(Or, to give the quoted work its full title, The History of the County Palatine and City of Chester; Compiled from Original Evidences in Public Offices, the Harleian and Cottonian Mss., Parochial Registers, Private Muniments, Unpublished Ms. Collections of Successive Cheshire Antiquaries, and a Personal Survey of Every Township In The County; Incorporated with a Republication of King's Vale Royal and Leycester's Cheshire Antiquities. They really don't make titles like that any more.)

IRTA Count Palpatine.

Backtrack to Open Thread 208.

@2: It's the fault of the SW media blitz. Anyway, that's the story I'm going with. :-)

In olden times a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking. Now, Heaven knows, anything goes.

As it happens, I spent the first 37 years of my life living in the County Palatine and City of Chester. Dutton was still a prominent local surname when I was growing up -- there was a major grocer called Dutton's of Chester in the city centre, and the name (though not the business) still exists as a wine bar.

The good news is, as of 2013, it is no longer a criminal offence in the UK to be an incorrigable rogue.

How about being an incorrigible punster?

I can think of a few offhand.

Cadbury Moose #8: Well, don't incorrige them. ;-)

PS: What would a "letcher" be as per the document's context??

to release a ginormous comment from moderation.

Holloween candy, everyone?

Holloween candy has a less-fattening centre?

David Harmon @ 10: Current spelling "lecher" aka "letch."

Times (and spellings) change. New Paltz, NY was named by French Huguenot settlers (they had been refugees in Mannheim in the Pfalz (in English, Palatinate (see? there actually is a connection))).

when I was a very young man in the Army, there was an old Staff Sergeant who grew up in the walled city of Chester, and later worked at Bletchley Park during the war. I used to go out to lunch with him and hear all his stories, most of which I have now forgotten which is a pity. He was a self-proclaimed 'old rogue' with a twinkle in his eye and some great stories. Back in Chester, spare parts for his first car, a broken-down old Austin, were courtesy of 'the number 10 spanner shop'.. late night raids on other Austins, equipped with a #10 spanner to get parts off.

@10 David, I too am curious as to who the 'letchers' are. Presumably those that patronize the whores, but how that was accounted is an interesting question..

Area Woman has decided to try making Tomato Soup Cake -- went with what I suspect is an older version of the recipe, containing no eggs. I'm not sure what the soup is subbing for in the versions that do call for eggs (possibly oil or butter, as the eggless recipe calls for half-a-cup of the latter).

So far it smells good, very cinnamon-y.

Patrick writes in #1:

They really don't make titles like that any more.

Gee whiz, if you really care about this, as a senior editor at a major publisher, you're in a position to do something about it!

I look forward to seeing lengthy, complicated titles on forthcoming books from Tor.

(I recommend you try, if possible, to work in a phrase such as "The Whole so clearly explained as to be within the reach of the most limited Capacity."

16
The cookbook I have with tomato soup (AKA mystery) cake has no eggs, but the note that one or two can be beaten in after the butter (1/4 cup) and sugar (1 cup) are creamed, for a richer cake. I think that it doesn't need the eggs because it's using condensed soup - there doesn't seem to be anything else that would work.

It's occurred to me the acid in the tomatoes is also activating the baking soda. Will try a slice after supper.

An appeal to combined knowledge of the Fluorosphere:

Next month, I will be making my first foray beyond the borders of my native Australia, with a group of friends going to Europe to see this "white Christmas" thing so many songs have been written about. We will be touching down in Frankfurt, then heading east to Prague, south to Vienna, west through Cesky Krumlov, Salzburg and Munich, and so back to Frankfurt.

What is there in these places, or points between, that we absolutely should not miss?

@20 Paul A.

The salt mines in Salzburg.

Bill Higgins, #17: I remind you that in my very first year at Tor, I reprinted, as one side of a tete-a-tete "Tor Double," Samuel R. Delany's We, in Some Strange Power's Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line.

#16, #18, #19:

Verdict -- tastes like the better pumpkin-spice items floating about at this time of year (I used nutmeg instead of allspice); texture similar to that of a (N. American) muffin. I used a square 9" pan and the cake didn't rise all that high -- slicing it into two rectangles and stacking them as layers with cream-cheese frosting in between and on top would probably be a good serving suggestion, but I don't have any cream-cheese on hand at the moment.

8.0 out of 10, would make again.

One of my favorite old-style titles is Casaubon's 'A True & Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years Between Dr. John Dee and Some Spirits' or more correctly:

'A True & Faithful Relation of What passed for many Yeers Between Dr. John Dee (A Mathematician of Great Fame in Q. Eliz. and King James their reignes) and Some Spirits: Tending (had it Succeeded) to a General Alteration of most States and Kingdomes in the World. His Private Conferences with Rodolphe Emperor of Germany, Stephen K. of Poland, and divers other Princes about it. The Particulars of his Cause, as it was agitated in the Emperors court; by the Pope's Intervention : his Banishment and Restoration in part. As Also The Letters of Sundry Great Men and Princes (some whereof were present at some of these Conferences and Apparitions of Spirits) to the said D. Dee. Out of the original copy, written with Dr. Dees own Hand, kept in the Library of Sir Tho. Cotton Kt. Baronet. With a Preface Confirming the Reality (as to the Point of Spirits) of this Relation, and shewing the several good Uses that a Sober Christian may make of All.'

(I am not doing anything like justice to the printer's enthusiastic use of ALL CAPS, punctuation, and spectacularly varying point sizes.)

GoodThoughts are requested for my partner, who has an appointment at the urology clinic tomorrow. If we're very lucky, they'll go ahead and take the damn stent out right then; if not, hopefully they'll give him an appointment to get it taken out sometime sooner than the day before Thanksgiving. The stone has not moved since the stent went in; at this point the stent is giving him more trouble than the stone, and we think it's actually holding the stone in place.

He has lost two full months to dealing with this shit. We can't afford to lose any more.

Re #24: I still remember the early years after the introduction of the Macintosh effectively brought unconstrained typesetting to the masses. At the time I had no idea that the resulting wild excesses were merely a reprise of a phase that printers (the people) had to work themselves through centuries earlier.

Indeed, if not for the specifics of the typefaces and some spelling issues, this title page could well stand for a late 1980s desktop-publishing production:
A True & Faithful RELATION

There's something I really love about that title page, and about the book itself - perhaps it's its admixture of sharp skepticism with credulity rivaling Dee's own credulity.

Good thoughts on the way, Lee.

