So, I need to do a run to Devon Street in Chicago (prob Apr. 27/28) and am considering a couple of options. A) drive up, with concomitant costs, but lots of storage and freedom of movement. B) MegaBus up, and rent a car. C) MegaBus and throw myself on the mercy of friends in exchange for dinner. ;) Mostly this post is hey, I'm going to be in Chicago, anyone up for lunch/dinner and/or playing in Indian fabric stores?

(Damn.)

I: Mispronounce.

TK: Denounce.

I: Renounce, announce flounce. Bounce back.

TK: Pounce.

I: Jounce.

TK: Trounce. Pronounce ban.

i have begun a blog named Metawyrd. Right now it has a poem about Meg from The Family Guy, a story about My First Band ("Chicago: A Love Story"), and a followup tale about how '60s R&B changed my life.

it is at:

http://www.metawyrd.com/blog/

And then the Internet decides to remind me. People claimed it would be our 9/11, but I really feel most people outside the political scene would like to forget about it.

Seeing the Louvre, and Versailles... one begins to see why they had a revolution.

I also got to sample French Medicine. It's better than I expected, so I used it wrong.

I came down with a case of Bell's Palsy. I was pretty sure that's what it was (and the worst part is that it clobbered my sense of taste, and my tongues tactile sense). So, come the morning after realising that's what was happening, we went to the hospital, and so to the ER.

When the doctor got there he chastised us, since it wasn't an emergency, and we should have gotten there before noon so we could go to the ENT, and not wasted his time.

He prescribed drugs, and off we went.

But... For it being a weekend, and a non-emergency there were surcharges. The ER visit was 100€, and the surcharges were another 150€.

Meds were about 50€.

Happily it was mild (I never lost more than about 70 percent of the control of my the left side of my face. I could keep my mouth shut, and blink, though closing my left eye, so I could take photos, was hard; and sometimes I failed).

More happily it's mostly gone. It came on slowly (which seems to be a bit atypical), and it's going away a bit more slowly, but at this point I have control of about 90 percent of my face's left side.

Best of all, my tongue seems to be working again.

* * *
Foodism:

I'm going to make soup using the chicken stock I made last weekend. The recipe, on a back of Bob's Red Mill bean soup mix, says "four cups of broth." Are broth and stock synonymous? Is watering down involved?

I plan on throwing in a bunch of previously cooked, frozen cabbage, carrots, celery, and sausage.

By order,
The Mgt.

Not unless you need a foot (for metrical purposes, perhaps?)

Hmm:

The speed of light is 1,802,617,499,785 + 355/1397 furlongs per fortnight.
Or, for those who want the recurring decimal rather than the neat fraction:
. .
1802617499785.254115962777380100214745884037222619899785 furlongs per
fortnight.

The correct position of the dots is left as an exercise for the student.

(actually, 11.8 inches, but I guess that's close enough for government work)

Also: Constant Which We Remember Well Because It's Light's Velocity (check the acronym, then look at your phone)

Incidentally, the speed of light can also be thought of as the speed of everything. Light expresses all of its speed in spatial directions, while most stuff-like stuff expresses most of its speed in the temporal direction. The "time dilation" effect noted in things covering great distances quickly then becomes a byproduct of the constancy of the speed of everything; speed used to traverse distance and speed used to traverse time both contribute to the constant speed of everything. Putting more speed into covering distance reduces the traversal of time.

In this regard, "feet" and "nanoseconds" are within a few percent of being interchangeable. They are measures of nearly the same magnitude, just on different axes. And that's why your toes and your nose are about five nanoseconds apart.

As far as I've been able to figure out, "broth" vs. "stock" depends mostly on one's willingness to quibble. Yeah, some people hold (firmly, even) that "stock" involves at least some roasted bones. For the purposes you describe -- which I'd call "soup made from leftovers & cleaning-out the freezer" -- it probably makes no never-mind. All you need is meat-flavored (unless you're vegan) liquid (though if the ingredients are hearty enough, a pint or so of beer/ale/stout might not be amiss).

You seem to be sufficiently savvy about food that it'll turn out to be Pretty Good Soup, at the least, and quite likely Very Good Soup. (I'm pretty sure you're aware that any dilution, or addition of salt (or spices), is to take place at the very end of the process -- you can always add things, but taking anything away is close to impossible.)

point, line, cube, tesseract...

Marilyn McCoo.

Here is a picture of the chicken:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stefan_e_jones/6909575048/in/photostream

(You know, I'd had that V-shaped metal rack for going on six years, and I'd always assumed it was a peculiarly bent cooling rack, perhaps for bread. I never realized until last week what it was really for.)

For a really good stock, useful in the dish being made, "peeling" drumsticks and then boiling them with an onion (carrot top, and a bit of celery optional) for about an hour will give a very rich "short-stock" (short as in, "court bouillon").

But I tend to think of any boiled preparation as stock; vegetable, fish, shells (needed for bisque), etc.

And boiling the bones from meals gets a second use out of them. Right now I've not got any in the freezer, so the next few months will be doing things that make more stock, because I like the flexibility that having a sauce, half-made, in the freezer gives me.

It's a handy thing to have when people drop in.

Food is love.

And because of the equivalence of mass/energy, the speed of light is 299,792 joules/kilogram.

Thank you.

My teenager is currently iso the Who cast in Manhattan (she is apparently outside their hotel) and has several leads on potential shooting sites for Thursday.

She'd gotten to clean out the roasting pan when I cooked the chicken, so when she saw that go in the oven again (with carcass, onions, and all the offal I stripped from the pieces of chicken I'd eaten the day before, and the liver and neck) she was highly expectant.

After I strained the stock there was a sort of chicken rubble amidst the bones and wilted vegetables. I mixed thin in with her kibble. Oooohhh, was that one happy dog.

I filled three and a half 32 oz. yogurt containers with rich brown stock.

No square? Am I missing a subtle joke here?

#8 is "6 million trees planted, in Macedonia". Not to mention that they've kept doing it for at least 4 years running.

Xopher #40: Not to mention that his lawyers are dropping him, and not just for that. Seems he's been making legally significant phone calls without telling them....

For those in the know - would it be impossible or difficult to make my own pickles in my own smallish apartment kitchen? Feel free to talk me out of it / egg me on as appropriate.

Because I didn't want to deal with the problem, I had let my resume get badly out of date over the last few years. So I'm now trying to polish it for things like posting online.

The last time I did this, people were talking about "action verbs" and even offering lists of good verbs to use. Is that still the style, and if so, does anyone reading this have suggestions of suitable verbs for someone whose recent experience is editorial, and before that copyediting and proofreading?

I'm still using the present tense action verb format on my resume*. It is getting me noticed at the preliminary job hunting state, anyway.

The other advice I'm seeing a lot is "show how you added value/saved money". In other words, show where you increased efficiencies, brought in new accounts, things like that. Which don't really apply to the jobs on my resume. So I skip that part, and figure interviewers will realize that my job isn't to bring in new clients, and thus not expect to see that on my resume.

*Two preliminary face-to-face interviews on Thursday! Woot!

Refrigerator pickles, by your request.

Don't worry - I'm sure it's all under control...

In the spirit of Open Threads and well aware that all knowledge is contained on Making Light I was hoping to get advice/reassurance/tips on moving my (enormous) cat from NYC to Alaska.

We will be going to the vet in a few weeks for his yearly checkup to ask the same sort of question, but I'd really like to hear some things from personal experience.

1 large cucumber, thinly sliced
1 medium onion, thinly sliced
1 cup Splenda Granular (or sugar)
1/2 cup white vinegar
1/2 teaspoon mustard seed
1/4 teaspoon celery seed
1/4 teaspoon turmeric
1 teaspoon salt

In a microwave-safe 2-quart bowl, combine all ingredients; mix well. Microwave uncovered at 80% power for 5 minutes, stirring halfway through, or 6 minutes at Medium High (75%). Cover and chill at least two hours before serving.
(Cook longer for less crunch.)

And this gem from Dickens is quoted in a soon-forthcoming article in Mythlore on the etymology of 'hobbit':

If I buy wheat at Swansea, I must order by the stack of three bushels; if at Barnard Castle, by the boll of two bushels, and must not, when I compare quantity and price, confuse this boll with two other bolls, one of two hundred and forty, the other of two hundred and eighty pounds. If I buy at Beccles, I must order by the coomb of two hundred and forty pounds. If at Preston, by the windle of two hundred and twenty. If at Wrexham, by the hobbet of one hundred and sixty-eight. But even if I do happen to know what a hobbet of wheat means at Wrexham, that knowledge, good for Flint, is not good for Caernarvonshire. A hobbet of wheat at Pwlheli contains eighty-four pounds more than a hobbet at Wrexham; and a hobbet of oats is something altogether different; and a hobbet of barley is something altogether different again.

I've flown my cats cross-country before, with the only hitches being:

(1) Carrier wasn't big enough to meet airline requirements for the amount of space around the beast.
(2) Carrier utterly confused about which terminal I was supposed to pick them up at (but the folks at the cargo terminal took excellent care of the cats, and admitted that they were kinda hoping I wouldn't show up, so they could adopt them)

When I flew on the same flight as my cats, the flight attendants made a point of marking who I was, and that I had live cargo on the flight, and came by several times to let me know they were okay.

I was definitely nervous about the process, having found all of the horror stories online -- but it did work out well. There's obviously vaccination requirements/health requirements, and it's a good thing to give your cat(s) something familiar smelling... but that's pretty much standard for any travel with cats.

Oh -- as far as size goes, my largest cat would have been around 25-or-so lbs then, fwiw.

once = nonce (as in "for the nonce")

perhaps giving an Escher-like mapping in Cartesian space?

7 John has invented a water-heater powered by burning grain, but cannot decide how to calibrate it.

(a) How many nanosecond-hobbets does it take to raise one kilo of water one degree Kelvin at a grain-market located halfway between Wrexham and Pwlheli?

(b) Why would you want to?

Show your work.

(And no, Firth of Forth is not a Borg with a lisp. The Borg use imperative languages, not functional.)

1 A
2 A Couple
3 . . .
4 A Few
5 A Handful
6 . . .
7 Several

time to go home.

('sprobablynotverygoodbutIjusthadtodosomethingwiththosewordsandthereitiswhateveritis P.S. and for #0 not #69)

So, I should put "edit manuscripts" or "maintain Unix system" on my resume even if I no longer have the job in question? (I'm not saying that's a bad idea, I just want to make sure it's what you mean.)

"A Brief History of Time"
"Robert's Rules"
"Film Form" - Eisenstein (The first treatise on motion picture grammar and literacy)
Something on Communism, whether the manifesto or Das Kapital just because it's influenced so much either directly or as a reaction/rejection of the theories.
"Malcom X"
Tempted to add the Big Book from AA to represent self-help.
Along the same lines, "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Carnegie and "7 Habits of Highly Effective People" by Stevens. Maybe an ISO handbook too, to give an insight into corporate thought?

I'll rename the 8-wheeler to "popsicle."

On that note, I don't think anyone else has this measuring system for liquids when cooking (smallest to largest):

A mist, a spritz, a drizzle, a droozle, a glug.

I came up with it when I worked at the cafe in Borders. I got really bored in there sometimes.

Looked interesting until I bounced off the sexist captions to some of the photos. Then it just made me tired.

The hills roll barren between the lonely firs
Not desert yet, but slowly they succumb
To cold bleak drought; in vain they thirst
No cloud brings rain, no flood bursts forth
The riverbed cracks: the stream is no longer fit
Yet where does the land lie sickest?

Not here: though sick, not sickest
Not amid silent rocks and firs
Somewhere else, in a maddened fit
Land and people alike succumb
Pain brings madness, madness pain brings forth
Unfed is hunger, unquenched, thirst.

Nor alone the body's thirst
Stagnant pools of Justice leave us sickest
Unrequited, from Court we straggle forth
Windbent as willows, frozen as firs
While to floods of lucre, levees of laws succumb
Warped by the wealthy as they alone see fit.

Who is fit, prospers, who prospers decides what is fit
So say the wealthy, and yet for more wealth they thirst
More cries out for more, and if they succumb
Perhaps they are the sickest?
(Altogether elsewhere, between the snowy firs
Vast herds move back and forth.)

Daily the jobless throngs set forth
Starving or day-fed, ruined or fit
They cannot eat light like the firs.
A coin for rent and a coin for thirst -
A pill for the child who is sickest -
Lacking work, they will soon succumb.

Cupiditas radix malorum est: we succumb
To the ills that love of money brings forth
Where the golden blood flows not, we are sickest
Hoarded up, unflowing, lack leaves us less fit
For that not spent, we vainly thirst
Like the barren hills and the lonely firs.

O Princes and Princesses, who watch as firs succumb
Who see us thirst, yet thrust us forth
If the shoe fit, wear it: you yourselves are sickest.

(You know, when I set out to write a sestina with end-words that sounded vaguely like ordinals, this was not somewhere I imagined it going. Sometimes it's just amazing to sit back a bit and watch your brain work.)

(Also spending a couple of hours on the site last night, I got very annoyed at their reader-control. "You will view these items one at a time, in the order we specify." For every single feature.)

Hmm, third comment in a row. Time to go do something offline, like morning stuff.

Time to start doing more with the stock in the freezer. You could make chicken demi-glace.

I like this approach. I always felt icky about the kind of résumé B.S. a lot of "résumé advice" recommends -- "Improved customer engagement! Exceeded sales expectations!" Customer engagement measured how? How much improved? How did you make this improvement? What were sales expectations? How much did you exceed them? How did you do it? I always feel like I'm trying to hide something, writing like that.

I therefore have written each entry on my résumé as a terse narrative in the past tense. Something like "Starting with no $language experience, was given $N lines of $language code. Within one month, was improving and extending existing code to implement new data analysis requirements, assigned approximately weekly."

Essentially, pare it down to what you really want to highlight about a job -- how fast you learned something, how much you improved some measurable quantity of interest (sales, speed, efficiency, customer satisfaction). Describe this as specifically and concretely as you can. Use numbers where possible ("$N lines of code," "within one month," "assigned weekly"), if only because they force you to get specific.

Rather than having a block where you just list skills, incorporate the skills keywords into the narratives. That proves you actually used those skills (rather than listing "PowerPoint" as a skill on the strength of once having seen a PowerPoint presentation), but still allows automated keyword searching.

For me this led to a fairly wordy résumé, so I judiciously bolded key words and phrases to aid the eye in a quick scan (along with using layout elements to help break up the Wall O' Text).

It took a lot of work to get specific while still keeping things concise enough to fit on one page, but I did it.

Résumés: As a graduate student, I taught a goodly number of college students to write résumés and cover letters -- stressing bullet points and objectives in a rather lockstep way. I've since come to the conclusion, having spent time on the other side of the hiring process, that I did a terrible job of it. (And this is why you don't assign 22-year-olds who have brand-new creative writing degrees and have never held a real job to teach your business writing courses.) Caroline's approach provides much more information about not only a candidate's experience and skills, but their ability to identify highlights and shape bits of data into a coherent whole. Just keep it as concise as possible.

Open-threadiness: Anyone have any ideas for how to engage the academic interest of students who are only in college to play basketball? My usual "What are you doing here if you don't want to learn anything?" pep talk is juiceless here.

Thanks. I have a feeling it's going to be hard for me to do much of this, because I'm working in the past tense, and even when the stuff is quantifiable, I may not remember the details that way. (I'm more likely to remember a specific example of an error rooted out, than to be able to say how many such there were.) But it's something to aim for.

Won't stop us. But thanks for the reassurance.

:)

It is beautifully crafted and for whatever reason rings bells all over my present. Thank you. It may help a lot.

Blessings.

For sects in my life I've got someone who needs me,
Someone I've needed so long....

Pericat, #6: I bow to your feline expertise, but my personal viewing experience has been that the ounce first pounces, then trounces, bounces, batters, and finally carries away the starlet in its mouth to an unviewable fate under the bushes [or its catnip equivalent to somewhere in the apartment].

Cadbury Moose, #27: Using the Non-Breakable SPace character (ampersand nbsp semicolon) (no spaces there) might help, but you'd probably also need to trigger a non-proportional (typewriter-like) font to make sure everything lines up, and I don't think Making Light allows such.

Cadbury Moose, #33: Cue religious war over the 2nd Iota in Aluminium.

Xopher, #40: [blank puzzled look] Well, of course. It's not as though he'd done anything wrong, after all. So why would he ever want to run?

...(Proverbs 28:1)

Chris, #48: No, the square showed up, right on schedule. [cue snapping of fingers]

(Sorry, couldn't resist a ready-made Beat joke.)

Dido, #58: Smallish dog-harness; sled; fishing pole; catnip mouse.

Geekosaur, #66: After seeing John Carter of Mars, whose villainous Therns are updated via Ray Kurzweil's "Singularity" to be nanotech-based worldkillers, I think the Borg need to fear a new, entirely post-biological bully in town, and better run before they get assimilated/datastored.

fold, cusp, swallowtail, butterfly

That was very evocative, though I'm still sorting through the emotions to see exactly what-all it evoked. Well done.

little pink beast @ 89:

ummmmmm ... sestina
Very good job.

In the 1st minute of the final hour Walt Whitman was found
in an ancient subwaytunnel beneath 52nd st. where he
had lain in exstasy since the first bars of jazz filtered
through. The trackwalkers who found him immediately
took up their crowbars and smashed in his skull, re-
ceiving two month's pay from the grateful City Council
and promotions to the rank of Conductor;

They're at Bethesda Fountain now, according to a friend of my teenager, who is there (my teenager is on the way).

* Too Much Fun!

But there are no shooting signs posted in the neighborhood, which there would be if they were shooting here tomorrow.

Job history is good, not just your most recent job. If there are major gaps, you can consider what's called a "Skills resume", but I've never used one, and so really can't advise on it. OTOH, you don't need to list every job you've ever had, either. My resume currently has 4 jobs on it, 3 firmly in IT, and 1 where I did some IT stuff on the side since we didn't have a regular IT person. My previous jobs (not in IT) I leave off. My work history goes back far enough that prospective employers haven't commented on it.

Take with caution, as these next notes may only apply in IT:

The one page resume (at least in IT) is no longer a hard and fast requirement - especially since so many job applications are submitted electronically. Mine is 2 pages. I've got a colleague whose resume is 4 pages. Who cares if it needs staples if it's never going to be printed, much less photocopied?

"Objectives" statements are out, "Career Summary" sections are in. As far as I can tell, a career summary is longer, but not as required. Your industry may vary.

