What to expect in your first pregnancy: Sean Stewart's Mockingbird
Is the fluidity of modern gender roles bewildering and depressing you? Trouble on Triton will help you cope with these issues.
Erik @ 166: Amusingly, it is a Windows95 app that "might work under NT". It works fine under Win7, although I'm not able to check if the MIDI output is functional.
Microsoft gets a bad reputation but I wonder if there are any Mac or Linux binaries from 1997 that will run unmodified on a current version of those OSes.
Xopher@130 all we really need is for that applet to have a finite automaton rule associated with it. Or to be able to specify which rule. Turing-complete music!
As I recall, in Some Buried Caesar Wolfe and Archie both enjoy an excellent rendition of chicken and dumplings at the fair. I agree with Terry that for Wolfe it's a question of how much extra effort it takes to get that class of food, rather than an inherent snobbish refusal to eat it at all.
As for Japanese culture, at least nowadays the way it was explained to me (in college Japanese class -- take it for what it's worth) was that eating while walking is considered rude.
One way to handle a pile of e-mail which I find to be useful is to sort by message size. The very small and very large messages are almost always easy to handle: the small ones tend to be one-liners that can be handled with one line of response, and the large ones often have useless attachments and can be deleted. (But don't delete your authors' manuscripts!)
The opening post of this thread makes me want to strongly recommend Paul Ford's Love Lost to the Ylem to all of you. So, I do. It's short, quantum, and deals with the vagaries of the human heart.
In regards to #3, I really wish someone with more understanding of standard police procedure would flesh that statement out for me because I'd love to be able to use it in an argument and back it up.
(I think that torture is always immoral. But I've gradually come to realize that there are many wrong-headedly "pragmatic" folks who aren't swayed by that none-too-radical position, but may be persuadable with pragmatic arguments, so it kind of behooves me to have a quiver full of them.)
Moral human beings do not do it to one another, and they do not advocate for it to be done to others.
Not even in the case of "well, let them prove it's not torture!" I wasn't serious. Just in case that wasn't clear ...
Wouldn't an operational definition of torture satisfy all the pragmatists out there? Torture consists of techniques which, when applied over a relatively short duration, will induce an average innocent person to confess to a serious crime in order to get them to stop.
Then heck, we can test these things out by taking things which people are maintaining not to be torture and subjecting those people to a choice: admit that it's torture or endure a relatively long duration of the technique.
For instance, if you claim that waterboarding is not torture, then in order to prove it you will have to submit to a eight hours of waterboarding a day for a week. If you can make it through, we concede it's not torture. But you can make it stop immediately by conceding it to be torture.
Frankly, this is a stupid idea. Torture is not a pragmatic issue -- it's not wrong because it doesn't work. It's not a political issue -- wrong unless applied to your enemies. It's not an issue of "closure" -- wrong unless done in retribution for a heinous crime.
It's wrong because it's wrong. Moral human beings do not do it to one another, and they do not advocate for it to be done to others.
I didn't watch Season 2, because Season 1 was as satisfying a story as one ever finds in a one-season American television series.
The most important point to me is that at the end of Season 1, all the backstory was used up. I've seen many other creative works use up all their backstory, and the result of continuing to flog them into another couple seasons or another couple books has always been painful to watch. I figured it would be best to not give Veronica Mars a chance to disappoint me.
Nobody has mentioned Numerical Recipes in [C|Fortran]. These are okay texts if you want to get a basic (very basic) overview of the theory behind some common numerical methods. Do not type in the code and compile it into your important simulation code, though, or you will be very, very sad.
Not to mention the fact that are very smart people who have written very fast and robust libraries for practically everything in the books. Use those!
(Numerical Recipes in C does some insane things. For instance, they rebase all their pointers by subtracting 1, so they can have 1-indexed arrays like Fortran. Makes my eyes bleed.)
While I'm on the topic of math/science books that are full of mistakes, let me give props to Barnsley and Hurd for releasing Fractal Image Compression -- a book so riddled with errors I suspect that they accidentally sent the publisher LaTeX files of an un-proofread draft by mistake. They've got proofs that don't prove and typos by the score, including a limit proof that started, memorably, with "Let epsilon < 0 be fixed ..."
