It means I don't have to catch every single syllable of dialogue, but I also don't have to read a lame translation.



Terry Karney @116:

You might enjoy this bit of trivia: Das Boot is actually dubbed in the original language. According to the commentary track on the 3 1/2 hour director's cut DVD, there was too much noise on the set for sound to get recorded cleanly, so they redid the dialogue afterwards. As they pointed out, Germans are good at overdubs...

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