27
Dear Ghu, they went to the trouble of two-color printing? They must have had high hopes for the book.

Paul A @ 20

I studied for a few months in Vienna, so think of me a tourist with little money.

Do not miss the Heeresgeschictliches Museum; it has everything from a manual of arms for pike to clubs from the street fighting of the 1930's.

The meal I remember most fondly was at a Mostheuriger--a cider Heuriger; the Heuriger sell wine from the vineyard they are in and food to go with it, this one had cider rather than wine. I think it was in the Gentzgasse.

If you have the slightest interest in opera, standing tickets at the Staatsoper are an incredible deal; pay the extra for the ground-floor tickets if they are available.

Lee @25 sending good thoughts his way

P J Evans @29 -- it was a specialty market item, even then. Something that folks who were interested would pay a premium for; they didn't expect it to turn into a bestseller. Probably didn't hold onto the reprint rights, either -- they might have made a little on that. Though it is out of copyright, so maybe not. (Said all with tongue firmly in cheek, in case you can't tell -- though it is all probably true!)

HLN: local woman reports light rain is falling, signally that it's now autumn in Los Angeles. (It looked like just another deep marine layer until mid-afternoon, when the wind rose and the temperature dropped.)

Sending good thoughts, Lee.

Best wishes for your partner, Lee.

Best wishes, Lee.

Lee, having recently been there myself, sending the best thoughts I can manage while in the presence of the word 'stent.' Two months is too long. Shuddering. Best wishes sent.

Lee @25: Good thoughts. Kidney stones are one of the true miseries of life. May this end happily, and soon, for you and your partner.

Lee, all good thoughts to you and your partner. Hoping for rapid progress soon.

Lee, all good thoughts, hopes, and prayers for your partner's recovery.

Lee: Guh. Hope things turn around for Partner!

More good wishes for Lee's partner.

J Homes.

Sending good thoughts Lee's partner's way.

Paul A @ 20:

I can maybe help a little with Vienna though, to be honest, if you just go the Stephansplatz and wander round you'll probably find something.

Go to see The Third Man in the Burg Kino, then go down the sewers (near the Museum Café). Then go to Prater and take the big wheel. While there you could visit Schweizerhaus and have a Stelze.

There are plenty of Galleries. The Albertina doesn't always have the best art, but it's an interesting place and they have the Dürer hare. If Egon Schiele is your thing then the Leopold is a must. The Hundertwasserhaus is a bit of a tourist trap, but worth a look.

There are some good brew pubs. Near the Staatsoper there's the 1516 which has good trendy beers (hoppy IPAs, hoppy Ambers Ales, the odd not so hoppy beer), but is a bit dark and loud in the evening. It's also fairly near the Ronacher if you ever wanted to know what Mary Poppins sounded like in German (surprisingly good). The Siebensternbräu does a great Prager Dunkles bier (it's like a porter) and decent pub food in generous portions. Try a Zwickl bier anywhere.

Have coffee and cake somewhere expensive. It's hard to get bad coffee in Austria (though definitely not impossible) but drinking it in a place with too much marble adds something.

Simon Winder's Germania and Danubia books are a Bryson-esque look at the history of where you'll be and I enjoyed them immensely and it's always good to be able to point out why Heldenplatz is, perhaps, misnamed.

Lee, thinking good thoughts for the both of you.

Lee: best wishes to you both for a successful outcome and speedy recovery.

open-thready political comment, ignore as needed:

Have I misunderstood something, or are we basically saying we're running ground troops in Iraq and Syria now? This article says we are.

As with the last several of these little adventures, I'm having a hard time seeing why this one is going to work out. I'm certainly no expert on the region or on military affairs, but our track record is really awful. You don't have to be a stock market expert to predict that the guy who's made a loss on every investment he's made in the last couple decades is probably not, in fact, going to turn everything around this time. It could happen, but it's not the way to bet.

An election year is coming up. And yet, I think I can predict with a lot of confidence that we won't, in practice, be getting a vote on this kind of policy. (Maybe you will if you vote in the primaries, but in the general election, I suspect it will be a race to see which candidate can sound more beligerant.) This is a pattern--it's very hard for us to get a vote on this stuff. Maybe simply because it's not too unpopular--we kill a lot of faceless third-world people, but they don't vote and mostly don't show up on US TV, so it has little effect on popular opinion. Some US soldiers die, but they're not draftees so the whole endless war thing isn't *all that* unpopular.

Sometimes I long for the days when I was young and naive enough to think that the country's leadership was evil and Machiavellian, instead of merely inept and captives of the sytem they're living in.

Ann Leckie recently blogged about her first ever visit to IKEA, which caused this moose to remember the Mitch Benn and the Distractions song about that company.

Original and Metal

Enjoy!

(The Moose Operating Division feels that the Metal version is superior, and intends to buy the album: Crimes against Music.)

Lost in Ikea movie tailer.

A song which should exist "They Call the Store Ikea".

Cadbury Moose, #48: So there are now two IKEA songs.

Fans of the Anglican Hymnal will like this post on Crooked Timber:

http://crookedtimber.org/2015/11/02/john-and-belle-used-to-have-a-blog/comment-page-1/#comment-648250

Paul A:
As you probably already know, all of these cities will have Christmas markets, or Christkindlmarkt, through the month of December. Have a piece of Sacher Torte at the Hotel Sacher in Salzburg. Go for a sleigh ride!

Lee:
Good thoughts to your partner and you.

Paul A. -- Vienna, if you can afford the tickets, go see the Lipizzans perform.

Lee -- best wishes for partner!

In 'Life in a Medieval Village' Frances and Joseph Gies write:

'Court records contain numerous instances of women leaving their villages in company of men without any mention of marriage. They contain even more frequent instances of "leirwite" or "legerwite" (lecher-wite), a fine for premariatal sex, literally for lying down. On some manors a seperate fine called "childwite" was levied for bearing a child out of wedlock, but in Elton premarital sex and pregnancy were lumped together. Twenty-two cases of leirwite are listed in surviving Elton records between 1279 and 1342, with fines of either sixpence or twelve pence in a single three pence. In all but one, only the woman is named,and she paid the fine: in the single excpetion, in 1286, Maggie Carter and Richard Miller were fined sixpence each.

Paul A: Wherever you go, you're going to miss something. What I would most recommend is not trying to schedule too much in, and allowing some time for just random walking to see what you find. The serendipity of just being in a new place and wandering around, eyes very wide, will allow you to find little bits that you'd have missed no matter what anyone said in advance.

