Well. Someone's up late.

#1: make that two someones.

Obviously preparing for Viable Paradise.

Are there any known pictures of the first Tuxedo? I'd be interested in seeing how it compares with current ones.

Indeed, Tom #2, exactly what we're doing.

So anyway, this penguin walks into a bar. And the bartender says, "You look like you're wearing a tuxedo!" And the penguin says, "How do you know I'm not?"

(Reportedly the first tuxedo jacket was the same cut as a fox hunter's formal jacket, only in black cloth rather than red.)

The English fox-hunting tradition depends on two coats/jackets. The hunting coat is black or red, and at this time of year, still pre-season, a tweed hacking jacket is usual.

Riding jackets in general have a cut suited for riding, including a flared skirt and a long centre vent, What shift there has been since the first tuxedo, I don't know, but riding jackets also have a longer length than the usual sorts of modern jacket.

So I am a little dubious about the idea that the first tuxedo was a black hunting coat, but that daring young man could easily have owned one, making the experiment easy.

Both Sean Connery and Roger Moore as James Bond cam be seen to wear hacking jackets in some of the movies. It is, in effect, a form of English sports coat.

In Sweden, a tuxedo is a smoking (I thought it was a frack, but that is White Tie, rather than Black Tie, so, smoking it is).

Not quite as hilarious as reading about the "fracking" people do to extract oil, but it does make "No Smoking" signs in fancy places somewhat hilarious.

Now I want to get a hedgehog and name it Griswold Lorillard.

Alas, it is illegal to keep hedgehogs in Georgia.

Perhaps a pocket Yorkie.

(No, seriously, I have enough pets. And I would never acquire a living thing just so I could name it. Well...maybe a plant.)

Meanwhile: "Science Tackles the Logistics of Dinosaur Erotica"

"When, in 1889, a gentleman wearing a “Tuxedo” (as the rig came to be called) was admitted to the New-York Metropolitan Opera’s Dress Circle, Griswold’s fashion revolution saw its victory."

Well, I s'pose 'tis proper attire for Verdi's 200th birthday.

A Tuxedo is un smoking in France as well.

That's what the velvet lapels are for--unlike a self-faced lapel, they can be easily replaced when they get holes burnt in them.

Lila @ 8: I originally wanted to name the two ginger kittens Mandelbrot and Feigenbaum, but my ex-spouse objected on the grounds that they would feel like an idiot if they had to shout either of those names out of the back door.

Personally, I thought it was entirely appropriate to name kittens after two pioneers of chaos theory.

Mongoose @ 12
That says a lot about your ex. I think Mandelbrot and Feigenbaum are perfectly suited to yelling out the back door due excellent meter.

Now, if I were only a pet person, I'd steal your idea.

Salon: Ex-GOP insider unloads: Blame “neo-Confederate insurrectionists” for shutdown! Lots of interesting comments, including noting that Clinton was "the best moderate Republican President we ever had", and highlighting Gingrich's role in the last shutdown.

Dinosaurs are writing erotica? (Link didn't work.)
[Consults search engine, wonders whether waking up was good idea] At least this one place I worked acquired a tuxedo kitten for the office, who grew into a big fat old tuxedo furbag. He disappeared after being let outside--those idiots went thru 3 cats that way despite the cautions of wiser minds--and he is still missed, at least by me.

it is also Double Ten Day.

I don't have anything more to say than that but I feel I should add some text here so as to reassure the gnomes I am not exactly a spammer.

Mongoose @10: Absolutely appropriate. Although I have to say that in my experience, for causing chaos, hand-reared lemurs in the house are even more effective than kittens*.

*More three-dimensionally mobile and more liable to poop everywhere.

Dave harmon @ 14... I like this quote of his.

"...I am not an Obama partisan. I have many bones to pick with him, including the healthcare bill. If your intent was to insure as many people as possible, you’d have single payer..."

Like that goes so well with his former Party when Democrats propose something like a single-payer system.

(ddendum to my 17): And they have grasping hands...

dcb @17 &19--I am contemplating the results of certain felines in my household having grasping hands and I find I need to lie down and have a quiet weep.

One rearranged the kitchen counter to suit himself the other night, taking out a large jar of tutti-frutti/rumtopf in the process. What he could do with hands...

That sounds messy, fidelio. I'm glad my local Feline Overlord is generally pretty mellow (except for being a Shouty Cat). My parents, on the other hand, have a polydactyl feline (she looks like she has thumbs) and if said cat wasn't elderly and arthritic, she'd probably be working on world domination. Or at least on spreading political ideology.

You see, she's named Chairman Meow.

Benjamin @ 21: my late, lamented, superintelligent tabby had his own LiveJournal for a while under the name of chairman_miaow. (I can no longer get into it, since I've forgotten the password.)

When I say he was superintelligent, I do not use that word lightly. He proved it a number of times, but the most spectacular occasion was when he decided he was going to convince my former lodger, who loftily refused to believe that a cat was capable of being particularly intelligent.

Outside my house there is a paved footpath, and on the other side of that footpath there is another row of houses. At the back of this row of houses, there is what I grew up referring to as a "ginnel" - a narrow alleyway, in this case unpaved - and on the other side of this ginnel there are the backs of a third row of houses.

So this cat saw the lodger approaching and inclined his head in such a way as to signal, "Follow me, human." The lodger did so, out of curiosity, and the cat led him up the ginnel and stopped by one of the back gardens, where there was a dog. The dog saw him, ran up to the fence and started barking its head off. The cat calmly walked along to the garden diagonally opposite, where there was another dog. Same thing happened.

The cat then positioned himself squarely between the two dogs, so that they could see each other... and then darted back to the end of the ginnel and just sat there looking smug while the two stupid dogs stood there barking madly at each other, as if to say, "See? I did that!"

The lodger came in and reported the whole incident to me, suitably chastened. "What was so remarkable," he observed, "was that he'd obviously planned it all out in advance. I had no idea cats could do that."

To be honest I don't think most of them can. But this one was a bit of a feline-stein.

fidelio @20: Sounds messy. The late sister of our present feline overlady once jumped up and pretty much into the fridge (where the wonderful foods come from, such as cheese, and cauliflower leaves). She would have got in properly except for the solid front of the salad crisper compartment. Hate to think what she would have done with opposable thumbs. And I'm sure her sister too would open the door and then the cheese box, given half a chance.

(And the lemurs went outside as soon as they were old enough, to see other lemurs and grow up learning they were lemurs)

Mongoose @22 and dcb @23--I am reminded of the stories told about the late Snufkin, who cohabited with Maureen Kincaid Speller and Paul Kincaid. He could open the refrigerator, and unless active steps were taken to secure it against his depredations, often did so...

I'm reminded a story told by a friend who was owned by two cats and two dachsunds.

The cats weren't strong enough to open a pizza box, and the dachshunds weren't tall enough to get on the counter. So surely it was safe to leave the kitchen for a few minutes after the pizza was delivered...

Solution? Cooperation! The cats pushed the pizza onto the floor, where the dogs tore open the boxes, and all had a feast. Except the humans, who had to make do with peanut-butter sandwiches.

Open Threadiness: Mercury Seven astronaut Scott Carpenter just died. He was 88 years old.

My cat Phoebe, age 11, was diagnosed with mast cell cancer in May. After a splenectomy, she tolerated chemo with no side effects at all. Until a few days ago, when she started a rapid decline. I said good-bye to her this afternoon.

I have other cats, but she was my baby. Also the second cat I've lost in 16 months.

Glenda, I'm sorry for your loss.

Glenda, much sympathy.

Glenda, much sympathy.

Lots of sympathy from here too, Glenda, from another survivor of recent cat loss.

Glenda, I'm so sorry.

GlendaP: The loss of a cat is always hard to bear. You have my sympathies.

I'm currently attending a conference in Jamaica where the front-page news in today's paper was the death of a former deputy prime minister who was one of the most affable politicians I've ever met, and who was also an excellent jazz pianist. I can't help reflecting that had this been in the US there would have been insects crawling out from under stones to condemn him for having been a lifelong socialist (British Labour Party variety).

GlendaP, my condolences. It's always a hard choice.

I'm sorry for your losses, Glenda. And I'm glad your cats had you, and vice versa.

The BBC has published details of the lost Doctor Who episodes recovered.

The Web of Fear and The Enemy of the World

Glenda, sorry to hear about the cat. I hope you feel better soon.

GlendaP: My condolences.

Mongoose #22: People joke about their cats going for world domination, but an old boss of mine told me about a cat that repeatedly used a highway to assassinate other neighborhood pets, by luring them onto it.

Another cat he told me about was one of the 10% who are immune to catnip. The local catnip patch was in his yard. Easy path to at least neighborhood domination: "Invite" the other cats back to his place, let them get stoned out of their skulls, then beat on them.

Glenda, my condolences as well. No matter that we knew all along that they'd go someday, no matter how ready we thought we were when their time drew near, it still hurts.

My sympathies, Glenda.

Glenda, I'm sorry for your loss.

Fragano, is this you?

Glenda: it always hurts to see them go. My sympathies.

A tomcat that belonged to some friends of mine would find and socialize a feral kitten and add it to the household every time the humans got another dog.

My sympathies, Glenda.

there was an article in the news about a cat in London who knew how to ride the bus and what stop to get off at to eat the scraps behind a fish store.

My parents had two cats, from the same litter by quite different otherwise. Once, during 'frisk the cat' season, one came to the door and asked to be let in: not carrying, so was let in, went over and checked the food dish, then walked over to the cat door, stuck her head through it, and pulled it back into the house with a bird in her mouth. Another time one of them, in very dry, staticky conditions, walked up to my father and carefully touched him with an extended claw.

HLN: woman turned on computer this morning and found that it couldn't get past the BIOS. Hard drive failure. Currently on netbook, will be installing new hard drive (and more memory) tomorrow.

Glenda, my sympathies on your loss. Mast cell is one of the nastier kinds, and I'm glad your Phoebe was given a little more time with you, although clearly it was not enough.

Kitten chaser, for those who need one: as you may recall, I agreed to foster four orphaned kittens, who are now 5-6 weeks old and full of energy. They have charmed the FF as well as the Ex, and one of my technicians at work, so I have homes for three. They are still quite small, but have taken readily to soft food along with kitten milk replacer.

I am now on furlough, so I am looking forward to doing a few more things around the house (that didn't get done while I was on vacation), as well as watching kittens grow.

Personally, I'd love to a fly on the wall at the writers' meetings.

Love to be, I mean.

Glenda, I'm sorry for your loss.

Germane to the thread opener, I am currently sewing a tailcoat for my five-year-old's Halloween costume. This ought to be interesting, since the pattern, though "for kids", still had to be sized down.

(He'll be The Big Bad Wolf. The three-year-old will be Little Red Riding Hood.)

B Durbin @51 (He'll be The Big Bad Wolf. The three-year-old will be Little Red Riding Hood.)

Suddenly I'm picturing a five-year-old singing "Hello, Little Girl" from Into the Woods. Anyone have any brain bleach...?

(Sounds like a cute costume set.)

I guess the gnomes like Sondheim, too. I have chocolate chip ice-cream...

Julie, I doubt it. A kindred soul maybe, but that's not how Fragano would put it.

I'm sorry for your loss, Glenda.

Thanks, everyone.

I've spent the evening cuddling my other two and looking at cute kitten pics.

I am sorry to read this, Glenda.

Benjamin Wolfe mentioned his parents having a polydactyl feline. Polydactyly is a long-running program by our feline overlords to develop opposable thumbs so they don't have to depend on apes to do all their work for them.

Glenda: sympathies and a virtual {{{{{hug}}}}} if it's of any use at all.

fidelio: I'm very glad ours isn't strong enough to do that.

Cassy B. @25: That's teamwork!

P J Evans @48: A timely reminder for me to start backing up more regularly again (you'd have thought I'd have learned that lesson after two catastrophic HD failures, but it's so easy to get complacent again).

Glenda,
my sympathies, that first too-quiet morning is a hard one.

P J Evans @48 dcb@58: if you need more incentive, what I thought was a memory error- well, what started as a memory error -- cascaded into the hard drive. Got a new laptop, recovered most files. Which could almost sound good, but it's more like getting most of the sand out of your shoes.

Dave @ 39: that's terrifying. Fortunately, my feline genius, though undoubtedly the boss of all the other animals in the neighbourhood, was an entirely benevolent tyrant. He never picked fights. If another animal insisted on fighting him, he'd do his best to convince them it was a waste of time, but if they still wouldn't back down he'd prove it. I've known him break up fights between two other cats. He was very strong and had excellent reflexes.

Basically, he'd let anyone onto his territory as long as they behaved respectfully towards him and the other feline members of the household. If they didn't, well. He wouldn't actually hurt them, but I do recall one cat who made the mistake of hassling the highly-strung ginger girl who is now my one remaining cat. This cat ended up upside down in a flower bed, being looked at. When he tried to get up, he'd just be batted back into position. It was psychological warfare at its finest.

Nancy Lebovitz #45: Aww. I like that kind of feline genius better.

Any idea why he decided to wear the short coat though? Was it born out of necessity and his position in society led to its adoption, or was it actively rebellion on his part.

Nancy Lebovitz @45: Well done that cat!

Mongoose @61: Wow! We had a peacock once that used to get fed up with the red junglefowl cockerels fighting. He'd stride up, position himself between them and deliver a peck in each direction to make it clear that "this is to stop, right now!" Of course, he had the distinct advantage of being a lot larger than they were.

GlendaP: I'm sorry. Their physical size is so small compared to the space they can take up in our lives.

GlendaP, my sympathies for your loss.

1+8+9=18
1+8=9

If recursively summing the digits of a decimal number n yields 9 as the final result, the number is divisible by 9 (that is, n = 0 modulo 9).

You think that's feline-canine cooperation? Try this:

B's bedroom was over the kitchen, and one way to reach it was through a trap door in the kitchen ceiling. The pets, two dogs and a cat, had been getting into the garbage. The garbage can was now kept tightly capped, in the cabinet under the sink, behind a door that the family knew could not be pulled open by any of said pets. But they were still finding the can on its side, and its contents strewn over the floor.

One afternoon, when B was home alone in his bedroom, he heard a noise, and looked down to see the cabinet door burst open, and the cat leap out. To do that, the cat had had to slide behind the refrigerator, on another wall, slip into the gap that led into the cabinet space, and work his way through all the other cabinets to get to the one under the sink.

Then he had to hurl himself at the door with enough force to overcome the latch.

Now the big dog went into action. He grabbed the handle of the can in his mouth, and carefully pulled the can forward, until it was just balanced on the edge of the cabinet floor. Finally, he gave a sharp tug, so that the can keeled over onto the kitchen floor, and its lid popped off.

They feasted.

GlendaP I'm sorry you lost a friend.

fidelio @ #24: He could open the refrigerator, and unless active steps were taken to secure it against his depredations, often did so...

My parents' last cat was really good at pulling doors open, and they had to install a latch on the refrigerator to stop him raiding it. But he once got himself trapped in a cupboard that opened outward, because if pulling the door didn't get it open he was out of ideas.

# 25 and 68: That reminds me of a time years ago when my sister an I shared a house. We had three dogs - one perpetual puppy that looked like a golden retriever (wasn't - pedigree didn't branch much), one classic black lab and a bouvier des flandres that could be purely evil. One night, these three canine geniuses figured out how to open the refrigerator and they had a lot of fun. I sure didn't cleaning up the food they pulled out and the mess they made as they discovered somethings are not intended for dogs.

Then, a few days later, to prove it wasn't a fluke they did it again. Then I invested in a child proof latch for the fridge and it never repeated itself. Though there were suspicious marks on the lower part of the fridge door...

GlendaP, late but sincere condolences.

HLN: Local man sees Gravity, anxiously sifts Internet in search of spoileriffic discussion forum.

Bill Higgins @ 73... Thumbs up or down?

the legendary Doritos-stealing seagull

Serge @74, C @75, I am amused by these two posts coming in sucession, as five years ago a Norwegian gull stole part of my thumb!

Andrew Wells @ 76... Ouch.

HLN: Local woman is bemused to see her kids in an Of Montreal music video from 1997. Had forgotten how adorable her kids were back then.

Serge @77, yes, that's pretty much what I said at the time. (Well, what I said may have been a little longer ... )

But it was worth it, because it was an immediate prelude to seeing a White-Tailed Sea Eagle :-)

I work for a state agency which is entirely federally-funded. The state government managed to scare up enough cash (on the theory that they WILL be repaid) to keep us open these past two weeks.

I am about to go to a meeting with our director where she'll explain which people are being furloughed next week, and how we're going to handle all the things that need to be taken care of without these people.

I expect there to be vigorous discussion.

Serge, #74:

Oh, thumbs up, certainly.

But I have certain reservations, which I will mention here in a spoiler-free way:

1. As I have written elsewhere, if you are the slightest bit inclined to see Europa Report, which has just come out on DVD this week in the U.S., try to see it before you see Gravity. Here's why.

2. Under their extravehicular-activity suits, Hollywood actresses do not wear what astronauts wear under their own suits. Also, Hollywood actresses are remarkably speedy both at donning and doffing various types of space suit, even without assistance.

3. There is fantastic attention to astronautical detail in the suits, sets, and spacecraft. However-- as other observers have noted, mostly in spoiler-filled discourse-- the principles of orbital rendezvous are rather implausibly twisted.

Nevertheless, it is a fabulous space movie.

Bill Higgins @ 81... I won't be able to see "Europa Report" before "Gravity", alas. I saw the ad for the former at George RR Martin's Cocteau Theater and they both look good.

Jerboa starring in Dramatic Little Monster.

fidelio @80: Urg. Hope it works out as well as possible.

dcb @84: About 23% of the agency furloughed, with nearly all of uppermanagement and those support units not directly involved in claim processing. Not great, but it could be ever so much worse, and we're hoping it won't be.

We get congressional inquiries on cases regularly; someone uggested that the answer to such inquiries should be "We're sorry, we can't answer that, and it's your fault."

If anyone was thinking of taking a peek back into the political thread, don't bother. It just Godwinized.

Thank you to whoever it was that mentioned/recommended Psychonauts (I can't remember person or thread, I'm afraid). Even if it is evil and has stolen my time.

86
Not really, and that line is going nowhere.

@70: The two cats in my life have had different philosophies about opening doors which are already open a crack. Percy hooked a claw around the door and pulled it toward him to open it. Zachias goes up to the door and pushes his nose against it, opening it that way. But neither one figured out how to open the door the other way.

On cats and doors: Cleo has taught herself how to open the one door with a lever handle. She also taught herself how to open it from either side. As a consequence, if the other cat is out in the sun room to eat his meal in peace, I have to lock the door to prevent her from getting to his food. She also attempts to open the usual round door handles, and I fear for the future should she ever figure that one out.

I forget if I read about it here, or way back when on rassef, but wasn't there a fan who decided to breed Siamese cats for both polydactyly and intelligence? As I recall, it didn't take many generations for it to become a little freaky... she had a web page, I think, but Googling for polydactyl Siamese intelligence doesn't get me anything like what I'm looking for.

Cheryl @91

I am not sure that the cats are Siamese, but this is what Leslie Fish is doing.

I pass through Tuxedo Park when I take the train up to my parents' place up near Port Jervis. I knew there was a connection to the suit, and something about a club, but not the full details.