Zimmerman to be charged in Death of Trayvon Martin

US Sues Apple and publishers over E-book prices

And in case you needed something to wipe your mind clean:

A particularly spectacular op-art starburst

Aha! Trick question, because the Kelvin temperature scale doesn't HAVE degrees, it has kelvins (since 1967-68, convention). That is why when it is written (in technical/engineer jargon), it is 0K without a degree sign.

Unless you meant raise the water by a degree of arc, in which case I must to a gunner go.

I'm just not sure where the burning grain fits into that one. Hot air balloon?

(I'm also glad there's no school this week because I don't think I could keep her in class with Doctor Who in town.)

She says the fans were very respectful and not pushy and obeyed the crew at all times without giving anybody lip. And mostly they were all stunned and worshipful. Which I can totally understand.

Tooting my own horn, I posted about the making of stock (the lazy/easy way) at lisajulie.livejournal.com.

At last count, I have over twenty 1 quart bags of frozen stock in the freezer. And they are being used and renewed.

appreciate
depreciate
try not to hate
food on plate
at fifty-eight we all rotate
like pretty Kate has sex ornate
to separate
the number eight
necessitate
to decimate
your unborn mate
...
deliberate
fascinate
deviate
reinstate
liberate
liberate
liberate
liberate

I had to do some Wikipedia research to understand that question.

ambiguity of whether hobbet is a unit of volume or weight confounds the dimensional analysis.

to say nothing of its regional variations.

do you have the answer to the question?

I am tying my brain in knots wondering whether an answer could even exist.

(Also most of my stock is already at least half-way to demi-glace, and once the stuff has cooled once, I've never yet succeeded in further reducing the stuff without burning it.)

Throw frozen lump of stock in pot. Turn on low, go do something else until it's mostly thawed. (I didn't own a microwave at the time.) Add noodles and whatever. Turn up the heat and cook until the noodles and whatever are done. Slurp, sometimes from the saucepan I heated it in, while surfing the internet.

I am really down on myself this morning.

On resumes: I'm kind of giving up on ever getting a realjob. I'm tired all the time from subjobbing, I only just found the search term that returns jobs I'm more qualified for, I haven't been going about this systematically-- checking USAjobs every four days, checking Jobs@UIowa every week-- and when in doubt, I point to the raw numbers as if it matters at all. People ask me if I've thought of going back to school, and what can I tell them? No, because I don't carry any school debt (parents took undergrad, grad school paid me twice what I make now). No, because I have two degrees already and neither is helping. No, because at twenty-eight (almost) it is really terrible that I haven't had a single job that wasn't school. Not a real job. Not a job I can live on without panicking pretty much continuously from December to now. People ask me if I want to go into publishing, but that's not my background, even though two of my four interviews have been for writing/editing jobs.

So if anyone needs a biologist, mostly molecular, with engineering background and a license for semicolons, or any combination of those, who learns fast but is anxious about screwing up, let me know.

It's complicated for me. Undiagnosed depression which struck at about 14, undiagnosed ASD (or something very like), oldest/good child syndrome, plus I was my daughter's age in the mid-1970s, which was a time when a teenage girl wandering around NYC on her own was a target in a number of ways that don't apply today. NYC then was a grimmer place to grow up in than NYC today (caveat: speaking from a position of privilege; for many people, it is quite as grim today as it was then).

I was paralytically shy as well.

All this sounds so strange to people who know me now, because I have a Big Personality, but that me didn't exist when I was 15-16. She developed as I "got better." Sometimes it still feels like a shell over the real me, and sometimes it feels like the real me.

At the same time, under certain circumstances, I could talk to people I admired. I went to a lot of theater even as a teen and hung around by the stage door after and got autographs and said things to the performers, who were generally gracious.

What I couldn't have done was wake up in the morning and say to myself: I'm going to go wander around Manhattan in the hope that X will happen. I'll blow off the homework or chores or whatever I was "supposed to" be doing and deal with them later, because I want to do this thing that I might never have a chance to do. I mean, I did do some cool stuff--went to tiny comic book conventions, the last Star Trek Welcommittee convention, etc.--but everything was always planned ahead of time. I was not spontaneous (and am not, or not very, even today).

The kid, otoh, knows what she wants and goes for it. Last year, when she started high school, she learned that Men in Black III was shooting across the street from school, at Kaufman Astoria. She came home in October and said to me, "I am going to meet Will Smith. Somehow. I'm going to make that happen."

I said, "good luck, dear, more power to you."

It took about 6 weeks, during which she made friends with craft services, the guy who drove the honeywagon, and pretty much anyone else who would talk to her. One day I got a text message which was a photo of her and a friend and Will Smith; he had one arm around each girl and they were in his dressingroom/trailer.

I mean, ?seriously? How did she do that?

By being herself.

Lord knows her life is not perfect; it's full of normal teenage trouble and angst and she has a sometimes crabby and irrational parent (that would be me). And I've no idea what her future holds.

But I have to admire her.

Job-wise, let me just say this, which I hope is not hlepy . . .

When I was younger, I had a good friend who never had a "real" job. She was a good decade older than I was, and all her jobs were temporary or part time or freelance or some combination thereof. I worried about her a lot--how was she going to keep a roof over her head? Have enough to eat? Etc.

But she made it work. She always had just enough work to pay the bills and she enjoyed the freedom of her non-work hours, many of which she devoted to creative pursuits or (almost) volunteer work (some with a local theater company).

A few years ago she got her first "real" job, with benefits. She still works elsewhere because it's not a big salary, but remains mostly pleased with her life. She's in her 60s now and has lived this way for about 30 years. It works for her.

It's definitely a mindset thing. I would be nuts without a steady paycheck but my friend had faith that she would always find "enough" work, and she always has.

Bell's palsy is one of those things where recurrence is likely. Not that Terry, or anyone else who has had it once, will probably have it again, but Bell's Palsy is significantly more likely to happen to people who've had it before than to those who haven't.

Does she give lessons?

C. Wingate @133: Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style

OMG. Those are freakin' brilliant. And she has the perfect face for that style.

Melissa Singer @134: Quelle fromage, you have to ask!?

Diatryma @135: They go out and get their success, while I was taught that you wait and eventually opportunities will show themselves and 'great potential' was all I could really hope for.

Just wait until you're into your fifties, and having these thoughts.... ::sigh::

Melissa Singer @136: I mean, ?seriously? How did she do that? By being herself.

All right. Ghoddamnit. I need to meet this person. Would you-all tolerate an out-of-town visitor some weekend after May? I'm dead serious about this.

(It's an earworm, but one I don't mind having.)

I'm feeling a lot better today about my clutch of lanky, sullen-looking dudes after administering a brief, mild scolding to the whole class, not singling anyone out, after which every one of the problem students looked abashed and immediately buckled down to work.

Melissa Singer: I'm so impressed with your daughter! I, too, wish I could be that bold.

All hail my roommate, who, in the course of making dinner, made delicious meatballs, boiled pasta, drank two glasses of wine, tossed said pasta in a light cream & lemon sauce, and somehow managed to turn the burner knob far enough down that the flame went out but the gas stayed on.

On the plus side, we neither 'sploded nor suffocated in our sleep and the apartment no longer smelled of gas by the time we left for work. On the minus side, she's no longer permitted in the kitchen. (she blames the messiness of said kitchn for her futile attempt at mass apartment 302 extinction. I blame her lack of general understanding of our un-subtle stove controls and her drinking while cooking.)

So I guess I get to be the cook again. feh.

My general reaction, however, was !yikes!

I have a gas stove too, and have actually managed that trick a couple of times, but usually catch it within seconds--it usually happens _while_ I am cooking, not after. When I'm done, I turn the burners off very firmly, having lived with my share of temperamental gas stoves.

And I have a very messy, disorganized kitchen. But checking the burner knobs should be automatic.

So sorry you will have to resume being sole cook.

(She insists she is shy, btw, and she is, situationally.)

I just don't want her to lose it, whatever it is. Finding the right college will help.

The Grand Central Station shoot is apparently very, very late tonight (as in early tomorrow morning), so that's out (and it may be a closed set anyway; if they're filming inside, the station is officially closed from 2-5 AM). Tudor City looks like a better choice, around dinnertime.

Jacque: alas, my tiny 1-bedroom apartment could be featured on an episode of Hoarders, so we do not entertain, but if you can find a place to crash, we can definitely visit/hang out! (I'd really like to meet you.) If "after May" equals "not June" (because of finals), even better. We will be around most of summer, except possibly a couple of weeks at the end of July/beginning of August, when we may be in CA.

A white lab coat and a pink crustacean.

Heee, er, kraw.

Talk shows book guests to generate ratings and controversy, and routinely book people who are known paid shills for one side or another, or who are known liars. News stories, even relatively respectable ones, are often quite dishonest, omitting some relevant information or editing footage to tell the story the news channel wants told.

These are what we collectively use as a gauge of what people are thinking, what the range of respectable or sensible ideas includes, what the world really looks like. And these things are also massively deceptive, with many of the most respectable sources of news having been visibly used as propaganda organs, or caught making up evidence to make their news story spicier or easier to believe.

Our sensors are both buggy and compromised. If you are building a substantial part of your picture of the world from those sensors, you are internalizing a picture of the world that is riddled with lies and errors. There are better and worse sources of information, but finding multiple sources with very different agendas, and getting access to ground truth or data as close to the source as possible, is a huge win.

Even worse, mass media determine a big part of the consensus worldview on which we make our decisions, even though much of that worldview is flat wrong, omits critical stuff, includes bullshit, etc. I don't know how we even begin to fix that as a society.

This has been a public service announcement from your friendly local EMT who hates having to go to scenes that he can't enter to help the sick/injured until after the guy in the turnout coat and SCBA tells him it's safe to go in.

On most gas stoves, the burners can be adjusted so they won't go out on low; this thread has a good description.

My own notes: it's worth putting a drop WD-40 or PB on the adjusting screw and letting it sit for a day before trying to adjust. Also, if your adjusting screws aren't under the knobs (they usually are), you can often find a repair maual online by searching for the exact model name and "service manual" or "repair manual".

Please do, at least, take credit for not repressing that tendancy. I was like that when I was very young. School and my mom largely beat it out of me. I've largely gotten it back, but I lost a lot of time.

if you can find a place to crash, we can definitely visit/hang out!

Sa-WEET. I'll start nosing about. Not-May & not-June, Roger. This, of course, brings up the question of where in NYC? (It's been eons since I was out there. Good excuse for a visit! Any cons in the appropriate time-frame you go to?)

Fixed link to the for adjusting stove burners.

"What goes up, must come down."

All else is mere detail.

Area woman had interviews with IT recruiters from two agencies today. Both agencies appear ready to pass area woman's information on to appropriate clients, although one recruiter thinks area woman's requested salary may be too high. (Area woman thinks recruiter's clients are cheapskates, as other recruiting company found identical salary request to be perfectly reasonable.) Common sense dictates that all recruiters and clients shall remain anonymous during this HLN update.

In other news, area woman discovers she now gets nervous after interviews. "Better then than during the interview."

"What goes out* must come in."

* (Unless at escape velocity or higher.)

Be sure to test them from time to time. Not just "press the test button and see if it beeps" testing, but actual "does it go off when exposed to what it's supposed to detect" testing. I've seen one years-old propane detector that "tested" just fine, but didn't go off when there was a problem with the stove, and later didn't go off when a propane tank was vented directly onto it.

Conventions--I'm not on the circuit, really, but I don't think so.

Plenty of other stuff to do here, of course, depending on your interests. Museums, zoos, botanical gardens, mini-golf, tons of walking tours, etc.

(Sorry about the date strictures but school is school, kwim? the NYC school year starts just after Labor Day and runs very nearly to the end of June.)

When Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker was Milwaukee County Executive (for the preceding seven years), he saved money by canceling infrastructure inspections and maintenance. His last year in office, while he was campaigning (successfully) to move up to Governor, a heavy concrete panel fell off the side of a County parking garage onto two pedestrians, killing one. Poor attachments (never detected due to lack of inspection) plus years of freezing/thawing damage (never detected due to lack of inspection). But don't blame Walker; how could he have known there were problems there? They'd never been detected!
__________
* The brilliant linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf, whose day job was fire inspector,** might have suggested part of the problem was calling such gadgets "alarms" (e.g. "fire alarms," "smoke alarms") rather than "detectors" to begin with; now when we test the alarm portion of the device (push button, get beep), we tend to forget we haven't tested the whole process of the device at all.

** After all the fires Whorf had seen caused by cigarettes or matches tossed into "empty" oil or gas drums, he was keenly aware that words can have an almost hypnotic effect on our (non)recognition of physical reality -- e.g. that "empty" of fluid does not mean "empty" of fumes.

well doesn't that depend on what sort of person is reading it?

some people relate better to truthiness than to facts. maybe the resume weeder-outer will be one of those. maybe BS is a valuable skill if you are going into something like sales rather than engineering.

Charles Pierce

The Grinch, a bitter, cave-dwelling creature with a heart "two sizes too small"...

Technical Architect - Ned Stark
Data Analyst - Tyrion
Production Support - Jon Snow
Developer - Arya

Interview sushi is a really good thing.

And on the iPad thread, Entropy has apparently claimed my cookie, as I had to refill the posting info.

I could use mybluetooth keyboard, but if I'm going to go to that much trouble, I'll just grab the 6 yr old MacBook. It's still a better browsing experience, at least while the battery holds out.

Bill Higgins @38: You, sir, win all my internets.

I'm seeing that cookie vanish between sessions. Other websites don't seem to suffer from lost
cookies. It's odd.

It's called a Bitzer. Which makes me wonder where the Kid is these days.

A trunk
A trunk/branches
A trunk/branches/leaves

...and the bog down in the valley-o.

And, I'm waiting to be picked up for my first trail hike of the year. (With Gracie, yay!)

Bill Higgins @38: You, sir, win all my internets.

*blushes* Aw, shucks, ma'am.

a sempre pio piano dolcemente

i make no move to hide the silver hair
i need to see the gleam here and there
the sign i cannot pluck away
i am older than i seem today
and older still,
and ever bolder I hold quiet for these threads
of frost on my head, touched with the cold
premature
rushing uncovered to a colorless air
I see it at my temples, at my crown
I see it springing in my step
and in my winding down
I make my peace
I cannot wait to see
what it looks like to be
untrammeled by more color.

there are copper strands as well
announcing fire as my fingers weave
through the heavy locks
and it is not a stain, a veneer, a pose---
I love that I have no use for those.
---

Say goodnight?

You know what would be great? An anthology of ML poetry. In hard-copy, so that it might survive.

So if anyone needs a biologist, mostly molecular, with engineering background and a license for semicolons, or any combination of those, who learns fast but is anxious about screwing up, let me know.

That sounds to me like a perfect background for the industry I'm in (biotech pharmaceutical production). In particular, the molecular biology/engineering intersection would be a strong selling point for someone doing development/troubleshooting in biotech production processes. Where I work, the departments in question would be named things like "manufacturing sciences" or "production engineering".

You might need to move to one of the biotech ghettos (like the SF bay area) to get the best opportunities, but there are plenty of companies in the midwest as well.

And, believe me, the additional ability to write/edit clear, communicative prose is not at all a handicap in the field!

The rights situation would be horrible, but whatcha gonna do?

Photos from New York

An open thread cry for assistance: I had a spreadsheet someone else had sent me to fill in. I filled it in, sorted it, had tons of information. I saved frequently. I sent it back... or at least I sent the email; I forgot to attach the spreadsheet. Now I can't find the filled-in spreadsheet. My current hypothesis is that it was read-only and I managed not to save it as my own thing, but wouldn't it have told me that more than the once I might remember?

I hate screwing things up. Seriously.

HLN: loopy person placed gadgets clear across the room in effort to Get More Sleep, and also to avoid that punchdrunk tendency of sleep deprived person to text and email when impaired by said lack. did it work? yes and no. Not more rest for the human, oh no, throes of internet withdrawal--- but the gadgets didn't heat up and they got their electronic rest.

More likely, it saved it somewhere in your email temp file structure. Two suggestions:

1. Check your spreadsheet program's recent documents: most programs keep track of the last 5 or 10 things you've dealt with. It may be in there.

2. Get another spreadsheet in email (send it to yourself or something). Try, not saving it, but save as, and look at the path that the system is offering you. It'll probably be somewhere temp-ish. Go into a file browser and look at that directory, and one or two directories up the tree. Sort them by date and see if there are any recent files in there.

It's the amazing vanishing spreadsheet! I may have found a hole in the universe. Sigh.

Crossing fingers for you! :-)

Thanks for the suggestions, Cecy. That seems like a weird way to run email/attachments, but then, I am wed to Gmail.

Jim, #187: This has been discussed before (back around 2009 IIRC) and there was a problem identified -- getting permissions from people who might not be around any more (literally or figuratively). If that can be resolved, I'd certainly buy one. And a ML cookbook as well.

And Canadian Coins with glow-in-the-dark dinosaur skeletons in Boing Boing.

It's religious music, created specifically for South American congregations in "mission times." Performed A cappella.

Dah-dah-DAH-dah-dahh
Dah-dah-DAH-dah-dahh
Dah-dah-DAH-dah-dahhh-dahhh

Thanks!

The biggest challenge to the anthropocentric principle here is probably: how important, and how special, was our Moon?

On the other hand, I have an SF conceit lurking around: Among the interstellar community, a race of theropods (or at least records of them) wandering around, that came from Earth. Why didn't we notice the remnants of their pre-space civilization? Well, other species nickname them the "Footprint Lifters"....

Details - and puppies - HERE...

And it's not a good time for this to be happening, either. I'm potentially a tiebreaker. Gr.

(I'm being quiet about what exactly the spreadsheet is for privacy and stress-to-others reasons.)

Three brave puppies went to sea,
Called Mary-One, and -Two, and -Three.
     A Stella Maris, oro tibi
     Pro catellae viā pelagi.
...

Perhaps I should have slept after all. thunk

Which, don't get me wrong, is a neat link, but I confess I was disappointed. I misread the link, you see, and I was expecting "GOOGLE BBC:"

"And now, on Google BBC 1, a dog riding a skateboard. On Google BBC 2, something improbable created from Legos. On Google BBC 3, cats."

Good thoughts, please.

Summary: This person has had a cyber-stalker for 10 years, who floods every post she makes with spam. Kickstarter deleted her project and threatened her with a permanent ban because of something she has no control over. Someone notes in the comments to this post that any Kickstarter project is now vulnerable to the actions of hate groups.

Not just hate groups. Any sufficiently motivated jerk with an axe to grind.

I am starting to think that real and/or effective apologies tend to be brief. Otherwise they go from "I'm sorry for this mistake, I understand how it must have upset you" through "I can't deny that I'd be bothered too" to "While I'd like to attempt to 'explain' how it happened, I understand that a) an explanation won't undo what was done and b) in the end, as the writer and editor of the newsletter's content, the buck must stop with me."