Different things are "don't miss" for different people, and I wouldn't try recommending without knowing what you care about.

Lee: Best wishes to your partner.

Paul A: Years and years and years ago, in Munich, I was charmed by the Glockenspiel; a clocktower with a mechanical show. I'm sure there are better clock automata out there, but this was the first major one I ever saw, and was good enough for me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rathaus-Glockenspiel

As for Salzburg, besides the salt mines (which I enjoyed), and the cathedral, and the funicular (spectacular views!) and other such touristy places, I had a dessert there that as far as I know you can't get other places: the Salzburger Nockerl. It's a kind of dessert souffle. Be prepared to share; it's large and filling, or was when I visited. Perhaps they've got bite-sized versions now.

And Frankfurt, or a roadside cafe just outside of Frankfurt, was where I used my single year of German to order the one thing I could read on the menu "Chicken Soup with Egg", and was horrified when the smiling waiter broke a raw egg into my not-nearly-hot-enough-to-cook-it chicken broth soup. And had to sit there and pretend that I knew he was going to do that, and it's what I'd wanted all along, because I wasn't going to be That Tourist.

I see on twitter (and UrsulaV has confirmed there) that Disney has optioned movie rights to Castle Hangnail for an adaptation to be produced by Ellen DeGeneres. You may now commence the squeeing, and the keep-fingers-crossed that the project will fly and that it will do the book justice.

Also, I originally typed the producer's name as "DeGenres," which would be an excellent name for the purpose.

oldster @ #51:

That's awesome.

Also, I felt immediately obliged to sink several minutes into finding a tune to sing it to. It goes pretty well to DIADEMATA ("Crown Him with many crowns").

#57 and preceding.

Castle Hangnail? UrsulaV, you are Edward Gorey, and I claim my five pounds.

Here in NZ, I have never heard/seen the "five pounds" programme, but I have read about it often enough (usually in parody) and it was the first thing that came to mind.

J Homes.

PNH, #22:

I did need reminding. Well, that should give you street cred with the long-titles crowd. Even though it turns out to be a misquotation.

"We, in Some Strange Power's Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line" is a perennial favorite when Science Fiction Charades are played.

I probably should have made this announcement sooner, but I've been lurching from stressor to stressor for weeks if not months. But anyway....

I will be visiting NYC for the next few days (4th-9th November). I realize it's remarkably short notice, but if any NYC-area Fluorosphereans want to arrange a mini-GoL, I'd be game, and can receive mail at my firstname_lastname (at) Earthlink dot net. Otherwise I will be wandering about the city, to various points of interest.

This will definitely include the Museum of Natural History, which has been a point of amusement as my sister and a couple of other folks responded to that with "wait, what about the Met?". I may well get there too, but Different Priorities. ;-)

Friday night appears to be spoken for, by the high-school friends who are the main reason for this visit.

Medical update on my partner: (1) No joy on getting the stent out today; (2) it now appears that the stent has pushed the stone back up into the kidney; (3) they were able to offer him an appointment next Tuesday for getting the stent out and doing ultrasonic lithotripsy on the stone. (And presumably also on the one we know is present on the other side as well, so that we're not doing this dance all over again 6 months from now.)

This means that he's going to have to deal with the stent over Austin Celtic weekend, which is going to be a bitch.

We are not exactly happy campers right now, but at least it looks as if there's an end to the ordeal in sight.

Lee #62: Ow ow ow, much sympathies.

Bill Higgins @ #60

"Hot wireless sets, Aspirin tablets, the sandpaper sides of used matchboxes, and something that might have been castor oil"?

Paul A. @58-

Someone on the CT thread says that they immediately sang it to "St. Thomas," a.k.a. "I love thy kingdom, Lord."

@Lee: ARgh! I hope things resolve well and quickly for your partner. And take care of yourself.

Lee--I hope that all goes well with what the doctors plan to do, and recovery is fast and pain-free.

My computer started uncontrollably playing Peter Gabriel last night and it is behaving slowly this morning. I have a fear that it is singing silently to itself.

However, a funny moment ensued.
Spouse had tried some methods and a song had just ended. Spouse said, "I think I fixed it." The computer replied, "Hi there"--the beginning of "Big Time". All present started laughing.

Lee -- best wishes to you and partner through this ordeal. Not much else I can offer from here!

Lee: Aaargh. Best of luck on finally getting this over with.

for abi.

QA engineer walks into a bar, orders beers all around.

QA is in this mix.

How do we see each other

Steve: tl;dr: Sysadmins get no love? ('Cept from other sysadmins.)

Jacque #73: And it seems designers get no respect. Sysadmins do tend to be in the "bad guy" position a lot when they'real talking to users, and their greatest successes are when the users don't notice anything (despite smoke coming out of the server room). I can believe they'll have an image problem.

Lee: Good thoughts heading your way.

So, there's me of this parish explaining that Thomas Hobbes considers that a key element of human nature is infinite acquisitiveness. So far, so C.B. Macpherson.

Now, this is what I get back from one, shall we say, less than perfectly literate student:

Civil Order is based on human rationality and infinite inquisitiveness of the social contract.

It is to weep, and I did.

@59 - Alas! I do not look nearly so impressive in a fur coat.

Lee, all my sympathy for your partner. My husband gets kidney stones and I have never seen him reduced so completely as when he has one. Best of luck.

UrsulaV@77: You clearly need to try on a large number of fur coats to find the one that works for you.

Gorey did not look quite so impressive in a fur coat as his pictures do.

Paul A@20:
Be prepared for a serious temperature range in Germany and the Czech Republic. Within the last week in Germany's Baden-Württemberg state, I've run around in a thin sweater, and at other times I ran the full-body cover of winter jacket, gloves, long underpants, and a beanie. Mind you, I work outside, but still.

QA engineer walks into a meeting room. Takes PostIt notes from back of notebook. Jots down figures of how long it will take to save up cash for first year of retirement. Idly figures out after-tax amount of top prize in state lottery. Notes meeting room clock is still on DST. Wonders if future generations will have to be taught the velocity started out as a physics term and initially had nothing to do with time management. Idly figures out after-tax amount of top prize in state lottery if no one wins this week.

Speaking of Palpatine: War on Kinkade

I had been vaguely wondering why the new season of Agents of SHIELD hadn't shown up on Australian TV yet, and now I know: after airing on free-to-air for the first two seasons, it's been snapped up by pay TV.