I always pictured the club as an isolated country place that the elite travelled to for the occasion. Never knew Tuxedo Park was an estate sort of place; it is so isolated! But I guess that is the point.

I believe there's a SCA event or Ren Faire held up there.

Theophylact @67:

A neat variant on that, which I conjectured to my teen last week, is that if you express the number in Base 8, the number is divisible by 7 if its digits sum recursively to 7.

It's neat because you can also make it work for binary: you chop things up into sets of 3 digits and sum recursively: you need to get things to sum to 111 for divisibility by 7.

(Proof left as an exercise to the reader.)

(Mostly because the margin is too small to contain it, of course)

praisegod barebones@95

So this means that we won't be able to verify this theorem for several centuries?

pgbb, #94: That's because binary and octal are so closely related (8 being a power of 2). If you have a long binary number, you can convert it to octal almost as fast as you can write by mentally grouping the digits (right to left) by 3s and writing down the octal equivalent. Conversely, you can convert an octal number to binary by converting each individual digit to its binary version.

I wonder if "digits in a number Base X sum to 1 less than the base = number divisible by 1 less than the base" is a general formula? I'm in a rush this morning, though, so I'll leave the testing for someone else.

Cheryl @91: That's Leslie Fish's cats, all right. Some of her foundational stock was Siamese, but Maine Coon brought the polydactyly in, and she'll take any stock that's smart enough for her standards. She initially selected for large heads (figuring extra space for neurons was good), and then started raising her kittens in really enriched, play-based, puzzle-y environments and keeping only the smartest one or two out of any litter.

Even her culls are really freaky-smart and teamworky, by now ...

I wonder if "digits in a number Base X sum to 1 less than the base = number divisible by 1 less than the base" is a general formula?

I wondered this, too, while laughing over "proof won't fit in margin".

Allan Beatty @ 86... I peeked and see that Abi has made clear there's a containment policy in effect. Thank goodness.

Carol Kimball (99): That's been discussed around here before, and the answer was Yes. I'll try to dig out a link to the earlier discussion this evening, unless someone beats me to it.

It seems strange to say that anyone is "shocked" by a garment of unusual cut. And not very unusual at that. It's not like the young man showed up barefoot or in assless chaps.

Lee #97: Yup -- in base 16, you cast out fifteens, and so on. Learned that one back in high school (my math teacher was also the computer teacher).

While you can't cast out zeros for binary, the equivalent there is "parity", which is 1 iff the original number has an odd number of 1 bits. Parity is equivalent to summing the digits and discarding all but the low bit.

@94, etc.: Summing the digits is equivalent to subtracting multiples of (b^n)-1 (where b is the base, and n is which digit you are "demoting" to the ones place). (For example, in base 10, if you replace 100 with 1, you are subtracting 99, and if you replace 500 with 5, you are subtracting 5*99.)

Since b=1 (mod b-1), b^n=1 (mod b-1) for all n, therefore, (b^n)-1=0 (mod b-1), and subtracting multiples of it cannot change the value mod b-1.

If you started with a nonzero number, the repeated summing procedure won't actually get to zero, it will get to b-1 instead, but that's the same thing mod b-1, so it still indicates divisibility by b-1.

@92 & 98

Merci! That's who I was thinking of. I wonder if being owned by one of her cats would fall under "so cool!" or "somewhat terrifying"?

The most exciting cat story I have is Sheba, who plays fetch with her foil balls. She'll be obsessed with playing for a couple weeks, during which time the house will accumulate a dozen or so balls made up by various of her humans, then she'll lose interest for six months or so, but other than that I haven't see any example of cognitive brilliance out of our cats.

The puppy, on the other hand, is obviously a thinker, but there are no stories yet.

Cheryl @105: She only adopts out her (sterilized) culls in pairs or threes, because one of hers in a household containing only 'normal' other cats gets really bored and frustrated quickly.

I'd like to meet Leslie Fish's intelligent, dextrous cats, although I'm also getting worried about the imminent rise of our new feline overlords!

She only adopts out her (sterilized) culls in pairs or threes...

I will face my temptation.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the temptation has gone there will be nothing...
Only I will remain.

Andrew Wells @108: They (and she) live on a compound in fairly remote Arizona, so they're not an easily-accessible tourist destination.

@107 Elliott Mason
She only adopts out her (sterilized) culls in pairs or threes, because one of hers in a household containing only 'normal' other cats gets really bored and frustrated quickly.

Well, that definitely tips it over into the "terrifying" category. Three super-intelligent polydactyl cats against ordinary me? Feline overlords indeed!

I've spent enough time around a wide range of cats to have a certain amount of trepidation where superintelligent (or even dangerously clever) cats are concerned. I'd love to observe cats that clever, but I'd rather not be owned by them. Local Shouty Cat is enough of an overlord for me.

Alex R: Yeah, I'm carefully not thinking about how I could manage to get a pair of kittens happily and safely from Arizona to Pittsburgh...

Our cats are eight and a half; it's time to get a kitten anyway!

The "casting out" yielding 0 of n-1 for base n being a test of divisibility is one of the really interesting fun bits of math. I don't know if anyone's proven that the casting-out of one less than a power of the base number is a similar test of divisibility, but it seems likely from the result in octal mentioned above -- it's probably of fairly limited use, but it might make a nice small math paper for someone who's interested in developing the proof. It's trivial in certain cases (where the number of digits is a multiple of [the number of digits in the power to which the base is raised], it's just making the power the base), but it's not so obvious in a longer string. (Resists temptation to go off and play with the math....)

If you can see a simple counterexample, let me know, okay?

Carrie S. @ 113

Shipping live animals is easy. Just Google it!

I've read the Parhelia about the Daily Mail bein caught lying about the European Court of Human Rights.

For starters, the Daily Mail is a hard-right newspaper. History is not always reliable, but ownership has been in the same family since it was founded, and there is a consistency in the newpaper's political atitudes. So I don't feel it unfair to point out that the newspaper supported the fascism of the 1930s, whether in Britain, Spain, or Germany.

Meanwhile, Britain was one of the countries which wrote the European Convention, and founded the European Court, all as part of the post-WW2 reaction to the Nazi abuse of the German legal system. It was a collective European declaration of "Never again!".

Fast-forward to 1998. In that year came the Human Rights Act, which required British Courts to take into account the Convention, and the rulings of the Court, when they interpreted British Law. It also required legislation to be drafted to take the strictures of the Convention into account, and required the Ministers responsible for new law to make a declaration that they had done so.

It was soon apparent that British politicians has a less than obvious understanding of what the Convention meant.

We now have a very vocal anti-Europe campaign in the UK, intended to get us out of the EU, and which lumps together a variety of distinct things as "Europe!", about which they routinely promote lies and scare stories. Senior members of the Government, such as the Home Secretary are talking openly about abrogating the European Convention after the next election.

Even Russia has signed up to the Convention.

While there are differences in the language, there is a considerable overlap with such things as the US Bill of Rights. And these things can all be traced back to Magna Carta. But, because it might stop a bunch of authoritarian thugs from treating us like slaves, I suppose the old fascists have reunited to oppose it.

Now that the European Court has made an official statement pointing out the lies which the Daily Mail has published, and there is an argument about the proposed Royal Charter for the press (which does seem to have flaws), I intend to lay in a good supply of popcorn.

Dave Bell @116: It surprises me how many Europeans have forgotten why European integration is a good idea: http://alternateflags.tumblr.com/post/48218162433/why-there-is-and-ought-to-be-a-european-union

My sister Pat and I once shared a table with Leslie Fish at a Pegasus Awards banquet. She told us a story about her cats setting an ambush for some cat-harassing jays, using a half-grown kitten as bait to lure them in. They sounded frighteningly smart then, and that was probably over 15 years ago.

Anyone else going to OVFF this year, by the way?

Johan Larson @102, he was moving in 19th Century upper class society where fashions were very narrowly defined (especially for men) and slow to change (especially for men).

John @116, I fully agree. I am not a great fan of European integration; but anything that helps to keep the peace in Western Europe for 68+ years has to be a good thing.

This update from Leslie Fish seems like something the Fluorosphere would find interesting. (If anyone can find the link referenced in her comment, I'd very much like it.)

Anne Sheller @118: I am definitely going, though I have yet to find a suitable carpool companion (yikes).

Ah, Glenda, you have my condolences.

Newspaper headline:
Mortal shells strike near chemical weapons inspectors’ hotel in Syria

I suspect someone let autocorrect do its thing without bothering to check the result.

About a third of a century back, I recall establishing that that thing that works for 9's in base 10 also works for 15's in hex. I may have tried it for a few other bases as well, but don't recall. Haven't been back there since--I've got some cognitive/memory problems that make it hard to hold onto math. Even though I discovered/devised hex by myself when I was D. There's folks that are just no good at math and then there's folks that would be but they have intermittents or shorts in their wiring.
Sympathies to those who have lost furry friends and congratulations to those acquiring same. Me, I can't afford one.

Oh, I would love a pair of Leslie Fish's cats! I really miss my superintelligent tabby.

He only ever once opened a door that he shouldn't. I responded by picking him up, giving him a cuddle, telling him what a very clever cat he was to work out how to open the door, and then asking if he'd please not do it again.

And he didn't.

On the topic of intelligent cats, I thought I'd been owned by some smart cats but nothing tops these two.

(Link goes to a youtube video. I don't recommend watching it while ingesting liquid.)

The two of them haven't figured out doorknobs, but they open unlatched doors, sliding pocket doors, and cabinets, can get dresser drawer open to retrieve toys inside (including the top drawers from the top of the dresser), can get under boxes left upside down on the floor, and both fetch jingle balls. They can also open many types of plastic food containers.

I have to tie my closet door shut (it doesn't latch) to keep Mocha from getting in there. If he gets in, he pulls all the clothes off the hangers just because he can.

It seems like this should get as much attention as possible, so I'm mentioning it here. There is an infinite amount of wtf in that final email response.

My parents' cats, the same ones that brought the bird through the cat door and discharged the static, could open drawers that they could reach. Walk into the kitchen, discover dishtowels on floor, and check drawer for cat (usually black-smoke Sammy). Harry had a cupboard in the utility room she liked. Sammy had a thing for heights, inside and out.

Is the cat discussion reminding anyone else of André Norton's "Star Ka'at" series?

Following up on my #101, I'm not finding the earlier ML discussion I remember on casting out nines and other numbers, but looks like it's already been addressed well right here.

Russ #128: Bora Zivkovic, the blogs editor from Sci Am, who seems to be liked and trusted by the bloggers (at least up to now), just tweeted

Sorry for delay, hard to find ppl on a long weekend. I contacted bloggers with info. Not all info available yet. Public statement later.

I think there's a proof that
11 x 11 = 121
In any base greater than two. It should follow from that algebraic expansion.

The properties of (base-1) in base n are probably similar. I am not enough of a mathematician to attempt it though.

PJ -- The red tabby in the video I linked to has an absolute obsession with boxes, bags, baskets, and anything else she can get in. I have found her in drawers more times than I could count!

When she was about five or six months old, I hurried out the door with my laptop bag, got in the car and reached inside for my keys.

The inside of the bag was unusually furry and warm. She weighed so little at the time that I didn't notice the extra weight.

I can't count the number of times I've picked up a box or shopping bag and went, "Why is this so heavy? Oh. Cat inside." That tiny little kitten grew up to be twelve pounds.

Anne Sheller @ #118, that story is told in the pages linked to by Elliott Mason @ #98. There are a couple of similar tales told there as well.

Google's Plan To Shove You In Ads
"Google announced Friday that it will begin featuring users’ photos, names and comments in the promotions it serves up online, both on Google properties and on the more than 2 million sites that tap into its advertising network."

Ew.

Thinking on from my own post @108, I've just realised that these cats might be reading Making Light. So what I meant, of course, was that I for one welcome the rise of our new feline overlords, and will be a good and loyal human servant ...

Theophylact #67

Here's the song that taught me that axiom when I was nine.

The fact that there is currently no educational math show equivalent to Square One makes me sad. The fact that you can't get official high quality DVDs of it anywhere makes me even sadder. Thanks to that show, in fifth grade I was able to provide a definition of "tessellation" when my teacher didn't recognize the word.

All the songs were just amazing, and they stick with me decades later. Comedy music has a long history of "honest" love songs, but this one from Square One is my favorite; hilarious, with bonus math lesson.

One of the politically awkward points about intelligence in humans is that, while genetics has to have something to do with it, family environment is involved too. There are measurably smart parents who create a sterile and uninspiring environment for their kids.

Politically, the parental element, especially when it is labelled "genetic", is a great excuse for not "wasting" money on education. While a chunk is in our genes, it's certainly worth making the effort to inspire children.

And most of this effort needs to be made from the earliest days. By the time they start school, it may already be too late.

This is one of the reasons I am rather glad that we have the BBC, here in the UK. Yes, you have Sesame Street, but we have a whole TV channel, Cbeebies, aimed at this age group, and with a lot of material designed to stimulate young children.

It's never going to be enough, and parents trapped by poverty and unemployment are going to struggle to add to that stimulation. But it's there.

Yet, despite that start, we're told that we are at the bottom of international comparisons of literacy and numeracy, and older people score better than the young, which is unusual.

I wonder what schools have been doing wrong for the past twenty or so years. One feature in that time had been the pressure on the school to score well in standardised tests. The Politicians are now insisting that all schools should be above average.

That might make sense, if they were to say that the average they set as the target was, for instance, that of 2008. But that isn't what they say.

As for the newspaper results on these shocking results for numeracy and literacy, there's all the usual statistical deception and inadequacy in how the figures are presented. Nobody is saying what the difference is between the worst and the best, and (more subtle) there is nothing about the error range possible. Old people are smarter, but the difference between old and young is one part in 2500.

One radical proposal I have seen is that schools should stop teaching calculus, and put the effort into probability and statistics. When there are so many instances of figures being abused in obvious ways by those in power, it's a tempting idea, but do we really expect to get a change in education which goes against the interests of Government, Media, and The Mob?

Dave Bell @13:

Speaking as the parent of a newly-effloresced middle schooler, let me tell you that a lot of the work of making a kid an academic success (and thus "intelligent" by most measures we use in society) is not complete by the time they start primary school.

The amount of adult time and attention that goes into making sure the kid is appropriately fed, rested, bathed and dressed, at the right location at the right time with the right books, and has completed all of his homework with an acceptable level of attention is pretty staggering. I'm certainly staggering as we do it.

Running a household that has the mental, emotional and physical space to do this is very much easier with money. We each only work one job, so evenings are available for tutoring and coaching in study skills; we have the energy to spend those evenings doing that; we have enough space that the child can have somewhere quiet to study.

This is not to discount CBeebies, which both of our kids adored and learned a lot from. But I gotta tell you, I look back on those days with fond nostalgia sometimes.

abi @ 140... I'm certainly staggering as we do it

Writer Daniel Abraham and his wife Kat, when asked why they have only their 7-year-old-daughter who's joked about coffee as a non-newtonian-liquid, have responded with words to the effect that they wouldn't have the energy to nurture two kids.

When I ask the mother of my younger godson & his brother - currently 5 and 7 - how she is, she almost always replies, "Strangely tired;" to which my standard reply is, "And why is this strange?"

My nephew is four years old, has Down's Syndrome, and is a sunny, sweet-natured, adorable, but above all very energetic little boy. I recently went to stay with my sister and family, and experienced his constant boing at first hand for a few days. It was fun, but... tiring.

"Where does he get all that energy?" I asked my sister.

"He drains it from his parents," she replied.

It made perfect sense.

Mongoose @143: I've known for some time that children are energy vampires - it's the simplest explanation for why they have so much energy while the adults around them have so little.

Dave Bell #139 - the thing is, the scores of people in their 50's and teenagers that people are comparing, are actually very close indeed, so there isn't any clear need to worry about it. But then as you note the newspaper presentation of it all is pants.

REgarding how education is, is going, and what might be done to improve it, Gove's adviser Cummings wrote a paper on it:
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/interactive/2013/oct/11/dominic-cummings-michael-gove-thoughts-education-pdf

There are many, many things wrong with it, and some useful points. Interestingly, there are charts suggesting that, over the last decade with teach to the test, that exam results are uncoupled from the results you expect from general surveys of ability. Which makes sense if you are teaching to the test; you gain ability at completing set narrow tasks and lose more general abilities.
Cummings work also claims, without any evidence, that Sure Start and the like don't work. Apparently the Tory government shut down the funding to the body which was monitoring how Sure Start was doing, so that's not exactly fair.

Older people may read Cummings paper and remember ones like it from the 50's or 60's, with the white heat of technocracy promising to use science to make everything better.

Henry Troup @ #133: Yeah. It's called the Binomial Theorem.

Dave Bell #139:

One of the politically awkward points about intelligence in humans is that, while genetics has to have something to do with it, family environment is involved too. There are measurably smart parents who create a sterile and uninspiring environment for their kids.

This is much of the difference between "genetics" and "heritability". Parents who screw up nurturing are failing heritability no matter how stable their genetics are.

guthrie #145: over the last decade with teach to the test, that exam results are uncoupled from the results you expect from general surveys of ability.

See also Goodhart's Law.

(Hmm. It seems my "view all by" is split, with only 86 of my posts (including some older ones) attached to this address -- presumably, the rest are at my older address on the same site.)

Russ @ 128

What the fuckity-fuckin-fuck is wrong with that guy?

That's a rhetorical question by the way. The so-called male is question is obviously suffering from a combination of sexism, racism, and the sort of very small "instrument package" that would make any scientist insecure.

Tom W.@114, Henry Troup@133, et al.: Re-read chris@104?

"Niagara Falls? I told you we should have turned left at Tuxedo Junction!"

David G @149 -- the problem for an off-number of the exponent isn't actually addressed by chris's comment, at least directly. It's slightly more complex than that. For a simple question (I haven't played with it, so I don't know!) does casting out 99s indicate divisibility by both 9 and 11? Since divisibilty by 11 is indicated by the sum of odd and even digits in the number in question, this could be a useful bit of information. (And that aspect of 11-divisibility is also base-independent, because of the binomial expansion referenced earlier.)

Here's the latest from SciAm

while attempting to post a link to the latest from Scientific American regarding the situation discussed upthread.

I can offer butter-pecan ice cream.

Alex R @148: Sexist and racist, yes, very plainly - but could we not conflate anatomy with character?

HLN: Local woman completes photoshoot of artwork to be displayed at MileHiCon next weekend. Good news: the job is done. Also, took about as long as anticipated. Bad news: job took about 4x the energy local woman anticipated. "It's amazing how much exercise is involved in running up and down a half-flight of stairs twelve times turns out to be." Local woman is now feeling thoroughly squashed. "I could have lived without schlepping all that stuff outside, and then carting it all back inside. Especially considering the," she coughs, "quality of the images produced."

Local woman garners the perhaps not-mind-blowing insight that the intelligent way to approach this would have been to photograph each piece, individually, as it was finished. Of course, this would presuppose finishing each piece in a reasonably timely fashion, istead of leaving touch-up and that last coat of varnish to be done in a batch in a mad panic at the very last possible minute.

Also: local woman concludes that she hates product photography.

Tom Whitmore @151:
For a simple question (I haven't played with it, so I don't know!) does casting out 99s indicate divisibility by both 9 and 11?

If you do it properly, yes. You have to work in two-digit blocks, so that you're actually doing it in base 100. At that point, it works exactly the same as 9s in base 10, for the same reason.