And then several paragraphs of attempting to explain how it happened, including naming someone else who was involved and implying that it was more her fault than his. (That he referred to her as "the young woman who handles data entry" doesn't help.)

Since I can't think of anything useful to say to this person, given that he is no longer involved with the organization in question, I'm posting here rather than try to give him a brief course in how not to apologize.

I am not sure if that's the proper stress pattern.

The melody starts around 1:00 on this movie trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvWaD-NErlY

but there are times when it is sung by a chorus, not just the high voices.

(Google, google, "On Earth as it is in Heaven.")

On that note, I have misplaced my one-year-old. But since I've got a two-year-old now, I haven't looked too hard. (my... press-cioussss...)

So we have a plant in our yard whose basal leaves look just like a (fairly ratty and elongated) dandelion's, but it then puts up a tall spike and produces tiny white flowers just like a shepherd's purse's.

We are very confused over here, and online weed-keys are not solving the dilemma.

For those who remember, my last puzzle-weed is now definitely confirmed to be purple deadnettle.

http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-5-stupidest-habits-you-develop-growing-up-poor/

His comments: "You've been cromwelled".

another blogger, Malcolm Knight, on the matter.

There are a few different kinds of sow thistle, from what I can figure out:

Spiny sowthistle
Annual sowthistle
Perennial sowthistle
And smooth sowthistle, references to which seem to be mostly British Isles-based.

So if the first link I posted doesn't quite match either your weed or Elliott Mason's, perhaps another variety?

Jacque @247: I absolutely adore chicory, and this isn't it. The exact shade of actinic periwinkle blue that chicory flowers are on the first morning they open is my favorite color in all the world. :->

This is a really odd little weed. It honestly looks like someone took the spike/stem from a shepherd's-purse (minus the tiny heart-shaped leaves) and glued it into a dandelion base.

I'm pretty good at weed-ID, at least of stuff that I've been around before, but this new house has a slightly different biome and is turning up species I haven't encountered since my mom's yard in childhood.

The other plant-ID confusions I'm encountering is in the department of planted-on-purpose ornamentals, which I'm not nearly as good on as weeds. :-> We have peonies! Also lily-of-the-valley (both of which I did know on sight) and a big wad of something that I'm sure are bulbs but not sure what KIND of bulbs; the initial leaves are coming out of the ground all veiny and convoluted, which is a new one on me.

Beaked Cornsalad?

Beaked Cornsalad?

Serge reported the same thing—BitDefender, right? I went and looked on the WordPress.com support pages, BitDefender is prone to false alarms on WordPress blogs.

Note that Noise2Sig.nl is a WordPress.com hosted blog mirrored onto a custom URL. In other words, I'm only using WordPress' own centrally provided and maintained software and plugins. (That's not the same as WordPress.org, which gives you software to install locally, and which has been known to have malware.)

So unless WordPress itself has been hacked—and I checked, and it hasn't—it's a false alarm.

Sigh.

Hollywood Reporter obit: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/william-finley-star-brian-de-312504

I saw Phantom of the Paradise for the first time in the summer on 1975, about two weeks after Rod Serling died. I was 15, and I cried when I heard Rod's voice.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stefan_e_jones/7085081671/in/photostream

You know, because!

"Never," he said, "have the words 'no news is good news' been so apt." He went on to thank his friends for all the good thoughts and good mojo (including more than a kilocrane of origami!) that have supported this happy result.

His next checkup is in July.

I'm in the market for a different blogging app now, so I don't have to do it again, at least for my sites. I want to keep my archives(going back to 11/99!), not necessarily the template, and most importantly, I want to edit in emacs, with a reasonable wiki syntax, and save to html. And store in source control. And then. bah, I'll want ipad access.

Xopher: Many happy returns of the day!

Xopher: Yay!!

Where do you live? It sounds a bit like bittercress.

*"cup" being approx 6 fl oz. for this particular coffeemaker

Area man also wishes many happy (non) returns (of the cancer) to Xopher.

I live in Chicago.

As a teenager, I would frequently spend my Saturday afternoons busking in the small town where I grew up. (I play the fiddle.) We had a system where you signed up for an inexpensive permit and the town allowed you to put out a hat for tips. I usually made a decent amount of money, too--twenty to thirty dollars during a couple of hours' concert, on a busy day. Time went on, life intervened, and I quit fiddling for the most part.

Right now, I'm thinking about going back to sidewalk fiddling, with perhaps some interludes of singing and/or guitar. I'd like to try playing in the city, and I'm planning to get a T permit and play on subway platforms in Boston. Perhaps I'll try other tourist-destination cities for working vacations. For now, I'm just practicing and trying to get my skills up and running again.

Does anyone have experiences they'd like to share as a public performer? I'd like to hear 'em. (And I won't judge you if you're a mime.)

I don't know if they still busk, but you should talk to these ladies.

If you come through Boulder, you should give us a shout and we'll try to put together a meeting of the Making Light Colorado Front Range Little Old Ladies Sewing Circle and World Domination League.

So it's not this?

My personal fave story, though, came from a paying gig. We were providing color for a relaxation meeting of a bunch of hotel people. There was a picnic area, and beyond that a bunch of medieval-style games for the people to play. As the hoteliers were arriving, one of the hotel-based crew said "Well, I guess I should start the music now." "No," I replied, "if you start the music they'll sit down in the picnic area and never get to the games. Let the morris dancers start dancing, and lead them down to the game area; then, once everyone's here, start the music near the picnic tables. It'll work better." He replied, "What are you, some kind of banquet manager?" (But he did what I suggested!)

In last Sunday's episode of Mad Men, we learn that one of the characters was pursuing a side career in writing . . . SF&F.

He's told by a senior partner to lay off, but in the last scene of the episode we see him writing in bed, incorporating an idea brought up at a party earlier in the week.

B. 286: I liked both the phrase and its referent.

dcb 289: Obviously it's the cranes that made the difference. By the way, did you ever get time to string them up?

Ooo, now we're touching something about which I have tremendous guilt. I got them when I was still recovering, and the physical recovery was followed by a period of depression (of the not-getting-out-of-bed kind) and...I never did put them up. I'm very sorry about this. The magic of them works for me just the same though.

Today I came across something like that. Fit for open threadiness and relevant to some of the conversations that have been ongoing in some of the threads here

A short quote from it:

Dear Daughter
You should know that you are hated.
I’m not sure why they hate you. You didn’t do anything to them. You don your princess crown, take up your sword, and pretend at Pokemon. You read your books and you learn how to draw comics and dragons and you play piano and practice kung fu. You delight in pretty dresses and weaponry. You love me when I nurture you as a mom, train with you as a warrior, and play video games and card games with you.

Click through and read the full thing, it really rang true for me.

You can put them up to celebrate anything, or never put them up at all. The magic of the kilocrane still works.

This crowd also potentially includes Carol Kimball and CZEdwards (although the latter intermittently seems to fall off the planet. ;-> )

Psst! The Boulder County Fair concludes the previous weekend.

Xopher @300: The kilocrane is a lot of cranes; when we had the .2 Boulder kilocrane strung from Niki's chandelier, it was an imposing sight. Deploying the full contingent might best be reserved for ... Special Occassions ...?

Ginger, that's good news, too. Glad to hear the disentanglement is proceeding.

Jennifer, it's been back for a while. I thought I posted about that. I'm singing like before, albeit with a few funny consonants.

I do wish, however, there was a decent word for "every four months". I've only found the suggestions of triannual and quadrimonthly. The former is easily confused with triennial* and the latter seems an awkward hybrid.

*I must confess I wasn't aware of the distinction between biennial and biannual until now.

IANAL;TINLA. IA,H,AWP...AITZBIAB.

Thena @285: What a world, where breathing is regarded as a salable commodity that should be doled out to those who can pay for it.

Stefan @299: Gosh, here's a description of a scene from Mad Men that actually makes me want to see it. I know I really enjoyed the 20th Century SF writer episode of DS9.

Sika @301, thank you for that link. One of the few times I was really satisfied with a reply to a bully, it went like this:
"Huh! What a woman!"
[Raised eyebrow] "Really? Gee, I kind of like women."

Ginger @304, I'm glad to hear that.

Xopher @308, I'm glad to hear that -- and I'd love to hear it.

GlendaP @310, I once created a silly calendar which divided a 360-day year* every way it could be: from two Halves of 180 days to 180 Doubles of two days. I forget what the three 120-day periods were called, but probably nothing better than "triannual" or "quadrimensual".
* With an intercalary 5- or 6-day festival, of course.

I suspect the cranes are marinating their magic. Marinated magic has a subtle flavor, unlike fresh baked magic.

You will know if/when the time to hang them comes!

But it is nevertheless a fascinating reveal.

Jr yrnea gung Pbftebir unf unq gjragl fgbevrf choyvfurq, va Tnynkl nzbat bguref, naq gung gurl'er fyngrq gb or nagubybtvmrq.

Uvf jvsr vf cyrnfrq nf chapu, naq ng n cnegl "bhgf" Xra naq qrfpevorf n fgbel juvpu, va gur pbagrkg bs n 1960f trg-gbtrgure bs uneq qevaxvat nqiregvfvat glcrf, fbhaqf hggreyl ynzr naq chmmyvat.

Xra pynvzf gung gur bayl ernfba ur pbagvahrf gb jevgr vf gung uvf jvsr yvxrf gur vqrn . . . ohg gur snpg gung ur'f frra fpevooyvat njnl nsgre orvat pnyyrq gb gur zng naq gbyq gb fgbc fgebatyl fhttrfgf gung ur vf qevira.

Ng gur cnegl, ur frrzrq vagevthrq ol na bssunaq erznex gung gur ubfg'f arj fgrerb fbhaqrq yvxr vg zvtug npghnyyl unir n bepurfgen bs gval zhfvpvnaf vafvqr . . . naq fher rabhtu, gung orpnzr gur frrq bs gur fgbel ur vf pbzcryyrq gb jevgr. V pbhyq eryngr gb gung.

Was it just me interpreting that last scene as, "He's no longer writing fantasy/SF, but has moved on to a more 'literary' style."?

Jacque, #303: Yes, but the Boulder County Fair wasn't at MileHiCon last year actively recruiting vendors for their Geek Tent. :-)

OTOH, Ken was established as a literary writer in season one, when he got ribbed for having a story published. (In Colliers, was it?) A account of his country childhoods, if I remember right.

So he might be putting "literary quality" in his SF&F . . . recall that the story may have been about little orchestra men!

Hope you found the bookmark.

REALLY glad to hear about the progress with the singing.

GlendaP: Congrats!

Thena @285: Sympathies. Ridiculous that the simple act of breathing should be taxed like that.

I see the point he's making, but have two major reservations:

a. I no longer have much confidence that I can predict what liberal principles Obama's administration will violate next. It's easy to say that Romney will be worse than Obama on torture or interventionist foreign policy, and that seems plausible, but it doesn't seem all that solid to me--Obama has already reversed himself on a number of issues he committed to. After the election, when he, personally, never needs another liberal vote or dollar, why should I believe he will not reverse himself on still more of these positions? To put it another way, if you had asked me in 2008, I'd have said that Obama would be very unlikely to do the things he's actually done. If you'd described the war on terror, hammering of whistleblowers, stopping of torture but sheltering torturers from justice, I would have thought these policies more consistent with a McCain administration than with an Obama administration. Why should I trust new predictions of the same type?[1]

b. Voting for the marginally better candidate means that there is no way to push back on the ruling class consensus in places where it's a disaster for the country--whether that's mall cop wannabes taking your pocketknife and water bottle away at the airport, or bombing the hell out of the next three small defenseless countries that annoy us, or running huge deficits forever because it's good for your prospects in the next election. If it doesn't cost Democrats anything to sell out the liberal base, but the Republicans fear the Tea Party and don't dare move to the center on many important issues, then guess which way our politics move as a nation.

[1] I will note that I was not predicting rainbows and unicorns from Obama even before he came to power--still, I would not have predicted his administration's handling of things related to the war on terror, whistleblowers, interventionist foreign policy, etc.

**SIGH**

YAY for the clean followup, and the returned singing!

ZB claims to have written "We all come from the Goddess?" Funny, I thought it was Starhawk/Reclaiming's creation...

*My own personal library, not a public one. I have finally achieved one of my life goals in having an entire room in my house devoted to nothing but books. With 245 shelf-feet of space I just might have enough.

Besides, I can hardly imagine a more efficient dust-collector than all those little folds.

Dusty strings would be depressing, eh? Whatever you do with them, it should continue joy.

*****

At her request, we had a Viking Funeral for a friend who'd had a terrible year. Made a cardboard ship a couple feet long, filled it with calendar pages with the unfortunate dates circled, anything that represented awful stuff any of us wanted to get rid of. We fired it up and let it drift off down the Platte (admission of possible misdemeanor) with flames shooting up, just before the New Year's Fireworks started going off. It was good closure.

To flip the imagery - maybe liberate a few cranes with each good checkup, so their healing can go back into general use?

I understand this might squick someone out. It would work for me.

Lots of interesting things in there, whether one agrees with all (or any) of them or not. I found this especially thought-provoking:

"And I believe very strongly people on the left are too prone to do things that are emotionally satisfying and not politically useful. I have a rule, and it’s true of Occupy, it’s true of the gay-rights movement: If you care deeply about a cause, and you are engaged in an activity on behalf of that cause that is great fun and makes you feel good and warm and enthusiastic, you’re probably not helping, because you’re out there with your friends and political work is much tougher and harder."

I worked in HHS Inspector General office, in Audit Services. Since GSA is in charge of the travel system (Govtrip), I'm trying to figure out how they got those expenses through the approval system.

Yes, there are overrides that will allow you to claim higher expenses, but those raise flags that the next person up the chain has to review and approve.

Today I'm reading that these Federal employees were taking their spouses and children on trips and had the government pick up the entire cost of the trip. And I'm asking, "HOW!?" Because Govtrip does not allow you to make flight reservations for more than one person.

I'm still boggling over the Secret Service situation as well...

::blinkblinkblink:: Whatwhatwhat? Geek Tent? Vendors?

What, may one ask, are you vending?

fidelio @334: you are engaged in an activity on behalf of that cause that is great fun and makes you feel good and warm and enthusiastic, you’re probably not helping, because you’re out there with your friends and political work is much tougher and harder

Hmm. That sounds suspiciously like the classic Puritan Work Ethic: "Real work is boring and difficult and painful. If you're enjoying yourself, Ur Doin It Rong."

Sorry, don't buy it from Frank, either.

Elections are won, and change is made, by getting out the vote. ObSF: Two of the best books on this topic that I know of were written by SF writers who were also deeply involved in politics at very practical levels: Robert Heinlein and Fred Pohl.

*ahem* As a former "mall cop", I'm not sure if that was meant in a derogatory sense. (Because -I- was never one of those officious jerks you sometimes encounter wearing a security uniform. Well, hardly ever.)

In related HLN, I'm happy so far with the job change to a new security position at a large local manufacturing facility. Shorter commute, higher pay, actual benefits, and a workplace atmosphere that people seem to actually appreciate.

(A lot of the employees have been working there, not just years, but for decades. Having an actual non-governmental career from entry-level position to retirement with the same employer nowadays just seems... freakin' weird.)

I'm told by some of the other security employees that eventually the repetition and routine of security patrols will become "mind-numbing". But after having to deal with explosions, floods, armed robbers and always the damn drunks at the last workplace, "boring" is pretty refreshing right now.

The one drawback so far has been that I work two 12-hour shifts on weekends, which pretty much eliminates attending local conventions until I build up some leave time. Had to miss LepreCon last week for the first time in over thirty years.

I would suggest you take a look at the full text of the interview before dismissing his point entirely. I think one thing he's trying to get at is that the work is not done because you show up for the rally, the march, the [insert activity]. Follow-up has to happen, and the follow-up may not be nearly as much fun.
Knowing the work you've done, however tedious and drawn-out it may be, has lead to good things can be fulfilling (and I think he would agree that a lot of what's he's done has had results that make him happy), but the work needed to get to the end may not always be a Good Time.

Look at the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s; the 1963 March on Washington was an uplifting moment, but it's hardly the whole part of that movement. A lot of hard, dangerous work lay in the years behind the moment where MLK said "I have a dream", as well as in the years after that. If all one did was show up for that speech, or watch it on television, how great a contribution was that? Was the work done by the Johnson Administration and key members of Congress in getting the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as uplifting? Was it vital in spite of that?

I don't think Frank's denying that there are high points along the way, or saying that victories cannot be enjoyed. I think he's saying that if you expect it to be that was all the time, and aren't willing to play unless it is, then you aren't doing much to advance your project.

We've just been through revisions of the Civil Service laws in Tennessee. There were rallies for state employees, and opportunities for them to meet with state legislators. There was also a lot of hard-nosed, face to face negotiation going on beyween the governor, legislative leaders, and various lobbyists, including the state employee's association. The rallies may have given the TSEA a little added ammunition, but they weren't the biggest factor in play.

The rallies against Scott Walker & Co. in Wisconsin made a difference, but if people hadn't been willing to carry around all those repeal petitions, canvas for donations, and do the less-agreeable parts of the job, they wouldn't have a recall election on the calendar. After the primary for the Democratic candidate, an effective campaign will have to be conducted to make sure Walker loses in the fall--and even though he's wildly unpopular, poor effort by his opponents could blow everything done so far. This will require a lot of dull work--passing out yard signs, arranging appearances, setting up and clearing away after meetings of different sorts, get out the vote work, and all the rest. Some of it will be enjoyable--but to assume that it must be so, that you can count on that, is unwise, I think, and I believe that's Mr. Frank's point.

On an unrelated matter, I offer this:

"We were a great team," said the wizard Livelong, disconsolately stroking a pointed ear. "Everyone knew who we were. But then he had to go back and be Duke of Milan. But people still mention us to each other back home, which is kind of touching."

"It's not a perfect world, but it is a very different one."

"When you say "We've made progress" you are not saying "We shall now disarm." You are saying "We have won some battles.""

Debra, #337: I took it to mean the equivalent of Tom Lehrer's "Folk Song Army" -- or, on the other side of the political fence, the people who think that putting a "Support the Troops" magnetic ribbon on their SUV (and doing nothing else) is actually doing something substantive about the issue.

fidelio, #340: A lot of the hard work of the Civil Rights movement was done by the people out in the field, in the Deep South, who risked (and in some cases lost) not just their freedom but their lives. And before them, there was the Underground Railroad, and anyone who was part of that network risked death if they were discovered.

* My website is currently undergoing reconstruction -- it got nailed in a server crash, and my backups were insufficient.

