Re Brain's Faggots - they'd doubtless go nicely with a pint of Brains' legendary Skull Attack...
Kathryn@662: The man behind that source of all things geek, XKCD, has come up with a one-handed keyboard layout that works by reflecting the right-hand side of the keyboard onto the left when you press Caps Lock. It's for Linux, but there are Mac and Windows equivalents mentioned in the comments thread.
Xopher@95: no typo. If you can track down some more of Blackadder Goes Forth as mentioned upthread, all will be explained.
cap@70 (and anyone else for that matter): I'd strongly recommend reading The War the Infantry Knew. It's a collection of officers' accounts of WWI - but the kind of officers who led their men over the top blowing a whistle and waving a revolver, not the kind who sat in a villa three miles behind the lines making 1:1 scale models of that day's territorial gains.
It captures the chaos and confusion of a war fought before widespread motorised transport or reliable long-distance communications (marching three miles one way then right back the way you've just come; mislaying the baggage train and field kitchens; narrowly snatching defeat from the jaws of victory because the message for the reserves to advance never got through) as well as the terror and quiet heroism of it all.
Terry Karney@142 - the low end of the Lancet study was around 390,000 (warning: PDF), and the top end was around 950,000. Given that the study's over a year old, various people have extrapolated the median death toll to be about a million now, but I don't think the original research team have officially endorsed this.
Bush's 30,000 figure may have come from Iraq Body Count (which counts only violent deaths that can be checked against media reports and official records), but if so it was already well out of date by the time he was bandying it around.
In a similar vein, y'all have seen Modern Mechanix, right? No? Well, enjoy. The six-foot cigarette holder was a particular gem for this hopeless nicotine addict.
Ajay@292: "Middlesborough" is in fact spelt "Middlesbrough" - yet another word that the Guardian in particular seems to struggle with, but at least the pronunciation makes sense. Another fun one is Gillingham, which is pronounced Jillingham if you're talking about the one in Kent or with a hard G if you mean the one in Dorset.
Heh. Only just noticed that Gandhi was already on the list of spelling references here. Our gracious hosts, then, will probably be appalled by this.
Debcha@158: While we're on the subject, the subtleties of Hindi consonants are probably to blame for a personal pet spelling peeve, Gandhi/Ghandi. To the untrained westerner, there's no difference, and I guess putting the H after the G feels intuitively right (a charitable circumlocution for "wrong")...
Faren Miller @101: evidently your teachers didn't consider Shakespeare sufficiently respectable. "We are such stuff/As dreams are made on..."
Re: Arabic names, and Muammar Gadafy/Gadaffi/Qadafi/Khadafy/ohwhatthehell in particular - to quote the Guardian's style guide:
"Though Arabic has only three vowels - a, i and u - it has several consonants which have no equivalent in the Roman alphabet. For instance, there are two kinds of s, d and t. There are also two kinds of glottal sound. This means there are at least 32 ways of writing the Libyan leader Muammar Gadafy's name in English, and a reasonable argument can be made for adopting almost any of them." Simple enough?
Re: suggested reading for children - I have no idea if he's still in print, or whether his books made it across the Atlantic, but Nicholas Fisk's worth checking out. Cracking Good SF Reads which I devoured with great glee when I was a young'un.
Bruce Cohen@65: Your best bet from getting anything usable out of the thrice-cursed Microsoft Word is probably to try PrimoPDF or anything similar that'll let you print a file as a PDF, then use a graphics program to rasterize that back into a bitmap image. At this point I would mention Photoshop if you hadn't warned not to, but I think The GIMP, which is freeware, has a plugin to convert PDFs.
Brooks Moses@99 - as it happens, I was reading our host's musings on linotype machines just the other day. I got to the bit about them squirting hot lead everywhere and suddenly felt very grateful to the inventors of Quark XPress and RIP processors.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2008 | 3 |
| 2007 | 12 |
| 2006 | 1 |
Total: 16 comments. View all these comments on a single page.
The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by James E:
Show all comments by James E.