The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Andrew Kanaber:

On the other hand, Obama had already made a major contribution to world peace by preventing John McCain from becoming POTUS.

Jaws@47: ... reliance on unclassified information on "Ajax" that ultimately traces back to three sources, one of which is just as reliable (on the opposite wing) as was HUAC under McCarthy
Huh? Is that a jab at James Risen?
I think most of the people who talk about Ajax are referring back to the declassified CIA Clandestine Service history by Donald Wilber. Presumably you're not calling him anti-American, and a CIA history an anti-CIA fabrication?

So-called Andrew

The 118 xxx directory enquiries thing was a dumb idea. Ofcom (UK telecoms regulator) apparently thought they were unleashing the magic of the free market on a stodgy old BT directory enquiries monopoly, but it's a basic service. I don't think any possible improvement in utility from better service or value could have outweighted the loss in utility from the number doubling in length.

Market competition doesn't work very well here because people don't want to remember and have opinions about multiple directory enquiry services. After all, it's the number to call when you've forgotten someone's number.

The various players spent a fortune on marketing and total directory enquiries usage actually went down. End result, the numbers are six digits instead of three, usage is down and the BT monopoly turned into a BT/The Number duopoly.

I liked this satirical reaction.

Sorry for the rant.

Thanks, there's some good stuff here I'd missed.

Also, the Cloverfield link is missing a trailing 'l' and the Abi 'honor of your assistance' link is missing a starting quote so firefox thinks the end quote is part of the URL.

That gushing NYT obit reminds me of Not The Nine O'Clock News' take on the press coverage of Oswald Mosley's death in 1980. So it could be worse, of course.

From Avram's holiday story and Debbie's comment at #46 it seems we can precisely gauge the paranoia of Amtrak security: worse than Yugoslavia but not quite as bad as the Soviet Union.

The documentary about Bush and Iraq is called What Barry Says and is the original. The Google one came later from a different person and is heavily influenced by What Barry Says but much less good.

I don't want to seem too vinegary here, I just wanted to correct any potential misunderstanding of these as episodes in some swoopy red and black paranoid infosthetics.com infomercial series.

Clifton, thanks. I had forgotten about comm. But now I think of it I could have done

grep '..' /usr/share/dict/words|rot13|sort - /usr/share/dict/words|uniq -d

The IOCCC entry Spike at #17 mentioned is at:

http://www.ioccc.org/1989/westley.c
with partial explanation at
http://www.ioccc.org/1989/westley.hint

I see your ruby script and raise you a hideously inefficient shell pipeline:

rot13 </usr/share/dict/words |tr A-Z\' a-z|xargs -i egrep ^{}$ /usr/share/dict/words;

with, of course, alias rot13="tr A-Za-z N-ZA-Mn-za-m"

When I tried this the best I could come up with was "What if one errs" = "Jung vs bar reef". Various attempts at irking an onyx ant or putting Carl Jung up against abba envy lead me nowhere.

Basically I don't think there are enough pairs of real words. If you give up on that and try to make nonsense words that sound pronounceably silly you can have some fun with names and insults.

I hadn't seen Richard Robinson's "Onebarff Gungpure" at #10 but it's great. Now I'm at it, Bibi Netanyahu is Ovov Argnalnuh which is ok.

rot13 is good for sounding rude
cunt=phag
shag=funt
frking=sexvat
The laxative fybogel=slobtry

I think you could produce something that's readable as an English sentence both ways if you relax the conditions to allow phonetic misspellings and the like, but I never did that because writing the smart word searcher sounded like work.

This is of course the resolution to Firefox bug #347226.

[mild Torchwood spoiler warning]

Eleanor @23, yeah I understood the hand when Captain Jack showed he cared more about it than pursuing the monster-of-the-week. I saved reading the inevitably spoilerful Radio Times article until after I'd seen the episodes. That said, I think RTD's minions showed a new subtlety in the info-dump




[severe Torchwood spoiler warning]

with a nice bit of misdirection in having biographical data on all the members of Torchwood and implying how each of them will develop.

The good wikipedia article Jakob mentioned is here

Steve Clemons has put up a full and much better transcript at
http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/Wilkerson%20Speech%20--%20WEB.htm

coln: Are two bags of hammers dumber than one bag of hammers? The proposition seems logically questionable.

Presumably dumbness is an intrinsic rather than an extrinsic quantity? If so, two bags of hammers are just as dumb as one bag (providing they're all the same type of hammer).

On the other hand, if we're also including the dumbness of the bags and bags are dumber than hammers then two bags of hammers are dumber than one bag.

Hope this helps.

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