Okay, Coworker A comes back from the building's Disaster Preparedness meeting. Turns out each department has to come up with its own plan. Coworker A says, very reasonably, "Wouldn't it make more sense for the whole building to come up with a plan?"

"I think we should do the CDC's Zombie Apocalypse plan!"

"Zombies? What's that?" says Coworker A (who is from Poland—I had stumped her earlier in the day with a reference to Rumplestiltskin.).

"You know, Zombie Apocalypse!"

Coworker B chimes in: "I haven't heard of that either. I quit paying attention to all of that back when we were supposed to have the Rapture."

"...we need to assume the entire population of Oakland now wants to eat us..."
- from zombie novel "Deadline" by Mira Grant, aka Seanan McGuire.

*great sadness*

I feel sad about the railroad and it's no wonder
it used to run right by my door
I can't hear it anymore
How can I sleep at night when the whistle don't blow...

"There was a demon that lived in the air. They said whoever challenged him would die. Their controls would freeze up, their planes would buffet wildly, and they would disintegrate. The demon lived at Mach 1 on the meter, seven hundred and fifty miles an hour, where the air could no longer move out of the way. He lived behind a barrier through which they said no man could ever pass. They called it the sound barrier."
- Levon Helm in "The Right Stuff"

Man, I thought he was older than that -- and that he had a picture in a closet somewhere. It feels like the world has changed.

Both Zombie Apocalypse and the Rapture seem crazy, but they could both be used as examples of different sorts of disaster.

Zombie Apocalypse: that's essentially rioting in the streets, with a touch of disease epidemic. You're talking about things such as perimeter security, and also about the possible effects of an influenza epidemic.

The Rapture seems to me to be an analogue to a bus (or plane) loaded with key staff (going to some big industry event) crashing. How do you cope with that sort of thing?

I wouldn't push the analogy too far, but it might be useful, for instance, to emphasise how extreme things have to be to justify the use of weapons by security guards.

I agree, it's easier to sell danger than boredom when trying to get people to help with the work.

Lee @ 353:

A lot of the hard work of the Civil Rights movement was done by the people out in the field, in the Deep South, who risked (and in some cases lost) not just their freedom but their lives. And before them, there was the Underground Railroad, and anyone who was part of that network risked death if they were discovered.

That's true, but a great deal of both movements was the detail work of planning and preparing, making sure the maps were drawn properly and the food was packed, that the false compartment in the crate had enough air holes, and that the lawyers were at the jail before the cops brought in the marchers so there'd be witnesses to prevent brutality. One of the real heroes of the Railroad was a free black man of Philadelphia named William Still, who was chairman of the committee formed by Abolitionists in Philadelphia to aid escaped slaves. Among other things, he kept records of the people who passed through his station of the railroad (often as many as 60 in a month), so that we now know who the people were who fled slavery; for most of them, no other record exists. While interviewing one of those escapees, he discovered that the man was his own brother, born in the south after his mother and two brothers had been recaptured after their escape, and unknown to Still for all the intervening years.

Hand them this?

Hence: huge explosion, nuclear winter, dinosaurs die out, K-T iridium spike.

Oh terrific -- why do I have the feeling that GSA is not using the same systems they make the other government agencies use? More stories today about officials taking their families on trips on the government's dime that had absolutely nothing to do with said official's duties...sigh.

The last time there was a blow-up over government training (during the Chimp's administration) our agency required that all Regions desiring to have a group training session submit a request that gave all details -- location, number of attendees, and total cost (travel, hotel, etc.) to the Inspector General for approval.

I have combined leave and official travel in the past (got to the last Chicago Worldcon that way). I've also saved the government money by staying with relatives and friends when TDY brought me close enough to do so.

I am so angry and disgusted with both GSA and the Secret Service -- but I also know that there are people working in those agencies who are embarrassed and heartsick right now.

Texanne, Serge, any others interested, here is the latest panel of Girl Genius.

You will notice a word on the side of the Cunning Artifice's boiler. I believe it is a particularly clever pun, possibly French, possibly bilingual, but I can't work it out. I know that the French word for "mouse" is "(le) souris", but that's as far as I get.

Can anyone fathom it? It's been itching at my brain all day.

http://girlgeniuscomic.livejournal.com/185263.html

Șoarecii sunt animale rozătoare (Rodentia) din familia Muridae, din care fac parte ca. 37 de specii din care unele trăiesc în pădure iar altele ca șoarecele de casă trăiesc în apropierea omului.

ajay, #364: I like it! Find a way to explain the strike remnants in the Gulf of Mexico, and I think you've got a salable story there.

I recently read a book by Tom Perrotta, The Leftovers, which deals with the Rapture, as suffered by a suburban Midwestern town.

K. D. Wentworth, Oklahoma SF author, fan, and conrunner.

Actor Jonathan Frid. His last work was a cameo in the upcoming Burton/Depp Dark Shadows movie (which will be uncredited at his request).

Damn.

In the popular versions of eschatology that include a Rapture, the 144,000 are not all the saved. (Ideas of who the 144,000 are differ, but I'm not familiar with the "all the saved throughout history" view; the "Watchtower" view that they are all those who go to heaven exists within the context of a theology where most of the saved inherit the new Earth.)

I'm working through Head First Python, and I'm at the point where I'm adding a file parameter to an indented-printing function, and I keep getting this error "TypeError: print_lol() got an unexpected keyword argument 'fh'."

I've imported the function from the module in the program. I rebuilt the new version of the function. It seems like it could only get that error if it's reading the old version of the function, but I've installed the new version in my Python shell and everything.

I'm sure I've done something stupid, but for the life of me I can't figure out what. I asked on the Python forum on O'Reilly's site, but no response so far.

email: com dot protocolzero at jbaughman (reversed)

Without seeing the code, a couple of things that could be tripping you up-- reloading anything in the interpreter doesn't touch up existing objects, you would need to recreate them. If you're using modules, reload can be helpful, but it can also get you into places where you have an inconsistent set of code. To truly make sure that you're not getting fooled, exiting the interpreter and restarting can sync everything back up again.

Roumanian! Of course!

It reminds me of the song from "My Fair Lady", except of course that was Hungarian. If you see what I mean.

Come to think of it, do I see what I mean?

I know! It's not a story idea, it's a story I read somewhere and I can't remember the title.

"No, what really bothered me was sleeping only on my back and with only one pillow -- I suddenly realized I just couldn't breathe!" she said in a rather grouchy tone this morning. "All night long! Hardly any sleep! BLECH!" She went on to describe her uvula as "Edematous, and that makes me almost nauseated, which I do not like."

Although the local woman, who did not wish to be identified by name, also indicated that she knew many people in the world had worse problems than hers this morning, she also indicated that she would be feeling somewhat grumpy until the irritated throat settled down. Current predictions of cool weather and hot tea may possibly soothe the grouchiness, but only time will heal the uvula.

Patrick 379: Thanks! I couldn't quite figure out your email address for sure. Is it your first name at your domain?

Jennifer 380: Thank you, sent. It's Python 3.2.2, and the book says Python 3 (in fact that's why I chose 3 to download).

eric 381: Thank you, sent. This particularly caught my eye:

Without seeing the code, a couple of things that could be tripping you up-- reloading anything in the interpreter doesn't touch up existing objects, you would need to recreate them. If you're using modules, reload can be helpful, but it can also get you into places where you have an inconsistent set of code. To truly make sure that you're not getting fooled, exiting the interpreter and restarting can sync everything back up again.

That really sounds like what's happening. Questions in email.

Ginger 389: Ick. I hate that part. I've found that when my voice is croaky from swelling, hot cranberry juice does wonders for restoring it, not only for speaking but for singing. I theorize (and IANAP; ICDOP; TIIOFEPO) that there must be some topical astringent effect. If I'm right about that it strikes me as possible that it might help your uvula as well. Might. Possibly. Void where prohibited etc.

Conditions included bright sun, temperatures in the mid-seventies and cheerful passers-by. During the same evening, AW also held a practice session in a relatively private area near waterfront shopping districts, and engaged in conversation with a panhandler who was resolved that no one must trespass on his territory, but who was a decent guy. "I call the day a net win," said AW. "I definitely mean to do it again."

I'm so using that word if ever I write a Lovecraft homage.

Serge @ 394: The squamous, rugose, edematous uvula? Sounds pretty horrifying to me. Ia! Ia! Ulp.

In fact, for me it set up a bit of classical conditioning. My orthodontist wore powdered latex gloves when he adjusted my braces. For years, even after I got my braces off, the smell of powdered latex gloves would cause my teeth to ache. Seriously.

The first few times it happened I couldn't understand why my teeth were hurting, and why it only happened when I was working in the lab. Then one day I idly sniffed the box of gloves, and was rewarded with a more-intense ache in my teeth -- and I put it together.

Brains are weird.

Condolences. Even when it's the best choice, after a long and happy life, it's a painful thing to do.

If cats can be proud of their names, I'm sure he was!

The ornamental cabbages that were planted in the park last fall have not only bolted, they have blossomed. It turns out that, given the chance, those purple-and-white cabbages produce tall spikes with lots of small yellow flowers.

In anything resembling a normal winter, the cold would have killed the cabbages by February. Even after this mild winter, with the early spring, I would expect a gardener to have uprooted them and planted something else. However, the parks department is repaving the tennis courts, putting this cabbage patch inside the fenced-off construction area. I wonder how much longer this will last.

I'm currently in Archer City TX (found a book inscribed by my grandmother to another female force in 20th C printmaking!); the bookstore cat has cancer and is very skinny, but seems to be still having some good times. He liked being stroked and massaged, and even got up a bit of a purr for me.

Lee: I'm sorry you had to go through that. I have a friend struggling with a similar choice, so it feels close to home.

Xopher HalfTongue @390: when my voice is croaky from swelling, hot cranberry juice does wonders for restoring it

I have become rather a fan of hot cranberry juice, just on principle. I get Knudson's unsweetened cranberry juice concentrate in the little 8oz jars, splash a dolop of that into a cup dosed with the appropriate amount of sugar, pour in boiling water and: violá! Numminess.

Lee @401: Via con dios, Fafhrd.

Pick a word. Any word, from anywhere.

Prove it isn't English. Go ahead, I dare you!

(Which is not to say that was the intent. :)

I and my family are fine. I haven't heard that anyone we know was involved.

My thoughts are with those who were, and their families. From what I hear, the emergency sevices did good work. I hope it's rewarded with commensurately good outcomes.

... How very meta. And unethical. And, if government funds were used in the process, illegal as hell.

"Billy drives me crazy; all he wants to do is papiar all day."

The other day, one of our cleaning personnel at work asked what the thing was called that she stirred the coffee with. She is originally from Cuba and is still not comfortable speaking English.

She had a real hard time with pronouncing the way the i sound happens in the word stir. She wanted to make it more like 'steer'.

Any thoughts? Is this a sound that doesn't happen in Spanish? Just curious and ML knows all.

*Approximately. In both cases the vowel is less drawn out than in English, and the "r" is a bit different, too.

I won a gift basket of dog stuff, and was amazed to find that not one thing was of use to me or my dog. (Doesn't need a fleece vest; gets bathed by professionals; bending down to pick up poop is good exercise; is terrified of laser pointers.)*

I find myself in an unjustified and petty bad mood because of this.

I'm going to find therapy in a mental exercise:

Think of a person. Mentally assemble a gift basket of wonderful, new, even pricey items which he or she would have absolutely no use or appreciation for.

I'd never do this, mind you, but it is an interesting exercise.

* I'll either donate the gift basket goods to the local dog park fundraiser, or give them to dog owners at work.

It's difficult for a native Spanish speaker who learns English as an adult to make the leading-S sound. Usually you'll find folks adding an E sound to the front of the word. You could ask her to try saying it with an Argentine accent. That might work.

Think of a gift basket, provided by way of apology from a corporate entity, consisting entirely of items to which the recipient is spectacularly and ferociously allergic ...

The wife of a former boss of mine had a plant business, and one year she gave the entire staff, all 60-75 of us, poinsettias for Christmas. Everyone in our office loved them, but I did wonder how many went to people who had allergies.

There's an aphorism about English and dark alleys, which I'm sure you all know.

Maybe that word wasn't English, but it is now.

J Homes.

Last night I was at a showing of international short films, which was followed by a Q&A with the producers/writers/actors in attendance.

The writer of one of the French films was describing how he started with a love story, but the producer insisted on a twist that would defeat the audience's expectations. He was struggling to find the English to express categories of film types, and settled on "kind of"; I wanted to shout out "genre" (while also thinking "the French have no word for entrepreneur").

—

* One of her obsessions is feral cat rescue, and she is owned by twenty-some-odd who are unadoptable for one reason or another.

So you have a cat-orker instead of a cow-orker?

Perhaps Jacque works at Catastrophe Inc ;)

Out here, I was once flummoxed by a young lady from New Zealand. I was handing out freebies at a con - you know, you buy a day membership, you get a free cup of coffee. Her five friends had sent her over to get all of theirs at once, but I didn't know that. All I know is that when she got to the table she announced that she wanted sex.

Honestly, Joyce, I didn't know where to put my face.

(1) At my age, my response would probably have been along the lines of "I'm honoured".

(2) I am reminded of the story of the English writer autographing books in Oz who signed a book to "Emma Chisit" and then discovered that she'd misunderstood an inquiry regarding the price.

As for 'hlepy', I think that's one meaning, but advice can also be hlepy if it's just really unhelpful, or suggests things impossible for the hlepee to do, or that s/he has already tried.

Welcome, Carla!

I tend to read 'hlepy' / 'helpy' and variants as 'toddler help' - the kind of help that's more helpful for the helper than it is for the help-ee, being at best useless and at worst an active impediment to solving the initial problem.

This can take various forms, including being patronizing or condescending; redundant (in the sense of something already tried that was mentioned not to work); inapplicable (in the sense of options eliminated due to some described barrier); or just really annoying and clueless.

This is not an exhaustive list: file under "recognize it when you see it."

OT question regarding software for photographers, wrt to teenager and moderately expensive camera . . . does it have to be Photoshop? She has a MacBook. She makes her little videos with iMovie, which she loves. But she really wants Photoshop to go with the new camera, which is making my budget squirm. The camera (body and basic lens, plus assorted basic accessories that come in the box), plus extra battery and extra memory, plus camera case, plus tripod, is probably in the neighborhood of $1,000, and Photoshop seems to be another $600 or so on top of that.

OT on an Open Thread???

But The GIMP may do what she needs.

Things it does not do as well as Photoshop:
Print colour control.
There is an advanced feature called Effects Layers in Photoshop that The GIMP does not (yet) have.

Things it does better than Photoshop:
Preparing images for Web presentation.

Price: How much will it cost you to download the installer. The GIMP is Free Software.

J Homes.

Thanks for the recc!

Thank you, Patrick, Jennifer, and eric!

You're hardly the only one to cringe at the price tag on Photoshop. What my friends and I use to get around that $600+ is as follows:
The GIMP as mentioned above; Photoshop Elements or Lightroom, both from Adobe; or Apple's Aperture. None of them are an exact match for Photoshop's full feature set, but they come in at a lower price even if you were to acquire all of them.

Note -- if you get Photoshop Elements, buy it from Adobe, the version in the App Store lacks some features of the full version. The full version does have the most frequently used features of Photoshop and goes for less than 1/4th the price.

Aperture is basically iPhoto on steroids, so would likely be the shortest learning curve. The GIMP comes the closest to matching Photoshop's capabilities but has a rather quirky interface which makes the learning curve a bit of a challenge for some people. Lightroom and Aperture are very similar, intended for professional photographers working with a lot of images. I have worked with all of these, and have found myself mainly using Aperture.

The lilac and the dogwood are finished blooming, and the clematis on the lamp-post is loaded with buds. During the last two freezes we've wrapped it in a bedsheet.

There are thousands of toadpoles in the pond. I need to take the waterlily out and divide and fertilize it.

I've got lotus and more waterlilies ordered, not sure when the suppliers will ship because the weather has been soooooo weird. I'm guessing they'll stick to the regular schedule despite the warm temperatures we've been having...

Aperture is great for photo organization and management for large numbers of photos. It handles RAW files completely transparently to the user. It has very good adjustment tools, too -- exposure adjustment, color correction, brushes, etc. I also found it very easy to use.

Photoshop is really for heavy-duty professional retouching and photo manipulation, and is priced accordingly. Moreover, it does not have any tools for photo organization. It is also quite difficult to learn from scratch, because it's just a huge, complex program with hundreds of tools and options -- I'd recommend a class or at least a book.

My husband is a professional photographer who's been using Photoshop since version 2.0 (before there were layers). He knows and loves Photoshop; he's completely comfortable with all of its complexities, and can do pretty much anything with it. But he spends much more of his time in Aperture now. So much of a photographer's workflow involves importing, organizing, and sorting photos, and Aperture excels at that. And the adjustment/retouching tools are so much quicker to use right there, rather than having to export everything to Photoshop in order to just do a basic color correction.

He goes to Photoshop when he needs to do cutouts, compositing, or heavy-duty retouching. But watching him work, I've noticed that he does the vast majority of his photo adjustments in Aperture.

I'd say that Aperture is more likely to be immediately useful to your daughter -- and is certainly more immediately affordable. Photoshop might be something she can save up for.

AKICIML - All Knowledge is Contained in Making Light, short hand for here comes a question

HLN - Hyper Local News, shorthand for this post is unrelated to the ongoing discussion, but I just gotta share.

Helen Mirren as Emma Peel. But who opposite her?

The genesis of HLN was this August 2010 Open Thread #145 post by Erik Nelson, noting that "hyperlocal" was the new journalism buzzword and linking to a mockup of the Hyper-Local News front page. It only took one comment before the concept of "Hyper-Local News" was adopted by the Making Light commentariat. The phrase was contracted to HLN by praisegod barebones in the same thread, with a William Carlos Williams reference (another Making Light tradition).

janetl and Caroline: Thanks for the additional definitions of AKICIML and HLN.

I'd better start my own FAQ now!

Jacque @446: Poinsettias are not poisonous. They're not health food, of course. The place I worked had a handout with info from the poinsettia growers that disputed the toxic claim vigorously.

Stephen Fry as Steed?

So, would the Avengers be standing out anachronistically in the 21st Century, or would it be a period piece? Personally, I'd like to see them feeling a bit out of place and uncomfortable in Thatcherite 1982 . . . .

This reminds me of Kim Newman's Richard Jeperson, aka the Man from the Diogenes Club. The first stories are set in the early Sixties, and are quite whimsical, but an air of melancholy starts permeating the tales as Jeperson, a psychically sensitive person, finds himself facing the Thatcher Era.