Example: 57024 (=9*11*576)
5+70+24=99

Dave Bell @#139
I've heard a lot of suggestions that calculus be removed from the curriculum, and a lot of suggestions that statistics should be added. Usually the two suggestions go together but I've heard other candidates for what should replace calculus or be dropped for statistics. I'm unsure if they are good ideas. On one hand its true that calculus is one of the least useful branches of math in day to day life and as it is currently taught not very good at building mathematical reasoning (something with more proofs would be better). On the other hand knowing calculus is a huge bottleneck for a lot of fields that require math, there's a reason Newton needed to invent it to explain gravity. Probability/statistics is arguably one of these fields. You can teach people some rather useful tricks for not being misled by statistics without using calculus, but actually understanding even basic probability theory often requires the use of calculus concepts like limits.

#151: For a simple question (I haven't played with it, so I don't know!) does casting out 99s indicate divisibility by both 9 and 11?

Assuming you mean something like "starting with a base 10 number, break it into 2-digit chunks (starting from the right and allowing the leftmost digit to stand alone if necessary), add up the sum of all chunks, repeat until answer is 2 digits or less" the answer will be congruent to the original number mod 99, so yes, if it is divisible by 3, 9, 11, or 33, then so was the original number.

Similarly, casting out 9s also works as a test for divisibility by 3 -- if you end up with 3 or 6, then the original number was divisible by 3 but not by 9.

Since divisibilty by 11 is indicated by the sum of odd and even digits in the number in question

At first I thought I found a counterexample, but if instead of "the sum of the odd digits and the sum of the even digits are equal" you use "the sums differ by a multiple of 11" as the criterion for divisibility of the original number, I think it would work.

And, like you say, that seems like it will generalize to b+1 for any base b. On the other hand, (b^2)-1 is always (b-1)(b+1), so you could also use the 2-digit-chunks method to test for divisibility mod (b+1). It's not immediately obvious to me which would be easier in general.

3-digit chunks would preserve value mod (b^3)-1, 4-digit chunks (b^4)-1, etc. In general if b and n are relatively prime I think there must exist some k<n such that breaking into k-digit chunks, adding, and repeating will preserve divisibility mod n, because b must have finite order in Z/n, but that's advanced enough that I'm not completely sure of it.

Is this too much math?

Not a double post, just crossposting with someone with a very similar name. Honest.

Area man caramelizes onions in slow cooker starting Friday, is very satisfied with the result on Sunday.

"I really was just too busy to take them out," AM said. "But they're really almost black now, and still soft and moist. A slow cooker is really the way to go when caramelizing onions!"

AM says this is the perfect time to caramelize onions by the slow-cook method. "It's cool enough to run a slow cooker without misery," he says, "but warm enough to leave the windows open." He had his slow cooker on a marble slab next to his living room window. "Last year I did my caramelizing in November, and everything (sheets, towels, clothing) in my house reeked of onions until I washed them. This year there's a smell in the house, but not on everything."

AM plans to use his caramelized onions in his famous tofu pâté at Thanksgiving. "Obviously I don't need a whole potful for that," he admits, "but caramelized onions are yummy things in many dishes, including..." AM began to list various ways to use them, but your reporter got bored and wandered off.

159
HLN: area woman buys mushrooms for half price at supermarket and decides to have mushroom pizza. No basil or oregano in house, so pizza is seasoned with thyme and garam masala (onion/garlic free). Result is very tasty.

The post was about math so maybe some pie will help. It was also about education, but I suspect school lunch would cause it to disappear forever. Sorry about the delay with your dessert, real life called me away immediately after submitting my last post.

Allan Beatty @86: If anyone was thinking of taking a peek back into the political thread, don't bother. It just Godwinized.

But in between, Leah Miller continues to be Really Interesting.

Elliott Mason @98: That's Leslie Fish's cats...Even her culls are really freaky-smart and teamworky, by now ...

One can't help but wonder: is this really a good idea? I mean, forget Skynet.... (Although extinguishing the human race seems like a bad bet, given that they're prone to making all that lovely food.)

Cygnet@134 - An "open thread" is also likely to attract cats. (My cats, alas, are currently spending their days locked in a bathroom while we have construction being done on our floors, (or - long rants omitted - not currently being done on our floors.) The two cat carriers are in that bathroom, and the smaller cat really likes sitting in the smaller carrier most of the time.)

Another recent cat-and-container sighting: we stopped in at the San Francisco zoo when we were going through the city this weekend, and the baby tiger there had a mostly-demolished cardboard box that she was playing with. When we first saw her this spring, she was a bit larger than a housecat; she's now well into Labrador retriever territory.

On childrens' energy levels - they've actually got the same energy as adults, but much lower mass, so much higher velocity and faster acceleration.

Put my cat into a carrier and she will yowl and swear constantly until you let her out. Put a box in the room, however, and she will immediately go and sit in it of her own accord.

Cats are strange.

Mongoose #165: Exactly how can you tell that your cat is swearing?

me @ 121

Ok, finally found the link; here is the link to Leslie Fish's fundraiser for an orchard.

abi @ 140

You are scaring me; I had this idea that once ours got bigger (like middle-school age) it would be less energy-draining than four pre-schoolers.

Fragano @166: cats have a remarkably broad range of vocalizations, and to add to that they've spent the past five or ten thousand years under a selection pressure for human compatibility -- which includes being able to get us shaved apes to do what they want.

Also, if you'd ever heard a cat swearing, you would be under no illusions as to what was being expressed. (It involves hissing, growling, and a general sense of "you wait until I get out of this thing, food ape: I'm gonna rip your face off and shit down your throat!")

Thanks to my daughter's Gunga hosting an all-cousins sleepover last night, I GOT TO SLEEP ALL NIGHT and wake up when I wanted. Hosanna in the highest!

Plus we had a kid-free, two-adults chore afternoon last night that was hella productive on a bunch of stuff that backs up because we're too tired to tackle it, or is strongly not aided by kid-presence. There was an surprisingly relaxed vibe to some of the chores ... because I wasn't constantly interruptng them every ten minutes to handle Kid Stuff. I got to sort through the empty spice bottles, find all the right bulk spices to go into them, and fill the bottles -- in one go! Amazeballs!

Now if I can just figure out exacly which few colors I want to put in the dark-and-rainbow swirl-skirt dress I just cast on, this morning shall be perfect. Time to hike up to the attic and dig through the yarn boxes and put a few more boxes of yarn up there, newly boxed yesterday in newly-bought boxes -- luxury! Target ishaving a sale on Rubbermaid in 'Halloween colors', if you don't care if your boxes have orange lids.

SamChevre @167 I had this idea that once ours got bigger (like middle-school age) it would be less energy-draining than four pre-schoolers

In my experience (my kids are now 19 and 21) it's energy draining in different ways. With preschoolers you have to be constantly "on", as Elliott describes @169. With middle schoolers there's less that has to be done Right This Second, but it's more demanding mentally because it requires more strategic thinking about when you need to intervene and when you need to stay out of the way. I still needed to pick my battles, as I did when they were younger, but some of the battles were bigger.

Charlie #168: I've heard angry cat vocalisations a time or two.

Ours just got home after half a week spent in durance vile while we were off in Jamaica at a conference. I gather, since I was at work when she was picked up, that she was not altogether happy.

The 10 most disturbing facts about racial inequality in the U.S. justice system.

And the 11th disturbing fact: that these numbers, skewed by racism, are then used by bigots in defense of racism. It's a vicious cycle.

Agatha the Cat Genius often utters angry vocalizations when Rocky the Idiot Cat tries to impose his idea of playfulness upon her.

And Siamese cats swearing is very tonal, much different from other cats I have owned.

The first time I heard it, was when Pyewacket, in leash and harness, had been taken outdoors for his first walk in the snow...

He was not amused.

The Four Hoaxes of the Martian Invasion
by Neil Verma

John A Arkansawyer @ 175... It makes no mention of Jeff Wayne's version of the story? Humph.

I hear that today is Chris Columbus Day.
Why a mediocre film director gets celebrated in such a manner, I have no idea.

Teresa, definitely don't click this! News Website Refers To Users’ Ceaseless Exchange Of Racial Slurs As ‘Discussion’

Tomorrow (October 15) is the anniversary of Sir Ian Hamilton being relieved of command of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force. It seems like right day for this--one of the best songs about war I know.

Fragano @ 167: I think Charlie covered it very well at 169. When you live with a cat, you definitely get an idea of what they're trying to tell you.

Superintelligent Tabby didn't swear often, but when he did, he made it count. On one memorable occasion, we had about two feet of snow. Cats tend to excrete at the edge of their territory, and he, being Local Boss Cat, had a rather large territory, so to get to the edge he had to leave the garden, which normally meant ducking under the fence.

So there's all this snow on the ground, too deep for a cat to walk normally in. The old boy - who was fifteen at the time - eyed it up, squared his shoulders, launched himself into it, and set off swimming towards the gap under the fence. It was only when he got there that he realised he hadn't fully thought the situation through. He didn't know how much snow there was on the other side of the fence, he had no way of finding out, and if it had drifted he risked being buried.

He was not pleased. He stopped, turned round, looked at me - still with a clod of snow on his head - and said "Mwap!" I had no difficulty at all interpreting that as "Dammit!"

I called him in and set up the litter tray. He didn't like litter trays and wouldn't use them unless he absolutely had to, but this was an emergency. And he knew I understood he wasn't being a wimp.

Circling back to the original opening topic:

Before Griswold Lorillard, what did people call black cats with white shirtfronts?

(Or am I the only one who uses the term 'tuxedo cat'?)

Leslie Fish's cats on Kay Shapero's webpage:

Mrrrp the Magnificent and the Re-invention of the Lever
Mrrrp the Magnificent and the Great Bluejay Massacre
Mrrrp vs. the Scotties

I Have No Account And I Must Retweet:

from @LeVostreGC:

Whanne Adam dalf and Eve span
What did the foxe saye?

HLN: Area man sees streaky flashes of light after gym. Tells friend who yells at him "get thee to an opthalmologist."

Fast Forward to: Area man has a tear in his retina. The opthalmologist's office will get precertification tomorrow, then call AM, who will go in and get lasers shot into his eye. This should keep the retina from detaching altogether.

Area man is rather upset, and his eyes hurt from the dilation. Area man would like good thoughts if possible and prayers from those who pray.

Argh, Xopher. A tear is about the only thing my father's retinas haven't done yet. Good luck with the lasers and any other treatment they do-- if they do the bubble thing, take a little while to brainstorm work you can do in bubble posture. The last time Dad's retina went walkies, he worked on chainmail a lot because it was in the right place anyway.

I'm glad you found it early. Eyes are serious business.

Fragano @167: Some cats stick to a handful of common vocalizations, but many have extensive reportoires. My 16yo, Carrie, is quite expressive. Although she's almost solid black, I suspect Siamese ancestry, because of her body shape, her voice, and her intelligence.

Xopher, so glad you're getting it dealt with promptly.

That's thanks to my friend Lenore. Many of you know Lenore. She's the one who made me go to an opthalmologists right away.

Xopher, all good wishes and prayers headed your direction. Good for Lenore for good advice, and good for you for following it.

Xopher, kind thoughts and whatever mojo I have directed your way (since you ask). Hooray for prompt diagnosis & treatment!

When my martial arts teacher had eye surgery (good outcome, too long a story to tell right now) he found audiobooks a considerable comfort. There are excellent audiobooks of many of the Discworld books, the Aubrey & Maturin books, the Spenser mysteries of Robert B. Parker (read by Joe Mantegna), and the Dresden Files novels (all but one read by James Marsters). I also really enjoyed "Holmes on the Range" by Steve Hockensmith. Maybe someone could run by the library and stock up for you?

My best wishes, Xopher...

Lila @182
I was going to say jellicle, but apparently that term is from the 30's.

Xopher, I've told Mojo-bear, whose mojo is generally focused on job hunts and the Red Sox, but he is a kind and accommodating bear, and some of his mojo will go towards your eyes.

I tweeted a few pictures of him recently, if pictures of a cute teddy bear aren't contraindicated.

Xopher, good thoughts being sent. For what it's worth, they can do amazing things with lasers to repair retinas these days.

Xopher, a friend of mine had that happen several years ago. The eye doctor fixed it with a laser, and all was well.

For those of you following along at home, if you suddenly have funny light flashes, or a dark area in your field of vision, see an eye doctor immediately. An optician can get you referred to an opthamologist right away. Here's more info..

Oh, joy. WebMD says that being near-sighted increases your risk. In an eye exam, I can't see the big E.

Cassy B. @195: We are truly Living In The Future. No flying cars, but you can fix eyes WITH LAZORS. I first realized this in high school when my sorta-cousin (our moms were Lamaze buddies, we got raised together a lot) crushed her spine in a skiing accident and was walking two weeks later. She was just pissed she was forbidden from roller coasters and diving into swimming pools headfirst (she was on the dive team until her accident) for a full two years. I was just in awe that THEY FIXED HER and gave her 3 PLASTIC VERTEBRAE. Like, 'broken back' was the ultimate classic trope in all the fiction I've read for 'reason to be stuck in a wheelchair all your life'! Living in science fiction, yeah.

Elliot @197, yes, I think we take medical science just a little too much for granted.

Xopher -- my Karen got ring cataracts from an OTC nasal decongestant, and may have to have laser cataract removal -- so I'm sending you best wishes around the retinal detachment. Eye stuff -- brr!

We really do live in the future around medical tech. Not everything gets Fixed, but most stuff gets Better (right, T?). Despite how bad the US system currently is, there's a lot of hope. I have many friends who would be dead without what's possible now, and I celebrate their continued existence.

Best of luck Xopher!

* * *

It is frustrating seeing relatives die or become disabled due to conditions that will likely become treatable in a decade.

Lila, #182--I don't know who made up the term "tuxedo cat" before I ran across it, but it seems to be an extreme example of the countershading found in many wild species, for instance tigers and leopards with white underneath, or at least paler than the back. Penguins and orca whales seem to find a maximum- contrast black and white color scheme useful for camouflage in the water. But giant pandas, now, that's a mystery.
The fuss made over clothes has to me always seemed extremely weird. The outrage over a new type of outfit, and the becoming-mandatory of the same item a bit later, appear two sides of a very silly coin. People can decorate themselves however they want, I don't give a rip, but when somebody uses it to hassle other folks, that needs a rework. I have for some time suspected the fashion industry of being a mechanism designed to just get people to buy new stuff every season, and so I shop at thrift stores and so on.
Best wishes to Xopher and anyone else facing a medical crisis.

Xopher, best wishes for a full, speedy and painless fix.

I am not sure if it will be a bit late, but I have found that an Android tablet/smartphone has some good tools for Text-to-Speech, if you have ePub-format ebooks. Cereproc sells some good voices, the TTS is apparently part of Android, and the Moon+ Reader works well.

The Kindle reader doesn't do TTS.

My last laser eye surgery was very easy, but I have had my retina zapped, and it isn't fun.

Xopher: I'm going into the hospital myself on Friday, so I'm wishing us both good luck.

On another matter, I think I've finally convinced an old friend to look around here, so everybody be charming and warm and brilliant and witty and stuff, O.K.? And you should all put a sweater on because I'm cold.

Best wishes and prayers, Xopher. Glad you caught it sooner rather than later.

Angiportus @ 202: indeed. As far as I can tell, there are two kinds of fashion. There is the democratic variety, where people gradually take to wearing a particular style because it turns out to be more comfortable/practical for what they're doing than whatever they were wearing before, or because it's just been invented and they think it looks cool, or for whatever other reason. And there is the oligarchic variety, where there are a few top designers who basically dictate what is going to be "in" this season.

The two types of fashion coexist. I have no quarrel at all with the former, but I have been deeply suspicious of the latter all my life. It took me until I was in my teens to convince my parents that I should be allowed to choose what to wear rather than simply have clothes put out for me (it doesn't help that my dad doesn't care what he wears, and still to this day puts on whatever my mum brings him after his bath), so I passionately hate being told what to wear by other people.

Bruce @ 205: I'm wearing a cardigan - does that count?

Tom Whitmore @200, you can get cataracts from OTC nasal decongestants?!?

Xopher @ 186

Good wishes and prayers for rapid and complete healing.

On the subject of teaching young children, and the endless questions--my wife wrote a piece on it just today (actually, published today--she's been working on it for awhile)--Seven Million Whys

Last weekend, I went on a longish bike ride with "Buggle"--the 6 year old. He noticed the strips in the road for the traffic light controls, and spent the rest of the 35 mile ride looking for them at every light, asking why some lights have them and some don't, why sometimes it takes longer than others for the light to change once you are on the strips, and so on. It's fun, but very demanding on attention, to try to explain traffic engineering to a 6-year-old.

Xopher #186: Good grief! Wishing you the best.

GlendaP #188: Our cat just gets very loud, and a bit yowly. She also gives us very dirty looks.

Xopher: Yikes! I'm glad you caught that in time!

What if TV’s "The Golden Girls" were actually living in old-folks witness protection, with decades of super secret government assassinations behind them?
(Keep in mind that Joss Whedon's dad was a writer for that show.)

I knew I shouldn't have invoked the Golden Girls *and* Joss Whedon.
I have some peaches for our moderators.

Further to John A Arkansawyer @ #180:

If you do follow John's link, don't neglect to... well, I wouldn't recommend actually reading the comment thread, necessarily, but take a moment to appreciate its existence.

Xopher, best wishes! Good on Lenore, too.

Good luck to Xopher and Bruce E. Durocher II. May you both heal speedily and well.

Good wishes and prayers, Xopher.

Just chiming in with some positive vibes for Xopher and Bruce! Take care, you two!

Argh. Elliott stole my line. Xopher: May the gods be with you!

Good luck to Xopher (lasers are frikken' awesome, and you done good to listen to Lenore), as well as to Bruce (I've got a flannel overshirt on).

Xopher and Bruce, may all be well with you soon.

Lions and tigers and boxes — Oh, my! (Sorry, video may have ad.)

Internet-famous cat uses its words.

I break my lurking...

Xopher, all the best! I hope the treatment is effective and not too troublesome!

Regarding cats, I grew up with cats. Spouse tells me I have many catlike mannerisms, too... (which I consider awesome :) They definitely do train you to understand their commentary, and we've had a few good laughs (followed by pissed off cats - don't like being laughed at!) at cat communication. My favourite was when the younger cat did a "PRRrrrRRT?" at the door to be let in, instead of yowling. The other one, determined not to be out-cuted, one day says "PRRrrrRRrrrRRT?" Was the most adorable thing EVER!

Regarding food, I thought people here might be interested in a news article from Science magazine on the first use of spices in European cuisine - 6100 years ago! (Stone Age)

*relurking*

Mongoose, #206: At least in America, the democratic style of fashion traces back fairly directly to the Great Maxiskirt Debacle of the 1970s. Women had been dutifully shortening all their skirts as the miniskirts got shorter and shorter, and then when all the designers said, "Oh, this year all the skirts are going to be mid-calf and you will have to throw away your entire wardrobe and buy all new," women said not just no but HELL no. And ever since then, while there are definitely still trendy seasonal looks, there's been a lot more acceptance of women simply wearing what suits them. And if I can't find what I want in the stores, I have several online sources that carry the style of things I like to wear.

Xopher, good luck with the reattachment.

Xopher & Bruce Durocher: good fortune to you both! Prayers coming up. (Not that I have any special pull with the Almighty. But as a friend of mine says, Prayers are one of the ways we care for one another.)