I'm not sure yet how I intend to respond to this. Certainly it's not going to be by giving pay TV another customer. I might get it the DVD when it eventually comes out, but I'm not sure I'll even do that. It's not as if there are any big unanswered questions to drag me back to the show, since they answered all of those last season anyway. I might just not bother.

C. Wingate #82:

Almost does what's needed, but where's the trail of destruction? So far, it's almost all just menace.

Interesting article on FBI forensic problems in the Washington Post. The FBI is probably way more professional and careful than anyone else doing this kind of evidence, and yet they're now acknowledging that a huge amount of their forensic work was flawrd.

My guess is that most people who were convicted based on this evidence were probably guilty--the police had arrested them and the prosecutor brought the case against them, so they must have looked pretty guilty. But some significant number were innocent, and were railroaded based on forensic evidence that turned out to be bullshit. Some of them went to death row, and probably a few innocent people were executed as a result of this screwed-up evidence.

This is probably a symptom of a lot of bigger problems--being more wedded to formalisms than to getting the right answer, too many people assuming anything with the word "science" in it must be true or right, inability of a lot of critical stuff in our society to adapt to new technology in a sensible way, etc. But it's also just horrifying to imagine being that guy who gets sent to the death chamber because he looked pretty guilty and some forensic analyst claimed that the stray fibers on his clothes were a 100% perfect match for the ones on the victim's clothes, or that his teeth were the only ones on Earth that could have made that particular bite mark, or whatever else.

Albatross #85, I worry about the idea that "most people who were convicted based on this [bad] evidence were probably guilty." The police don't arrest people because they're guilty. It isn't their job to determine guilt or innocence--many police officers are under pressure to close cases, so they arrest somebody who seems halfway plausible and let the courts sort it out. And sometimes when the prosecutor thought a suspect "looked pretty guilty," the prosecutor's thinking was based on hair analysis. Prosecutors rely on lab analysis even before they go to court.

I think you're right that the FBI analysts probably did this technique more carefully than others. Most of the other labs using hair analysis probably learned it from the FBI. The problem is that some techniques are just fundamentally flawed (like using burn patterns to prove arson), so it doesn't help to be super-meticulous.

albatross 86: My guess is that most people who were convicted based on this evidence were probably guilty--the police had arrested them and the prosecutor brought the case against them, so they must have looked pretty guilty.

I agree with Adrian, and would add that this is not how we do things in America. In fact the sentence above is one of the most appalling things I've seen you write. "Looking pretty guilty" isn't enough reason to convict someone.

And given the corruption that we all know pervades the so-called "justice system," it's not even reasonable to conclude they were "probably guilty."

Paul A @ 20: If you're crossing the space in between those cities on the ground, Mad Louie's castle at Neuschwanstein may be worth a visit. (Don't know whether it's open in the cold season.)

albatross: I wonder how much older tech would fail when examined? e.g., how reliable are the markings put on bullets by rifling? I saw a traveling exhibit on forensics some years ago, but I figure their examples were chosen so that inexperienced viewers would have a chance of getting them correct.

Because it's an Open Thread:

I've put up a tumblr, Hugo Eligible Art 2015, to collect potential Pro and Fan Artist nominees. Mike Glyer has generously put up my post The Recent History of the Hugo Artist Awards on File770 for discussion.

In particular, I'm hoping a lot of people will talk about how *you* think the Hugo Art Awards should divide up the vast and exponentially growing world of SFF art.

CHip @88 -- back in the 70s I helped someone review the information on rifling marks -- and even then some folks were saying that they were not very useful. After about 3 shots, the marks change significantly. Don't know what's been done on that since, but it's probably easier to research now than it was then.

Adrian and Xopher:

I didn't say it was okay to convict them on "probably guilty," I said my guess is that most people who get arrested and charged are guilty[1].

This probably made it easier for forensics experts to convince themselves that their junk science worked--they usually saw cases where lots of circumstantial evidence suggested guilt, and their results, which tended to support convictions very often, usually went along with that. It also means that many of the people convicted on that junk science probably were actually guilty, but since we don't know which ones, we probably need to give them all new trials. The alternative is releasing everyone convicted using thet evidence, but that probably puts a lot of actual criminals back on the streets.

Imagine a forensic Magic 8-ball which had 5 "guilty" and one "not guilty" answers. In this environment, the magic 8-ball would seem pretty accurate--usually the guys looked guilty and usually the 8-ball said so. It was probably easy for the forensics guys and the police and prosecutors to convince themselves that their equivalent of a magic 8-ball (like bite mark analysis) was really accurate. The forensic techniques we're discussing probably had some validity, so they weren't random like the 8-ball, but they were apparently very noisy and unreliable.

[1] This is an empirical statement. It can be correct or incorrect, but making a moral judgement about it won't help you figure out which.

CHip@88 asked "I wonder how much older tech would fail when examined? e.g., how reliable are the markings put on bullets by rifling? I saw a traveling exhibit on forensics some years ago, but I figure their examples were chosen so that inexperienced viewers would have a chance of getting them correct."

When I got to do the comparison (in 1969) I had no trouble getting the striations to match up -- once I found which grove on the right bullet (which I could rotate) matched up to the front-facing groove on the left bullet.

Tom Whitmore@90 wrote "CHip @88 -- back in the 70s I helped someone review the information on rifling marks -- and even then some folks were saying that they were not very useful. After about 3 shots, the marks change significantly."

My bullets were fired consecutively (into a long tube of cotton wadding), so I didn't face that problem. I will note that it gives you a false negative rather than a false positive, which isn't so bad.

Most criminals don't fire their guns a lot of times. There was an armed robbery that went bad in 1920, and the robbers killed two men. When they were arrested, the police found a gun of the same make and model as the murder weapon in the home of one of the men. There were no ballistics tests in those days, and the suspect admitted that it was his gun.

Come the sixties, and someone finally runs a ballistics test on that weapon. It was a match to the bullet recovered from one of the victims. So Nicola Sacco was guilty, or at least had guilty knowledge of the crime for which he was convicted and executed.

#91 ::: albatross

When you say "probably guilty", do you mean a little over half? 80%? 95%?

I hear a lot about the worst cases, which seem to be damn near random arrests followed by railroading, but I have no idea how typical that is.

re 84: Pantone Menace? (G,D,R)

My knowledge here is pretty sketchy, but from what I can tell, it's probably more like 90%. This is based on what I have read, but also on conversations with criminal defense attorneys and with some inmates in the distant past, when I was involved in a project that involves some prison inmates, many years ago.

