The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Brooks Moses:

Lindra @ 213: The relevant "book boxes" are also called "banker's boxes" in a lot of places. They're sold packed flat, and are designed to unfold and become sturdy without tape, so that they can be folded back flat for storage, and they have handles on the ends. The standard US size is 10" x 12" x 15", which is corresponds to a stack of regular paper file folders if filled one way, and a stack of "legal paper" (which is this weird US thing, normal width but extra long) if filled the other way.

When we were moving, I got a stack of 80 used ones from a local mover for $1 apiece. They tend to run about $2 apiece or so at Office Depot and the like -- and the ones they sell, even the cheap ones, are quite sufficiently sturdy. It's a good basic design, and everyone uses it.

Joann @ 216: The provenance of your boxes reminds me of the time I moved seven years ago, using a bunch of Sun server boxes I'd scavenged from Stanford. Some of my friends still remember that I put books in some of them -- even half full, and the rest lightweight clothes, was enough to be excessively memorable.

Phil Lee @ 29: Along the lines of The Big Idea, I was really enamoured with the concept of X-Machina, by Blood-and-Cardstock Games. It's sort of a combination of that and Rube Goldberg; rather than having a verb and a noun, you have somewhat improbable components to combine.

Sadly, though I bought a spiffy pre-release copy, I think I've only actually played it once, and the group wasn't really right for it. I rediscovered the box recently while unpacking, though, and I think that this must be rectified. Perhaps this weekend.

Terry: The version I played has the slight variation that Points of Order need not be violations; the thing that can need to be addressed can be the fact that a silly comment needs to be said at that time.

But, yeah, I can see that souring it. We lost an entire games group to a few people starting to play Bridge, once -- the foundation of the group had been Spades, which takes about half a brain and leaves the other half free for carrying on conversations on vast and wide-ranging subjects. Bridge, on the other hand, requires full concentration (especially for people learning it), and seemed to encourage the sort of seriousness that made the players unhappy about being distracted by conversation going on around them. And it turned out that for a lot of us, half the point was the conversation (and the fact that the games provided a matrix whereby being an introvert and just listening sometimes was perfectly okay).

Madeline: As a third alternative, Joe Decker (http://www.rockslidephoto.com) has done some things with getting his large digital photos mounted on aluminum sheet, which I remember looking quite stunning in person.

Ulrika @ 172: When my wife moved her stuff cross-country to join me after we got married, I used my dad's wood shop (not very far at all from where she was living) to make the difficult pieces for a pair of bookcases, and put them in the van with all her stuff. And then got pre-cut pieces at the local lumberyard to fill them out, and assembled them on the living room floor.

Mine were always intended to be sanded and stained and polyurethane-varnished, but it's been seven years and two additional moves and it still hasn't happened.

A large part of the problem is that ... well, I'd have to find some place to put the books for a week!

(And, of course, the problems of not having a place to do it -- at least we have a garage now, and in the summer it'll be a reasonable place to do this sort of work.)


G. Jules @ 175: Yes. It's that "And it looks exactly the same" that's the hardest part, for me. It just doesn't end.

Last time we were moving, it felt like it would never end, even though I was free to box all of it up because it was being moved rather than thrown out.... (But, then, we had a couple of weeks, with no time off work, to do it in, and it all had to go.)

Stefan @ 140: Doesn't Powell's pay extra for signed books, if the signature actually adds value to them?

(And, if it doesn't, what's the point of eBaying them?)

Teresa @ 82, in re: "In your own estimation, are you better than average at spotting the object or objects in your environment that can be used to address some emergency or sudden need?"

I think so; I think this comes of being a tinkerer and an engineer. (My canonical example is the time that I tromped into a Kwik-Mart in the middle of nowhere, eastern Colorado, with an attitude of "Somewhere in this store is the piece I need to replace the busted rubber bit on my radiator." Found it, too, as part of a thing that ironically happened to be a radiator-fluid tester.)

The big thing here, though, is that I suspect that I have a different value than many people for having the piece I want to repair something, as compared to the costs of keeping lots of potential things around.

This has gotten somewhat more difficult over the years. When I was 20, "I'll keep this because it might come in handy someday" was just theory. When I was 30, I'd had enough experiences of going to my box of random spare bolts and other similar cruft and finding just the right thing to repair something, that I had practical experience to back it up.

And the real problem isn't the thought of "this will be useful in 10 years", it's "this has a 5% chance of being useful in 10 years". The collection of a few hundred such things is absolutely going to be useful. But applying the "if you haven't used it in 10 years, throw it out" rule to each individual piece of it gets quite the wrong answer.

Paul @ 94: That sounds like an excellent idea. I'll note that my own counter-clutter tendencies were strongly informed by my own time in the campus wood shop. That shop was run with a strict rule of "It will be clean." Everything used was put away at the end of the day, every tool used was cleaned, and people were obligated to spend 5 minutes on a general cleanup task before leaving, as well. And it made a tremendous difference to how the work environment felt.

De-cluttering is at least a little easier when one knows, down deep, why it is that one wants to do it. It's harder when it's just, "I've been told it's better this way."

