re 51: One thing I would like to point out is that in spite of big box retailing, local appliance retail still persists-- and there has always been big box retail as a major force for them to have to compete with (see under "Sears, Roebuck, & Co."). The reasons? Buying a dishwasher requires a LOT of mediation: beyond selecting one, it has to be delivered and installed. This stuff is all non-trivial, and it's all service-oriented; a computer can't do it (or rather, enable the consumer to do it themselves). Music is at the extreme opposite end: anyone can pick out a download online and install it, and publishing (assuming the original recording was well done, and decent sound engineers are not hard to come by and can even support themselves through that profession) is absurdly easy. Just to take it back a notch technologically, there I was at Dupont Circle at lunch, and there was an Andean band busking, and they had a stack of very attractive and very professional CDs in a guitar case. One wonders whether the Music Industry provides any added value beyond publicity. Publishing decent books isn't that easy; music performance itself accomplishes most of the editing that text publishing requires as an intermediate step.
which takes me to
re 61: Well, the worst thing about turning an OOP paper work into an ebook is that it costs exactly those nasty editing costs that self-publication so frequently stints on. I'm doing some work on CPDL translating original publications of Billings's music into modern, electronic scores, and it's a lot of tedious handwork, plus playing the stuff back to make sure it makes sense, and all in all it's a festival of copyediting on top of the transcription. (I did make one interesting find: the currently performed version of Kittery deviates considerably from that in the original plates; there's a lot of sacred-harp-telephone behind the characteristic sound of early American shape note music, it appears.) Practically the only "free" part of such republication is the original authorship!
re 127: I had a round of the glass/flash thing this summer trying to shoot pictures of a room through a glass door. After a run of less than successful shots and moving on to something else, it suddenly occurred to me that the secret was to hold the lens directly against the glass. I doubt they'll let you use that trick in the Smithsonian, though.
126 cartridge pinhole camera
My daughter and I made one; the processing labs around here can't make prints from them but they can develop the negatives. The results were somewehat better than Niépce's. The hardest part is getting the film registered properly so you don't have a bar running through the middle of your image.
My father pushed us through practically every craft/hobby out there, so I had a B&W period. I can't for the life of me remember what camera I used, but I'm pretty sure it took 126 film. We developed it in the laundry room and made contact prints. My father had a Leica and shot huge numbers of slides when I was little and miles of 8mm when I was older. The film processing always punched some sort of code into the tail end of the latter so you always knew when the film was about to run out because the sprockets would make a different sound and the image would be shot full of holes. I took my father's Leica with me to Europe, where it stopped working somewhere around Prague; the guy at the photo shop in Vienna suggested pitching it, but I kept it and picked a disposable or something else cheap. It turned out all I had to do was mess with the lens the right way and it would have started working again. I later had a couple of low-end SLRs, one of which I still have though it hasn't been loaded in over a decade. Part of me wants to get a DSLR but the cost has always seemed daunting.
I've never really gotten good because the cost of processing always made me parsimonious.
re 562: From 1987-1993 we here in Maryland had both the tallest and shortest congresscritters ever (as best anyone knows). Mikulski (she of shortness) is currently the senior female senator; McMillen (ex-NBA and Olympic medalist) was gerrymandered out of a seat after three terms. (That was the election we got stuck with Al "my ex-wife is my opponent's campaign manager/what I really want is to be a lobbyist" Wynn.)
re 495: Maybe a flying and controlled landing car? Stopping is easy.
Does anyone know anything about Sutton Hart Press? We've had a fringey medical issue pop up on the Wikipedia fringe theory noticeboard and I see this publisher pop up in connection with it. I personally don't see signs that it is a vanity publisher, but it does give off some vibes of being a woo-woo promulgator.
A nursery near us has a B&O I-5 caboose. You could also stay at the Red Caboose Motel, which is in Strasburg right near the Strasburg RR and the RR Museum of Pennsylvania and the National Toy Train Museum.
re 137: If that's where you're feeling a burning sensation, perhaps you should load your fire extinguisher with Cruex.
re 979: I'm afraid this is failing my "driving off the end of the bell curve" test: off-road driving and street driving have rather different issues as to what you have to react to. Also, there's no technique that doesn't involve letting go of the the wheel with at least one hand some of the time, unless you have a much faster steering ratio than I've ever seen in a car.
A survey over the net seems to show that the issue with hand-over-hand is that when they started putting explosives in the middle of the steering wheel the crossed-over arm became vulnerable to being broken as a result of the explosion. The whole business of good/bad technique seems to be heavily governed by theory over fact; for example, I found some places worrying about thumbs getting broken if you hit a pothole while gripping the wheel with the thumb wrapped around. Personally, I expect that hitting a hole with that sort of force is going to set off much worse problems, and besides, keeping your thumb out of the grip is going to produce a lot of fatigue quite quickly.
I stupidly paid attention to what I actually do on the way to work and discovered that any decision about method co-opted by the fact that I'm driving a 5-speed over Md. backroads, and therefore often have to downshift in the middle of a turn. One-handed is therefore the only option.
I have to say that the whole exercise sounds like a great deal of niggly effort for almost no improvement in safety.
We've had running problems with the heat in church this fall, to the point where I was given to remark about the authentic Anglican heating.
re 950: On most of the US northeast coast, locking your car down at a light like that would stand a high probability of setting off road rage. Also, how do Brit traffic lights announce how long they will be red?
Extreme geo-statistical coolness from the NYT:
mapping app of Netflix rentals
Two divisions that jump out from the DC-area maps:
1. Race is really easy to map, if not to explain in its tastes.
2. The soldiers and airmen at Ft. Meade and Andrews AFB have distinctly different tastes from the rest of us.
re 275: Brutal put-down here: "Consider, for example, a comment made by Amanda Craig in The Independent (London) that describes
Tolkien’s core audience as “hippies, computer programmers and Americans.â€"
re 235: I would say that Pern and Darkover illustrate two points about genre: first, that SF-ness is to a large degree a function of publisher, and second, that space opera bridges SF and fantasy because, in the end, operatic plot works more or less the same regardless of what kicks it into motion.
re 238: What's different about the web is that it allows one to find metadata/context easily-- if you choose to look, if it is there, and if it isn't drowned out in the shouting. In the library you had to look in Index to Periodicals or other reference works and hope that the library actually had a copy of the work listed. The biggest problem with the web's metadata is that so much of it is garbage. If someone comes across this discussion, for instance, how do they know that we are worth listening to? Or for that matter, which of us are worth listening to?
I have a book on old tools that, through some sort of typography glitch, has a spurious ligature one every single instance of a a couple of consonant combinations (IIRC one of them is "st-- there's a loop connecting the uppermost serif of the "s" to the tip of the "t"). Hundreds of pages of this. You get used to it after a while but it is peculiar at first.
re 73: I cite Daly all the time, but it's always footnote 47 of chapter 10 of Gyn/Ecology. (returns from checking our copy: yep, that's the passage)
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