Again, that absolutely doesn't mean it's okay to make up evidence or convict people on magic 8-ball and ouija board evidence. It just says that the police often have a good idea who committed the crime pretty early on, and prosecutors don't like to go to trial with a weak case. It also suggests a mechanism for how reasonably bright people could have convinced themselves that their magic 8-balls were telling them who did and didn't commit the crime--if you massively overestimate the probability of guilt, that's hard to notice if it's applied to a pool of mostly guilty people--you will seldom see obvious contradictions.

Is there any good data on what fraction of inmates really did it? I'm not sure how you'd get to ground truth there, but it would be really interesting to know.

There was a clip on the news while I was sitting in the doctor's waiting room that absolutely pissed me off. Apparently Houston is going to be hosting the NCAA basketball Final Four in 2016... and they're looking for 3,000 volunteers to help with putting it on.

VOLUNTEERS.

This is absolutely not a struggling non-profit agency. Ghod knows how much money they're going to rake in on this event -- but they can't afford to HIRE people to work for them? In an economy where even temporary jobs might help some people stay off public assistance? There's a name for that. They are TAKERS.

albatross #95: The first key point here is that every "false positive" here is not merely a mistake, but a betrayal of justice. The traditional rule was "better that a hundred criminals go free than one innocent man be imprisoned unjustly". That's just one of the things that's gone by the wayside in recent years.

The second key point is that the errors aren't random, they're focused on the already-oppressed -- non-white, poor, female, and so on -- and diverted away from the advantaged, the people who get the benefit of the doubt or can afford to out-lawyer the state. If a cop wants to "find" another drug conviction, or meet his quota for traffic stops, you know who they'll pick on. That's not even counting criminals who actively frame someone else, usually taking advantage of those same biases.

David H., #97: The third key point is that if there are two people who, circumstantially, are equally likely to be guilty, and one is in a privileged class relative to the other, guess which one the cops are going to focus on and which will be cleared based on a cursory investigation?

The fourth key point is that then those numbers, already biased by institutional racism, are used to defend racism, which is obscene.

There's one arena in which wrongful convictions can be established with some certainty, and in which the identity of the actual felon can sometimes also be determined: exoneration of convicted criminals on the basis of DNA evidence.

As David Harmon and Lee suggest, the record strongly supports the notion that black people are more likely to be wrongfully convicted.

Also, relevant to the current discussion: "Unvalidated or Improper Forensic Science played a role in 47 percent of wrongful convictions later overturned by DNA testing."

This is just to say

I am reading
the conversation
regarding
conviction rates

One which
we are certainly
not turning
into an argument

Remember
that everyone here
is commenting
in good faith.

#97 ::: David Harmon

Women have it worse in a lot of ways than men, but I think men are more likely to be suspected and convicted of crimes, regardless of guilt.

Nancy Lebovitz #101: For wrongful convictions, I'm thinking in particular of: Women who kill their abusers and do not get any recognition of the context, and child-death cases (notably SIDS) that get blamed on the mother. There's also several other situations which aren't exactly "wrongful conviction", but where women traditionally get the wrong end of the legal stick, and/or face rules that fail the "law in its majesty" test. A lot of those situations are improving over time, but slowly.

David, both of those things certainly happen.

I'm inclined to think that women are at less risk (but still some risk) of being wrongfully convicted, but it would take a lot of number-crunching with dubious numbers to prove it.

Women being convicted for being in the drug trade when they've done very little but don't have much information to trade in a plea deal would also belong on your list.

Lee@96 - IIRC, I heard the same thing discussed on the radio a while back for the Superbowl, which will be here in the SF Bay Area next year. I forget if it was before or after the NFL gave up the pretense of being a non-profit.

My reaction at the time was that if you get to be in the stadium where you can watch the game, having to spend half the time ushering might still make it worth volunteering (if you care about football, anyway.) But for herding traffic around parking lots, and NOT getting to see the game? That's a job, and needs to be paying cash.

And, I just found a reminder that some folks don't even get trials: Over in DC, another black guy dead in police custody. Apparently courtesy of "special police".

Unicorn chaser: The Guerrilla Grafting Movement: Grafting fruit-bearing branches onto SF's ornamental trees. ObSFF link: Might help bring more elves (back?) to SF, too. :-)

David:

I think we're in substantial agreement. Nobody here is saying that either the use of sketchy forensic evidence or the railroading of the innocent is remotely acceptable.

One interesting sideline from Lila's link: two of the sketchy kinds of evidence that led to a lot of false convictions are ones that have traditionally been held in very high regard in the law--confessions and eyewitness testimony. It's pretty clear that neither of these is actually very reliable (though there are probably procedures that make them better--I know there's a big project to get local police departments to adopt a standard way of doing police lineups so that they don't bias the witnesses toward one suspect, for example.). But I think the law generally gives them both a lot of weight.

I don't have any data better than Lila's link, but intuitively, I'd guess being black, poor, without a private lawyer, or uneducated probably all make you a lot more likely to be railroaded. I doubt being a woman makes you more likely to be railroaded, but again, I don't know where we'd find good data to decide who's right. Women make up a very small fraction of prison inmates, FWIW.

My guess is that most railroadings aren't the cops and prosecutors knowingly sending an innocent man to prison, they're cops and prosecutors convincing themselves the wrong guy is guilty and then conveying that belief in a convincing way to a judge and jury. I suspect that is usually true even when there is serious misconduct, like beating a confession out of someone or bribing a cell mate to make up a jailhouse confession. Even when doing really bad things, most people convince themselves that they're doing the right thing. Sketchy forensic evidence plays into that really well--I already know that bastard is guilty, and this bite mark analysis proves it.

As an aside, shaken baby syndrome has led to a number of people going to prison, but my (very limited) understanding is that the diagnosis is actually not at all clear, and probably a fair fraction of people in prison for it didn't kill their baby by shaking them.

I haven't been able to find a source, but I think I've read that being ugly and not being local are also risk factors for false conviction.

Update on my partner: Due to legitimate medical concerns, the stent removal / bilateral lithotripsy has been rescheduled for Monday. But once that's done, the physical part of this ordeal should be OVER. He's already made some changes to his diet to reduce the likelihood of further stones developing. GoodThoughts for a smooth procedure would be welcomed.

Lee (109): May all go well.

Best wishes from here, Lee, for both of you!

@Lee: Good Thoughts order queued up!

Lee@109: Good thoughts on their way!

Lee #109: Best of luck!