Why? No one who knows anything about the brain has believed that in decades, and in fact I'm almost sure no brain scientists have ever believed that. My only reservation would be the fact that I know that some scientists have always believed that anything whose function they couldn't determine did nothing.

For example, glial cells are named after mortar because people thought they didn't do anything except stick neurons together. Far from the case of course, but people really did believe it.

But that 10% thing? No, that's bullshit. If people ever believed that, it was stupid of them. And no one who knows anything about the brain has believed it in years and years.

The reason I would recommend Lightroom over Aperture for a beginning user is that Adobe offer a 30 day free trial of Lightroom (Apple don't seem to have one for Aperture). You can find out if it's enough for your needs before you have to worry about money.

What I use for my home photos is iPhoto. No joke. And I've got a horrible little camera.

Let me tell you a little something I picked up in college. After a year and a half of engineering, I realized it really wasn't what I wanted to do. So I needed a major that I could finish in two-and-a-half years, and settled on Broadcast Studies (which is why I usually refer to my degree as a BA through the Honors Program; Broadcast Studies can be a big joke of a degree if you don't treat it seriously.) We had equipment that was older than we were and the most snarky sarcastic and talented professor you could imagine on the visual side. He told us something that was very important—Don't use the latest, greatest, and fanciest equipment when you start. Develop your eye and your technique first, and you can use anything.

The same concept applies to photography—if you start out with a heavy-duty program, you'll often use it to mask your foundational problems. If you've got nothing more than cropping and levels adjustment, you're going to learn to fix things before you get into trouble. "Camera time makes money; Photoshop loses money."

Now if only I could convince some photographers of that...

I use iPhoto to adjust contrast, brightness, and color temp, because you don't really need anything more for simple adjustment. I have a copy of Photoshop CS2, which I acquired very cheap some years ago (a friend of mine is a Photoshop instructor, and she had an extra copy that Adobe had given her). I used it a lot for retouching, modifying perspective, and making collages and composites.

Unfortunately, CS2 doesn't run on any Mac OS X version after Leopard, and I'm developing an app, and therefore need to run at least Snow Leopard so I can have Lion and Mountain Lion virtual machines available (and I bit the bullet and am running Lion as my primary OS, with Mountain Lion VMs for testing). When I first hit a project that needed PS capability after switching OS, I downloaded a current version of GIMP (which I'd had some dealings with in the past before getting Photoshop) and spent several frustrating hours discovering that the user interface and functionality were still confusing and mildly brain-damaged. But I continue to use it because I can't afford to buy a new copy of PS this year. Luckily I don't need it for routine photo work.

GIMP is at least cheap, but it too tries to do everything.

For most of us, it's possible to find less intimidating software which does what we want.

There is a free trial version downloadable from Adobe, which is described as fully functional, but that might still mean that saved images are watermarked, or something.

afhankelijk van zijn / haar onderzoek. on Moderation certificate
Su conexiè´¸n enorme no hay ninguna pregunta on A gentleman was thrown out of a chaise
Ontvang GRATIS 6-daagse Italiaanse taal-programma on Scenes from literature
Indsats Teknik Udvikler Trusts blandt kunderne on Precisely

Call centre staffed by people with almost stereotypical accents of India...

A claim to be some sort of Windows support service...

"There's something wrong with your computer."

They are unable to give even the most basic information which identifies my computer. That's collected by another department.

They can't explain how they got a telephone number that is associated with that computer. That's done by another department.

They don't know which version of Windows I am running.

After 9 minutes and 47 seconds I was told "bugger off" and they hung up. I am not sure it was the same voice as had been speaking previously. I'm no Henry Higgins, but the tonality and accent seemed to shift.

I don't know what the crooks paid for that call. I only regret I didn't get around to letting them try to talk me through a Linux filesystem to find Windows\System32\....

Considering the previous front-runners in this discussion were Alan Rickman and Helen Mirren, both of whom are a decade older than Fry, I think age has been disqualified as a consideration.

That said, I agree there are other reasons for considering him not right for the role.

This is two years out of date, but may be useful to some: Comparison Between Photoshop and Photoshop Elements (features).

geekosaur 485: That's what I've always believed, but I didn't have any facts to back it up.

Niall 489: Glad to hear it. My favorite examples of transatlantic title association problems are a) The Madness of King George III, which omitted the 'III' in the US, because including it made Americans think "But I haven't seen parts I and II"; and Malcolm X, which IIUC made some British moviegoers wonder what country had ten King Malcolms.

Carla 495: I was going to say "I haven't seen Kate Beckinsale play anything other than smouldering rage. But then I've only seen her in two Underworld movies." But then I looked her up to be sure. Good gods, I didn't even connect her to the actress who played Flora Poste in Cold Comfort Farm. Wow. OK, she's got range. Emma Peel would be Flora Poste's sweet unflappable demeanor with vampire Selene's kickassness. That might work.

In 2009's "Legion", archangel Gabriel was played by Kevin Serge Durand. Not that I'm trying to toot the horn for a fellow Serge...

But I first saw him as Zipacna in Stargate SG-1. Haven't seen him play a good guy yet (though I guess Gabriel, much as he's trying to kill all the good guys, comes close).

Our logo would of course be: *>^.^<*

Thena @461: I tend to read 'hlepy' / 'helpy' and variants as 'toddler help'

Which, in turn, is a variant of weasel help.

Melissa Singer @462: I, personally, am a huge fan of Photoshop, and have found substitutes like GIMP to be frustration (and I still haven't figured out how to make it go on my mac.) It is expensive, no argument. I've been hearing rumors lately that they have a subscription variant which is ~$50/mo. A passable (and free!) online variant I've found and played with little bit is aviary.com. And, I've found it reasonably easy to use, based on my experience with PS. The main problem I've found is that it's slow. This might keep her sufficiently entertained until her next birthday? ;-)

Mac also has the onboard "Preview" which can do some limited color correction, sizing and cropping, and, I think, some effects. (I can never keep its features straight with MS Photo Editor, which I use for lame stuff at work.)

Riffing on what Caroline @469: said, PS (and Illustrator) can be absolutely crazy-making until one gets the hang of it.

Xopher HalfTongue @470: No. :)

I had occasion just this week to encourage someone to continue PT (he'd had a stroke while under treatment for lung cancer, and pretty much given up). He'd been told that if part of the brain is destroyed, it's gone and you don't get it back. Well...that's true for the memories that were in that bit (though the brain's memory storage isn't simple either, and at least somewhat redundant). It is NOT true for abilities and capacities; other parts of the brain can be pressed into service to a certain limited extent. It's hard and painful and frustrating, but it can work.

Sometimes. There are no guarantees, of course, and the more extensive the damage, the harder it is to recover. Can't even guarantee that things won't come back if you DON'T do PT. But, like wearing seatbelts, it's the way to bet.

Serge 505: W00t! Congratulations to your lady wife.

The contention is that poinsettias are specifically poisonous to cats. A quick google suggests that their not toxic in the sense of being lethal, but that they will make your cat sick, due to the latex in the sap.

Given that I, personally, have neither cats nor poinsettias, this is entirely of academic interest to me. (At least until my c[ao][tw]orker launches her annual rant. :)

There could be only one.

I wish I'd had less beer in my mouth when I got to this comment.

"There can be only One!"
- Clancy Brown

Over on a model rocketry discussion board I frequent, people are talking their dogs.

Apparently, several of them own ####er Spaniels.

"Looks fine from here, I can't tell why you're having trouble. Are you sure it's plugged in?"

"No, I'm looking at it right now and it seems to be just fine. I don't know why you can't see it. Are you behind a firewall? Maybe you need to adjust your settings."

... etc.

Jacque, #504: That "subscription version" doesn't sound like any bargain to me. You use it for a year, and you might as well have bought the thing outright, and will still have to lay out the money if you want to do so! This is furniture-rental thinking.

There are also some simple editing tools built into iPhoto (which should've come already installed on the MacBook) for minor tweaks and cropping.

Here's what the Bard might have written if the fairies hadn't threatened him with painful death unless he cleaned it up. (Probably not NSFW, but kind of nasty, so not for the squeamish.)

GIMP, not so much. On OSX, it still uses X11, which means that it has some really screwy interface and windowing stuff going on. Like click to raise the palette window, then click again to select the tool. Stuff shows up under my dock, and it takes 45 seconds launch to the splash screen. Photoshop, which is notorious for having a splash screen that you get to gaze upon for a long time does it in 11 seconds OMM.

She might be. To my knowledge, she's never been reported in that situation, unlike Emma. Unless the visiting writers got them mixed up somehow, and they said Emma when they meant Alma. Tricksy family, the Chisits.

Knitty has their surprises up. Including a Tardis shawl.

Please excuse me while I make a trip to the yarn store...

(To be more accurate, I learned Photoshop 2.5 in the early 90s. I don't remember the details, though, and I don't imagine they'd still apply if I did.)

Billionaire-Backed Asteroid Mining Venture Starts With Space Telescopes

The venture known as Planetary Resources eventually plans to go asteroid mining — but the first step in the billionaire-backed business plan is to launch an orbital fleet of "personal space telescopes" capable of looking out into the heavens or back down on Earth.
Planetary Resources' ultimate goal is to set up a commercial infrastructure for fueling trips far beyond Earth orbit, with Planetary Resources controlling the equivalent of oil wells, refineries and filling stations in outer space. That's the long-term promise of near-Earth asteroids.
"A water-rich asteroid would greatly enhance the large-scale exploration of the solar system," Anderson said in a news release. "Water has many uses in space. For instance, it would not only be used for hydration, but also would be broken down into oxygen and hydrogen, for breathable air and rocket propellant."

That's what Zeetha said to Agatha Heterodyne anyway.

I heard once that scientists in Russia were on the verge of finding or inventing something that didn't make cats barf, but I think it turned out to be a false alarm.

Avram @517: For that matter, it also turns out that Preview (came with my MacBook) has a few useful tools as well. Sometimes I end up using it to crop and resize pictures when the idea of waiting some portion of a minute for Photoshop to boot up is intolerable.

This might be better addressed in a separate post...

Probably the best/most cost effective solution for someone on a Mac is to buy one of the other, lighter packages people here have brought up (Aperture, Lightroom . . .) and keep a recent version of the GIMP in reserve for the few photos that need something the lighter package doesn't offer.

[1]Photoshop's interface is problematic because it uses widgets in non-standard and non-intuitive ways. It isn't obvious just by looking at the thing where some of the options are hidden. People who have been trained on the thing (or followed a lot of how-tos) don't tend to notice this, because the nonstandard widgets are transparent to them.

The interface of the stable versions of the GIMP is problematic because it was designed not only by geeks, but (as far as I can tell) geeks who had only ever used Gnome with Metacity as a window manager, and who liked grouping windows from the same application. It's not very usable even under Linux if you prefer your windows ungrouped. The tab-based interface for the newest versions clears some of that up, although I've discovered a whole new category of nuisance problems that involve drag-to-dock dialogs. (For the record, GIMP 2.7.3 on Linux with KDE3.)

In other words, Photoshop's interface problems involve a single large roadblock, while the GIMP's are more like the death of a thousand cuts. Which of those is actually more of a nuisance depends on how, and how often, you use the software.

Paint Shop Pro had a better interface than either of the others, back in the days before it was sold to Corel, but it was always Windows-only.

I agree, it's much less common than I'd like.

On a different topic, I was really pretty thrilled to see that Tor is transitioning to DRM-free ebooks. I don't know what role our gracious hosts had in the process, but it's awesome news regardless.

Hm. You might see if Vuescan does what you need. It's commercial-but-sane scanner software with a fairly crazy list of supported scanners of all vintages.

Inefficient, I'm sure - especially the way I hold a tablespoon - but it works.

Actually (not in Lee's case, I'm sure - she just wants the efficient answer) this is a big issue with numeracy I've seen: the bill is $7.83, I hand over $8.08, and the cashier stares at the 8 cents and hands it back, with another 17. Doubling is fine, but "seeing" a quarter or "eyeballing" 15%, or the like, seems to be very difficult.

Of course, then there's Advanced Innumeracy, where it's right because the calculator/computer says it is. Common (both types) in Engineering: people that don't reject a solution out of hand because the computer says that the bridge they're building over 50m of creek will require a roadbed 1km (or 8m, for that matter) long, and those who, despite it being pretty much the first thing taught in Engineering classes (and they should have had it before), still claim that the piece of steel they need to have cut is 5.0378265m long.

I do think that "ability to read a survey result and understand it, and understand when it is likely not significant" is a required skill in 20th+ century numeracy, and I do realise that that is very much harder than the other things we're talking about. In particular, to be able to both understand, and understand the impact of, the error statement: "Polls of this standard will be accurate to within X percentage points, Y percent of the time" (or, Y times out of 20, which does seem more able to make clear the difference between the two percentages). That is not trivial, and failure to understand it is one of many things that lets the marketing game work.

Benjamin Wolfe @535:
Matlab had switched to a Java-based interface, I thought; which has its own issues, but at least it should use the native GUI instead of X11. (As someone who both uses and is close to X11 development on OS X: it's working about as well as it ever will. It's a hard problem.)

I once gave a (young) cashier a similar, odd-seeming amount, and when she questioned why, told her to ring it in. Her register correctly figured the quarter change. "How did you know that!?" she exclaimed. I told her it was practice.

for example, I couldn't double "1 cup + 2 tablespoons" without looking it up, because I don't have the cup-to-tablespoon conversion ratio in my head.

Me neither (I have to look at the mL equivalents on my cups and measuring spoons to figure it out), but I'd just put in 2 cups + 4 tablespoons. Perhaps not the most efficient method but it certainly works.

More subtly, to be truly numerate, one needs to be able to recognize math problems in everyday life, and be able to figure out the appropriate operations and estimations.

There are also a few things where I don't expect proficiency, but people should at least recognize them and their relevant issues: Orders of magnitude (e.g. saving 10¢/day isn't going to reach $1000 anytime soon), exponential notation (really big or small numbers), digits of precision (just because the calculator said 2.674523 doesn't mean all those digits go in your answer). For bonus points, recognize imaginary/complex numbers, if only as "weird scientist stuff, they work funny".

On a base technical level, I'd expect someone to have minimum capacities for "in their head" math: Know their times tables at least to 10, add or subtract at least four or five digits worth of numbers, multiply at least a two-digit-by one-digit product (ideally two-by-two), divide two-digits by one digit. Without that much, symbolic manipulation is kinda pointless, and calculators become treacherous.

(Also, 3 teaspoons = 1 Tablespoon.)

It's sometimes easier to find the target when you're hoping the student can hit it, rather than working with people who have already surpassed it. I'm not sure it's exactly what you mean, though.

In most cases I've seen, the cashier will ring up $8.08, see that the change is $0.25, and hand me back a quarter. But I'm more likely to hand them $8.03, and they seem to have an easier time looking at that and handing me back two dimes. Estimating 15% is easy; take 10%, take half of that, add the two together. It's the odd percentages (like 8.25% sales tax) that throw me.

But honestly, if we're having a feeding frenzy at the table, I am extremely grateful for the ability to let the register calculate the change for me. Under pressure, I make stupid mistakes.

And yes, I would include "basic statistics" under the requirements for numeracy. Lack of that makes you easy prey for any con-man.

(I parsed "survey result" initially as meaning a land survey rather than a poll, which gave me an interesting mental image for a minute!)

Mary Aileen, #543: My partner likes to use the response, "Where I come from, most people can do that." If asked where that is, he says, "The past." Personally, I think that's a little mean; I prefer, "It's not hard. You could do it too, if anyone had ever bothered to teach you how." That IMO puts the onus where it belongs.

David H., #545: However, saving $1/day will get to $1,000 in a little less than 3 years. I remember this not because of math precisely, but because of the movie Anne of the Thousand Days.

Every evening, I get to evenly divide 1 head of romaine lettuce, 5 roma tomatoes, and 1 bunch of parsley 14 ways. Oh yeah, and: two of those doses get no parsley, but compensating amounts of lettuce. I'm a good servant monkey!

Mycroft W @541: failure to understand it is one of many things that lets the marketing game work.

"Half off, this week only! Buy now and save!"

"Uh, no thank you. I'll save even more by not buying any."

Oh. Right.

And meanwhile, I've now lost my cookies on my home machine, as well.

Returning to "simple" numeracy -- does the average person understand how scientific studies and surveys/polls work? Do they understand the significance of sample size, and how methodology can influence results? I don't know, and it's on my mind given the current and future bombardment of election-related surveys/polls, and my befuddlement at how can people vote for certain referenda and candidates given the scientific facts (yes, I know, science literacy is a whole nuther ball of wax) and results of said studies and polls, and how people can believe what the so-called news says without stopping to think "hey, that doesn't make sense."

Mary Aileen@543: and Lee @548: I was taught at a fairly young age how to make change without the aid of a cash register or calculator: start from the amount of the transaction and make the change by counting up to the amount the customer gives you. Simple once you know the trick, but I concede that if no one has taught you, it's not necessarily intuitive.

David Harmon@545: More subtly, to be truly numerate, one needs to be able to recognize math problems in everyday life, and be able to figure out the appropriate operations and estimations.
Yes, exactly!

Lee @548: Good point: one needs enough understanding of numerical concepts to prevent being taken by con artists.

I'd say that with "basic statistics", we're venturing beyond "basic numeracy" into "general numeracy". At that point, I'd also include more stuff: actual understanding of exponents, orders-of-magnitude, exponential notation, and digits-of-precision/error ranges, simple algebra (with functions and "unit conversions"¹), and basic geometry and trigonometry.

¹ I forget the proper term; I mean how pints can be converted into liters, but meters can't, and that affects what equations you can write.

My biggest problem was learning to ring things up with my right hand, as I was more strongly left-handed then than I am now.

Huh, interesting. I've only used Vuescan on Linux and Mac -- didn't realize that it didn't have consistent cross-platform support.

And the one good thing that came out of it:

"Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives… you are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets where they lie side by side here in this country of ours… You the mothers who sent their sons from far away countries, wipe away your tears. Your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. Having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well."

Kemal Ataturk, 1934.

But then, I had to figure it in the bookstore for many years, and it was quicker to do it in my head than to use a calculator. Even when I used a calculator, I'd do a quick checksum to see if I'd missed a book when I entered them. Scanners? Not in use back then, or even available when we started.

xeger @561 -- that's according to the list of scanners they can manage on their website. I haven't actually tried it, but this scanner is notoriously difficult. It makes up for it by being incredibly cheap for what you get.

In my experience there aren't many people comfortable enough with dimensional analysis to get it right either quickly or often. Of course there are the egregious mistakes perpetrated by lazy engineers, like measuring thrust in pounds, or specific impulse in seconds, but most often it's just not recognizing that acceleration is not velocity, or that angular velocity and linear velocity aren't the same thing.