Tazistan Jen @5: It's a reference to Jesus Christ the Resurrected, I'm reasonably certain. Beyond that, in my experience, it was mostly used to refer to God as directly relevant in our lives today -- the "living" is a reminder that it's not just about what happened to the Israelites thousands of years ago, but He is here now, today.

As such, it's an appropriate loaded usage for his point, and one that will resonate with his audience, but it's not (in my opinion) one that's speaking with a forked tongue the way some such code-phrases are.

(Hah. I'd say, "That'll teach me to write posts before reading the rest of the thread," except I suspect it won't actually do that. Still, I didn't mean to add to a dogpile -- and it's certainly true that it's often misused in that sort of phrase; that's why I was entertained by its being a correct usage.)

Matt @54: Yes, but in this case, if I forward it to (on average) X friends, and they forward it to (on average) X friends, then it _is_ exponential in the true scientific sense. After N iterations, it's reached X^N people.

And that's why I considered it a good thing, rather than a bad thing -- he used it _correctly_.

Living in California, I actually did get someone caring what I thought -- but for the Illinois congressional seat left open by Dennis Hastert's resignation, not for anything to do with the presidential race.

Specifically, I got an email from a Bill Foster, who appears to be running on a platform of being a particle physicist, former businessman, and (as best I can tell from the email) entirely reasonable and sensible, and capable of hiring a campaign staff that can write intelligently to people who are assumed to be intelligent. Basically, he was asking for campaign contributions, and I suspect he got the email list either from the American Physical Society or something along those lines. (Probably not actually the APS, as I don't think they give out email lists for such, but I could be wrong.)

And, yes, it was spam asking for me to forward it to other people, but I can forgive a lot when it's phrased as "P.S. spreading the word by forwarding this email to others in the scientific and academic community will be exponentially helpful."

"It doesn't have any advantages over life-without-parole [as far as preventing crime]."

This is not quite entirely true. Prisoners do occasionally escape -- for instance, one of my brother-in-law's fellow deputies was shot by an escaped convict who had faked an injury and then overpowered and shot his guard when he was taken to the local hospital.

I certainly do not consider this sufficient reason to support the death penalty at all, but I think it's important to note the flaw in the argument.

(Meanwhile, the other circumstances of that event were such that they probably support other arguments against the death penalty. Even in a state with the death penalty, the fellow was only in for life-with-parole and nearly to a point of getting off for good behavior, as I understand it. And the death penalty did not act as a deterrent, obviously.)

Without prompting, the earliest thing I can think of that I remember is the Challenger disaster as well. I was 10 at the time.

I don't have a very good memory of my childhood in general, though, sadly.

Frozen turkey update: I got up, and changed the water, took a shower, went to change the water again, and observed that the turkey seemed to be entirely thawed except for a chunk of ice inside the cavity. Hooray! So I now have an entirely thawed turkey, waiting to go in the oven in an hour or two.

Tom @27: After a couple of years of doing a research conference that's always the Sunday through Wednesday before Thanksgiving, and then staying a couple of days later with my wife to enjoy a vacation together, I'll note that we've had pretty good luck with the hotel restaurants in reasonably good hotels. They're open because there are people travelling away from home on Thanksgiving. The restaurants are usually not that busy, though there are usually a few people there, and it seems that everyone on staff (at least the places we've been) is extra-pleasant that day.

Caroline @12: Thanks muchly for the recipe; that sounds even better than I was imagining!

Thanks, everyone, for the advice about thawing the turkey! I checked on it and it was, indeed, still completely rock solid. So I have placed it in a water bath, and placed that in the fridge (so I don't have to worry about checking on it overnight without checking on it; I'm figuring the increased heat transfer coefficient will at least help a good bit) and will take it out and start changing the water tomorrow morning early.

Also, while I seem to be realizing things that I should have put in the first comment rather than doing so many: Jon's description should probably be amended to specify "time in hours", not just "time".

Also, Google's quite happy to parse "natural log 20 times 1.65", if one wants to be lazy about the multiplication.

Caroline @7: A stuffed squash sounds like something I'd really like, and I don't have any recipes for such. Any chance you could post yours (or a loose description thereof)?

Dena @4: Well, there's always blue potatoes. So long as you don't do what I did with them once, which was apply my usual parsley-and-lemon-juice semi-mashed recipe to them. (Essentially: Cube potaties, cook until soft, sprinkle with lemon juice and parsley, and toss a bit.) It turns out that the blue in them is the sort of blue vegetable pigment that turns magenta in the presence of acid. The result was the sort of set of colors that is only appetizing to the adventurous.

Hmm. Does Jon have an algorithm for how long it takes a frozen turkey to thaw out in the fridge?

We put ours in the fridge Tuesday night, and I'm beginning to worry that the answer to that question in our case is, functionally, "longer than that".

I (half-)remember a complaint from a fellow who did quite a lot of work for the FAA on improving the Atlanta air-traffic-control procedures, so as to significantly increase the number of on-time arrivals going through the airport.

The airlines immediately responded by scheduling 20% (or some such) more flights through Atlanta, with the result that the delays were back where they were.

Despite all the finger-pointing at regional jets and the like, I suspect this is fundamentally not a problem that has a technological solution.

(Want to solve it? Find a way to make the airlines actually care if their flights are late. Right now, where's the incentive?)

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