I remember getting a dose of the underlying Stats explained to me, and I find myself wondering just what DNA evidence can prove. Essentially, we share DNA with our near family, it doesn't have to be all that near, and some of the DNA differences that are tracked in "fingerprinting" are in the "junk DNA".

So what does a match prove?

It's arguable that the lack of a match, proving the negative, as in the DNA Exonerations, is far more reliable that the claimed matches can be, but courts and lawyers have never really had the limits explained to them.

Incidentally, the traditional fingerprint indexing systems can lead to a hit without any match. They were a way of finding recorded fingerprints close enough to be worth checking. I wonder how many people in the system realise that. For all I know, some Chinese crook has fingerprints that index to the same value as those of John Dillinger.

A fingerprint can be compared in far more detail than the index records. I sometimes wonder how much modern forensic science is at the level of matching an index entry.

What would Sherlock Holmes do?

Lee #109

Best wishes!

#115 ::: Dave Bell

Sherlock Holmes has the author on his side in ways that the rest of us presumably don't. Sherlock Holmes could probably look at a fingerprint and tell whether owner's name was misspelled in the police records.

This moose has never been much of a fan of Sherlock Holmes. Dr Thorndyke, on the other hoof....

Another fan of Dr. Thorndyke here. I have nothing against Holmes, but the Thorndyke stories are steeped in the forensic science of the day. (The author, R. Austin Freeman, was trained as an apothecary and a physician, but made his living as a writer.) Interested would-be readers can find Dr. Thorndyke stories at gutenberg.org.

I take the view that Dr. Thorndyke is more technically accurate, but loads less fun than Holmes. It might just be because I was introduced to Holmes at a much more impressionable age, though.

Idumea Arbacoochee, Gardener of Threads @100:

Some say this thread will drift to food,
Some say to verse.
From what I've sampled of our mood,
I hold with those who favor food.
But since its drift will not be terse
I think I know enough of feet
To say that for distraction verse
Is also neat
And worth the purse.

Edmund Schweppe @120

Applause.

Edmund Schweppe @120:

The foody posts are sweeter,
But the poetry runs longer;
I therefore deem it meeter
To make the latter stronger.
I made a single comment;
Your answer, inspiration;
I hope that I don't bomb it
And kill this conversation.

122
*snerk*

Good thing I wasn't drinking tea at the time.

Higgledy-piggledy
Food posts or poetry
Either is welcome and
Good in our sight

Both on the menu and
Chewy or fluffy, they
Fluorosphere-phoricly
Feed Making Light

pity this busy commentariat
making light
not -- commenting is a comfortable disease....

I think that releasing 75 books in five years would have been a clue that something was up.

Laura Harner caught plagiarizng

Note that on my prior post, I'm hardly a fan of the Daily Mail and its clickbait headlines. I found the link on John Varley's blog.

A purely informational note. If one stores items in the oven it is important to make sure to remove all such items before turning the oven on. Not that anyone here would actually make that particular mistake you understand...

(Damage was actually minimal. A large cutting board that I use five times a year got singed a bit, but is still usable. I may replace it anyway.)

Michael #128:

At least your cutting board wasn't plastic, like the ice cream scoop I left in my oven 20 years ago.

Back in the days of the Bell monopoly, before the Carterphone decision, my parents had a basement extension phone which had not been blessed by almighty Ma (and for which they didn't pay the monthly connection fee). It had crocodile clips to connect it to the binding posts on the junction block, so we could unhook it and stash it in the dryer when a telephone repair man was going to be in the house. Sometimes it didn't get hooked up again until the next time someone needed to use the phone down there. We never actually ran the dryer with the phone in it, but there were a couple close calls, where someone closed the dryer after throwing in a bunch of wet clothes, and then thought to open it and check if the phone was under the clothes, before turning it on.

Michael, #128: My partner is in the habit of using our (gas) oven as a warming/drying chamber. I, never having had anything but an electric oven until moving here, do not have that habit. More than once he has asked me to pre-heat the oven for cooking without mentioning that he had something sitting in it, with sadly predictable results. Once or twice he's done it to himself as well.

Our work-around for this issue is a piece of masking tape on the edge of the oven dial. When there's something being dried/warmed in the oven, the tape goes over the dial. Ta-da! If I go to turn the oven on and there's tape over the dial, I know there's something in there that has to be removed first. End of problem.

Lee @ #131 - We stick one of our Pyrex baking dishes in our lower oven. I don't know how many times I've had to pull it out when I wanted to use both ovens to do a meal.

I've come to the conclusion that one acquires kitchen & cooking gear to fill 110% of the space available. No matter how much space is available.

131
We had a sign on our dishwasher: two index cards stapled together with a magnet inside, in case the stuff hadn't been taken out of the machine fast enough after it finished its run.

P J Evans (133): My mother puts a fridge magnet* on the dishwasher when she runs it, to indicate that the dishes therein are clean, not dirty.

*Specifically, one shaped like a skunk. When the original magnet became damaged, I had the dickens of a time finding her a new skunk magnet.

I think the last dishwasher my parents had, they used a magnet that was painted green on one side and red on the other. I also think I prefer the labeled card; it's easier to see.

(We used dry milk, and had another card magnet for when a new pitcher needed to be mixed. ISTR that it read 'XIM KLIM'.)

To-day we have faving of foods. Yesterday,
We had metered rhyming. And to-morrow morning
We shall have how to steep while brewing. But to-day,
Today we have faving of foods. Current events
Loom like monstrous sentinels on the television,
And to-day we have faving of foods.

This is the lutefisk. And this
Is the recipe for gluten-free muffins, which you can eat
Whether or not you tolerate wheat. And this is a sestina,
Which in my case I can not write. Repetition
Gives it its cumulative intricate crescendo,
Which in my case I can not write.

Been away for some time, busy with work and stuff. That being said, abi said I should post here about something we talked about. I'm in the process of whittling down my LJ site, including its various picture galleries. A few years back, I set one up featuring various ML participants, called "Making Light and Faces". I'll be shutting it down on December 14, but go ahead and download any of its pics until down if you want. Be warned that LJ messed it up and that the photos are not in alphabetical order anymore. Go HERE for a trip down Memory Lane.

...darn it, Kip. My version using that poem is not nearly as good.

Aw, thanks, Carrie.