And a little statistical literacy would be nice in the average citizen, enough to recognize that "1 chance in 10" isn't very probable, and that "1 chance in a million" is really unlikely.

I was sad not to see my favorite approximation, that there are about pi * 10^7 seconds in a year, on that list, and that the actual exact value appears instead. The approximation is accurate to about 1% and was very handy when doing the sort of astronomical calculations where 1% doesn't matter anyway and you're likely to have factors of pi floating around to be cancelled out. Plus it's geeky.

As a practical matter, do you keep multiple sets of spoons around, or do you just add an extra NZ teaspoon to every NZ tablespoon for Australian recipes?

I recently concluded that I was right to be confused by the use of "xícaras de chá" (teacups) as a volume measurement in Brazilian recipes. As far as I can tell, although there is a standard of 200ml, US cups (~240ml) are commonly used, sometimes rounded up to a neat quarter liter. I almost feel justified in my first reaction of "Which tea set?"

I would hope that a crawling shit who'd scam a low-paid cashier for a charity would have had his come-uppance somewhere in all this time.

First time was better - we sang it better and had fake snow fluttering about us as we sang.

Likely a short-change swindle. You can see a pile of these demonstrated in the Brit documentary The Real Hustle.

Since it involved money going back and forth ... the way that one works (or one of the ways) is this:

Buy a small item with a ten-dollar bill. Get the change. Gather up five ones, and say, "Could you give me a five for these ones?" The cashier says "Sure!" and gives you a five. You put the five ones on top of the five and say, "I don't want to carry too many bills; could you give me a ten?" and push over the five and the five ones. The cashier gives you a ten dollar bill. Depending on how smooth, and how bold, you are, in a similar manner you turn the ten into a twenty. Then you walk off with the item, your original ten dollars, and the rest of the change. Go to the place next door and repeat.

Now, the one middle-aged student who had what to all effects and purposes seemed to be a real learning disability relating to numbers, he was tough. It took an enormous amount of work, suggestions for using the extra tutoring services, specially-designed homework problems, and several one-on-one office visits... but I did eventually teach him to do division reliably, on his own, and how to check his answer by multiplying once again.

The rest of the class? They weren't bad at math. They were unruly, undisciplined, unwilling to work very hard at something they saw as hopeless. There were a few of the most uninterested or dispirited I could never reach, but... most of them I got somehow. Some of it was money, as in how to figure out change, how to balance a checkbook (most had NEVER seen a checkbook, period), or (shudder) how to actually read and _solve_ one of those horrible word problems. They were petrified of written math problems.

One day, we had begun discussing fractions. A student asked me point-blank, which was bigger 3/8 or 5/8? Yes, he honestly didn't know and seemed to think it was a challenge for me to know. I picked up my Snickers candy bar off the podium, and asked him, "If I get a knife and cut this in eight pieces, do you want five of them, or three of them?"

The light dawned in his face. He had never understood what a fraction _was_ before.

OTOH, I almost always wound up being cashier in my early burger-flipping days, because I could make change and count-back faster than almost anyone my age. Although many times I would have to count it back twice or three times, because the customer couldn't follow what I was doing. I learned to do it much, much more slowly.

There are defensive techniques for the short-change cons, such as not putting the original bill in the till until transaction is done, etc. A determined con is hard to spot and hard to beat; they time it and apply as much stress as possible.

There is also the reverse short-change con, where you give them a larger bill, say a $20, and they short-change you and then claim you only gave them a $10. Memorize your serial number on the bill before handing it over, and TELL them what it is as you do helps. They can palm the bill and hide it instead of putting it in the till, though.

Bruce Cohen #567: Which I consider a sad commentary on math education, because it's exactly at the heart of "what is all this math for, anyway?". Anybody but a mathematician is probably using those numbers to represent some quantity of something, and if you don't understand what they are representing, you're liable to end up "comparing apples and oranges". Notice though, that I did put it with "general" rather than "basic" numeracy; dimensional analysis doesn't show up much in balancing a checkbook. (It might well be an issue when figuring a unit price, though!)

While there are defenses against all of the cons, there is no one so street-smart and cynical that the right con on right day can't catch them.

(Example: Con artist one goes through the checkout line and pays for an item with a twenty dollar bill, honestly, takes change, and departs. Con artist two goes through right behind him, pays for an item with a ten dollar bill, gets change, waits for cashier to close the drawer, and counts change, says, "I gave you a twenty and you only gave me change for a ten!" Argument may ensue; con artist two insists. Eventually the cash drawer is opened, and con artist two proves that he'd handed over a twenty because the twenty on the top of the stack is signed with the name that matches the ID in his pocket. Which had been handed over by the (already forgotten and long-departed) con artist one.

When you're watching a game of three-card monte on the street, consider the possibility that everyone there except you is a shill. Because that's probably pretty close to true.

And I've seen an irate woman follow a 3-card Monte player down the street, demanding her promised payoff. He apparently blew his card-palm!

Find the lady

Brag

and

Poker

And if you discover the lady knows how to play Cripple Mr Onion, it's your own damn fault.

I also once told a cashier "get your manager and count the drawer, I'll wait." Faced with that, they didn't get the manager, they gave me my correct change. (I suspect they were counting on many people being in a hurry at lunchtime.)

Vicki, #581: I once paid for my drive-thru order at a McD with a $50 (because I had nothing smaller) and got change for a $20. I think it was carelessness rather than malice, but they also had to shut down the line and count the cash drawer. I took that as a reasonable precaution and didn't raise a fuss about the time it required.

*When I was a kid, my older brother gave my mother a huge jam jar filled with pennies. After that, any time she sent one of us to the store, she gave us four pennies, with instructions not to bring back any more than that. The habit stuck; I almost never have more than four pennies in my wallet, because I spend them as fast as I get them.

The sky above the port was the color
The sky above the port
The sky
The sky above
The sky above the color colour color out of space out of spacetime
The sky above the somebody has a case of the Mondays
SYSTAT UPTIME 9:01 unhappy READ MAKNAM
load emily_litella_racter
construct tasty_torte_reform_rant in 3, 2, 1, mark.
"Never mind"
end of line

I need to see it again.

And again.

(and Martin Freeman is adorable in the Martin Freeman role.)

Older brother, who has 'must read everything disease' couldn't be bothered to actually get out of the car while going through the latest Hardy Boy treasure found at the library. "Well, it was quiet. The little kids went inside." he was heard to say after finishing the book 1.5 hours later.

I think they're going to be hooked for life.

Also, I can't help but wonder what would come about if you put teenager + camera in contact with Lila's daughter.

::blinkblink:: Oh, You're the one who knows TJ Glenn!! Hmmmmm....

Unfortunately, they would have paid virtually nothing for that call on account of using VOIP, though by stringing them along, you would have prevented them from calling someone else during that period.

We/I have also been getting similar calls here in New Zealand.

I imagine it was the role he was born to play.

::blinkblink:: TJ Glenn. Now there's a blast from my past...

I met TJ in the early '80s when I was a starry-eyed film student. He was dating a friend of mine and was just starting his career -- he hadn't added the "Teel" to his name yet. He got me a job as a production assistant on a low-budget horror flick filming in upstate NY. I was so excited! It's not TJ's fault that one of the producers absconded with the funds... :) I don't think the film ever got made. Too bad; it was a decent script as I recall (I wish I could recall who wrote it, but I like to think he or she went on to bigger and better things).

Wow. I haven't crossed paths with TJ in several years; I hope he is well.

I will point out the odd "logic" in one of the supporters of the present system.

"On behalf of crime victims and their loved ones who have suffered at the hands of California's most violent criminals, we are disappointed that the ACLU and their allies would seek to score political points in their continued efforts to override the will of the people and repeal the death penalty," said McGregor Scott, who is chairman of the Californians for Justice and Public Safety

Yep, those nasty liberals, trying to override the will of the people by letting them vote on overturning a law which was passed by the legislature.

For some fairly silly reasons, I'm trying to explain to some folks how suspension of disbelief customarily works in science fiction.

Is there a literary or science fiction term for establishing what technology is available in a given setting, usually in the first act? I know it fits into the general category of good worldbuilding, but I wanted to know if there was specific jargon for establishing what tech exists and what doesn't.

Some of the people involved in the discussion seem to think that once you introduce telekinesis or FTL travel, that means any impossible technology can be introduced without explanation at any time in the story. I'm attempting to explain how the default tech level needs to be nailed down fairly early in a piece, and any new tech introduced later has to either be a clear case of combining/improving established tech, or the discovery and refinement of the new tech needs to be a major element of the story.

I know how to make these points with examples, but I just wanted to make sure there wasn't existing terminology defining these basic worldbuilding rules. Any commentary or advice is appreciated.

(It's also akin to the "she led him on" rape excuse, in which a woman who consents to any level of sexual activity is assumed to have given up her right to say no to anything else. This may or may not be a useful analogy in your situation.)

Anything liberals do is an attempt to override the will of the only people that matter....

I've had a rough week. I'll go be cynical somewhere else now. :-)

Hopefully, if the story started out with a block of text establishing exactly what the rules of the universe are, your listeners would consider it a reasonable hypothesis that said rules will not be violated later. In which case, more subtle introductions may also be used to the same effect, for an experienced reader.

(IANALiteraryWhatever)

Have you read Rampant by Diana Peterfreund? I stalled on the fact that female descendants of Alexander the Great are so rare, the boy couldn't get past 'descendants of Alexander the Great' period, and neither of us batted an eye at intelligent bloodthirsty venomous unicorns.

One of the interesting things is that sidekick dialog is pretty transferable. I expect that we will soon see Pirate With Scarf's lines being delivered to Sherlock.

Of course, an intelligent script makes a difference to begin with.

Also, David Tennant is a wonderful Darwin.

Carla @594: You knew TJ before I did, I think, but not by much. He's on Fb, though we are not friends there (this means nothing; I tend not to reach out because I generally assume people don't remember me and I hate to intrude, even in an open forum like Fb); I see him commenting from time to time on the pages of people we both know. He had started a stunt school in NYC a few years ago but I think it didn't survive the recession. Not sure what he's doing now.

He was a good teacher and one of the benefits, for me, of working with such a large person was that I was pretty sure I couldn't damage him, which made me more confident.

Many thanks.

Wilhelmsberg

So we went to Version Tracker, which I'd link except it's not coming up, and went for some hobbyist's beta program that successfully runs my scanner.

Come to think of it, my scanner's a teenager now. Pity that it's only 9x12. I could really be happy with it if it were 11x14.

I mean, those are just rules, and it's fiction, so you can have fun breaking them if you want, but only if there's a good reason to jerk the reader around. (And sometimes you can have the author of a play show up in a window on the second wall and point at one of the characters and make faces, too.) Usually one of the hard problems is deciding how much sufficiently-advanced-technology and/or magic you can throw in to create your story without the rest of the kitchen sink ending up in there as well and removing the characters' motivation or letting the Bad Guys kill them right away or otherwise breaking the story you were trying to write, and coming up with plausible reasons for those limits.

The reviewer concludes (as near as I can quote from memory):

If we are living in a golden age of animation (and we are), it is people like Aardman Animation who are responsible.

My quibble with most of the reviews I've seen to date is that they all approach it from the angle of "children's movie," which I don't think is quite right. There's plenty of slapstick here but an awful lot of the humor is verbal and other chunks depend on your paying attention in the first half, so that when things start paying off in the second half, you get the jokes. Plenty of the under-10, or maybe under-8, crowd will miss a lot.

On an entirely unrelated matter, here are some pictures of this morning's shuttle flyover.

Huh. There surely ought to be, but nothing is coming to mind.

Tangentially, I've run across the inverse of what you're talking about. Friend of mine writes some STTOSish fanfic. I'm reading along, the characters are using transporters, but I hang up on a turn of the plot because, well, in order to accompish Objective, why don't they just send a space-craft up to planetary orbit? What? They don't have space-flight? Er, wha—?

To me transporter tech implies space-flight, the former being a much more challenging proposition than the latter, laws-of-physics-wise. Her very minimal technical and scientific education doesn't flag that as an inconsistency. Completely blew the internal logic of her ficton for me.

Lee @597: Saying that if you have one unrealistic element you therefore have no reason not to have every unrealistic element is asking science fiction to behave like magic.

Well, except that if you have magic, it still has to have an internally consistent logic, and by implication your magic is going to have some limitations, so I'd say they're not parallel. Or they are parallel. Or something. (Can we tell I'm much too tired and only marginally coherent?)

After THE WRONG TROUSERS came out, the KFC/Taco Bell by work had some kid's meal toys based on it. I got a figure — about 3" tall — of Feathers McGraw, standing with his wings by his side, and expressionless (of course). When you push the body down, the eyes blink. They go from shiny black to matte black. And that is all it does.

I'm reminded of one of the defining scenes in Pandora's Star, in which it is memorably demonstrated that space travel must not necessarily come before other things, despite other things being theoretically more complicated....

(Va guvf pnfr, gur ynaqvat bs gur svefg znaarq Znef fcnpr zvffvba jnf vagreehcgrq -- tngr-penfurq, ernyyl -- ol n uvccvr fpvragvfg va n ubzrznqr fcnpr fhvg cbccvat guebhtu n jbezubyr ur'q cebqhprq va gur yno onpx va Pnyvsbeavn.) IMO, Hamilton pulled this off really well, and it was a great plot driver in several ways that all made internal sense.

I'm seriously considering dragging the teenager to Were-Rabbit on Mother's Day. Watching it on TV is nice, but the big screen makes a difference.

Oh, the Pirates screening was the first time I'd seen anything in the fancy-shmancy Sony 3D. Impressive. A sense of solidness/realness, if you will. Not necessary in terms of enjoying the movie, but kinda cool, and because I'm a member of MOMI, it was cheaper to see Pirates in 3D there than it would have been to see it 2D in our local theater. The glasses were different from the standard-issue 3D glasses, too, more heavy-duty and actually more comfortable for me.

Unfortunately, this place is a full day's drive from Houston, so I can't offer hospitality to anyone who wants to take advantage of the deal.

Lee: now you're making me almost wish I was in Texas...

Yeah, one of my coworkers (who does live in the mountains, to be fair) got out the family shotgun and borrowed a neighbor's german shepard after a bear expressed a little too much interest in their kitchen door.

We got mountain lions, too.

Debbie @619: I'm reminded of one of the defining scenes in Pandora's Star, in which it is memorably demonstrated that space travel must not necessarily come before other things, despite other things being theoretically more complicated....

Well, true enough. Given that it has been demonstrated that open-air lasers can be made with essentially Victorian-era tech.

And, of course, there's Vernor Vinge's story of the society that doesn't use doors because they can teleport.

I guess the thing that threw me in my friend's story was that she never explicitly said this culture didn't have space flight, and at the same time had a culture from another star system that did, so that disparity never came into consciousness until it was a glaring plot hole which she then had to explain to me. Which loops back to the original point of establishing a ficton's level and type of tech early enough in the story to keep the reader adequately inclued.

Melissa Singer @621: Sadly, Were-Rabbit was ruined for me by the perversely hilarious fact that a technique very similar to Wallace's rabbit-catching vacuum used here in Boulder County to suck prairie dogs out of their holes. More often than not, the prairie dogs then meet unfortunate ends, because most people regard them as pests.

nerdycellist #615: Also, Virginia's first rabid bear, killed with a fantastically lucky shot by the farmer it was attacking.

Jacque #614: Certainly if the teleportation did come first, it could easily squelch aerospace development... but yeah, that's just the sort of wrinkle that should be at inclued before the plot turns on it.

nerdycellist #615: Also, Virginia's first rabid bear, killed with a fantastically lucky shot by the farmer it was attacking.

(This of course depends on other context not contradicting such a limitation of resources. We know that Earth and Starfleet, at least, have no such limitations; random colony planets might well have them, though.)

Another time I visited her and she pointed out bear scats on their back deck. The bear had to go up eight or ten steps to get there.

That is before the 25% discount they're currently giving everybody who buys books.

And if you spend over $100, they offer free shipping.

Make sure you get into the rare book room in the second building -- that's where I found another book that I've finally decided to buy, even though it's outside my budget (the limited edition of Churches of France, with an original engraving by John Taylor Arms from his Gargoyle series -- one of 100 copies). On the shelf above i was an Italian elephant folio edition of La Divina Commedia, with Dore illustrations, from the mid-19th C -- I didn't check the price, but it's gorgeous. I'd have bought the $40 jacketless first of Lynd Ward's novel in woodcuts Mad Man's Drum, except I already have one -- that one's in the main store potpourri. The firsts of Wodehouse were more than I wanted to pay.

Oh, and I should mention that they don't have their stock up on the internet. And there are some cool books in the pamphlet section at fair prices too (they're in store #3). The nice limp-leather 11th ed Brittanica is in store 4, well outside my range at $750 but in much better condition than most of the copies I've seen.

If you're a bookstore person, with wide-ranging tastes, it's the sort of bookstore that's very hard to find these days. It's much less well organized than Powell's and much less crowded than the Strand; you should go check it out if you only live a day's drive away. Or make a special trip out of it like we did. Hat tip to Edd Vick for asking us if we wanted to go. If you're there, also check out Recycled Books in Denton: much better for SF, some absolutely amazing mysteries at good prices, and only a few hours away (and almost on the way back to DFW). Archer City is worth two days, Denton one (just because Denton is much better organized and smaller).

It's a different kind of place.

Good bet it was the "STTOS fanfic" mention in my first post. That would be a heavy clue. ;-)

Angiportus @634: which Vinge story was that?

Too lazy to get up to look (and I'm not sure my Vinge is shelved properly anyway), but I think it's in the anthology True Names and Other Dangers.

Kip W @635: I'm impressed that the father of the friend survived the experience. It's my understanding that humans are very dangerous when they feel their young are threatened. :->

Unless you're R.A. Lafferty. There's a man who understood how magic works. ;D

But if Magic isn't a Science—think of Freud and psychology, or Marx and politics—it can still have a plausible set of rules, based on observations. Dan Brown invites ridicule with his talk of symbology, and he is doing what the rule-makers do with magic: an object can be a symbol of many different things, and which is the one that matters? Dan Brown picks the symbolism which suits his story. He sees what he wants to see and throws away the rest.

So if, in a story, magic has rules, the only reason for those rules is that they make the story work.

"Black Magic is a matter of symbolism and intent."

Intent is something that can come straight out of the modern legal system. It is something we're equipped to deal with. The symbolism might be intensely cultural. Something as simple as the differences between France and England could throw us off a trail. The French accept the idea of ossuaries. Viewed from England, they are something slightly creepy, at least.