At 14, I dimly recall, I thought fashion was important. Now, I wear what I like, and what's comfortable. Age has its perks.

Xopher: Good luck, and I am so glad this got caught in time. Thank Lenore for all of us.

Bruce Durocher: Good luck to you as well; it's nice that we have all this swell modern medicne and stuff, but having to use it? Bleah!

It wasn't just women who said no to maxi skirts, as I recall.

Xopher #186: Sympathies, glad you caught it (well done your friend in telling you to get it looked at) and good luck for effective treatment and a speedy recovery.

Bruce E. Durocher II @205: Good luck to you as well!

Xopher, #190:

That's thanks to my friend Lenore.

Is this your friend Lenore that I know? Haven't seen her since 1978, but it's nice to know that she's looking out for you.

One day I will visit Hoboken again.

I have been spending the last few weeks getting my late Mother's sewing machine running. I ended up shortening the sleeves on an old shirt. The results are good. I do have short arms, and taking the cuffs off, shortening the sleeve by a couple of inches, and sewing back on, makes quite a difference. The first sleeve was a bit of hassle, the second went much faster with a few tweaks to the machine.

I think I have been used to having too-long sleeves because that's what comes with a big enough collar.

I didn't do that good a job, but I decided to invest in Sewing for Dummies.

Hey, it occurs to me to ask: will anyone else be going to World Fantasy Con?

Knitting content: I am not-quite-a-quarter done with a dress for my kid. I'm really liking how it's working up; it's a fairly simple to follow pattern, and the colors I sort of randomly grabbed really look on-purpose.

However.

I'm still not quite a quarter done, and the skirt width at bottom is starting to seriously exceed 1/3 of my desired total finished circumference. Eeeeeek.

I hate having to rip out something I love because it's not working so I can start it over BUT WORKING and meanwhile incorporate a few 'and if I did this THAT way it would be easier the whole time' modifications.

It's like my lizard brain can only see ALL THE STITCHES I AM THROWING AWAAAAAAAAAAY (and it's a lot). Sunk Costs Fallacy, let me show you it.

abi @ 232... Alas, no World Fantasy Con this year, and no worldcon next year. (sad face)

abi @232: yes, I will be at WFC. Am currently trying (not very hard) to avoid organizing a pub crawl.

Kip, #228: Very likely, male gaze being a thing. But I believe this still counts as one of the first times that women got up on their hind legs and told the male-run fashion industry to FOAD, and made it stick.

Cassy B @207 -- I was wrong. It is a prescription decongestant, but it's one that's generally thought to be very safe: Flonase. It's a steroid reaction, and one of Karen's doctors was completely surprised to hear about it (another said "Oh yes, that is a problem"). It also shows up if you start typing in "flonase c" on Google as the 4th item down, in my search pattern.

abi @232 -- I'm not going to WFC. Many other people are...

Best wishes to everyone at VP! Tell Karen I said hi, if you're still there. This will make her wonder how broad my influence is....

Probably for mentioning a prescribed drug. I won't offer the gnomes any of it! But I am about to roast a nice leg of lamb -- are the gnomes carnivorous?

Thank you, everyone, for good thoughts, and good thoughts coming at you, Bruce!

I had the procedure. It hurt, but not as much as I feared (and not enough to make me flinch back from the laser, thank gods). They had to dilate my eye a lot because the tear was on the periphery of the retina (which also made it more painful, because the nerve clusters are bigger toward the edge...or something like that, I was too nervous to listen in detail).

So now I'm resting and taking it easy. Hence the brevity here.

Bill, I think so. I'll ask her.

One funny thing that I'll mention here: after the procedure, everything out of that eye looked pink. A few seconds of "Oh no! Blood!" later, I realized that the argon laser was very bright and very green, and my green receptors were fatigued, making everything pink. I remember this from the old green screens; I would get up from them into a very pink world.

I'm going to lie down now. Thanks again for all the good thoughts.

Mongoose: I'm wearing a cardigan - does that count?

As long as you aren't commanding the Light Brigade, yes.

All the rest of you: thank you very much! (And buy original art--unlike the yayhoos who wait for my wife to post original Magic art on eBay, put in a bid, withdraw it, then send an e-mail offering half the bid. That bites.)

50 Intellectual Jokes.

Some I'd heard before, some I hadn't. I got all but two, and I'm fairly sure both of those were computer jokes -- just too techie for me.

Lee #240: Hmm. They're nominally from separate people, but the networking jokes make it clear they were from a forum, as they fit right into a routine (but yeah, esoteric):

"I’d tell you a UDP joke, but you may not get it. Or I could tell you a joke about TCP, but I’d have to keep repeating it until you do get it. Really, I prefer IP jokes; it’s all in the delivery."

The hotdog jokes nail down that it was a forum, because that's a classic routine.

Also, the Bechdel test joke as given fails the Bechdel test, because the women don't have names.

One piece of quasi-top-down fashion I appreciate was "business casual" coming out in the 1990s, as I was moving to Silicon Valley. I find cotton pants much more comfortable than wool, and Dockers came out in time to let me not have to wear suits very often when I was consulting. I'd still wear ties on the first visit to sales people or bankers, and then adjust to local custom, which was almost always no tie. (Jackets were a different matter; they're a fashion that's appropriate for inadequately heated office buildings in London in the 1800s, so they made sense in San Francisco much of the year, but not in the warmer areas around it.) And black jeans were pretty much always acceptable.

On the other hand, the fashion for pleats was really annoying; they look good on people with skinny waists or fat hips, but really fail on people with fat waists and non-fat hips.

To my mind, fashion serves two intrinsic functions (aside from the extrinsic function of "get the consumers to run out and buy new clothes as often as possible"): aesthetics, and signalling.

The aesthetics is people making their appearance pleasing, to themselves or people they care about (or people they're trying to impress, but that verges on signalling). It has all the usual artistic questions about pleasing to whom, whether there are rules, when to break or re-write the rules, etc. It can be an individual thing, or part of a conversation where one person's attire can sometimes be seen as a comment on someone else's. Fashion designers, to be fair, are participating in this sort of aesthetic conversation, along with all the other things they're doing.

Signalling is about telling other people something you want them to know about you. For example, bankers wear dark suits to say "see, I look like a respectable banker, just like all the others; I certainly wouldn't do anything foolishly individualistic, with my attire or your money". Software developers dress so as to say "I'm valued for my knowledge and intelligence, so I don't have to dress up, see!" A banker in a t-shirt would make customers nervous that maybe he wasn't conforming to other norms, like banking regulations and accounting standards. A programmer in a suit makes people think "why is that programmer dressing to impress? maybe to compensate for insufficient skills?" There's also plenty of signalling of group identity, whether it's punks in buzz cuts, Doc Martins and ripped black t-shirts (it amazes me to see that look is still current in some circles after nearly 4 decades!) or fashionistas in this year's latest trend. And that temporality has a signaling function as well, signalling to other afficionados "I'm sufficiently connected and motivated to know what is in this season (and wealthy enough to buy it)." Or in the case of the punks and other fashion resistors, the look says "I reject the phoniness of the fashion industry!"

This then intersects with the idea of "cool", and that people who try too hard, aren't. So the fashion industry periodically picks up some "look" based on people who don't care about the fashion industry (punks, truckers, lumberjacks, etc.). And so you get fashionistas trying very hard to look like they don't care what they look like, but in some very particulary way that's trendy at the moment.

Hmm, that turned out longer than I expected!

Bill @247

I am keeping my eyes open for pants that would look OK for a late 1930s look. No pleats, high-waisted, and a loose fit to the leg, all seem hard to find with modern fashion. I might, in the end, if my sewing skill develops enough, make my own.

The way things are going with pants legs, fashion might see a return of knee-breeches and stockings.

There's been a list announced, here in the UK, of the best-dressed Britons of all history. Top of the list is David Bowie. While he was sometimes startlingly extravagant, he has been known to wear a suit and tie.

Because my kid sometimes has odd ideas about what she wants to watch via Netflix streaming, I have now seen (several times) the Sonja Henie film It's a Pleasure (because there's skating in it).* I like the skating too, but I also found myself fascinated by this window into another time. It is set roughly contemporaneously to its making (1945), and OH MY BOB all the men's pants go up to their ribcages. No wonder, I realized, that 'all old men' stereotypically wore their pants there when I was a kid in the 80s; it was the style they got used to when they were young and hip, and they just kept it forever.

The film is also interesting, should you have a spare couple of hours and want to engage anthropologically with the period, for costume in general, but especially for the way the dialogue is written and delivered. I'm sure in any period most of a random sample of movies made will have clunkers and phoned-in performances, but the WAY they were phoned-in, I found interesting. YMMV.

Also, in case you were curious, Shirley Temple's Heidi is way less twee and unwatchable than I'd feared it was (thank goodness).

--
* For those curious, the plot is basically the same one later re-used for, inter multi alia, The Cutting Edge. Nobody chirps "toe-pick!" and its stakes are much lower than the Olympics, but it rhymes really strongly.

Jeremy Leader #244: As I recall, the classic Dress For Success had a great deal of discussion on both aspects of that, with regular updates to keep up with social changes involved.

The one I read had a story about a customer representative who got transferred to the Midwest or such conservatively-dressed area... from San Francisco and environs.

Dave Bell #245: ... the best-dressed Britons of all history. Top of the list is David Bowie.

You've gotta know the rules pretty well, before you can play with them and make it work!

Tom Whitmore @237, thanks for the information on the prescription steroid decongestant (unnamed in courtesy to our Gnomish Underlords). At my last eye checkup a few weeks ago, I was told I had the very beginning of cataracts, so I'm a little paranoid on the subject and I was concerned that one of my hayfever medicines might exacerbate the problem. I'll remember that about steroid reactions for the future. My eyesight has always been poor, and I have recurring nightmares about going blind....

Elliott Mason, a good friend of mine once lived in an apartment with three copies of Rise Up Singing and I think three of The Cutting Edge. I was there when the made-for-TV Cutting Edge 3 came out, though I didn't see the marathon of the first two. I will have to tell her about this one.

Also on the list: watching more Shirley Temple. I really liked what I saw back in my childhood.

Dave Bell @245: Trousers are fairly easy to sew, in my experience; it's adjusting the fit properly that's a challenge, and having someone around to help with that can be a good thing. Or a good set of mirrors.

Jeremy Leader @244--another part of the signalling aspect of clothing is enforcing class differences. We don't think about that as much these days, although there are clear group differences, as you noted.

In Griswold Lorillard's day, these class differences were a major function of clothing styles. Reading 19th-century etiquette books that go into any details about clothing is relevatory, I find. When you wore gloves, what kind and color you should wear, the rules about hats, necklines, uses of fabric and appropriate colors.

We see vestiges of this still in the rules for riding costumes at organized equestrian events and competitions, and at some clubs in the context of golfing and tennis--the rules at Wimbledon about white tennis costumes only, for example. British rules about courtroom wear and full academic dress are other vestiges, of course.

Readers of Georgette Heyer may recall the bits about the rules at Almack's--men weren't allowed to cheat on wearing proper full evening dress there, which to the Lady Patronesses, meant knee breeches*, instead of long trousers, which were a more modern, upstart fashion that (they were signalling) should be reserved for day wear and informal activities only. Young Griswold would have been out on his ear if he'd tried that with the Lady Patronesses!

THese things aren't as much about current fashion--which colors are in, which cuts are preferred, which accessories are the must-have item--as they are about an ideal group norm. In the era when people powdered their hair (or wigs), there was a wide range of styles which came and went. But having the hair powdered was a social norm that said things about class and status, as well as personal preferences. Charles XII of Sweden and Benjamin Franklin as the US Ambassador to France choosing to reject that norm sent certain signals, as much as the extremes of the macaronis did.

*Of an appropriate fabric--no leather riding breeches would be allowed to slip through.

A one-shot comic-strip by Bill Watterson
(I still miss Calvin & Hobbes.)

Lee @ #98 (and now somewhat outdated, but I occasionally like digging through archives, electronic or paper-based):

I wonder if "digits in a number Base X sum to 1 less than the base = number divisible by 1 less than the base" is a general formula? I'm in a rush this morning, though, so I'll leave the testing for someone else.

Yes (although I do have a vague recollection of having written a proof-sketch for ML, a few years in the past). Ah, yes, I did.

Xopher, #239 (and 186, 190, 230):

Bill, I think so. I'll ask her.

The password is "Hobbits."

The picture here may also be of interest.

@233 Elliott Mason
The problem you're having comes from using a thicker yarn than the pattern calls for. That's why your-stitches-to-the-inch don't match the pattern's. Thicker yarn, means the skirt will be larger than you think it should be according to the pattern. Essentially, you scaled the pattern up a size or three.

If you want it to be a certain finished circumference/size, you'll have to do one of two things: 1)frog the whole thing and re-do the math in the pattern to adjust for thicker yarn (i.e, cast on fewer stitches and knit fewer rows among other things). 2) get yarn in the right weight and start over.

If you don't want to frog or start over with new yarn, keep going and consider it a Knitting Adventure as defined by the TLAR* School of Design. This is standard for people who decide to alter things on the fly instead of strictly following the pattern as published.

Having altered every pattern but one on the fly, I've been where you are. Right now I'm playing around with a Pi Shawl. My edits are as follows: do a semi-circular shawl, make up my own lace patterns between each scheduled increase by playing around with yarn overs and knit/purl 2 together combos.

I knit for the math as much as anything.

---
* That Looks About Right

Serge @ 253 -

While the words are indeed Watterson's, the artwork is by Gavin Aung.

Zenpencils

http://zenpencils.com/comic/128-bill-watterson-a-cartoonists-advice/

Victoria @256: Sort of. Actually, it's thinner; I'm getting 22sts/4" instead of the pattern's 18. However, I've adjusted using The Skary Mathz (multiply most stitch counts by 1.22 and fudge). I decided on my own to put additional short-row turns in there too, which had the fun side-effect of making the skirt massively hypercircular. Oops. So now I'm doing it with the regulation number of turnings instead (but doing the colorwork from the other end so I can strand it along instead of HAVING to do all those beautiful, tedious end-buryings as I go). Also, to amuse myself, I massaged the turnpoints so they're loosely based on the Golden Ratio, because trumpet-flowers are beautiful and fractality amuses me.

I'm fairly good with patterns/recipes that boil down to "Do (algorithm) until (condition); then continue with (next thing)." Conditions can include "desired stitch count reached" and "it's long enough". It's fun being somewhat dyscalculic and doing knitting, which is basically making stretchy graph paper out of string, with decorative patterns. Any time I have to rely on bare numbers I need to figure it several ways, write it down, and in a pinch have someone check my work to make sure the numbers haven't been having a lovely samba when I wasn't watching and switched places ... And even then, sometimes, I get partway through the garment and discover the ground-truthing doesn't work. This skirt is likely to shrink in blocking somewhat in the vertical-to-original-knitting direction (because of the yarn I'm using), but not THAT much. So, rip-it, rip-it.

Then there's the days I can't accurately count how many stitches are on my needle. THOSE are fun too.

I think I'm really going to like this skirt/sweater 'recipe' once I've done one mostly to their pattern and gotten to own it; sideways-worked is good for me because there are fewer seams (the seaming, it burnsssss ussss!) and also it looks amazing for far less work, in things like striping or variegated yarn.

I mostly knit with unravelled recycled yarn from thrift store sweaters, primarily cotton, so I do a lot of adjusting gauge, or else I just swipe the concept of a sweater and make it up anew from a recipe I'm comfortable with, bolting on the technique or decoration I liked from the pattern.

Steve C @ 257... I stand corrected. I thought the art looked different, but assumed it might be because that Watterson's style having changed since Calvin & Hobbes left us.

Bill 255: Yep, it's definitely her, and she remembers you.

Xopher, glad to hear the procedure went smoothly.

Bruce E Durocher II, all the best to you.

Serge/Steve C, thanks for the link to zenpencils; I enjoy it but haven't been there recently.

With what fresh words of choice or soft regret
are we to fight our battles now that time
has tolled against us? The dull weight of grime
obscures our vision, but no sort of debt
to past or future could hurt or abet
the heart of purpose as we seek to climb
beyond this moment. Past the normal slime
where there is neither injury nor fret,
you see us crawling, searching for one spark
of ordinary kindness that might lead
the normal person from their weary plight,
relieve our hearts from burden of the dark,
reward with honour the most worthy deed,
and grant assurance of a renewed light.

I often enjoy The Onion, but this one really hit the nail on the head for my husband and me.

Chipmunk's Plan For Future Better Crafted Than That Of 8 Out Of 10 Americans

Sample grab: "Researchers stated that the striped 7-inch mammal displayed a degree of foresight and determination far exceeding that of the average U.S. citizen. In contrast to most Americans, the chipmunk was said to routinely work toward meaningful goals in an orderly and decisive manner without procrastinating for days on end, melodramatically sighing and complaining, or becoming immediately sidetracked by emails or online videos."

Link to The Onion. I did check it on preview.

You could share my slice of SMOG pie (that's steak, mushroom, onion, and gruyere) from Dangerously Delicious pies.

fidelio, #252: I've heard it said that a lot of Sherlock Holmes' profiling deductions* were based on strictly-enforced class differences in clothing, and that he would have a much harder time of it in a modern setting where many of those lines have been blurred.

Also, I admit that I'm a complete ignoramus about male formal fashion, and consider both the square coat and the tail coat to be variations on "tuxedo".

* The ones that were about people's social class, occupation, etc. as opposed to the ones about things that happened.

Cassy B -- the particular cataracts that happen from steroids are unlike other cataracts -- they're "ring" cataracts, which form around the outside of the lens (I think -- they're circular, anyway, rather than linear) and are fairly easily identified. They also don't get worse quickly, so once you know you're having the reaction you can stop the steroids before they get bad enough to need medical intervention, if you're paying attention. Watch out for not seeing well at night.

Which, as Xopher's story that started all this implies: it's a really good idea to pay attention and ask questions when something odd happens. Mostly, it's nothing. Occasionally, it's crucial. And it's a fractal-level problem to separate which is which, from a non-specialist's viewpoint.

Steroid-induced cataract may be circular, but they are apparently located at the back (posterior capsular cataract): link to a PubMed abstract on it.

By the way, if anyone is interested in seeing pretty pictures of cataracts, this page has a lovely set of photos. Don't go if eyes make you feel squicked out; there's no surgical photos that I could see, just pictures of eyes with cataracts.

I hear that the Shutdown is in the process of being shut down.

I read on Huffington Post that the Republicans actually changed the rules on Sept. 30 just to prevent members of the House from being able to to even present a motion for a clean CR. That right is now held exclusively by the House majority leader.

That's just... abominable.

Gloria Steinem Finishes the debate on Miley Cyrus.

Cheryl @ 270... They must be really stupid to think that this change couldn't one day be used against them.

Serge Broom #272: Unfortunately, I suspect they think they're in an endgame, where they can "win forever" and make sure all those dirty liberals know their place in the New Pecking Order.

After all, won't the American PeePuhl rise up and shower them in rose-petals, for stopping the dastardly Obama from spending "their" money on poor people?

Dave Harmon @ 273... they think they're in an endgame, where they can "win forever"

I rest my case.

#272-274: I've wondered how many of them really ARE premillennial dispensationalists, and how many are just along for the ride. It seems like a bad idea to let people who think there is no future do the planning for it.

