Nathaniel at #3: Thanks! If only I'd heard about the archive before I built one for myself using cut and paste. ;)
#5: Conceded.
Except that something in my fingers balks when I try to type "Othar Tryggvassen, Gentleman Adventurer's Twitter". That phrase just does not read right. Whatever it describes, it isn't what I'm trying to describe.
No Girl Genius plug would be complete without a mention of Othar Tryggvassen's Twitter:
http://twitter.com/Othar
The ultimate serial drama: Every episode is 140 characters or less. Is anybody else doing this? It seemed like such an obvious idea as soon as I saw it.
Of course, the medium has drawbacks. Twitter drops the occasional old message. And it offers a really lousy interface for going back to the beginning of an account's tweets and reading them in chronological order.
Nix @74: It is really cool.
One question, though. When you say:
It doesn't need to be a perfect match, because what the B cell does then is turn on its hypermutation and replicate *again*, hunting for a perfect match. Soon enough, it finds it, and all the failed copies die.
How does that work? How do the failed copies know that it is time to die?
Obviously "we don't know" is a perfectly valid answer. (There are many impressive things about the immune system, but one of the most impressive is the sheer amount of work required to formulate and confirm each sentence of your explanation.)
Rikibeth @59 asks: Are we actually any better equipped to handle it now than we were in 1918?
We know what is going on to a much higher degree of precision. Here's a quote from a paper on the CDC's web site:
In 1918, the cause of human influenza and its links to avian and swine influenza were unknown. Despite clinical and epidemiologic similarities to influenza pandemics of 1889, 1847, and even earlier, many questioned whether such an explosively fatal disease could be influenza at all. That question did not begin to be resolved until the 1930s, when closely related influenza viruses (now known to be H1N1 viruses) were isolated, first from pigs and shortly thereafter from humans.
And we have the Internet and other modern communications tools. These are not trivial advances. As a commenter on TPM just pointed out, we're less than a month since the first report of this flu in central Mexico and we've got half the world obsessively washing their hands. Our warning and tracking systems are a lot better than the ones they had in 1918.
Jim @37:
This is not the slushpile. This is a heavily filtered slushpile.
Sure, but filtered for what? One assumes that the producers of the show are aware of Simon Cowell's trademark talent: inspiring shadenfreude as he mercilessly dissects the artistic efforts of pretentious people. So, presumably, they send up a lot of pretentious people, as well as those who appear to be pretentious but in fact secretly aren't.
I was vaccinated against most of these as a kid, but I got chicken pox from a cousin when I was 28. Let me assure you: You want to be vaccinated against the chicken pox.
At least that experience hasn't led me to get shingles. Yet.
And now I find that I can't remember when my last tetanus vaccine was, so I have to try and dig up the names of my last few doctors so that I can pull the records. Curse my bad notetaking!
Elliott @ 21: I would be remiss if I didn't link to my friends and acquaintances at the Recently Traditional Fictional Morris, who have been doing the AntiMorris every October 31 for eight years running. They've got links to a few other groups.
There are, indeed, a lot of Morris teams in Massachusetts. Obviously nobody from the BBC thought to look into the New England Folk Festival.
Chris at #18: I don't think that having a remote sniffer steal your Google cookie and use it to masquerade as you counts as "CSRF". The term "CSRF" usually refers to a piece of Javascript running on *your own computer* that submits illicit transactions to (e.g.) Google, and gets away with it because your computer is currently logged on to Google in your name and has a cookie to prove it. I don't believe SSL helps prevent that; there are other countermeasures.
Michael at #23: The Weekly World News used to periodically run an article entitled Scientists Plan to Blow Up the Moon. I think they actually quoted the late Alexander Abian, who I will always remember fondly as the first crackpot I ever identified on the Internet, back in the days when the Internet consisted of nothing but email and sci.physics.
But the Weekly World News apparently just went broke. So maybe the lunar extortion market isn't as lucrative as one might think.
(OMG, the "Alexander Abian" Wikipedia entry provides Wall Street Journal citations (!) for Abian's moon-destruction theory. I guess there's a little Weekly World News in every newspaper.)
Weirdly, my early memories of famous events are all about sports. I vaguely remember seeing Bruce Jenner on cereal boxes... I was five in 1976. Though I didn't know who they were at the time, I distinctly remember watching TV when "Minnesota Fats" played pool against the legendary Willie Mosconi in 1978 (and was crushed, of course). This may explain my latent desire to own a pool table.