I beg to differ; magic has always had rules! Those rules are traditionally alien to science, because they're not actually about how the world works, they're about how people work.¹ Contagion, Similarity, Belief, Authority, "as above, so below", appealing to higher powers, commanding servants, heritage/bloodline, moral status... the list goes on.

What is a "modern development" is the idea of "magic" as a psychic technology, reliable and impersonal. Skills and abilities that can be measured, calibrated, and checked off a list², Standard Issue Fireballs, Glory Hands piled in the stockroom, spell schematics on file, and so on.

¹ Yes, people are part of the world, but they're so complex that science has a great deal of difficulty analyzing them.

² RPGs mostly make this overt, but the ideas go back to the early "psychic researchers".

Vinge may have written more than one story in the setting, but the one I'm familiar with is a novel, The Witling.

Ursula K. LeGuin says (I think she may have been quoting someone) that the only consistent "rule" of folktales is, "anyone whom animals help will come out all right in the end", but there are a lot of less-consistent "rules" like "don't ignore weird little old ladies". (See also the many "folksongs are your friends" examples.)

Magic (and I'm strictly talking fictional magic here, IANAW) seems to me to be more Jungian than Euclidean. Not so much rules, or even a one-to-one symbology, but big general themes and correspondences underlying a very personal and individual ad-hoc improvisation. Sort of like the way the witches in Terry Pratchett's juveniles foretell the immediate future by tangling up all the junk they happen to have in their pockets and reading the result.

Anybody else here having trouble with losing their "Don't make me type all this again" stuff, even when the box is checked?

Windows machine A at work loses the settings. Windows machine B (that I only use once a week) keeps them.

Now my mac at home (Snow Leopard), which was keeping them, has started losing them in the last few days. I know it's not, but it's starting to feel, you know, personal. ::mournful puppy-dog eyes::

646, 648, & 649 Okay, it's not just me. That's comforting. Odd. Among us, we're using Windows and Mac, and an assortment of browsers (I use Safari at home and IE7 at work). This suggests that it's an ML issue. That it's intermittent means that it's going to be a righteous pita to debug.

The other thing that was weird was that on my last post, I back-arrowed after hitting the "Preview" button, and the text of my comment was preserved in the chached window, but the ID stuff I'd entered was gone. (This argues that the page dynamically referenced the ID state, even in the cached version...?)

Dave Bell @641: So if, in a story, magic has rules, the only reason for those rules is that they make the story work.

This suggests an entertainly meta contemplation. Can anyone think of stories that play with this structural constraint of "story" in an illuminating way? What would it take to do so?

The French accept the idea of ossuaries.

Elaborate, please?

David Harmon @642: magic has always had rules! ... the list goes on.

This is very interesting. Can you point to any compendia of these rules?

they're about how people work.

& Lila @644: more Jungian than Euclidean

I would imagine the idea of magic having rules roughly correlates with the improving understanding of psychology and the structure of experience and awareness.

Paul A. @643: The Witling

Yes, that's it. Thank you.

My information only seems to be kept for a thread where I explicitly put it in once. At least that seems to be why I sometimes see it and sometimes don't. But I do lose track of posts where I've commented, so this may be an erroneous illusion.

Re: magic, I've mixed together principles from several meta levels, and some of them vary greatly in importance across time and place. The key point though, is that the universals reflect human universals, and the variants reflect their local society.

Her biography on IMDB begins with this grammatically fractured sentence:

Growing up in Ames, Iowa, Jane Espenson was a grad student at UC Berkeley, studying linguistics.

Jane Espenson grew up in Ames, Iowa, and attended graduate school at UC Berkeley, where she studied linguistics.

I actually would be surprised if they make the correction. The form doesn't actually have a place for correcting the text of a biography! Who writes the crap they post there, anyway?

Terry recently mentioned Anthony Boucher's short story They Bite. I forget if if was that one or a different story in the same book, but one of Boucher's characters expresses that "The essence of magic is deceit. If the magician isn't the deceiver, then he's the deceived." But different stories have different rules.

I've definitely encountered cases of students growing up while in graduate school.

But...I get the distinct impression that Rothfuss himself doesn't understand thermodynamics as well as one might like. He seems to think that heat can be freely converted to other types of energy. He has devices called "sympathy lamps" that, as described, rather blatantly violate the Second Law. Sigh.

If I want to be remembered between sessions, I find I need to use Firefox. There's something a bit different about Opera in its latest version.

As for ossuaries...

Paris, France, is one of several European cities with Catacombs, in this instance established 1785-88 when the cemeteries within the city were cleared, using a part of the underground stone quarries as an ossuary.

The more recent Douaumont ossuary contains the skeletal remains of more than 130000 unidentified French and German dead from the Battle of Verdun.

Apparently, it is commonplace for interments in French cemeteries to be exhumed several decades later, and the skeletal remains transferred to an ossuary, freeing up space for new burials.

We could postulate a conservation of mass-energy-magic, with the numbers for Magic putting it somewhere between mass and energy. To do a given amount of magic would need tangible quantities of either.

Thermodynamics is of course derived from two Greek words: thermos, meaning hot, if you don't drop it, and dinamiks, meaning dynamic, work; and thermodynamics is simply the science of heat and work and the relationships between the two. No mention of Magic there, so where does Magic come from? Perhaps it is the dark matter, and dark energy, that the cosmologists need to make their view of the universe add up.

And we talk of the heat death of the universe, as the universe loses the order which allows things to happen. So, where do that Last Order go?

Yes, you sir. The Barman? Excellent! Mines a Budějovický Budvar, thany-you.

F'rex: straightforward scrying? OK, using that for long-range communication is pretty classic: helps a lot with meteorology and such. Can the images be copied to permanent media (if necessary, by hand? What are the range limits, and where do they come from? Can they be used to magnify the view, or look at non-visible emanations electromagnetic or otherwise? That gives you some combination of telescopes, microscopes, cameras, and assorted other sensors.

If you've got contact with other realms/species, what do they know about the world?

Anyway, we are not con people. I'm not even sure that these really expensive extract-money-from-fans cons (put on by "Creation Entertainment") are really the same class of event as what I would call "real" cons, like WisCon. So we have no idea what to expect.

So for those who do, what should we expect? What should we absolutely do/not do?

"Maybe roasting whole birds isn't an Italian thing?"

I thought that sounded right, and this morning I ran across it. Marcella Hazan, Classic Italian Cooking, introduction to the recipe for Pan-Roasted Chicken with Garlic, Rosemary, and White Wine: "Reliable ovens are only a recent addition to the Italian kitchen, and consequently, traditional roasts are done either on the spit or in a pan on top of the stove."

I think the best magic is predicated on the premise that you don't have to believe the same things all the time, as long as your beliefs are contextually appropriate. I know this flies in the face of deeply held (even unconsciously held) principle for both scientists and many religious folk, but your beliefs are part of the structure of your mind, and tools like anything else.

This is not to say that consistency (in context) isn't important. It IS hypocritical to claim to believe in evolution when talking to your science friends and in $CreationMyth when talking to your coreligionists. But it isn't hypocritical to believe that gods are metaphorical archetypes outside of circle and that they're real people inside of circle.

The modified beliefs are adopted as a technique for accomplishing a particular thing. The changes in the unconscious mind are real, and can lead (for example) to greater confidence in a job interview, or remembering to take a calming breath before losing one's temper with a child.

Through the practice of magic, I now never have hiccups for long, because I know a spell (a symbolic act done in a deepened state of consciousness) for getting rid of them (without needing to drink water with a pencil or anything), and have the ability to be calm in the presence of a hysterically-crying toddler. Visualization and breath control is the secret there.

"Breathing cleansing energy up from the Earth" doesn't have any grounding in science. But when I think that I'm doing that I get the desired result. That's why it's magic: I'm changing my consciousness into one that believes in that breath-energy exchange, and by so doing, changing from an upset-by-hysterical-child consciousness to a calm one. Then I switch back to a more rationalistic mode, and check the child's emotional state. My calmness calms the child, IME. Probably something to do with mirror neurons.

This has its dangers. If you change into a non-ordinary, non-rational state and can't get back, you're in trouble. That's why Wiccans train slowly and carefully (responsible ones do, anyway). It takes a certain conscious state to walk across hot coals without being burned (and knowing what's really going on in terms of physics (heat-transfer rates etc.) really isn't all that helpful for most people); but it's stupid to think that doing a firewalk successfully means you could survive a nuclear blast if you just think hard enough.

Skeptics make the best magicians.

The thing is, once you have a technology, you can use it to experiment, and thus learn what rules it (and your world in general) works under. Such experiments may be personally unsafe (the Fluorine Martyrs, Pierre Curie, et pluribus alia), but these last few centuries, that hardly seems to stop anyone.

Pierre Curie, of course, was killed when struck by a speeding carriage; are you thinking of Marie (who did die from the effects of radiation) here, or am I missing your point?

Given that they included Spiced Plum Mousse With Honey, complete with the requisite poem, how could I not share it with ML?

OTOH, it's very likely that your daughter will be able to find Seven of Nine accessories somewhere in the dealer room.

My advice would be, don't have high expectations, go to any of the guest talks that you can get into without paying extra, and set a budget. You can probably have a good time there, but you may end up feeling like cattle at the end of the day.

Where are you located, IYDMMA? It's possible that there are other media-cons near you which would give you a better experience than a CreationCon. (This is not to say don't go, but that for your next con you might want to go somewhere else.)

Note to the Website Wizards: For some reason, the comments on abi's new thread are displaying (at least to me) in a noticeably smaller font than the ones on older threads. It's not unreadably small, but it's distinctly less comfortable to read.

Can you check the thread again? I forgot to close a tag, and not all browsers are forgiving. I've fixed it now.

Tangent: this is one of the things that disappoints me about the cancellation of Stargate Universe. There were so many interesting questions and possibilities that the communciation stones bring up.

Frex: In a way it yanks you right back to pre-literate culture: information can only be transmitted using memory. No external storage. Not even paper.

Also, brings up a whole new industry: Now, instead of hiring a personal trainer, you just hire somebody to come in and exercise your body for you (who enjoys it), while you go perform a useful service for them, like their accounting or some such.

On a different tangent, one of the things that fascinates me about modern technology is that we have, in any reasonable sense, achieved the equivalent of clairvoyance, telekinesis, telepathy, and so on. Granted, there's mountains of infrastructure and hardware involved. But, really, what's the practical difference?

Daniel Martin 672: It's been three quarters of a geological age since I've been to a Star Trek convention, but the key point is that you are an audience member, not a community member. If you can, get the program ahead of time and plan things out carefully. The big catch with these things is that a lot of the program items you want to attend will be popular, and getting a good seat will involve quite a bit of sitting/standing in line, so plan/pack accordingly. (E.g., plan your own fun for line-waiting time.) Might also be worthwhile sniffing around in the fan communities local to the con, and see if there are any "extra-curricular" activies that seem like they'd be fun. I'm sure others here can point you to useful "convention survival guides."

Xopher HalfTongue @675: Real magic, as opposed to fantasy magic, has been defined as "the art of changing consciousness at will."

My sense (and being a lapsed Pagan, I speak with confidence but no authority) is that "magic" can also be conceived of as the ability to change the unconscious at will, too.

I happily buy into the whole Secret methodology, not because I think I'm invoking spiritual forces beyond everyday experience (though I certainly don't discount the possibility), but rather by doing the practices described, one is programming one's unconscious attention and intent, such that one becomes more likely to spot and make use of related information, possibilities, and opportunities than one would be in the absence of some careful and systematic thinking about the question.

I beg to differ -- the infrastructure, and other tradeoffs, are the difference! Clairvoyance? Only if you already have a camera there, and means to communicate with it. Telepathy? I don't think so! Our long-distance communication offers all the usual hazards of misunderstanding, plus some extra -- and again, it's device-to-device. And the closest we have to telekinesis is magnetic levitation -- also for purpose-built devices.

What we have done, is to achieve many of the "implicit goals" of such abilities. Not clairvoyance, but ways to view distant places. Not telepathy, but distant, rapid, communication. Not telekinesis, but forklifts and cranes. All of these have tradeoffs and limitations, derived from both physical law and our limited resources. When a system of magic has similar constraints, it might be a psychic technology....

Depending on the size of the convention, there may only be one track of programming. While there may be some items for which you will have to stand in line, again, this depends on the size of the convention; at the one we went to, there was only 1 item for which there was a line on the day we were there (we only went for 1 day out of the 3).

It was basically a big dealers' room with a small convention attached. However, there wasn't much for the newish or young fan, so I wouldn't get your or your daughter's hopes up regarding 7 of 9 stuff, depending, again, on the size of the show. Many things were _not_ affordable, at least to my budget, or in the sense of being something I'd be happy with a child playing with/possibly breaking/losing.

Which is not to say we didn't have a good time. My daughter was old enough to understand the fiscal end of things, and had brought some money of her own, so even though she's acquisitive, she was happy with what she got. The 9-10 yo had a little harder time with it, but enjoyed seeing all the fans dressed in costume (there were lots of fans in costume and some were superb).

The program items were not all interesting to me, but the ones I saw were quite entertaining, and I heard a few new stories from Armin Shimerman.

A real highlight was the little masquerade, where there were some amazing costumes. There was a kids' division and an adult division and prizes were essentially awarded by audience acclaim. People literally walked or rolled out of the audience to participate, and the costumes were at every level of execution, but each was clearly a labor of love.

We also took advantage of the hotel pool and restaurant; on Sunday went to a nearby indoor amusement place where the young people played MagiQuest, which they loved, and (at another point) we got to shoot them with foam balls, which we loved, and everyone but me drove Go-Karts, which they enjoyed despite the fact that they all crashed a whole bunch of times.

The teen is now totally blue-haired. She looks like Ramona Flowers.

Almost all her gifts from friends (to date) have been hand-made and nearly all have been Dr. Who or Sherlock themed, even from people who don't watch either of the shows. I found this really touching.

I took half a dozen teenage girls to Forbidden Planet and The Strand today. Every single one of them bought a book at The Strand; most of them found stuff they wanted but could not afford at Forbidden Planet. Clearly my daughter has the right kind of friends.

What, something wrong with being OCD?

http://www.bigbadtoystore.com/bbts/product.aspx?product=EMC10016&mode=retail&picture=aux1

I'd like to learn how to work with Sculpy before actually building one of these. That would really open up the possibilities.

AIUI there are traditional magic systems which don't depend on the state of the magician's mind at all, but which work by invoking the power of spiritual entities in ways which compel them to obey. It's been more than 50 years since I read Waite, but I believe that was how the Golden Dawn's magic worked.

Isn't that part of the intent of Go-Kart emporia? As long as the walls are suitably bumpered, anyway.

Or maybe I'm just thinking of bumper cars.

Bumper cars are where crashing _is_ the name of the game, literally. I rather enjoy bumper cars, unless someone is being overly aggressive.

Say, would y'all care to have a sonic screwdriver (with psychic paper) to add to your collection? I had one gifted on me and, while I love the show, I have quite enough Stuff, thankyouverymuch. Email me a shipping address if you'd like to have it.

(BTW, if it's not obvious, response to the proposal outlined in the email in the form of, "Thanks, but no thanks," is entirely acceptable.)

Clearly my daughter has the right kind of friends.

Sounds like my highschool Star Trek club. Ah, tradition...!

Stefan Jones @692: "create your own superhero action figure"

There's someplace online where you can send them a couple of reference photos, and they'll create an action-figure head of the photos' subject.

Melissa Singer @695: Bumper cars are where crashing _is_ the name of the game, literally. I rather enjoy bumper cars, unless someone is being overly aggressive.

I've never really thought about it consciously before, but running a simulation in my mind, I predict that I would react rather badly to bumper cars. Like, with entirely inappropriate rage. Hm. But then, it's the start of Monday, and I'm already angry.

Probably at least in part residual reaction to my mac dying Saturday night.

Went off to the kitchen to put dishes away, came back, and Mr. Mac was shut down. I hadn't shut it down. It wouldn't turn back on. I tried to call Apple Care, but they were closed. (Note to manager: if you're going to tell users to call back during business hours, be nice if you would say what business hours are.) I had hysterics for a couple of hours (I was in the middle of listening to Spider Robinson's Variable Star, wanted to finish, and couldn't find my hard-copy either. Okay, so I overreacted; I was very short on sleep. My guinea pigs still aren't speaking to me. Apparently freaked them out some, too.), went to bed, got up later, little green tell-tale on power cord wasn't even lit.

Fortunately, they got me in an hour after I called, that time. (Automated voice response guy is programmed to understand "My mac is dead!" "Okay, I'll get you right over to the service department." Made me laugh.) And the issue turned out to be a power management somethingorother that the guy could reset right there in the shop, and I had a lovely chat with my neighboring user and her tech while I waited.

What amuses/frightens me is how completely freaked out I was by not being able to use my mac. I used to describe myself as a technophobe wannabe, but I've completely gone over to the shiny side, I guess. I use my mac for everything. Not having it was...like having one lobe of my brain tied behind my back.

So...I'm still having a bit of an attitude today. Anybody need somebody bitten? I'm in the right mood.

They claim to be helping authors.

The web-page that came up includes, again in a sidebar, that they want your RL identity info, in the form of name and address used for text purposes, and your Amazon password and associated email address

William Tare Fox and similar exclamations of astonishment.

Second, oh so sorry about your Mac! I've killed a number of PCs over the years and it is simply Never Fun and leads to much angst and feelings of uselessness, like half your thinking capacity has vanished.

Third, thanks but no thanks was understood.

Fourth: Perhaps from having grown up in NYC and having early exposure to bumper cars at amusement parks in general and Coney Island in particular, and having spent many hours at disco-bumper-cars (Eldorado Bumper Cars), laughing my head off as we smacked into each other, I have always liked bumper cars. I'm generally uncomfortable with things the replicate driving (since I don't drive), but this doesn't trigger that in me at all; I zoom around like a maniac, grinning my ears off and flying into other people who are similarly enjoying themselves.

The key, I've found, is to go during the day. Plenty of families (true fun is riding with your kid and letting them steer while you work the "gas") and younger kids who are just tall enough to ride by themselves. Later in the day and into the evening, you get more rowdy teens and guys trying to show off, and it's less enjoyable.

But it gets my adrenaline all zippy when I'm doing it right.

Sonic screwdriver, yes, please--the teen's is broken, sigh. Can you send it to me at the Flatiron?

Wishing a speedy recovery to your Mac and your equilibrium.

No, didn't. Appears to have been fixed, tho. Thanks, mods!