Fragano @ 262: I always like your sonnets. That one particularly spoke to me, since I'm really not having an easy time of things at the moment.

Jim Hines warns us against the existence of FAKE girl writers!!!

So hanging around here I've over time absorbed the idea that I should read John Scalzi. One sometimes forms worthwhile intentions that one doesn't act upon right away. Anyway, I started with Old Man's War the other day and I haven't had a good night's sleep since.

Thanks. This stuff is great.

Serge, #272: That's been the hallmark of Republican finagling for at least the last decade and a half. We said, "Do you really want to see those powers you're giving Bush II in the hands of a Democratic president?" and they stuck their fingers in their ears and said "La-la-la, we can't HEAR you!" They honestly never expected to be out of power again... and they still don't believe they are, hence this shutdown nonsense. Of course it's okay to give the House majority leader that kind of power, because he will always be a Republican!

Lee @ 279.. The awesome arrogance... And one wonders about their calling themselves 'conservatives' when they go about making changes that are more far-reaching than allowing two same-sex persons to get married.

Hey Fragano #262,

You gave me goosebumps.

(That is to say, "Thank you".)

#280: Maybe there's a "dictatorship of the proletariat" vibe there, where they have to behave like monsters to bring about an original intent small-government paradise.

The benefit, for true believers, and the horrible flaw, for democracy and everyone else, of that sort of thinking is that they can never be wrong. Failure is the fault of the RINOs, or the press, or not sticking to principles.

This kind of thinking ultimately fails, but it can cause horrible damage along the way.

Elliott Mason @246: It's not just fashion. Old men wear their pants high because they no longer have hips that will hold their pants up. To my chagrin, I am now apparently an old man for trouser purposes, and have had to go back to wearing a belt unless I'm wearing one or two special pairs that will stay up on my snakelike hips.

Chagrin, because I've always worn a belt, and recently have had tingling on the outside of my left leg, and the doctor said try going without a belt. So I did, and enjoyed the reduction in how much futzing around I had to do several times a day. And now I have to wear a belt or devote a hand to keeping the pants up there. Faugh.

Unless I'm wearing one or two special pairs…

That's right, kids! If your pants won't stay up, just wear two or more pairs! Would I lie to you?

Soon Lee #281: Thank you.

Mongoose #276: Thank you.

283
That's why my mother sometimes referred to my father as 'shingle-butt'. It isn't that the hips go away, it's that the stuff behind them does.

Kip, #283: I'm reliably informed that this is why many older men wear suspenders. And you can make a lot of different statements with suspenders -- they're like ties, that way.

Stefan Jones @ 282... they can never be wrong

People who think that way make me very nervous.

Earthquake in the Phillipines (BBC pictures).

One of the statements you can't make with suspenders is "I don't tuck in my shirt." Another is probably "I don't wear button-down shirts." As a guy-in-T-shirts with a wedge-shaped body whose belts have been losing the battle for about 20 years, I'm trying to figure out a way around this. I may just have to pull the pants up and let the old-guy gut do the... umm... lifting. Like my one experiment with a comb-over, the terrible thing about this is that it might work better than not doing it. [I was saved from the comb-over by a stray gust of wind. It FLAPPED and I had a reason not to do it.]

AKICOML- books, mmmmm, books edition:

Area woman is wondering what three^h^h two bookstores are ought not to miss in London. "Much as I could spend the whole weekend with books, they can more easily visit California than I London."

Kathryn from Sunnyvale @292

Area woman is wondering what three^h^h two bookstores are ought not to miss in London.

Assuming you mean the London in England, Foyles was always an experience. Apparently it's been modernised, and may have less of the charm it used to have

Kathryn from Sunnyvale @292 - Charing Cross Road isn't what it used to be but I think it still has some fantastic second-hand bookshops. Foyles has indeed been modernised but is still huge and labyrinthine and well worth a visit. If you're at all interested in lefty/anti-war politics then go to Housmans. Oh, and Stanfords is a travel book and map shop that can bankrupt you in moments if you don't keep a tight grip on your credit card.

A 2-minute tribute to America's ultimate refugee/immigrant

As of a couple of years ago, yes Charing Cross road, just up from the National Portrait gallery, had some very nice 2nd hand shops, with books of all price ranges, from a pound or two to hundreds. And many topics of course. Make sure to look in the cellars of them as well; a couple of shops have cheaper but more delightfully random and interesting books in their cellars.

Other than that, there's charity book shops in various burghs of the city, with good selections. There are subject specific bookshops to be found in various parts of the centre, I'm afraid I can't recall any off the top of my head, I'm sure there's some to be found near Charing Cross road, but at various distances up or down it. I am sure local guides will be available somewhere.

Here is an enormous list (from 2011) of London bookshops.

who were apparently so taken with my big list of London bookshops that they snagged it for themselves.

Dave Harmon @ 290: The damage and injuries from the 7.2 earthquake in the Philippines look bad, and I see there was a 4.7 aftershock a few hours ago. I confess that it makes my thoughts turn to the magnitude 8 to 9 quake that the subduction zone along the San Juan de Fuca fault is going to give the Pacific Northwest one of these days. I've scheduled work to have my house bolted to the foundation, but that's kind of like opening an umbrella in a hurricane.

"She's half-Navajo, the other half is New York."
- overheard by local man at the office today

janetl @299: Actually, being bolted to the foundation can cause more damage to your house and posessions (depending how it's constructed) than allowing it to float freely and having it lifted back onto the base afterwards. The town of Ferndale, in CA, is largely stick-built frame construction, none of it attached; the town owns a house-lifting crane, and all the houses have structural rings built in up high to be lifted by. Earthquake, every house askew; crane goes by, neighborhoods are fine (bar a little broken glassware). If they were fastened down they'd have shaken themselves to bits long since.

Serge Broom @300: My mother usually describes her ethnicity as "New Yorker." The kind of New Yorker who will limit that descriptor to 'Manhattan' and insist that natives of all other boroughs call themselves by their boroughs-name instead. :->

It's not my ethnicity, but I do think of myself as living in South Philadelphia rather than Philadelphia. When I moved here, I had to work to stop thinking of myself as living in the state of Philadelphia.

"Franklin, where were you when I needed you? You should have heard what I suffered in there."
"Oh, I heard, all right. Along with the rest of Philadelphia. Lord, your voice is piercing, John."
- 1776

Modeling what consent culture would look like.

Jacque #305: I wish that had been around 15 and 20 years ago....

Lee @288: I'm not entirely against suspenders, but I haven't seen a pair I want to wear, and having worn overalls a fair amount of the time, I can pretty well say in advance just how much more additional rigmarole would be in store for me every time I had to …well, you know.

307
I suspect suspenders are a little easier to deal with than overalls.

Speaking personally, when wearing suspenders you unhook the back and carry on, then reach up between your shoulderblades when you're done to retrieve the back-bit, and reattach it to your pants.

This is aided by the suspenders having a NON-STRETCHY last bit (the stem of the Y, as it were) in the back, if possible. I'm sure you can all imagine how I discovered the benefit of that feature (which mine lacked, at the time) ...

Suspenders got me through the last ~6weeks of gestation, when the belly was sensitive enough it didn't like to have a belt on it. I got up to a 46" waistband to go with my 28" inseam -- the shortest, fattest man-pants Old Navy stocks on the shelves without special-order! I became seriously spherical, though interestingly I 'clocked' as more and more masculine throughout the process. I just looked tubby and bottom-heavy with a teeny-tiny non-proportional head, probably because I was wearing button-down shirts, suspenders, and short-fat-man pants. Plus winter coats, of course.

Elliott Mason @ 301: Very interesting! Could you point me to more information? I couldn't find anything.

Odaiwai, James E, Guthrie:
Thanks! Yes, the London of Londons. With the jetlag and the work of getting ready I'd almost forgotten to ask about this. Many bookstores aren't what they were, but here I don't have to compare each to it's earlier self, just to my memories of having read about browsing UK bookstores.

odaiwai @ #293:

Foyles is indeed muchly modernized. Gone are the days where you would browse books in a section, hand them over to the section desk and be given a numbered ticket, with the total price listed, continue on to another section, so on and so forth, until at the end of the book-purchasing spree you descended unto the street level of the store, there to hand your tickets over to the till operator, who would, on your behalf, sum them up and once you had paid carefully stamp them with a "Paid for" stamp.

You could then retrace your route through the bookstore and exchange each ticket for the books it represents.

These days, you browse and pay as you go, as it were (or pay at the tills on the way out). Also seems the section staff is now less well-versed in the contents of the shelves, but I must admit to not having put this to the test in the last ten years.

Kathryn from Sunnyvale @ #311:

Ah, in London now?

Lee, #265: what Americans call a tuxedo is what we in the outer wilds call a dinner suit, and it is - get this - called "informal", on the formal-informal-casual continuum. (A dark business suit is said to be acceptable anywhere a dinner suit can be worn, but "acceptable" is not quite the same as "equivalent".)

"Formal evening dress" for gentlemen means white tie, stiff shirt, kid waistcoat and tailed coat, a rigout now only worn by conductors of major orchestras for full-dress recitals.

Or one may wear mess dress regimentals, if entitled, of course. (Of course!)

Dave @ 313: my friend the Star Tenor was once required to wear white jacket, white bow tie, stiff shirt and cummerbund for a concert.

Now there are certain fairly specific problems with asking him to do this. One is that he's the kind of person who could manage to rumple plate armour (and I feel for him, since I am likewise). Another is that he is a small, wiry man with an extremely energetic singing style. I always say he sings as if he's on his bicycle (and I know for a fact that he sometimes sings while he is actually on his bicycle, so it's no surprise). He uses his whole body. I mean, it's not that he flails around dramatically or anything, but you can tell he's getting a workout up there.

So everyone walks onto the stage, I take one look at his rig-out, and I think... that's going to be trouble. And it was. They were singing Handel, which tends to need plenty of oomph anyway, and, as ever, he gave it his all. And as he sang, this blessed cummerbund gradually worked its way up his rib cage. If he'd been any taller it would have untucked his shirt as it rose, but there are advantages to being a tiny tenor. By the end of the concert, it was at chest level, his hair was all over the place, and the general effect was as if he'd just cycled through a hedge. He must have been really uncomfortable.

The Orlando Consort have got it right. They normally sing in black trousers, black shirt, very fancy waistcoat and no tie. It's a really smart look, but there's nothing to constrict or ride up. Singing clothes need to be practical as well as posh.

Dave Luckett #313: I have had mess kit explained to me (almost exactly 37 years ago, as it happens; by chance, I passed the church where the wedding took place and pointed it out to my wife this past weekend).

Like formal dress for men it has its origin in the Europe of the eighteenth century. It is interesting that a mode of dress manages to hold its grip for a quarter of a millennium.

Mongoose @ 314 re: concert wear for the performers

Fancy vests/waistcoats/weskits are a great choice.

A pianist commissioned a reversible vest for which I enlarged the armscyes - didn't take much for greatly enhanced range of motion.

Both fronts had buttonholes, and I connected two sets of buttons so that it could be worn lapped either way.

One side was a solid purple, the other bright stripes cut on the bias (diagonal). Black pants - I'm not sure whether his shirt was black or white.

They are also an inexpensive way to change the look. A GLBT chorus in Denver went for them as they present gender-neutral. I suppose the front laps could be a subtle clue to orientation. A unisex (is this an acceptable term for this application?) solution would be to butt the front edges & use frogs or toggles. Oversize short decorative zippers?!

janetl @310: I don't have many details, I just know it's the entire town's attitude towards earthquakes. It may help that they already own the crane and have been doing it this way for literally a hundred years ...

The biggest awesome-est most earthquake-survivable Japanese buildings are built to shimmy (big slidey things between the building and foundation) -- these are massive skyscrapers or big wide convention centers we're talking about -- so clearly they like the concept too.

Also, the Ferndale CA houses are built to TAKE falling slightly sideways off their foundations on a moderately regular basis; ordinary construction might not be. But this has been their earthquake plan since well before WWI.

Carol @ 316: that sounds amazing! I like the idea of frog fastenings; they'd work very well.

Elliott Mason @317: I knew about the value of skyscrapers being built to shimmy, but imagined that the best course for a small 1.5 story wood frame could be quite different. Falling several feet off of the foundation seems like a worse shock that shaking in place.

319
It's not at all unusual for a house to slide off its foundation (if it isn't bolted) during an earthquake. The garage usually fares worse than the rest of the structure - it's weaker due to clear span and that large opening for vehicles.

Hmm, I think the only time I've worn a white bow tie was for my graduation ceremony, when I got biffed on the head with a several hundred year old cap (In the late 90's Scotland). Fortunately I had inherited a white tie from my grandfather who had been to a variety of the sort of ultra-posh do's where you did need a white tie and all the other gear.

Kathryn #331 - when you say The London I think of all the fictional ones, not the other places called London that are found on a map. I wonder what that makes me? A bookwork probably.

Ingvar M #312

I went into Foyle's in 1995, expecting the old-fashioned system; while that had been gotten rid of, the organization of the shelves was indeed such that one really did need a native guide: books were separated out by publisher. Which was a bit of a problem. Do they still do this?

PSA/HLN: local woman finds that the sturdiness and stability of covers for irrigation sprinkler valves in no way matches that of sidewalk grates and manhole covers. Local woman's foot went a foot deep into water.

"One moment I was walking along, the next I was flat on the ground with my foot stuck in a hole," says woman. "I am now fine except for mild scrapes and bruises, but will never again trust certain bits of infrastructure."

Area husband is nominated a Hero of the Revolution for walking home for car, to save woman from walking several blocks in a drowned shoe.

joann @ #322:

Honestly, I have no idea. Certainly they don't do per-publisher splits in fiction (they do rough genre divisions). In computing, I think they MAY do it, but that my be an artefact of there being relatively few publishers for whatever I was looking for when I was last there.

I also have not been in Foyles this side of 2008, I think, opting for instead visiting Forbidden Planet when I'm in the general area.

Ingvar @312,
Yes, for the next couple of days.

There is also highland formal, with the jabot, silver-laced cuffed coat, and kilt with the dress sporran and stockings with the sgian dubh. I see that when Princess Mary of Denmark (nee Mary Donaldson) was married to Prince Frederick, her father wore this version of formal dress to escort her to the altar.

For mine, it is the most becoming and romantic of all male formal attire, and I much regret that I am not entitled to wear it.

I'm pretty sure I was in Foyles 3 years ago and it was split up by subject, because I was after some archaeology books and they were all in the same bit of shelving.

Dave Luckett #326 - frankly nowadays you can wear the kilt etc as much as you like, no matter your background. So if you feel like it, go ahead and splash out on it.

I'm not a professional scotsman, but I have hung out with a wide variety of people wearing kilts, including people who wore their grandfathers or great grandfathers sporran made out of an animal head. It's sufficiently egalitarian nowadays, with tartans being made up to suit whatever occaision you like, that nobody cares whether or not anyone is 'entitled' to wear the kilt and accompanying outfit. Mind you I've not seen such an ensemble as you describe for a while; I think people just aren't buying or wearing it as much.

Duluth Trading makes suspenders to be worn under an untucked shirt, and also suspenders that attach at the side rather than the front and back.

Wilde said all clothing should hang from the shoulders, you know, and high-waisted trousers with suspenders are popular with swing dancers because they allow very free movement. I have enough hips to hold my pants up but I still notice the difference.

Has anyone here tried the pants from Old Town Clothing (old-town.co.uk)? The Vauxhalls look right, but they're a bit rich to order from the US on spec.

I live in Scotland and see formal kilts a plenty at formal occasions. Not a with a jabot though usually and sometimes there's an extra cape-y thing (highly technical term obviously)

Dave Luckett @326:

There are plenty of non-clan tartans that even the purest of purists will not begrudge you.

Re kilts: since most Official Highlandry was made up in the 19th century anyway, I don't see why anybody who *wants* to wear the rig-out should feel they can't.

Conversely, for anybody who doesn't want to but is feeling pressured (I can think of a couple of guys I know who have been leaned on to wear highland dress to weddings, and really weren't comfortable with it) I offer my Dad's argument against - that the modern kilt is a symbol of bourgeois capitalist imperialist oppression with which no rational person should collude. This is quite largely true, even though it's not his real reason for not wanting to show his knees in public.

I remember the Foyles of the early 90s; I think I never suffered the labyrinthine multiple-tills payment system but I remember a lot of the stock as still being sorted by publisher. I also remember watching as a member of staff, behind the counter, yelled at length at a customer who had misunderstood the shop layout.

How do suspenders to hold trousers up compare with belts? I've never tried suspenders, no particular reason to, but presumably they do the job.

Elliott Mason, on "short and fat" - in spite of being 6' tall, I usually wear pants that are 44 waist, 28 inseam if I can find them, though I'm usually stuck with longer ones.

My brother-in-law tends to wear suspenders under an untucked shirt. He grew up in Hawaii, and usually wears Hawaiian shirts, and wearing suspenders over them would look kind of odd. (And since he's convex rather than concave, suspenders do a better job of holding up pants than a belt does.) I'll wear suspenders with formal wear, where the pants have suspender buttons in them, but I find the clip-on suspenders tend to pop off, usually when I'm doing something inconvenient like picking up a heavy object.

Flying Cars! Well, road-drivable planes, anyway. The Terrefugia's been in the news for a while; the PAL-V is a newer, more helicopter-like vehicle from the Netherlands.

(Hmm, looking at the article again, it's actually from 2012. But still, *flying cars*!)

Bill Stewart @335: My dad's the opposite, he's 6'8" and when he's sitting down, his head is the same distance off the chair-seat that mine is (I'm 5'6"). He's ALL leg. I have no idea what his inseam measure is but it must be fearsome.

Guthrie, #328: I see plenty of men in formal Highland kit every time we go to a Celtic festival. And yes, it is extremely attractive and flattering to most builds.

Guthrie @321,
I'm in London but am not sure which tourism thoughts of mine come from read recommendations and which from half-remembered fiction set in London. I'd been so busy getting ready (for the business side of this trip) I'd done nothing to update my thoughts/knowledge of London.

Throwing up for five minutes and producing a tablespoon of results is discouraging. Doing so at 2 a.m. is worse.

Magical realism: Subnormality haz it. ZANADU.

Also, Jim's protein-folding sidebar leads to a very cool site with much weird and wonderful stuff: frex, an article on the Codex Seraphinianaus with lots of color plates, and an artist's depictions of mental illnesses as mythological creatures.

Thanks for the additional data on suspenders. I might get a pair — just for experimentation, mind you.

I wore a tux in a Neil Simon show once, and it certainly flattered my figure. It probably helped that I was also wearing a rug on top to make up for that small patch of flesh-colored hair in back. It may be the only time I portrayed a character younger than my chronological age.

(A random facebook posting this morning decided to turn into a poem. So I thought I'd share.)

133 Messages (read)

I am terrified of my e-mail in-box.
It swells and looms like an oncoming storm front.
Or like a brushfire -- I try to clear fire-breaks.
To sweep away the jumbled, dead, dry detritus
of a life that grows faster than I can trim it.
A question, a request, a stranger who wants something from me
that I need to think about.
An invitation I don't yet know if I can accept.
It sits there, until the event is long since past.
A reminder to check a reference in a publication for a friend.
She'd do it for me, after all.
A conversation, suspended in mid-thought
Because a deadline came due.
And when the deadline was past, so was the memory of the thought.
It drifts upward.
Out of sight.
Out of mind.
Becoming part of the pressed, layered strata of my fossil bed.
Somewhere, in the middle of those layers, archaeopteryx lies splayed
Caught in mid-flight and flattened
Between an expiration notice
And an invitation to tea.

oh, nice!