Also, just as I'm shutting off the lights, it occurs to me that others here may be interested in this magazine from Chicago, called The Chicagoan, which ran from 1928 to 1936, and looks like (as one of my professors puts it) an artifact from an alternate universe where it was all happening in Chicago. The pages of these magazines (they all seem to be here, from a mostly complete collection at U. of Chi., filled in with issues from elsewhere as needed) show that there certainly was a lot happening in the Windy City, and this proves it.

It's all searchable, and the link I provide is of search results for Covarrubias, a striking Mexican artist much loved by one of the art professors here, whose style knocks me out. I hadn't known him until we were looking at this book.

This magazine coincides, in date and time, with my mom's early years. One of my sisters thinks she saw a copy of it at the house Mom grew up in, in the 60s, but isn't certain. So I was happy to pick this up. The book, I mean. It's not perfect. The cartoons are kind of weak. Several of them name-check Peter Arno out of a self-conscious envy, I guess. The only name I recognize in the cartoons is E. Simms Campbell, who I never thought a lot of, though this one time he did a passable imitation of Arno.

In other news, I'm happy to say I had to punch a new hole in my belt today, for good reasons.

Another pic in the style of the Hawkeye Project: Wonder Woman draws the line.... ;-)

Of fast and cheap and good, pick one or two
My sonnets run to quick and nearly free
And piping hot, are served in front of you
But will not gain me immortality.

Nor did it for the Bard - had Shakespeare not
done cheap and cheerful (for the groundlings) fare
His mistress's eyes, his poems would be forgot
His summer's days all melted in thin air.

A meal, ephemeral, can also be
A work of art and craft - though not of rhyme
To please us now, and in our memory
A single joy, of just one place and time.

I wrote this o'er a single cup of tea
It does not need to awe posterity.

Sandy B. , magnificent!

Making Light, in poetry basks.
Many forms are on display.

Another form, more northern in style.
Alliterates across your screen.

Kin to the skaldworks.
Keen to be seein.

Interesting feedback?
Inform us at will.

Nary a word remains.
Never too much form.

Go forth and write.
Give in to your muse.

---

I think I vaguely lost the plot towards the end there, sorry team. Acrostic and alliterated poems are non-trivial and I should probably have restrained the urge.

WFC awards will no longer feature the bust of H.P. Lovecraft.

That's a step forward I hadn't expected to see so quickly. As usual, don't read the comments.

Michael I @128: If one stores items in the oven it is important to make sure to remove all such items before turning the oven on.

In a similar vein, I have empirically verified that, having taken the vacuum cleaner bag off to empty it, the vacuum cleaner is far more effective on its next use if you put the bag back on.

Steve C. @132: I've come to the conclusion that one acquires  kitchen & cooking gear  stuff to fill 110% of the space available. No matter how much space is available.

FTFY.

Mary Aileen @134: My mother puts a fridge magnet* on the dishwasher when she runs it, to indicate that the dishes therein are clean, not dirty.

Friend of mine actually found one purpose-made: triangular dowel, about three inches long. Face A is the magnet, face B says "Dirty," face C says "Clean." One just turns it around when the contents change state.

Sarah had a set of magnetic letters. For a while, we used D to indicate dirty dishes in the dishwasher, and Y for, well, "Yes, they're clean!" When we moved, the D went to some farm upstate where it can chase rabbits all day, but the presence of the Y still indicates clean dishes.

Steve Wright @ #119: I love Sherlock Holmes, but Freeman's Mr. Pottermack's Oversight can stand up against the best. For one thing, it's a perfect inverted detective story (a form invented by Freeman). For another, the forensics are perfectly legitimate. Best of all is the counterpoint, in alternating chapters, between a truly likable murderer and a brilliant detective, with a completely satisfactory resolution of the conflict.

Mr Pottermack's Oversight is simply superb,

Mr Polton Explains is another good one.

The observed detail, if you're watching the background, in all of the books is startling.

This moose was hooked by The D'Arblay Mystery in his grandparents bookcase, Lo! These Many Years Ago, and has never looked back.

"House of Stratus" appears to have "republished" most of them when the copyright expired in .uk, but this moose prefers the original hardcovers.

The Oatmeal's done it again: Secret Origins of someone nearly all of us remember fondly. (Trar Ebqqraoreel)

Marcia and I have cleared out more than half of our books, many dearly loved, in anticipation of a move to smaller quarters in the not-too-distant future. But I've kept all my Freemans.

#150: It is interesting seeing The Oatmeal venture into Zen Pencils territory.

Stefan Jones #152: Well, this isn't from a quote like ZP does. I'd consider this fairly well in line with Oatmeal's prior pieces on Tesla (he might have done another of the sort too, I forget). But I'll agree that the tone is uncharacteristic (especially the lack of profanity :-) ).

@148: I initially parsed the Freeman in question as this one, and was momentarily very confused.

When the darkness comes sooner and stays later, Get yourself one big po-ta-ter
Boil it for a bit so the jacket slips off then shred it on a grater
Chop some onion, mince some garlic,
Add an egg – to make things stick.
Take some bacon and weave a mat,
Spread the po-ta-ter mix over that.
Lift one end, then make it roll
Put it in a pan without a hole.
Then bake it well
Until brown, with a heavenly smell.

Openthreadiness

Medicating myself with the soundtrack of Hamilton. It's a much needed dose of music, history and perspective on this terrible news day.

ma larkey, #156: Hey, you're back! Good to see you, and how have things been for you of late?

I put on a silly movie, but it's not helping. Time to turn off social media. What a damned world. Poor Paris.

I'm just gonna leave this here.

I'm gonna accompany #159 with this.

Em, did you mean to link that?

I did, oops. Here it is.

Teresa, you may be interested in this. Apparently there's a mass resignation event planned in Salt Lake City because of the LDS' recent decision about gay couples and their children.

#157 Hi, Lee. Yes, still here but just short of spoonage at times. It helps that I have a stable, sane partner who helps me keep it real now. Sending good thoughts to all.

My system for keeping track of whether the dishwasher has clean or dirty dishes in it is to check the soap tray.
- If it's open, the dishes are clean.
- If it's closed with soap in it, they're dirty.
- If it's empty, put soap in it before dishes.

Ovens? Yeah, not so much. Fortunately we've got enough kitchen space to not usually need to store things in it, except the occasional forgotten extra potatoes, and when we've done so intentionally, it's usually led to at least mild annoyance (metal pans being undamaged but too hot to put anywhere except the stovetop, which is busy preparing things that are supposed to get moved into the oven...) or forgetting where we left the whatever-it-was pan when we want it.

ma larkey @164: Hi! So glad to hear you're still around, and that you've got (as you say) a stable, sane partner to help you out. :) :) :)

ma larkey #164: Definitely glad to hear from you! Given the last we'd heard from you, the radio silence was worrisome.