WRT bumper cars: entirely hypothetical at this point. Zippy adrenalin wins, yes. I'm still ticked at a childhood friend: we were riding a "tea-cup" ride, and I was all vertiginous and squeely, and she just sat there. I asked; she said if you just relax, it isn't thrilling at all. I tried it, and she was right, the zippy disappeared completely. Never got it back. NOT HELPFUL, friend. ::scowl::

Sonic screwdriver, ... Can you send it to me at the Flatiron?

Of course. But only if you promise me a tour when I visit. (Actually, even if you don't ;-> )Email me shipping address, plz.

Blessedly, Mr. Mac seems to be fully back in functioning order (with a screen not peppered with paint splats!). Me: not so much. We are entering our Stress Month tomorrow. I anticipate being somewhat disequilibriated for a while. Like I say, need anybody bitten, I'm in just the right mood.

You're welcome. I saw it and thought it looked like an overly-swift restoration of personal details in the wretched aftermath of a computer problem.

(My MBA has just lost the use of one of its USB ports. I'll be going to see the nice Apple guys in Amsterdam about it this coming week, probably.)

This is NOT a software development position. We want someone with a year's or more experience as a Wikipedia or other Wikimedia project editor/contributor, and with the reflexes of a librarian or archivist ("that information is disorganized! I shall file things appropriately!"), and with communications skills enough to translate between geek and nongeek. They can work from anywhere.

You could start by ascertaining if he's from Amsterdam, or from someplace I've never been, like Groningen or Delft. Narrows the chances, you know? But I don't know anyone that's over in your neck of the woods at the moment.

If he's Dutch, wish him a happy Queen's Day. That'll bemuse him.

I've been "recognized", if you will, twice.

Once was in an art supply shop in Boston, I fell into conversation with a sales guy in the paper department. We were talking bookbinding, and I showed him the small notebook I had with me at the time. It had my bindery mark on the spine—a rooster facing left—and I mentioned that that was because my bindery was the Evilrooster Bindery. He took a step backward and exclaimed, 'You're evilrooster?". He'd been on my bookbinding instructional site just the night before.

The second time was when my better half was at a dinner after a computer usability conference. He was chatting with the woman next to him, and they got onto the subject of online communities. He mentioned that I was a moderator here. She turned out to be an occasional lurker (Hi, Jen, if you're reading this!). We had lunch together the next day. Very pleasant indeed.

So it does happen from time to time.

Back in the mid-'80s, a friend from the Bay Area was visiting NY, attending a conference on women and spirituality, or somesuch.

Upon meeting someone from Boulder, it came up that he, too, knew a Boulderite, through fandom. "Who is it?" she asked, both of them laughing at the idea of common acquaintance. Turns out that she also knew me—through my old karate school.

That position looks interesting; how much of it is likely to involve team management? I can't tell from the writeup whether it's "will run bug tracking" or if that overlaps into managerial stuff like evaluating other employees and developing budgets. (My email address is above, if you'd rather take this offline or point me elsewhere.)

That position looks interesting; how much of it is likely to involve team management? I can't tell from the writeup whether it's "will run bug tracking" or if that overlaps into managerial stuff like evaluating other employees and developing budgets. (My email address is above, if you'd rather take this offline or point me elsewhere.)

Please do feel free to apply, and to spread the word.

There. Are. Worse. Looks. Did she squee when you told her this?

Bruce 693: Yes, Ceremonial Magic. I think that technique in general is either ineffective or unethical—because if you accept that these entities exist, why don't they have rights to self-determination?

(It's the process of getting into congruence and alignment with Somebody that interests me, personally. But that's another topic.)

Yes? Pray, continue?

Depending on the intensity of the alignment and the direction(s) of information/energy flow, that process can be anything from prayer to drawing down (that is, solicited possession by a deity).

I've always been somewhat bemused by the idea that the universe would be so designed that powerful entities would be compelled to do the bidding of pompous jerks in colorful robes. See also the First Law of Summoning: "Never summon that which you cannot control."

Yes? Pray, continue?

Lather, rinse, repeat?

*grins at Jacque and and Xopher*

Never summon what you can't send home.
Never open what you can't close.
And leave the Thing in the Laundry Room alone.

(Oh, wait, that last one is probably Milwaukee fandom/paganism specific. I remember it being part of a list of instructions, a couple decades back, though.)

On Monday, the car died on the way home from taking the oldest to school (he's 5). After being towed to a mechanic (completely freaking the 2-year-old out), and panicking the 8.75 months pregnant mother (it would be a distinctly sub-optimal time to have no working car), it was a relatively cheap repair and was finished that day. One neighbor sat with the children, and her partner drove the mother to the mechanic to pick it up. Meanwhile, the father was engaged in a rush assembly of a completely different way of looking at some analysis for a manager[1] (to be called MP hereafter) rather senior to him in the company.

On Tuesday, work was scrambly, as the analysis presented to MP Monday night had produced more questions than answers.

About 4 AM Wednesday, the two-year-old fell out of bed[2]. When his father went in and picked him up, he was nearly asleep, but his hair felt rather damper than sweat seemed likely to account for. On bringing him out into the light (by which he was much more upset than he was after falling out of bed), he had a significant gash in his scalp--he had apparently hit it on a toy on the floor[3].

On Friday, the father finished his week of seemingly-endless revisions and improvements and additions to the analysis by a heated rant by MP, directed at him, but related to the fact that someone elses' analysis, as previously presented to MP, was "basically useless for thinking about the question."

Meanwhile, a good friend [4] who lives nearby was dealing with a great craziness. As neither she nor her partner drive, an acquaintance often helps her with errands. He is not in the best of health. He showed up at her house, clearly not "right", at midnight Sunday. Her first guess was that his diabetes was out of control, but by Tuesday (with her feeding him appropriate food for his diabetes) he was hallucinating. This continued through Wednesday; with the help of a friend who works with the in-crisis homeless, he was finally persuaded to seek medical care on Thursday.

1) As in, he's one level from the top, and I'm one level from the bottom, in a 10k employee business.
2) He does this often; he's a sufficiently sound sleeper and his bed is sufficiently low that he often doesn't even wake up.
3) He had a gash about an inch long, nearly through the skin, on the back of his head. The culprit was one of these. See the corner above the P in Parking?
4) As in, our daughter is named partly for her.

In a different case, I do know that the "what I ask for, He shall provide" school of Christian prayer is something that is frequently discussed in my church. It is discussed as "won't work. can't work. actively impedes a solution. why don't we talk about what does work, and how it can lead to progress, maybe even in the way you think you need, maybe just in what you actually do need?" That kind of magic I don't need - the alternative, I'm not sure I'm strong enough to attempt (actually, that's not true. I am sure I'm strong enough to attempt it. I'm not sure I'm ready yet to go where it leads (not knowing where it would lead, of course).) Oh me of little faith.

On other topics (that's what OT stands for, no?) Calgary Expo came and went, and I didn't go. I wanted to, if just to meet a couple of webcomics authors and buy their stuff. Not enough spoons - in fact, I had to leave church before it started because I hit "too many people" mode. Sometimes I hate this - but it's better than the alternatives.

That reminds me of the series of three prayers somebody taught me about, years and years and years ago. They happen in order, and they're not for the faint of heart.

1. Lord, use me.

2. Lord, use me but don't break me.

3. Lord, I don't care if you break me.

Xopher: she's actually looked like Ramona Flowers before; she's cosplayed Ramona on and off for a couple of years (before the Sherlock thing hit; she now cosplays Sherlock). However, the older she gets, the more she looks like Ramona, especially when her hair is interesting colors (or she's wearing a wig).

The most astonishing thing is that in one of the photos she took yesterday, I can see the nascent woman looking out of her face; she suddenly looked like she was in her 20s. It was rather startling.

She's been running around tonight in her brand-new deerstalker; I suspect tomorrow will be a very Sherlock day.

WHAT THE MIGHTY MAGE SAYS: Abracadabra hoolah moolah! I constrain and invoke thee to do X!

WHAT THE SPIRIT POWER HEARS:
Simon says do X!
Let's play the X game!
No, come on Aunty, we have to do X now!
[Cat staring at catflap until one of its monkeys is compelled to open it by sheer force of feline concentration.]

A minor plot point in my WIP involves the most magical of its characters - who is basically a witchy healer - having once been in a state of sufficient enchantment as to be accidentally summoned to the local equivalent of Africa by an experimental medico attempting to conjure away a fever. Some mutual embarrassment ensued.

What a compendium of misfortune! I do hope that things get extra-better to compensate.

It's definitely going around though; I popped into my local art store, and couldn't restrain the guffaw when my guy Carl came around the corner, sporting three bandaids on the right side of his face, and the beginnings of a truly awe-inspiring shiner (which may end up encompassing both eyes). Seems he stepped on a rock wrong when unloading his musical equipment, and went down. "But I saved my gear!" he chirps.

He is, as one might expect, catching mountains of good-natured shit from his coworkers. Apparently completely freaked his daughter out when he came in, blood streaming down his face. His wife ... was somewhat less demonstrative, as she cleaned him up and packed him off to the ER. She's evidently had lots of practice at this.

I confess I worry (though I have zero authorization to do so). Seems like out of the last eight times I've seen him, he has been conspicuous-injury-free only about three of those.

elise @728: After I'd finally learned how to pray (and boy was it disconcerting the first time I got an answer), the prayers I've found to be most effective (for me) are variations on "How do I need to think about this to go where I want to go?"

I've occassionally tried the "Lord, use me" tack, as in "What do you want me to do?" The answer I pretty consistently get is, "Use your free will. That's what I put it there for."

Melissa Singer @729: I have a neighbor (who is also a Genius over at the Mac store, which is where she first caught my eye) who occassionally sports a purple wig that makes Flowers's look downright pastel. She apparently has some variation of alopecia, and has solved this issue by keeping an absolute beastiary of wigs. I have a hard enough time keeping humans straight. Changes in hair color will usually defeat my recognition capabilities. It's really unfair when the length of the hair changes, too.

Gray Woodland @732: You will, of course, alert the commentariat when said WIP is available for general perusal, yes?

(Which is actually a little unfair to James, as during the last decade or so the Nicoll Stories have had a lot less funny injuries and a lot more funny cats...ever since he started using a CPAP machine, in fact.)

I've read the story to which Gray's WIP is a sequel, and thought it was very good. He's currently in the midst of revision, while I wait patiently.

Gray Woodland #732: I'm now imagining a world in which CM works by other mechanisms than the summoners-and-binders believe,

I've long suspected as much for magic in general, and especially the shamanic context.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: if you aren't reading him, you should be. Three recent pieces of awesomeness.

We Must Tell Our Stories
My sense, from the beginning, has been that the primary loyalty of a story-teller is to the narrative that keeps them up at night, not to "diversity," "fairness" or any other so deemed societal good."

White Privilege I can run you all kinds of stats on the racial wealth gap and will gladly discuss its origins. But you can't really buy two parents like I had.

The Book of Human Language

This greater violence influenced our principles, which themselves were premised on other implicit, unstated principles. Among them: That the world was--and would always be--violent. That we were powerless to alter this fact.
...
Only twice in my life have I felt as lost as I did on that first day at Lemmel: When I moved to New York and when I started studying French. The obvious point is that "not knowing" on the streets carries a kind of consequence which "not knowing" in French class does not. And yet the fear--the darkness--is still powerful. Violence isn't simply physically painful, it is degrading and humiliating. The worst part about getting jumped was my helplessness. This is how I have experienced learning French.

Go read the whole thing.

I would suggest starting with the "Foxfire" books.

Your public library should have them, and Amazon has used copies.

I grew up in east Tennessee, so much of my recommendations are more "this captures how the place feels to me" than "this is a work of accurate history."

Fictionalized perhaps, but mostly autobiographical and quite accurate: Jesse Stuart's short stories, and his autobiography "The Thread that Runs so True."

For serious history/beginnings, David Hackett Fischer's "Albion's Seed", the section on the borderlanders/Scots-Irish.

For a modern and very philosophical picture, Wendell Berry's Port William novels.

I also react very badly to statements of the type, "Prayer always works -- you may not get what you asked for, but you'll get what you really needed" -- but that's a topic better discussed on the Dysfunctional Families thread.

Melissa, #737: Was she at Anime Boston? I took this picture of a very well-done Holmes and Watson there, both of whom were female. OTOH, they were also very clearly Holmes and Watson, not Sherlock and John, so maybe not.

Slightly off the Appalachian Trail (as you can tell from the title) is R. Gerald Alvey's Kentucky Bluegrass Country, which is sufficiently rich and detailed as to make me wonder if maybe I grew up in some alternate Lexington, and includes all sorts of sources in the bibliography. (Got my copy some years ago at Half-Price.)

There are all different kinds of Holmes/Watson Sherlock/John cosplay, I'm learning. There are Holmes and Watson, as seen in your photo (and portrayed by both males and females). There are Sherlock and John (again, portrayed by males and females). There are Femme-lock and Femme-John, Femme-lock and John, Sherlock and Femme-John (though that seems rare) . . . these are all female only.

Summary: A group of researchers hand-raised a litter of dog pups and a litter of wolf pups so that they would have equivalent experiences, then put them to a series of tests in which human/animal interaction was a necessary part of the solution. The dogs very quickly turned to the humans for help, treating them as social partners. The wolves did not.

I have been craving cake but my roommate's allergic to corn so I can't use box mixes. Despite a previous failure with scratch-baked cakes, I gave it a shot anyway. The Cake Flour at Whole Foods (yes, I know, but I didn't want to make another trip to a normal store) gave me a choice of either King Arthur, supposedly the Gold Standard of flour WHO PUTS CORNSTARCH IN THEIR CAKE FLOUR! ^#%%@$!!! (srsly, eff you, KAF) or Whole Wheat cake flour. Because Whole Foods thinks people want nutritional, high fiber junk food I guess. Due to roommate's allergies, I naturally went with the hippie cake flour.

I made this cake last night (substituted baking soda and cream of tartar for Baking Powder, which has - you guessed it - corn starch) but haven't frosted it yet. It feels predictably and dishearteningly dense. Is there any way to salvage this cake so I don't cry and throw it angrily on the floor after all that work? The amount of frosting on the linked recipe seems excessive (?! I am old!) so I was going to probably use half or maybe 3/4s of that amount. Any other suggestions for saving a dense, hockey puck of a cake - or is this the way cake is supposed to be and I have been brainwashed by Duncan Hines?

Thanks.

Serge,

I haven't been getting spammed on Dreamwidth, but I noticed a spate of it on a friend's journal a couple of days ago. (I noticed because one of them was hung off an old comment of mine, so I got email notification.)

Something entirely different that would also work would be turning it into a trifle - dense is good, since it holds up (whipped cream and fruit, layered). It wouldn't be a canonical frosted birthday cake, but it'd be tasty.

I wasn't aware that baking powder involved cornstarch - I assume as an anti-clumping agent.

*...baker
**although they can still be nicely moist, and they tend to have more flavor*** than the light-and-fluffy kind
***or maybe that's the wheat germ

You may be able to salvage the texture by sprinkling/brushing on some flavored simple syrup, as generally applied to a genoise. If you do that, the frosting may be overkill. Try syruping a small piece first to make sure it doesn't end up too sweet.

There's an informative passage about syruping genoises about 40% down the page here.

My kid (sometimes) loves bananas. She will (when she feels like it) power through five or six in a week. Or (sometimes) she won't eat a single one for days. However, bananas ripen VERY QUICKLY at normal household temperatures. We buy 'em green when there's 2-3 of the previous batch left, but they still sometimes linger long past their best-by (or at least, past where they're still firm enough for the kid to grasp it and eat it the way she likes).

I used to make banana bread somewhat regularly, but that takes rather more bananas than 'a couple'. I've been freezing them as I go, but right now, the mixer is, um, missing in the move, and I ain't beatin' that by hand!

So this morning there were two exceptionally-squishy bananas and one ripe-but-still-firm half-eaten banana that she wasn't going to finish more than the bite or two she had with breakfast.

I mashed all of them in a bowl and added enough brown sugar to make the mush taste like 'banana bread' to me and not 'mashed bananas' (I, um, dislike the taste of fresh bananas), sprinkled it with enough raw quick-cooking oatmeal to make the whole thing out of a 'pourable' temperature to a very loose dough consistency. Then I melted a thickish slice of butter in the microwave, mixed that in, and beat in two eggs.

I put paper cups in two muffin pans and one generous large soup spoon of batter in each cup (enough to cover the bottom non-scantily). I baked it at 350degF until about ten minutes past the fabled "Something must be horribly wrong, isn't it burnt yet?" point (because it spent an awful long time looking kind-of-baked but tasting raw; I tasted one to be sure).

So now I have about 20 little banana-oatmeal cookies, which I hope I can get the kid to eat; if not, they'll last longer in the fridge than the bananas would've, plus I actually kind of like them myself. They're a little chewier (in that you have to chew on the little oatmeal bits) than I'd like; maybe next time I'll soak the oats in a little milk first to soften them.

Put a bit of milk in a blender, and add the frozen bananas a chunk at a time until the mixture is thick (they should have been very ripe). Add to taste--a few drops of vanilla, a spoonful of peanut butter, some chocolate syrup, or substitute frozen strawberries or blueberries for the first few bits of banana.

This makes a great milkshake-like drink; for even more indulgence use half-and-half instead of milk.

I have been told at a staff meeting for Chicon staffers that There Will Be Hugo Packets, and they Will Be Soon. If memory serves "the first week of May" was mentioned, but I could be wrong. The last I heard, a couple of weeks ago, was that there was one holdup on one item; it wasn't that they'd refused permission, simply that the Hugo packet team had not heard back yet.

I'd check the Chicon page every day or so; I honestly expect it any day now. (There is some concern about the server being hammered immediately after it's released; please be understanding of slow load times.)

I can order non-corn starch baking powder, but with shipping and all that nonsense it would run me about $20. Considering all the half-full expired cans of Clabber Girl I've thrown out in my lifetime, I consider this somewhat fiscally irresponsible. At this point I am considering just making my own cakes, taking the three pieces I normally eat and bringing the rest to work. My poor roommate would have to put up with the delicious artificial "yellow" smell of the Box cake while I was baking, but maybe that would encourage her to buy her own baking ingredients.

Julie L @758 - I actually got quite a lovely floofy texture when creaming the butter, sugar and eggs. I have to say using superfine sugar helped there too. I actually considered using maple rather than simple syrup as a humectant. We'll see.

Mary @756 -

My mother used to bake bread with whole wheat she ground herself. Those loaves could have been used as doorstops and it was the best bread I've ever tasted. A couple of dense slices with whatever cheese we had in the fridge and you'd have the Platonic Ideal of a grilled cheese sandwich. For dessert you could put peanut butter and a little honey on the heel end and fold it over. Divine. Cakes, however, always came out of a box so that's the texture I'm used to.