Heather Rose Jones @344 <applause>

I'm wondering if there's a name for that feeling of uncertain dread you have when you open your work email after being away for a while?

Heather Rose Jones @344 Oh, yes.

Dave @ 341: I really enjoyed "Zanadu". Now I want to visit an empty house that leaves me little notes with weird but strangely appropriate definitions.

Steve C @347:

I don't know, but I get it every morning after only being away overnight. (Colleagues in multiple time zones. It kind of never stops.)

HLN: Woman finds wonderful new apartment out of the flood zone. "It's a longer commute than I really wanted," she remarked, "but I'll never find anything else this good for what I can afford to pay." Woman plans to move in slowly over the course of November. "I need to pack faster," she said. "I wasn't expecting to move until December, but I couldn't pass this up."

Note for those interested: adding 1/4c cocoa powder to Alton Brown's recipe for granola bars (somewhat redacted to change varieties of fruits/nuts involved and such) gives VERY GOOD results.

It wasn't even particularly good cocoa powder, but yum.

Mongoose #349: Yeah... but we each get our own chances at magic, and all different.

Subnormality does a lot of cool stuff, some of which I don't even have words for. A lot of it is overtly SF/Fantasy, but even the more everyday tales tend toward magical realism (and introspection). The "strip" ranges from sweet to cynical to seriously creepy.

Heather Rose @ 344: Seriously fantastic. Also, quite true!

HLN update: Local woman is having serious second thoughts about the wonderful apartment she found. Local woman is also up far too late stewing about it. But if she backs out now, local woman is out a lot of money.

Can I just say, "Arrrrrrggggghhhhh!!!!"?

(It really is a wonderful apartment. But there are drawbacks, some minor, some potentially major, that I didn't register in time.)

Mary Aileen @ 355... I'm sorry to hear.

Steve C @ 347... abi @ 350... My work-provided Blackberry is set up to show all work emails - some of them 12 hours into the future as they come in from India - as they come in so there's no morning dread for me.

Mary Aileen, good luck. Moving is stressful under the best of times, and in your circumstances it's got to be exponentially more so.

Serge, Rikibeth: Much gratitude.

Swinging wildly from euphoria to despair in the space of a few hours is not normal for me. And I hate it.

(The situation will probably be fine--I hope--but now I'm all stressed and very under-slept.)

HyperLondonNews:
Bay Area woman chances on a choir service in St. Paul's.
"Numinous."

Further Hyperlocal Update: I'm feeling much better about things after speaking to the real estate agent again a few minutes ago. The huge potential problem is...not an issue.

Now if only the other tenants in the building aren't psychotic, I'm in business.

Why students should not write essays when stoned:

On the opposing side of the legalization of marijuana they see Marijuana as a drug that is placing negative verdicts on the young and they are also seeing it as a harmful drug that is influencing the society negatively. On the other side of the argument we see that other individuals believe that Marijuana is not a negative impact on the society because it does not have any harmful entities tied to it and it would also bring an abundance of currency to the state that it is in.

Fragano @ 362 - At least you can be pretty sure they just didn't download it from somewhere. I think.

HLN: Local woman makes off with old family photographs from her parents' house. "They were being kept in a non-climate-controlled garage," she says. "I worried all summer about them sitting in the heat and humidity, and I finally located the box they were in."

The box contains not only photos she'd seen before (from the 1940s through the 2000s), but also contains her grandmother's high school yearbooks: 1945, 1946, and 1947. "The standard yearbook message in the mid-40s seems to have been 'Best of luck to a swell kid,'" says local woman. "Everybody really did use the word 'swell' constantly."

I'm fascinated by the yearbooks, and sad that my grandmother's memory has deteriorated to such an extent that she probably can't remember most of the people and stories referred to in the yearbook signatures. Then again, she's losing memories in a "last in, first out" order -- the older the memory, the more likely she can still access it. She did recently tell me a story about her first job at age 15, scooping ice cream in a local shop. So maybe she would see these yearbooks and happily remember her high school years. (They seem to have been genuinely happy years; she had many friends sign her yearbooks with much more than just "Best of luck to a swell kid," and she was elected president of her school's very first student council, which to me implies she was generally well-liked.)

I'm going to scan as many of the old photos as I can, and I'll see about scanning at least the most interesting yearbook pages, too. I'd like to set up an online photo database for family members, so they can look at the photos and add comments, stories, locations, dates, identifications of people whose faces I don't know, etc. It could be a neat family history project.

An amazing graphic story: All the Books in the World -- Except One. Probably particularly poignant for many here....

Not just Highland, but any kind of national dress is supposedly valid formal wear.

Oh, and suspenders as opposed to belt - I quite like them and use them on occasion. A belt just squeezes you around the middle, while suspenders actually do lift your trousers.

Tom Whitmore @365: In my case, the book is one that was my mom's, and it was a present to her from my uncle (who died before I was born) who inscribed it to her in letters made of little men. In the course of a series of moves, I decided it could go, and it's been nagging at me for the last thirty years now.

Well, I signed the lease this evening. No turning back now.

I'm feeling pretty good about it at this point. Hopefully I'll be calm enough to sleep tonight.

If you, like me, didn't see what was the point of making movies in 3-D, go see Gravity.

Following up on Allan Beatty's comment at 369, Gravity is worth seeing. That said, if you, like me, have a strong fondness for the realities of modern space exploration, I might suggest a flask with your alcohol of choice. Or whatever gets you through an hour and a half of serious dramatic tension.

This vision scientist notes that he'd have preferred to not see it in 3D (it's cute, but there are limits to the depth planes permissible by the technology; couple that with focal distance and stereo fusion issues and it's a gimmick at best - save your $6 and see it in 2D).

Mary Aileen @ 368: May your move go smoothly, and your new landlord be a good 'un.

Kip W. @367 -- I don't have a specific one, but many. As an opposite example, last year I found a book my grandmother had inscribed to another important woman in the printmaking world of the 1930s (probably a presentation copy). I might have figured that it might exist, but I would never have thought to look for it.

Turkey has legalized Q, W, and X. It doesn't make a lot of difference to Turkish speakers, but it's really good for Kurdish speakers and other ethnic minorities, who haven't been allowed to spell their own names properly since Turkey "modernized" spelling under Ataturk, changing from an Arabic alphabet to a Roman-with-accents one.

Hi, Gnomes!

HLN: local herpestid would like this year's crop of fleas to return immediately to whichever circle of hell they originate from.

"I can even provide a handbasket," they told HLN. "I understand that's a traditional conveyance. But it's the middle of October and normally they've all been gone at least a month by now. We need a good sharp frost or two."

The fleas were unavailable for comment, being too full to talk after treating local herpestid's left ankle as a convenient free all-you-can-eat buffet. Local herpestid was last seen looking hopefully at the weather predictions for minus signs and trying to channel Ned Stark.

Ack, sorry! I did it again. No spam here - that was on another thread. Forgot to change the name. *headdesk*

Bill Stewart @ 373:

ML's Turkish correspondent comments:

'The local joke, echoing the Prime Minister's complaints that Turkish protests during the summer were inspired by the 'interest-rate lobby' (a phrase whose anti-Semitic overtones have drawn some comment), is that this represents a capitulation to the 'scrabble lobby'.

It's also worth noticing that progress here may (it's not entirely clear) be less than it seems: since legal documents all have to be in Turkish, and Turkish still doesn't contain these letters, there's some doubt as to whether a Turkish citizen can be registered as having a name containing one of these three letters. For what it's worth the issue doesn't just affect Kurdish speakers, but also foreigners with names like 'Qwerty' and 'Xerox' who wish to become Turkish citizens.'

#373 ::: Bill Stewart

Making letters illegal is kind of thing I'd expect to only see in parody, but then, making music (in general) is the kind of thing I'd expect to only see done by a villain in a children's book.

Oh, well.

Praisegod Barebones @ 377,

Do they have some method of transliteration? Because it's not just the hypothetical "Xerox" or "Qwerty" that have problems, but the very real Walters, Quincys, and Alexanders. (If Prince William of England were to have make a state visit, how would the newspapers have spelled his name?)

Granted, in America we have issues with transliteration; look at the twenty or so valid spellings for Khadafy/Qaddafy/Kaddafi.... But that's a problem of going from one writing system to another, without shared letter-forms.

Cassy

I believe anyone named "Qwerty" should be granted US citizenship on demand.

Nancy Lebovitz #378: What if your alphabet doesn't need them? In Spanish, as I learnt the alphabet more than half a century ago, the digraphs "ch" and "ll" each occupy a place, while "uve doble" (w) was only grudgingly included as it is only used in foreign words (e.g., the names "Washington" and "Wellington", pronounced, in Spain, "Vashington" and "Vellington", with some Spaniards, on hearing them, spelling them "Vaxintón" and "Velintón").

Of course, I'm still amused by my uncle Eugenio's questions to me about the Royal Navy nuclear submarine "Tírilis" which had docked in Gibraltar for repair, causing a major scandal in Spain. I realised, after a while, that he was referring to HMS Tireless, and explained to him how the name was pronounced in English. His friends at the bar, he said, wouldn't understand that. Reading the name in the paper, they'd pronounce it "Tírilis".

In re the Turkish letters thing, I wonder if this will impact Mr. Erdogan at all? Since if you asked a lot Americans to spell his name based upon pronunciation we'd probably end up with something like "Erdowan" ...

I am reminded of Ella Minnow Pea, in which various letters of the alphabet are progressively made illegal.

Nothing wrong with an alphabet that doesn't use all the letters (though I wouldn't mind sf about a culture which used the IPA-- Heinlein's speedtalk isn't quite it). My issue is with a country which makes some letters *illegal*.

Fragano:

This makes me think of the main character in _The Peace War_, a black kid raised in a medevial-technology-level Spanish-speaking community named "Wili Wachéndon"

I'm not sure how keen I'd be on IPA. Even in English, there are mutually intelligible dialects that would "spell" the same words differently using IPA. For instance, in some, but not all, dialects of English, the two words "pen" and "pin" are homophones, and would be spelled the same. (in my dialect, I'd spell them /pɛn/ and /pɪn/, but I've heard them both pronounced /piːn/ in my mother's birth dialect). Similarly, in some dialect, "then" and "thin" is a minimal distinguisher between /θ/ and /ð/ phonemes.

I'm not sure there's a good solution to the problem of a general phonetic alphabet for languages which have regional pronunciation differences/dialects.

Unless, of course, you posit that your IPA-using SF culture doesn't have dialects or other regional differences.

What I've wanted to see is an SF culture which uses phonemes which are impossible for humans to produce, such as nasal plosives (caused by a temporary stoppage of airflow through the nostrils), or are inaudible to the human ear. How a linguist or diplomat deals with the issue in talks and negotiations would be interesting.

Buddha Buck @386 What I've wanted to see is an SF culture which uses phonemes which are impossible for humans to produce, such as nasal plosives (caused by a temporary stoppage of airflow through the nostrils), or are inaudible to the human ear. How a linguist or diplomat deals with the issue in talks and negotiations would be interesting.

If you haven't read Janet Kagan's Hellspark, I recommend it.

Elizabethan English had flexible spelling-- an IPA-writing culture could presumably have the same.

I assume people who wanted to "speak" an alien language that included non-human sounds would use keyboards or some more advanced tech. Or there would be "close enough" sounds that people could make without external aids.

Mieville's Embassytown dealt with the problem of people talking with two-mouthed aliens by having paired linguists. (from memory)

Mongoose, I love Ella Minnow Pea! It's particularly amusing in that book that they're trying to come up with short pangrams, and never come up with the shortest one* I know, which is "Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow."

I once created a whole multi-episode arc in a roleplaying game just so that at the end someone could say that in a context where it made sense.

*To count, it has to be a sentence that is at least grammatically parsible and coherent. This one is a pretty odd thing to say, but qualifies. And it's only 29 letters, repeating only a, o, and u. It's hard to get shorter than that without losing coherence.

Irish doesn't use j, k, q, v, w, x, y, or z. They use the other 18 letters a lot.

Buddha 386: I'm not sure how keen I'd be on IPA. Even in English, there are mutually intelligible dialects that would "spell" the same words differently using IPA. For instance, in some, but not all, dialects of English, the two words "pen" and "pin" are homophones, and would be spelled the same. (in my dialect, I'd spell them /pɛn/ and /pɪn/, but I've heard them both pronounced /piːn/ in my mother's birth dialect).

This is why Michiganders say "ink pen" (to disambiguate). It didn't make sense to me until I studied linguistics. And they don't do it in writing; I think it's rather unfriendly of someone editing a transcript of an interview with a Michigander to leave in the word 'ink', as someone did in an interview with Eminem I read years ago. But the decision about that is complex.

I'd be extremely unkeen on IPA in English. English writes the way it does for some good reasons (and some bad ones). For example, spelling 'electric' with a final k (or whatever that is in IPA) and 'electricity' with an s in the penultimate syllable is just plain stupid and loses something important.

And frankly I like the fact that we spell 'shun' and '-tion' differently, and 'affect' and 'effect'*, and 'marshall' and 'martial'. I know I'm probably in a minority on this.

Nancy 388: Elizabethan English had flexible spelling-- an IPA-writing culture could presumably have the same.

Well, the whole point of IPA is to be inflexible...unless you mean that everyone just writes their own dialect, and no one spell-checks any more. That would add the stigma now applied to various accents to communications in writing as well. I can't see this as a plus.

*Yes, in careful speech those are different, and in some dialects, and when 'affect' is used in its jargon sense it's quite well distinguished from 'effect'. So what? It's another argument against IPA, actually, since people would spell both words in a variety of ways depending on how colloquial they wanted to be!

Cassy B. @ 379: despite my flippancy, I'm well aware that this is a practical problem for people with names less singular than, say, 'Praisegod Barebones.' Some might even suspect me of being a member of the aforementioned 'Scrabble Lobby' myself.

Albatross #385: That's the result of the Spanish known to the author being Mexican (had it been Caribbean -- Puerto Rican, Dominican, or Cuban -- it would have come out more like "Guíli Guachendón").

I'm not saying the IPA as alphabet would be likable for everyone (my ear isn't that sharp, though I'm sure it would be sharper if I grew up in that culture) or ideal, just that it's interesting to look at the consequences.

I'm assuming that people would mostly write in their own dialects, though I'm sure there would be higher and lower status dialects and this would affect people's choices.

Buddha Buck @386, in China Melville's Embassytown (rot13 for minor spoiler) gur nzonffnqbef unir gb gnyx gb perngherf gung fcrnx ovcubavpnyyl (gjb zbhguf cre perngher; obgu fcrnx fvzhygnarbhfyl sbezvat qvssrerag cubarzrf gb perngr jbeqf; erpbeqvatf ner abg pbzceruraqrq ol gur perngherf fb gung gevpx jba'g jbex). Gurl fbyir guvf ol univat gjb nzonffnqbef, rnpu fcrnxvat unys gur jbeqf fvzhygnabhfyl....

Nancy Lebovitz @388, that'll teach me to reply before I read through the thread.

Praisegod Barebones @391, I'm the one that should apologize; I should have seen the flippancy. In my defense, it was first thing in the morning and I wasn't quite awake...

Today in "Gosh, Making Light should really hear about this," I present to you an iOS platformer game that teaches the player about the history of typography:

http://penny-arcade.com/report/article/the-bizarre-ios-platformer-thats-also-a-documentary-about-typography

Oh, clicky link:

Type:Rider

(Sorry!)

Xopher @ 389: "Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow."

Squeeeeee! I love pangrams, and I've never seen that one before. I shall now be carefully grateful in a way that will not overexcite the gnomes.

Apparently there was once, somewhere, a headline that ran "Cwm fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz" about some graffiti on a riverside rock face, but to be honest I've never been happy with that one. Anyone who paid the least bit of attention in O-level geography knows that a cwm and a fjord are two totally different formations.

The very first issue of Games magazine I read had in the letter column "XV BC fjord whelk quiz gyps T-man", but that one requires a fair amount of unpacking. (A worker for the Treasury Department goes on a game show, where he fails a question about Norwegian sea snails in the year fifteen before the current era.) Xopher's pangram is definitely one of the best I've seen.

Xopher @389, I've been working on constructing a pangram with "quartz sphinx" in it, off and on, for a few years now. This is far more elegant than any solution I've come up with.

HLN: Local man is peeved at Chrome for updating and losing all his prefs, cookies, bookmarks, search engines and other things that are supposed to be saved to the local drive.

Local man supposes that it's Google's way of telling me they'd really rather have me signed into their browser.

On the Amazing Cats of Leslie Fish

A great time ago (two Internet ages) I met Leslie Fish at a convention. At least at that time she seemed completely convinced (I did not think she was pulling a joke on the young and credulous fan) that she had telekinetic abilities and could move small objects with her mind. She was similarly convinced that in her part of Arizona either Elk or Deer had their rut in the spring so as to have young during the cool and wet fall and winter. I have repeatedly searched for any reference to this by any biologist and have yet to find any report or anecdotal report of this anywhere. (If it is true I would be quite interested to be pointed in the direction of papers or stories. It would be facinating if true.)

Those were to two most memorable subjects of the chat I had with her. She is undoubtedly nice and interesting since so many interesting people like her, but I would treat anything she said of how intelligent or dexterous her cats were with the same intellectual caution that I use when receiving historical information from a person convinced of the reality of ancient astronauts building the pyramids.

She may be accurately conveying the reality of her feline adventures within the limits of good storytelling or she could be exaggerating.

Mishalak @403: I was partly responsible for waifing her to the 2000 WorldCon, and I can't disagree with anything you've said. In addition, she insisted on keeping a loaded firearm near her person at all times and warned me not to accidentally get between her and it (for example, when it was on the nightstand of the bed we shared) or she might reflexively harm me for the subconsciously perceived threat. Then she turned our room (we were not the only two designated users of it) into an unofficial all-night smoking filkroom and consuite to hold court in and I had to find somewhere else to sleep ...

That said, I have heard stories of a pair of her culls' adventures after adoption from someone I know to be a credible witness on the subject, and they're definitely very intelligent in a fairly uncatlike way, and very teamwork-oriented.

Cassy B@394

A somewhat similar situation occurs in "Close to Critical" by Hal Clement.

Nygubhtu va guvf pnfr vg'f n uhzna naq nyvra jbexvat gbtrgure gb pbzzhavpngr gb n guveq vagryyvtrag fcrpvrf.

(Naq vg jnf n erfhyg bs na nppvqragny penfu ynaqvat engure guna n cynaarq qryrtngvba.)

Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.

Mix Zapf with Veljovic and get quirky béziers.

I don't remember where I got the sphinx pangram; I certainly didn't invent it myself. Might have been from Willard Espy.

Mishalak 403: the reality of ancient astronauts building the pyramids

Well, they were aliens with snakes in their heads. I guess they count as astronauts, though they also traveled by stargate.

Stephen 406: Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.

A letter shorter! It has a name, though not an extraordinary one (your other one isn't nearly as elegant). Adding another short pangram to my list.

Xopher @407 (re Stephen Sample @406) -- using a bit of modern slang (not uncommon in the 21st Century) one can eliminate the proper name quite simply: "Dub waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex."