If you're looking for decadent pancakes, try these; original recipe from The Vegetarian Epicure
Cottage cheese pancakes
2 cups small-curd cottage cheese
2/3 cup flour
2 tbsp sugar
1 tsp salt
dash cinnamon
6 eggs, separated
oil for frying
Beat the egg whites until they can hold soft peaks, but are not dry. Mix the yolks, cheese, flour, sugar, salt, and cinnamon together until just combined. Fold the egg whites into the rest of the batter.
Oil a skillet and heat to medium heat. Drop large spoonfuls of the batter into the skillet and fry on both sides until golden brown and puffed up. This batter is very delicate, even when set, so make sure that your individual pancakes are no bigger than your spatula so they don't fall apart when you try to flip them. Serve immediately with sour cream and maple syrup, or other condiments (e.g. honey or fruit preserves).
The video I saw (from the Fox News(!) affiliate -- both the CBS and ABC affiliates have much less useful coverage) made it clear that both north and south piers are still standing, so whatever happened to the bridge happened in the span, not in the supports.
My family is all okay; my aunt had crossed the bridge only a minute before it collapsed, but is uninjured. Not that you know any of them :-)
Lois McMaster Bujold is still writing Vorkosigan books and I'm still waiting eagerly for them, although personally I'm also glad she took a longish break after the last one (and did other, wonderful things), because it seemed like she was getting tired of the characters.
Someone once suggested that the sequel to Stars in My Pockets was The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals, which really was about the beauty and misery of bodies and cities.
... I had one other example in mind when I started writing this comment, and now it has slipped my mind.
"Our community belongs to us and whether it is mean or majestic; whether arrayed in glory or covered in shame, we cannot but share its character and destiny."
-- Frederick Douglass
"Do you ever feel like there's a secret game being played in America, and nobody will tell you the rules?"
-- Get your war on!
"It always feels so good to see Henry Kissinger standing beside a U.S. President. It's kind of like watching Voltron gear up to physically assault the Statue of Liberty."
-- Get your war on!
James Beard's Cream Biscuits are some of the best biscuits I've ever made in my life. Let me just list the ingredients:
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
2 teaspoons sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 to 1 1/2 cups heavy cream
1 stick unsalted butter, melted and cooled
Makes 12 biscuits. When I got them out of the oven I ate one, then another, then thought "man, I could eat six of these and my housemates would still get 2 apiece". Then I remembered that conservation of mass implies that the 1.5 c heavy cream and 1 stick butter I put in the biscuits will remain in the biscuits when they come out of the oven (incidentally -- or not -- contributing to their deliciousness), and that I really didn't need to eat 3/4 c cream and a half stick of butter for breakfast.
We will summon the great Gozer
We can model her in Poser
'til the Laundry blows our server
up. That's good enough for me!
I'm not going to defend myself against the charge of "not getting the joke" about that old time religion -- not when there are people writing FSM verses, at least -- because my Jesus verse would never get sung at a revival meeting, and that's good enough for me.
But I will offer this one, which is an older-time religion:
Buddha vanquished demon Mara,
And released me from samsara
I don't worry 'bout tomorrow
Right now's good enough for me.
My verse on Sikhism, however, will be withheld, as Nanak Dev was born in the late 15th century and thus does not qualify.
Counting and systems of units: In any reasonable system of units, c = 1.
Sets and numbers and the empty set: You don't even have to have sets to have mathematics -- topos theory allows you to build number systems on top of other structures. Anyway, if you have nothing at all, you don't have an empty set, until you have somebody to name it "the empty set".
Length of pitches: Cricket pitches may be one chain long, but the size of a football pitch is not standardized. They may be 50-100 yards wide, and 100-130 yards long, subject to the limitation that they must be longer than they are wide. American football players are at a distinct disadvantage in Europe, as their pitches are usually the size of an American Football field; some European pitches have more than twice that area. Makes for a lot of running...
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|---|---|
| 2009 | 7 |
| 2008 | 1 |
| 2007 | 13 |
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