I remember Reagan getting elected, and a bunch of brouhaha about hostages, but I wasn't really paying attention. I guess I remember seeing footage when Reagan was shot.
The Challenger disaster is crystal clear.
Cory Doctorow once suggested that the Star Wars prequels are much more entertaining if you switch on the Italian dialogue track and pretend they are operas.
In the spirit of that idea... it looks like, at the very minimum, we should be able to buy the Watchmen DVD, capture a series of still frames, add balloons with Alan Moore's original dialogue, and pretend it's a really excellent photocomic version of the original.
I'm cautiously optimistic... but, then, I haven't dared to watch the Hollywood versions of any other Alan Moore comic. My understanding is that I haven't missed much.
This is the only kind of pumpkin pie my family ate when I was young. My late grandmother used to make it.
The coconut is new to me, though.
Thanks for the recipe!
Steve @ 77: Do you use the bleach for homebrewing, or one of those more expensive options?
I'm thinking of trying my first batch of beer soon...
While we're asking c-spine questions: if you arrive on the scene and your patient is lying there with his head turned to the side, do you straighten it for him and/or encourage him to straighten it before holding c-spine?
I've always assumed that the answer is "no, it's more important to avoid moving the neck than to make it perfectly straight," with a side order of "unless you don't have airway and your patient is dying, in which case you do what you gotta do." But what do I know?
(Note to self: put first aid classes back on the calendar!)
Madeline at @53: I was hoping for more from Draco Malfoy... I saw him as the key to bringing the Slytherins back into the fold.
I thought it was poetic justice that Draco served the side of light by doing what he was best at - being a helpless pawn, unable to act effectively on his own, who is controlled by one authority figure after another. In the end, it was his mother's desire to reclaim him that made the difference at a crucial moment, not anything that he did.
It was superb. Back to the fast-paced drama that thrilled me in Book Four.
(My own take on the series is that books Five and Six, though not unpleasant, are the Harry Potter equivalent of Season Five of Babylon Five - having promised the fans that there would be seven books, the author was obliged to construct them as well as she could in spite of the Story, which would have preferred to pick up the pace and finish itself, already.)
For those who wonder why I'm pleased that so many scenes were off-screen rather than on-screen, I offer Terry Rossio and the Mystery of Point of View. (With special guest appearance by Will Shetterly!)
For those who wish that the book had lingered longer on the noble sacrifices of some of my favorite characters: I offer North by Northwest and the Amazing 43-Second Wrapup. In the rush to the finish, one cannot afford to slow down, even for Tonks.
Opening lines seem to fall into two categories: the ones that make you really want to keep reading, and the ones that don't work.
This may be why "opening lines which don't work" are a popular mini-genre, featured in lots of contests and collections: Bad opening lines are the ones which work well in isolation. When you read a sentence and find yourself wishing for more, it's probably not that bad as an opening sentence.
On the other hand, a list of great opening lines is incredibly frustrating. It's like listening to the first four seconds of every song on your iPod.
May we at least discuss opening paragraphs? Or talk about the great opening lines of stories that I can actually find on the Internet, like Moby Dick? ("Call me Ishmael." Now there's a line that doesn't work without the rest of its paragraph...)
MikeB (11), I neglected to tell you how much I liked that, though the second-to-last stanza puzzles me.
Why, thank you!
Since blog technology does not permit me to throw away the penultimate stanza and pretend that I never wrote it, I will explain the joke to death instead: It was an attempt to turn this profoundly alliterative line from the original poem:
A chorister whose c preceded the choir
into a joke about bad spelling. Perhaps it wasn't as obvious as I thought.
(I had originally written "preseded", but it didn't sound right, so I stuck in an "e", only to end up with "preseeded", which is an actual word with a different meaning, and is therefore not what I wanted. A rookie mistake, which I failed to notice at the time. Gosh, this writing stuff is harder than I thought.)
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 9 |
| 2008 | 2 |
| 2007 | 15 |
| 2006 | 24 |
| 2005 | 4 |
| 2004 | 4 |
| 2003 | 1 |
Total: 59 comments. View all these comments on a single page.
The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Mike B:
Show all comments by Mike B.