Xopher @389: Years ago, I came up with "Fix my quartz block when pigs do jive." Not a beauty, but it was a letter shorter than what was in the Guinness book at the time. I never sent it in because by the time I was motivated enough, they had something better anyway.

The one with BC I consider illegitimate for using abbreviations. Might as well just make up words. (Or get cute like the Saturday Review reader who sent in "Baby knows all his letters except D, F, G…" Eh, you finish it.)

In other lettery thoughts, I'm all for them allowing more diphthong letters in English, like X, which has two sounds in it. There was a -ps- letter that Claudius let into the Roman alphabet, according to Graves. If they made up a few more good ones, we could get more bang for our 140 characters in Twitter, see.

#407 ::: Xopher Halftongue: Well, they were aliens with snakes in their heads. I guess they count as astronauts, though they also traveled by stargate.

Well to be totally pedantic the the slave laborers of the humans with alien worms built the pyramids. So I would still say the Egyptians built them even in the Stargate universe.

Actually, that might make for interesting fiction. Even in a universe where ancient astronauts are real Erich von Däniken is still a fraudulent plagiarist. Sort of a Gilderoy Lockhart of SF.

OtterB, #387: Seconding the recommendation for Hellspark. One of the most fascinating linguistic mysteries I've ever seen, plus a murder mystery and a first-contact story all wound together. It taught me how to "take a step back" from my own culture, which has proven to be a valuable skill on occasion.

Xopher, #390: I continue to be astounded by the things you seem to have heard growing up in Michigan. I guarantee you none of the people I knew there would have said "ink pen" -- that's a formulation I never encountered until moving to Tennessee. (And to get the actual pronunciation, it should be spelled "ink pin".) The Michigander dialect I grew up with makes a clear distinction between "pin" and "pen".

Elliott, #404: Sadly, none of those anecdotes surprise me, especially the last one.

Wikipedia has a comprehensive list of pangrams in English and several other languages. Just reading the translations is an excellent way to get your morning bowl of surreal flakes.

Mongoose #412: Hmm. I note that "sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow" is credited to Adobe InDesign as a font-demo load.

I see that all the shortest English ones depend heavily on the language's libertine habits: if not initialisms and such, then local names for the wildlife, topography, and customs of various non-Anglophone regions. Not to mention abusing our tolerance for fragmentary clauses and sentences....

(Personally, I consider a pangram or suchlike pretty dubious if it needs to be translated for native speakers.)

Dave Harmon @413: I've long sought a ... well, a pangram-like item that also includes the numeral 1, a capital I, and a lowercase L, so I can see what they look like in various fonts. A font-testing text, I suppose.

Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow

I don't think I've seen that one before. Although it does remind me of "Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz", probably because sphinx and quartz are both pretty useful words for pangrams if you can fit them in.

The jackdaws weigh in at a relatively dismal 31 letters, though. Three As and two each of I, O, and S.

(Jackdaws are a type of bird, in case you're wondering. IIRC they actually are fond of shiny objects, although whether this extends to quartz sphinxes is more speculative.)

chris @ 415: I'm now experiencing the flip side of the mild becrogglement I had when I discovered that bluebirds were real (and indigenous to certain parts of the United States). I'd always thought they were a cute folkloric metaphor for happiness.

Jackdaws are pretty common here in the UK, or at least they were (I don't see them quite so often these days, but that may at least partly be a function of living with a cat; magpies will venture into my back garden, but then they are very bold). You're quite right about them liking shiny things, but they might possibly get bored with a big quartz sphinx, as they couldn't steal it and take it back to their nests.

HLN: Area man takes new telescope to public viewing night, pleased that it functions flawlessly. AM also realizes that having six telescopes is too many and must sell one of his optical darlings.

Steve C@417

Or you could just buy another telescope. Then you'd have one for every night of the week.

:-)

Mishalak @403: She may be accurately conveying the reality of her feline adventures within the limits of good storytelling or she could be exaggerating.

You know, it's interesting that you say that; there's something about the tone of her stores that just feels...embellished.

See also: Hi hi! Good to meet you at the con!

HLN: The Rainbow's End household now has a Siamese once more in residence -- his name is Luciano, and he has quite a vocabulary.

The house apes have learned his vocalizations for "feed me NOW dammit," "I'm lost," and "where is my litter box." The first 24 hours (Monday) were a little rocky as it took us awhile to figure out which vocalization meant what...

He goes for his first vaccines on Monday. He's a Virgo baby, having been born on August 29th.

HLN: After much angst and agonization, and having allocated insufficient prep time, local fan survives submitting art to local convention artshow. Said fan was duly astonished when informed that one piece won "Judge's Choice" award. Fan has made small (well, really small) effort to refrain from annoying passersby with excessive strutting and preening. Additionally, four pieces sold, neatly making back cost of hotel (or, would have done, had fan not also bought a piece of art).

All in all, local fan is well pleased.

Michael I @ 418 -

I hadn't thought of that argument. (Or 12 telescopes, one for each month)

Oh yeah, and: on the topic of The Graying of Fandom: Not in evidence at MileHiCon. Youngest I saw was eighteen months. Oldest was probably eighty-ish. But in between, the age distribution was pretty darn even, with maybe a slight bulge in the 20-60 range. Even better, some clans had (at least) three generations present.

Jacque, #421: Congratulations on your art sales! I never expect to sell any pieces in an art show -- I mostly put them in as an attempt to generate interest in my dealer table -- and am always pleasantly surprised when it happens.

Jacque (421): Congratulations! When I put art in a convention art show, I always figure I've done well if I make back my entry fees. Making back the cost of the hotel is even better!

Open Threadiness:

Some of you might remember that I've been dealing with automotive and financial issues (strongly coupled) and that my Jeep needs a new engine. Has needed one, in fact, since April or before. I haven't driven it farther than the half-mile from home to the mechanic's since April, and that was one trip, to drop the vehicle off once I finally had the $500 in hand to have the engine torn down for the warranty claim ('01 Jeep, purchased by me in '11, aftermarket warranty).

I've moved since purchasing the vehicle, and somewhere in the move the binder containing all my various records for repairs and oil changes went AWOL. I've had to go searching, and so the vehicle has sat, sans engine, in a spare bay at my mechanic's while I hunted around to find or reconstruct service records from a variety of local auto shops. One of the most difficult things was trying to decide which of three storage locations might be most likely to actually house the missing binder, and alternatively, which auto shops in town I had used for servicing the Jeep in case I didn't find the binder and had to go ask whether the shops still had copies of my records.

I believe I finally have everything together, and now I need to convince the warranty folks to reopen the repair claim and to honor the warranty by replacing the engine (and covering assorted other minor repairs). The warranty expires in 4 days. If this work isn't paid for by the warranty, I can't afford it out of my own pocket, which would mean I'd be stuck paying $240 a month for a large lawn ornament. Not to mention that since the car I have been driving in the interim is not in fact mine and its owner really needs it back, I would also lose my ability to hold a job easily as most decent jobs in this area aren't on bus lines anymore. And I would still owe $500 to the very good friend who pressed a check into my hand back in July with admonition to get my Jeep fixed and pay him back once the warranty company returned the money to me in covering the claim.

I need all the good mojo I can get for this to go through without a problem.

@233 Elliott Mason

Knitting content: I am not-quite-a-quarter done with a dress for my kid.

That's a really cute dress! I've printed the pattern out for my Mum, who is always happy to have a new project (!), however, I was wondering if you can help me? I think that this is a translation from the original Norwegian, and has a few hiccups in it. Can you help me figure out the meaning before I give it to my Mum? Keep in mind that I do not knit myself, I was just brought up in a Knitting House.

Where it says "I.e 4 needles means 4 needles knitted with Angora, at the top of the dress. You work the colour stripes at the same time, but don´t worry about them when measuring. Never do more than 4 Angora needles between each colour stripe", do they really mean "needles"? Or should that be something else, like "stitches"? It's confusing, because they use the word stitches properly elsewhere in the pattern.

Also, in what... direction (I guess is the best word) is the dress being knitted? It doesn't look like it runs top to bottom, to me. When you cast on that first row of 105 s, is that the length from nape to calf, where the buttons will go? And then you continue knitting all the way around, I guess?

One more thing: since I probably won't be able to get Pickles brand yarn here, could you tell me what weight the yarn is, so I can pickup something comparable? I can't find the info on their website (or I just don't know where to look).

Merci beaucoup pour ton aide! I think your daughter will have a really lovely dress, once you are done!

Cheryl: I think in that particular case it means rows. This is actually a really simple pattern, you can get by by counting garter bumps and going by how many color-stripes to keep it symmetrical, plus using inches. It's very adaptable to other sizes or gauges, as long as you've got a good gauge swatch in garter stitch (and don't get too ambitious about how many short-row turns you put in the skirt -- that way lies super-hyper-circularity!). I'm getting a bit more stitches to the inch than they want with a light fingering on size US 3 needles, so standard sock yarn should be fine.

I'm adjusting by having multiplied the initial cast-on stitch count (which is back-neck-to-hem length) by 1.22, and going by the inches in the patterns instead of rows, which is what they said to do. Also, I adjusted the increase-for-shoulders (and decrease, etc) by doing three groups of five stitches plus a single three-stitch one, which gives me about the right number of total stitches (multipled by 1.22, as noted).

Cheryl: Oh, and an adjustment I did that you might want (unless your mum really enjoys weaving in ends constantly) is to start the color-stripes at the top TIP of the triangle instead of at the hem -- you have to mark the spot ahead of time (do the counting up from the hem of all the turning-points) but it is TOTALLY worth it to me to be able to strand the yarn along at waist height instead of burying two ends for every flippin' triangle of color.

In that case, the short-row algorithm runs "Start knitting with relevant Colored Yarn at Point X, and knit to hem. Purl back from hem to first turning-point marker; wrap-and-turn, knit back to hem. Purl to second turning-point marker; etc, until your purl row is 'knit back to where you started the color'. Then instead of wrap-and-turn, you turn the work over and pick up the torso color and knit down across the top of your whole color triangle, knitting back to finish the garter-bump.

If your mum hasn't done short rows before I'd love to email-correspond with her about it, if she likes email.

Lee 411: Not sure what that 'seem to have' means. I did hear those things. My memory isn't that fallible.

I grew up in Okemos and went to college (that's "university" to any Brits who may read this) in East Lansing. The Okemos school district straddled the border between the burbs where the faculty and staff of Michigan State University lived, and distinctly rural farming communities (it was years after leaving that I finally realized there was a class divide in my school...but then I was on the privileged side of that, so of course I didn't realize what it was).

My parents are from Chicago. They distinguish 'pin' from 'pen' by the vowel, and so did I, from the very first. When I heard people in junior high and high school saying "ink pen," I noticed it. And they were not people who had just moved there from TN!

Not sure where you grew up that you didn't hear it. It actually makes sense if it's a Southern thing, because a LOT of poor whites from the South settled in Michigan after the Civil War.

Mongoose 412: Hmm, I doubt that a comprehensive list is possible, since you can always invent new ones. The "perfect" ones may all be used up, but I'm not sure even of that.

Dave 413: I note that "sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow" is credited to Adobe InDesign as a font-demo load.

It says "used by." That's not to say they invented it.

(Personally, I consider a pangram or suchlike pretty dubious if it needs to be translated for native speakers.)

Hear, hear.

chris 415: I remember my Baum! Never heard of Jackdaws before reading him.

Jacque 421: Congratulations! That's great.

416: Does anyone know if the real bluebird is actually the source of the legendary bluebird (as in Maeterlinck's play, The Blue Bird, where it is indeed a symbol of happiness), or if it is a coincidence? (Or might the real thing even be called after the legend, like, say, the Komodo dragon?)

@428, 429 Elliott Mason

Cheryl: I think in that particular case it means rows.

That makes much more sense.

standard sock yarn should be fine

The Craft Yarn Council site shows sock yarn as Category 1, Super Fine. Does that seem right?

Oh, and an adjustment I did that you might want (unless your mum really enjoys weaving in ends constantly) is to start the color-stripes at the top TIP of the triangle instead of at the hem -- you have to mark the spot ahead of time (do the counting up from the hem of all the turning-points) but it is TOTALLY worth it to me to be able to strand the yarn along at waist height instead of burying two ends for every flippin' triangle of color.

My Mum has a trick for that: she carries the yarn behind. I think this is how she does it. Youtube seems to have a few demos of this technique, if that particular video is not good for you. Unless that's not what you meant?

If your mum hasn't done short rows before I'd love to email-correspond with her about it, if she likes email.

My Mum generally has 4 or 5 different knitting/crochet projects going at any one time, and has since I was young. I can't tell you for sure if she's done short rows or not, but I wouldn't be shocked.

Alas, my mother does not do computers. I have tried to show her a few things (15 years, but she can now use the bank machine!!), but sometimes I think she would be less befuddled if I used Harry Potter's wand.

Congrats on your art showing, Jacque! John and I were at MHC for most of Saturday, but we never managed to make our way into the art show. Which I now regret.

Andrew M #431: Well, the bluebird, or rather bluebirds, are certainly the source of their own common name!¹ They are particularly pretty songbirds (and apparently helpful in the garden), so an association with happiness seems natural.

¹ Taxonomists are lucky that the common name stayed within one genus; compare Black-eyed Susan, or "bluets", which pretty much refers to any small blue or blue-white meadow-flower.

Day 3 of my training somehwere on the East Coast...

Without consulting each other, some of us showed up wearing a red shirt.
Nobody died.

SummerStorms @426: good luck in negotiating re. the warranty.

Dave Harmon @434: I'm confused by your comparison of "Black-Eyed Susan" to bluets - in my experience, flowers called Black-Eyed Susans are more commonly yellow with black centers, as in the Rudbeckia hirta.

Jacque @ 421: congratulations! That's awesome.

oliviacw #437: The only common factor is that those are both common names which refer to many different flowers; the link I gave for "Black Eyed Susan" lists three other plant families, plus "a number of other members" of the Rudbeckia genus.

oliviacw #437, addendum: Yeah, my phrasing was confusing in #434, sorry.

General: As I may have mentioned, for some time now I've been using nicotine gum to hold my smoking down to a pack a day. Last week, I saw what was described as an "e-hookah" (a bigger version of e-cigarettes) and decided to try it. (Brand name is "eVoodoo".)

Given that it cost about as much as two packs of my cigarettes (American Spirits, somewhat more expensive than most) the second¹ question was, would it last long enough to replace two packs of cigs? As it turns out, the answer is "hell yeah!". This thing has been going for most of a week, replacing nearly all of my cigarettes (I've smoked maybe half a pack in that time, because reasons), and some of the gum to boot.

¹ The first question of course, was "will it actually substitute for cigarettes". Obviously, it passed that test. Though for quite a while, I had to stop myself from trying to light it. ;-)

This has been making the rounds on FB. Incredibly beautiful.

Spontaneous Beethoven

(Apologies if seen before)

Likely for discussing a suspicious product and/or brandname. I can offer some mac-and-cheese with various veggies fried into it....

Quite Fluorospherian: Last summer, a Spanish bank decided to sponsor a flashmob for their 130th anniversary. It is classy. It is uber-classy. And awesome. Especially the way they chose to let it trigger.

I love how many of the passersby are singing along by the time the choir shows up ...

Cheryl @432: That craft yarn council chart is very strange to me. It has 'lace' include fingering? Fingering is fairly coarse for what I'd consider 'laceweight', and almost all sock yarn I've seen is sportweight or fingering.

I'd say you could make that dress out of anything marked Craft-Yarn-Council 2 or 3 with some adjustment of needle size (which your mum is probably a past mistress of).

The reason I suggest starting the color bits at the thin end is because if you do them at the thick end, you'll be stranding along four colors for distances of well over 20 rows, which is insane ... if you strand them along at the narrow end it is much more manageable, and also not right out at the hem where it'd show.

Some people hate end-burying less than I do, though, and the start-at-the-hem color method does have the advantage that it's very easy to explain in the pattern and to keep track of while you're knitting.

Mishalak @ 403 -- I can say with great confidence that the rut for elk and deer in Arizona is September and October, just like anywhere else. I'm about 30 minutes from Payson, right under the Mogollon Rim. It's elk and deer central here. I think there's more elk living in my neighborhood than people.

We even get elk on the porch.

That said, in the spring and early summer, when the females give birth, they will whistle to their offspring. A cow elk looking for junior sounds quite a bit like a bull in lust. It would be easy to mistake that for the rut. Many people don't realize that cow elk whistle too.

Steve C., 441 and Elliott Mason, 444: Great minds think alike!

re 439: I suspect some of the other Rudbeckia species get called "black-eyed Susan", and the black-eyed Susan vine is a thing unto itself, but the other things on Wikipedia's list fairly cry out for "citation needed".

@444 Elliott Mason

Merci pour l'info!

(not being chichi, just trying to avoid bothering the gnomes)

OK, so some new deep and abiding idiocy has taken root at Google, and now if you log out from one GMail account and go to log into another, it does not forget your first login. Indeed, it apparently tries to assemble a menu of alternate logins, apparently on the assumption that you're the only person who ever logs into your machine, and you want all your various identities linked together. OK, well, what about a public access machine at a library? What if I don't want everything tied together? Isn't that the point of having multiple accounts? I'm now reduced to opening up different browsers to keep things sorted, and it's a good thing I have less identities than browsers available.

Wait, is it just giving you a dropdown box with your different logins to choose from? Which browser are you using?

Because Firefox does that with Gmail on my laptop, but it's because I have Firefox set to remember my logins and passwords for Gmail (and certain other sites). It isn't anything specific to Gmail itself.

Xopher, #430: What I'm saying is that I can't imagine where you would have lived in Michigan to have heard those things, not that you didn't hear them. I lived in Michigan (Detroit area) for 16 years and never heard a single person say "ink pen", and neither have any of the other Michiganders I've encountered since moving elsewhere, and that includes people from all over the Lower Peninsula, including one from Okemos when I was at Vandy. But the thing that really prompted my comment is, several times you've talked about how "Michiganders" say this or that Southernism, and every time it's completely counter to my experience. If people in the area where you lived talked that way, it must be very localized indeed.

Steve C., #441: ISTR seeing that one before (the kid in red climbing the lamppost for a better view seems familiar), but well worth watching again if so.

I hadn't seen the Beethoven flashmob. Lovely. One thing I do wonder: the chorus didn't seem to be singing the lyrics from the beginning, but something different. Anyone know for sure what they were singing?

Steve C. @441 & Elliott Mason @443: thank you for that! It's a good one.

Just in case anyone missed it when it came around some time ago, I still think this one is the best: Copenhagen Station Bolero - I also really like the oe they did on a train Classical Special train - enjoy the music

re 450: What's changed is that there doesn't seem to be a way to reduce it to the default state of asking for a user ID and password. Before, if it were left logged in, it would present that account and ask for a password, but if you said "sign in as another user" it would forget everything. Now, there doesn't seem to be any way to get it to do that; it appears to be trying to set up a menu of accounts to log in from. Even if you take the option that appears to be intended to make it forget, it doesn't do that; it doggedly remembers the first account.

The current version of Opera does some weird stuff with bookmarks, a completely changed UI for getting the functions, and I was reluctant to make the switch. But some sites are starting to get awkward.

I am still trying to figure out how to organise the new system. And how to replace the ROT-13 tool I was using, which rather depends on the old-style UI.

