The trouble with "aureola" and "Suoidea" is, who uses them in a blog comment? What are the best words from genuine disemvowelled posts? Greg Ioannou's surname, from this thread, was a good one.
I'm sorry, my last comment came out sounding more selfish than I intended. My point was that most people who live in cities shouldn't need cars. Not for disaster evacuation, not for any other purpose - at least, not if the cities are properly planned and public transport is adequate. Sooner or later when oil becomes too expensive, we're going to have to learn to live without our cars. Something tells me that the city planners of the last few decades are going to come in for a lot of flack when that happens.
That "poorest 20%" without cars doesn't consist of just the poor. I'm not poor and I don't have a car - I don't even have a driving license. I choose not to get one because I too live in a walkable city. I can walk to my office, the railway station, the bus station or the supermarket within half an hour, or catch one of the buses that go right past my house every ten minutes. I'm saving money, improving my health, and trying not to wreck the planet any more than I have to. And when a disaster hits my city, I want one of those buses to pick me up and take me out of there.
Okay, now I can tell you what I was being mysterious about up-thread:
Va zl pbzcrgvgvba ragel, V unq Qhzoyrqber qvr ol snyyvat bss gur gnyyrfg gbjre ng Ubtjnegf - juvpu vf gur Nfgebabzl gbjre, nppbeqvat gb gur UC Yrkvpba naq ahzrebhf ersreraprf va gur obbxf. Naq va obbx fvk, Qhzoyrqber ernyyl qbrf snyy bss gur Nfgebabzl Gbjre. Nqzvggrqyl, ur vfa'g orvat punfrq ol n fjnez bs uhatel fpvffbef ng gur gvzr, ohg V arire fnvq zl gnyrag sbe cebcurpl jnf cresrpg.
Anapl Fgbhssre jbhyq cebonoyl rapbhentr zr gb fhr. Be rapbhentr Ebjyvat gb fhr zr sbe yrnxvat gur cybg orsber choyvpngvba qnl. V zhfg unir unq vyyrtny npprff gb na rneyl pbcl, evtug?
Decode at rot13.com.
Jane Yolen: I think it's spelled Pschitt. They were still selling it over there as of about five years ago.
On the other hand, they had to rename the Toyota MR2 for the French market, because it would have been pronounced very close to "merdeux", meaning "shitty".
I called a town "Wheatstone Bridge" after a circuit I studied in school physics. I changed it after my sister read it and laughed, and I realised that she, and numerous other potential readers, had followed the same physics syllabus as me.
I get the rest of my place names, including the new name for that town, from thorough abbreviations/acronyms/pronunciation-munging of existing words and phrases, adding likely-sounding place-name suffixes (-ton, -bury, etc.) where necessary. My places are meant to be in England, so I have to be quite careful to make them sound realistic without duplicating names that already exist.
I'm also having to avoid mentioning one of my major characters' first name and surname together, since someone with a very similar name married a celebrity recently. Maybe nobody else would make the connection, but I would.
A colleague is off to a conference in Amsterdam, where he's going to present a paper called "All XML Databases Are Equal" (meaning they're not).
Presumably this conference will have attendees from all over Europe, as well as other countries. I don't know whether Orwell is read much outside English-speaking countries. Any idea how many of them are likely to understand the reference, anyone?
Stefan, are those the initials "PA" on your junk mail? Any relation to those other scam artists we know?
I like it. I agree that the masthead title should be a link to the front page.
As for the small bold blue hyperlink text, it's fine for me in most places, but when it's italicised, as in the Recent Comments section, it's blocky and hard to read. Either less bold or bigger would be nice. I'm using Firefox 1.0.4 on Windows XP, and it isn't antialiasing the text (since it's so small, it would probably be worse if it did).
Actually (previewing the sample in the previous paragraph) it doesn't look so bad now. Maybe it's only a problem when it's on a grey background.
Dan Hoey: I was taking it as read that all real numbers have infinite decimal expansions, although some of them end in infinitely many zeroes.
JvP must be really enjoying this!
Nancy: "Escher Hilton" is a great description of the hotel in Deep Secret - although at first glance I wondered if you were talking about Hilbert's Hotel.
Oh yes, that's the book in which the multiverse is arranged in an Infinity sign. I knew the two topics were related somehow.
Well, so there should be books/films/etc. that portray fans positively, since so many writers are fans.
I know there was a British TV miniseries set partly in Doctor Who fandom, but I've never seen it and can't remember the title either. It was written by Russell T. Davies, who's now producing the new Doctor Who.
John M. Ford:
No, actually, a line and a plane (and any other finite-dimensional space) contain the same (infinite) number of points. We know this because it's possible to construct a one-to-one mapping from the larger space to the smaller one. For instance, you can map from a 2-dimensional number space to a 1-dimensional one by interleaving decimal places, so that the 2-dimensional number
(1.1111..., 2.2222...)
maps to
12.12121212...
in one dimension. (You need to do some extra trickery to make this work with negative numbers, but it can be done.)
Cantor proved that this size of infinity is larger than aleph zero. But the proposition that it is aleph one (defined as the next smallest infinity after aleph zero) is called the continuum hypothesis, and is unproved.
Nancy Lebovitz:
Ok, I've seen Galaxy Quest. I rather liked _We'll Always Have Parrots_. What I want now is a story about fans of something sfnal which is portrayed as being worthy of respect.
Have you read Deep Secret by Diana Wynne Jones?
"We'll always have Parrots" is also a line from Red Dwarf, by the way and since people have been talking about that.
A friend once told me he had written a school essay on Mahler's Violin Concerto, and that it had fooled his music teacher.
Now it seems that someone else has had the same idea.
Rats. I've just realised - should I now change the surname of Mr. and Mrs. Benedict, founders of the weird and rather sinister religion in my novel in progress?
I don't want to. I like their name.
Sometime next month, if all goes well, I will have a garden of my own for the first time ever. At the moment it's a 20ft square (ish) lawn of new turf and nothing else, surrounded by fence. So I get a free rein. It might be too late to do much with it this summer - I don't know, I'm just a novice - but next spring I should be joining you in the quest to make beautiful things grow.
I've said that I had a post in this thread which was deleted.
It was.
Barring database corruption, static electricity in the server room, or something else that mysteriously removed my comment but but kept all the follow ups my statement is perfectly accurate.
TJIC, if you mean this post, then you need to bear in mind that disemvowelled posts won't come up in search results, even if you search for your name (unless your name has no vowels in).
(As a non-Catholic) I don't really understand what's so bad about your original post in this thread. Maybe I'm just bad at picking up nuances.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2005 | 18 |
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