One thing which is looming is that Firefox is going to drop plug-ins, which is going to mess up No-Script.

I am going to be a bit grumpy for a while.

Dave @ 455: why is FF dropping plugins? Surely that'll just mean everyone who uses them will change to another browser? (Personally I don't know where I'd be without AdBlock Plus and WoT.)

Mongoose @456, Dave Bell @455: I think they're only dropping plugins (Flash, Silverlight, Java etc) as distinct from extensions like AdBlock Plus, Greasemonkey and NoScript. At least, I hope so, or I will be joining you in grumpiness.

They're dropping Flash? But then I'll have to use another browser to play with my trains... *shamefaced expression*

(Explanation: there's a game called TrainStation of which I am inordinately fond. What can I say? I like trains. Always have.)

James E @457: They can't do that until Netflix manages to get itself off Silverlight, which has been about to happen Real Soon Now for over 3 years.

Here and here is a bit more detail on it all. TL;DR version: Chrome is ending support for plugins. Firefox is not, but it is disabling them by default.

possibly as punishment for including a whopping two URLs in a post.

[It's not the quantity. It's the quality, in this case, the format, of one of the links. —Idumea Arbacoochee, Duty Gnome]

My friend Bill Harrison died today. I still remember Jim Whitehead "introducing" me to Bill (my life had been entwined with Bill's family for years by that time) by calling me brilliant (which is odd, since Jim was normally such a good judge of character). And I remember Jim saying that Bill, Frank Stanford (a great poet), and I had all been adopted and that explained our Romantic outlook on life.

(And now I am the only living person named in that paragraph. That's happening more often these days.)

(And yet they're much more alive than I am.)

He's best known for the novel The Roller Ball Murders and the screenplay Rollerball, but genre readers will also find In A Wild Sanctuary to be of interest. He was a good writer and a good guy. I'm sorry I didn't get up to see him last weekend.

John A Arkansawyer @462, my condolences on your loss.

John A Arkansawyer @462: My sincere condolences on your loss.

Thanks, y'all. And my apologies for the tone of self-pity.

No need to apologize for self-pity when mourning a deeply felt loss. Self-pity, it seems to me, is entirely appropriate. Part of what you're mourning is their relationship with you, after all.

John A Arkansawyer @462: Condolences from me as well. And it's a real loss, losing a friend; don't feel any need to apologise.

dcb, #453: I love that Bolero! It's a very abbreviated version -- the original is 8 x AABB with a coda, while this one just does one AB that's quiet and one AB that's loud and then goes to the coda. But that's about the right length for a performance of this nature, and it gives the feel of the full version.

And the Peer Gynt is a nice choice for a train ride. I may have to add that movement to my Meditation playlist.

John, #462: My condolences on your loss. And what Cassy said.

Dave Harmon: Hooray! I love it when someone switches over to an e-cig, because that means that instead of a whole plethora of carcinogens, you're getting the one toxin (nicotine) instead, which I consider a clear win.

All @ various: Loving the music videos.

John @ 462: Please accept my condolences as well.

For replying to Dave Harmon's comment. It probably had Words of Power.

I have pink pumpkin.

HLN: Area woman hospitalized with collapsed lung that is stubbornly resisting re-inflation. Despite medical staff's insistence that chest tubes HURT, woman reports no pain. She says, "I feel fine. Aside from occaissional shortness of breath, my only complaint is boredom."

GlendaP, wishing you a speedy recovery.

Glenda, I'm glad to hear that at least you're not in pain! Get better!

Lee 451: Well, it was Eminem (isn't he fairly iconic for working-class white Detroit?) who said it ("I have to sit down with an ink pen and work it out") in that interview where I said the word 'ink' should have been edited out. I don't think it's all that localized. Maybe it's the pre-internet, and largely pre-cable TV, time period? For reference, I went to high school in the 1970s.

It IS interesting that we have such different experiences. I heard 'ink pen' all the time, growing up. It wasn't just a few kids.

John 462: I'm sorry for your loss. And your tone struck me as saddened and entirely appropriate to the subject matter. I didn't get self-pity from it at all.

GlendaP 471: Good gods. I hope you get better quickly. I will NOT hope for the cessation of your boredom, because...well, not feeding that thought-form. Good thoughts coming your way.

John @462 -- condolences from here too, and another voice saying you were appropriate.

Heal well and quickly, GlendaP!

Lee and Xopher: "Ink pen" brings up the memory of how mystified I was the first time I encountered that term. I grew up in western New York State, and don't recall ever hearing anyone say "ink pen" until I moved to Cincinnati as a young adult. Plenty of people there said it, and I remember wondering why on earth anyone should need to specify a pen that used ink, given I'd never heard of any other type.

Just a random data point, apropos of nothing in particular.

John @ 462: condolences. It is always sad to lose a friend.

Glenda @ 472: oh my! All the best for a speedy recovery.

Another random data point: when I was at school, my classmates said "ink pen", not to distinguish "pen" from "pin" (which would have been unnecessary), but to refer to a fountain pen or cartridge pen in order to distinguish it from a ballpoint. Being a ferociously logical child, I had trouble with this. After all, ballpoints also use ink; it's just a different type.

When I heard/read* 'ink pen' as a kid in Atlanta, I thought they were differentiating it from 'pig pen'.

*I may have encountered the usage only in books (dialogue); I no longer remember. It certainly wasn't a common usage in my circles.

Mongoose, 478: Hmmm. I don't know when you were in school or to what extent the tools commonly in use differed from those in my school. Fountain pens were very unusual by the time I was in school (1969-1982); we mainly used ballpoints and felt-tips, with the occasional roller-ball pen when I was in high school. Pens with pointy metal nibs were rarely seen outside of drawing classes, although when I was in high school fountain pens did see a temporary resurgence in popularity and availability, as kind of a fad item. My move to Cincinnati came only five years after I graduated from high school, but I have no idea whether the use of "ink pen" in that area had any genuine relationship to differentiating between types of pens.

And yes, like you, that would've offended my sense of logic as well.

GlendaP, #472: Yikes! Get better soon!

Xopher, #475: I know nothing about Eminem except his name, so can offer no opinions there. I left the Detroit area in 1972, just after my sophomore year of high school. I'm starting to wonder if it might not be an urban vs. rural difference; it is true that everyone I knew in Michigan (and pretty much the same with expatriates I've met since) was "city folk".

SummerStorms, #477: If you were hearing it as "ink pen", with the short-e sound, I can understand your mystification. The people I've known who used it (as I mentioned to Xopher above) said "ink pin", with a short-i sound, to differentiate it from a sewing pin. "Safety pin" was already differentiated.

Mongoose, #478: That usage actually makes some sense to me, in that a cartridge pen was the kind that invariably leaked all over your fingers, making you very aware of the ink in a way that a ballpoint pen wouldn't.

SummerStorms @ 480: I'm talking about primary school, specifically junior school (in the infant school, you had to use a pencil). That would have been 1971-75. I seem to recall that we were still stuck with pencils in the first and second years of junior school (as a result of which I grew to loathe them with a passion, and am only now starting to accept that pencils occasionally have some merit for writing as well as for drawing), and then in the third year we were obliged to bring a cartridge pen. (Specifically a cartridge pen, not a regular fountain pen. Apparently at nine years old we couldn't be trusted not to get ink everywhere. I'd been filling a fountain pen at home for some time by that stage.)

So I had a cartridge pen, which I didn't particularly like; as soon as I arrived at grammar school, where you could write with anything within reason, I brought the fountain pen and used it for the rest of my school career. Most of my classmates used cartridge pens; there were a few who used a ballpoint, but not a majority. It was only after I started having trouble with my wrists that I switched to a rollerball, because it has such a light action.

It is one of my lasting regrets that the lovely fountain pen I was given for my 18th birthday was stolen out of my top pocket by a particularly dexterous thief on a bus. If I still had that, I would without question still be using it. It had a beautiful action.

I love cartridge pens, and have a rather nice one, as well as two or three disposable ones. I also have a couple of old-style fountain pens I inherited from my parents but I haven't used them. (One needs its bladder replaced -- anyone know how to do that and where to get what I need?) But I didn't discover cartridge pens until around 1979, which is when they appear to have made a resurgence in popularity on my side of the pond. Up until that point, kids in my school were all using either pencils, ball-point pens, or felt-tip markers (Flair fine points were quite popular).

It depends on exactly what pen needs a new sac; I'd look over at the Fountain Pen Network forums. As a general rule, there are very few pens that can't be repaired; it's more an issue of how much it'll cost to do it. Simple sac replacement and cleaning is usually pretty inexpensive (and doable yourself with a modest amount of tools). There's a huge community there interested in fountain pens, ink, repairing pens, paper... you name it, someone there is interested in it. I've been reading and commenting (infrequently) there for a few years now. It's a big community, but extremely helpful.

My own interests generally gravitate toward modern Japanese fountain pens, since I've miniscule handwriting and keep a lab notebook by hand.

Dave Harmon@434: Well, 'bluebird' is certainly a natural thing to call them, but they didn't have to be called that, so it remains possible that when European settlers first saw them they said 'Good heavens! We've found the bluebird!'. There does seem to be a legend of the Blue Bird (generally written as two words, interestingly) which goes back quite a way.

Benjamin Wolfe, thank you for the information!

The Eastern Bluebird, which would have been the first one encountered by English-speaking settlers in North America, isn't actually all that blue - it's got orange and white as well. (The male Mountain Bluebird is entirely blue.) It would have made just as much sense for people familiar with the European Robin to call it a "blue robin" (and apparently that name was used in colonial times as well). So "bluebird" certainly isn't a foregone conclusion; after all, we don't have a "redbird" despite several decent candidates for the name (like the Northern Cardinal and the Scarlet and Summer Tanagers). I think it's quite plausible that pre-existing stories influenced the choice of names.

I know I'm tired when I read "tanagers" as "teenagers" and have to look again.

That's interesting; didn't know there was more than one type of bluebird. Are they related, or just two similar-looking species with the same generic name (like European and American robins)?

John A. Arkansawyer #462: My condolences. Losing a friend is a very hard thing. I've lost a few good friends in the past few years and mourn them deeply.

lorax @ #487, actually cardinals are commonly called "redbirds" in the Southeastern U.S. Far more often than they're called "cardinals", in the part of Georgia where I grew up, at least.

Mongoose, the Eastern bluebird, Western bluebird and Mountain bluebird belong to the same genus (Sialia sialis, Sialia mexicana and Sialia currucoides respectively).

You can search by genus and/or species at eol.org for a great deal of information on all three.

John A. Arkansawyer @ #462: I'm sorry for your loss.

Glenda P. @ #472: best wishes for a fast recovery!

Has this knitting story made the rounds here yet?

Glenda P #472: May your recovery be swift and without pain.

Glenda P #472: May your recovery be swift and without pain.

Eek! Double post.

Okay, there is a mystery that has puzzled me for several years. Why do my students keep writing "being that" when they mean "since" as in, for example, "Being that Aristotle believes that the best form of government is one in which the middle class dominates, he is obviously biased in favor of rule by people like himself"? It strikes me as clumsy and, frankly, rather unpleasant.

Fragano (495): 'Being that' meaning 'since' sounds normal to me. Perhaps it's a Southernism?

Fragano @ 495: There's also "seeing as how". I love that phrase.

Fragano, #495: Yes, that's an idiom. I'm not sure from whence it arises; were I writing that sentence, I'd be more likely to start with "Given that" -- or, as you suggest, "Since". But the sentence as written sounds okay to me, just a bit clunky.

"Being" might be short for, "It being... that..."

It’s a kind of formal throat-clearing, a bit of fluff to stick at the front of a thought to make it sound more like the sort of thing they think formal writing sounds like.

Lee 481: The point is that in dialects that disambiguate with 'ink pen', the vowel in 'pin' is the same as the vowel in 'pen' (that is, native speakers of those dialects do not distinguish them or perceive a distinction when made by others). I've listened closely to some such speakers. Some of them appear to make the distinction but not hear it (or perhaps these were people who learned that others couldn't hear it and said 'ink pen' to disambiguate for others). Others pronounce both words with a ih-eh diphthong.

Have I mentioned that 'disambiguate' is one of my very favorite words? It and 'pathognomonic' are consistent contenders for the title.

For the information of anyone who may care: the "Global Cyberwar Mapped In Real-Time" Diffraction demands that you register before being allowed to see it. Free registration or not, I am disinclined to acquiesce to that request. If someone felt like providing a brief summary of the article, I would certainly read that.

Lee #502:

It's http://www.digitalattackmap.com with some explanatory text.

Does anyone know if there is a French equivalent of the Urban Dictionary? I want to track down some slang that French Wiktionary and French Wikipedia aren't helping with. Supposedly the word "neo" as part of a URL is gravely insulting to French WW II veterans, and I'm curious whether there is some basis to this or whether one complainant just has a burr up his cul.

I don't think I used a Word of Power, but I linked to a page that probably does.

(Sometimes it just happens. —Mortlock Senyavin, duty gnome.)

I was able to see the map and article at that site without being asked to register for anything.

Xopher, 501: Nope, in Cincinnati and northern Kentucky -- where I first encountered the term "ink pen" -- "pin" and "pen" do NOT use the same vowel. So it isn't a matter of distinguishing one from the other; at least not there.

(For the sake of reference: I lived in that area from age 23 to age 35.)

Allan Beatty:

There's La Parlure and Le dictionnaire urbain, though neither seem to be as comprehensive as the Urban Dictionary. I didn't find néo in either.

Here in Montreal, I think I've heard néo used to mean "newbie", more or less, but nothing worse.

That doesn't mean much. I'm not really up on WWII slang, and there's a significant difference between France and Quebec french anyway.

Sorry I couldn't be more help.

The people in the Sabadell "Ode to Joy" clip are singing Schiller's words translated into Catalan by Joan Maragall.

Dell Cotter @509: Today, you are why I love the Fluorosphere. :->

Fragano Ledgister @ 495

"Being that" sounds natural to me (Appalachian Tennessee upbringing), so I suspect it's a Southerism. If I were speaking at ease to my family, I'd much more likely say "being as", though.

511
Yes, and 'seeing as how' is close enough that it's also used in my family. (My father's father was from NE Kentucky.)

P J Evans (512): 'Seeing as how' sounds natural to me, too.

"Being that", "given that", "seeing as how", etc.... yep, they all sound perfectly normal to me. My personal choice is generally "given that", but I've used all of the others in conversation depending on where I was and with whom I was speaking. Also, I think I've used all of them in writing informal blog posts, Facebook comments and occasionally as part of dialogue in my fiction.

Woot! The library's disaster recovery company called last week to say they had eight boxes of our materials that they had freeze-dried* during the Sandy cleanup a year ago. The director went out to their facility today to investigate. As I had hoped, it is the materials that were in the bottom drawers of the local history cabinets. And most of it should be salvageable! The historic photographs† themselves should be okay, although they'll need new albums. Similarly, the newspaper clippings** seem to be fine but will need new files and folders. We did lose some slides, but I'm not sure anyone had ever looked at those.

It'll be a lot of work to get everything back in place--the director's line was that I*** now have guaranteed employment for life--but this is seriously wonderful. Most of those photos were irreplaceable.

*a standard preservation technique for books and papers
†the things I chiefly mourned
**photocopied to acid-free paper for long-term preservation
***I'm in charge of the local history collection.

Tomorrow - actually, today, now - is Sally-my-wife's sixtieth birthday. We have been married just shy of thirty years.

I am deeply, deeply content that it is so.

The day after, we are having six of our oldest friends - the friendships also go back thirty years - to dinner. It will be a very old-fashioned dinner, which I shall cook - prawns and asparagus with hollandaise (it's spring, here), standing rib of beef with yorkshire pudding (of course), roast root vegetables and greens, and a dessert of chocolate torte birthday cake, berries and orange whipped cream.

And wine. And brandy. And port. Talliancich vintage, 1978, Swan Valley.

I shall reflect on how very good life is. I am looking forward.

Rejoice with me.

Happy birthday to Sally from here in Nashville, Dave, and congratulations to you both on the upcoming anniversary.

I am told that, in Colorado, the distinction between "pin" and "pen" disappears south of Pueblo. I dimly recall hearing the term "ink pen" back in my earliest grades of grade school.

John A. Arkansawyer @462: What Fragano said. I have a couple of friends that I lost unexpectedly, some years ago now. I'm kind of surprised at how often they come to mind.

Glenda @472: If you cross paths with Spider Robinson, you should trade stories with him. Apparently he's experienced this repeatedly. (And would doubtless concur: Not Fun.)

Mongoose @482: Specifically a cartridge pen, not a regular fountain pen. Apparently at nine years old we couldn't be trusted not to get ink everywhere.

Based on a story a friend told, I speculate that the reasoning wasn't so much nine-year-old tidiness that was at issue as nine-year-old restraint. A fountain pen evidently has a mode wherein it can be used as a miniature paint-ball gun. (What provoked the story was the quote, "My pen has gooshie but it won't splat." The gooshie being the little lever used to suck up ink.)

SummerStorms @483: I love cartridge pens

Jon Singer is wont to cut custom calligraphy pens from them. He's a lefty, but has the fully-lateralized hand position, as opposed the hooked position taught to so many of his age-mates. Therefore, off-the-rack calligraphy nibs are 90° off for him.

John A Arkansawyer @497: There's also "seeing as how".

"Being as how...." A colloquialism. Why? Because. Mix it up. Add a little flavor.

Lee @502: the "Global Cyberwar Mapped In Real-Time" Diffraction demands that you register before being allowed to see it.

Odd, I didn't have to register, either at home or at work (although my antique work browser choked on it).

At home, I was presented with an ad offering to let me subscribe, however. Had to scroll the page around to find the "make this go away" link.

Dave Luckett @516: W00t & congratulations!

Dave Luckett @ 516: That is so wonderful. All of it. The birthday, the anniversary (happy happy to you both) and the dinner menu which has me positively drooling.

Jacque @ 518: Yeah, now that I think of it, when I went to the Global Cyberwar Map I did get that splash overlay offering the opportunity to subscribe, but IIRC it had one of those "x" things at the upper-right where I could click to make it go away. I did so, and then promptly forgot I'd ever seen it, as so many sites have those these days that I just get rid of them and barely notice.

Also, regarding handwriting... I've known a couple of lefties like that. And then there's me: Right-hand dominant, but largely ambidextrous for most things, and although I write with my right hand, for some reason I often do so with an odd slant that makes it come out looking as though I'd written with my left. (Which I actually can do, albeit slowly.) My handwriting in general looks awful with either hand, EXCEPT when I write very slowly and/or do calligraphy. I think when I'm doing calligraphy, my brain thinks "oh, art" rather than "oh, writing" and that makes all the difference in the world.

I've never actually tried calligraphy left-handed, though. I may have to experiment, just because I am now curious as to the kind of result I'll get.

"Being that" sounds normal to me, and I grew up in the NYC suburbs. As a being that absorbed much more English through reading than through speech, it could still be a Southernism or similar: I could have read it in Mark Twain or something.

What I originally came here to talk about: I'm thinking about examples of "A costs less than B" which I know, intellectually, but are still surprising. Generally, they're "living in the future" things, but not always.

A microwave oven costs less than a tank of gas.

A laser costs less than a mouse ball and two rollers.

Any other examples?

... buying GM and Ford together, by market cap, would cost you less than buying Google.