Jacque @145, I once had a builder doing some work in my house, who then used my vacuum cleaner to clean up. Without realising there wasn't a bag in it. I had plaster dust everywhere.

Bill Stewart #165:

No problems with the dishwasher, as we run it overnight, and whoever's down first in the morning (almost always not me) sees the little blue "done" light and unloads.

Where things can go ascrew here is indeed with the oven, but more with the racks. I've lost count of the times I've not checked beforehand to ensure the rack isn't all the way up under the broiler, because if it is, there's an extra shuffle at the last minute.

#167 thank you Dave. And here I was too absorbed in stuff to think of posting here. Should have posted sooner to at least let folks know I'm alive, cared for, and doing as well as can be expected for someone with my problems.

Just saw a shot from the end of the latest Victoria's Secret runway show.

Wow, their stuff has gotten to be so fugly.

AKICML, and related to next year's Hugos....

I'm involved in one of the many efforts to get a non-partisan "list of good stuff out there" going, and the current topic of the week is Professional Artist candidates.

Now, I'm so clueless about art, I barely even know what I like, so the only idea I had was to look out book covers (obviously, for recently published works) that have struck me as memorable for one reason or another, and find out which cover artists did them, and then dig out some more about their work....

Trouble is, I'm having a devil of a time getting that first step done - identifying the cover artists. Is there any easy way of doing this? Any online "one-stop-shop" where you can find out who did the cover on a particular book? (It would sort of have to be online, due to my own mobility issues.)

(The one that started this train of thought off was the very striking cover for The Library at Mount Char... I found lots and lots of stuff about the book, obviously enough, but haven't been able to put my finger on the cover artist.)

HLN:
Woman stages early celebration of Officially Becoming a Senior Citizen by getting shots for flu, tetanus/pertussis, and shingles. (On insurance, for which hurray!) Pharmacy person was very good at it: the shots were almost unnoticeable; only the tetanus/pertussis shot is having lingering effects.

Tom Hanks apparently was approached to appear on "Doctor Who", but he had to pass only because he's very busy. In related news, Peter Capaldi wouldn't mind having David Bowie on the show.

So, as a result of - things - (grumble airlines, grumble procrastination, grumble too agreeable, grumble...) I will be in Denver for the end of the month starting Nov 25.

1) can I pick someone's brain for not-terribly-exhausting things to do (in Denver) (whether you're dead or not)?

2) Ideas on places to stay relatively cheaply that might be fun?

3) barring Friday and Saturday (the only days I'm there *for*), is anyone interested in a meetup?

Mycroft W: I'm in Boulder, so of limited help with accomodations recs. Carol Kimball might be able to help. As to things to do, what categories do you have in mind? There's obvious stuff like museums and such. Frex, I've actually realized I need to go the the zoo.

WRT a GoL, I'd be up for it, long as it's not on Sunday.

Where in town are your meetings?

There's a great Wyeth show at the Denver Art Museum. I'm in Capitol Hill so within walking distance of DAM/the 16th Street Mall, if we wanted to set a GoL there.

That also has easy bus access for Boulderites and a free shuttle once there.

Many places for cheap/interesting food. Not much help on lodging.

AKICIML: A friend is trying to identify a book.

I am reminded of a science fiction story I read many years ago, whose author clearly was familiar with this phenomenon [of lodgepole pines propagating via forest fire]. The tree species in question shed bark that spontaneously combusted after several years of buildup, causing a fire that burned up the tree and allowed the seed cones to burst and scatter widely. Having taken steps to prevent this spontaneous combustion based on the understandable premise that Forest Fires Are Bad, the settlers were wondering why these trees were not propagating!

And now I am going to spend hours wondering who wrote that story, and what its title was, and wondering if I can find it in my library so I can re-read it... Does it sound familiar to anybody?

So far we have determined that she's not talking about Niven's stage trees. Anyone here care to take a crack at it?

shadowsong@178

It sounds like one of the sections of "Mirabile" by Janet Kagan.

shadowsong @178:

One of the stories in Janet Kagan's Mirabile has firestarting trees; the rest of the details don't quite match my recollection, but it's been awhile since I read it.

Yeah, the Mirabile story is a bit different; instead of the bark itself combusting, there's a different plant which does it, and one of the townspeople is under suspicion of starting fires.

First: thanks for the amazing, though expected, immediate response and interest. That it is expected is one of the things we get spoiled with here, no?

Jacque: I'm looking for "home-grown" experiences (no, not that kind of home-grown, I guess I should say, being that it's Colorado) - not necessarily the touristy stuff I could find by looking at the tourist board, but interesting little places.

For some idea - I hated Toronto, and everything that supposedly were "the things about" Toronto (except Bakka, but you don't see that in the list unless you're talking to SF people). But people who deeply loved the place and didn't do the tourist things (as we all don't do, in our own city, no?) took me to their places, and that was much more fun.

I'm an introvert - and currently in "constant recovery" mode. So I know if I let myself, I'll spend the entire "extra days" I have in my hotel room, blahing around. But I can recover "alone in a crowd", too, as long as it's not too invasive (public transport is fine, dance club is not) - if I come prepared with a list of potentials so I can get myself out of my room.

Carol: specifically I'll be going to the ACBL Fall Nationals (Sheraton Denver Downtown); but I have a place for Thursday through Saturday. Wed night, Sunday and Monday are my issues, and since I don't have to be anywhere in particular, I can be anywhere that works.

In particular, I will be looking for quintessentially Denver food, whether the immigrants brought the style in 5, 200, or 10 000 years ago. Quintessentially (even if a bit kitschy) Denver other things are good, too.

Does that help?

Re: meetup: permission given for abi to give out my email address to those who ask.

Re: Denver. Home to one of the best independent bookstores around, The Tattered Cover.

http://www.tatteredcover.com/

HLN: Area traveler has an unexpected adventure.
After spending a weekend of baking and river observation, I headed home on an intercity bus. About 1/3 of the way out, there was a loud beeping and the driver yells "We're on fire in the back! Everybody out!" So he pulls over and stops and we all get out(a dozen of us)into the rain and cold wind with the freeway traffic roaring by, an acrid burnt smell following, and the driver goes back to look at the motor, and it was I that called 911. I didn't see anyone else doing it and figured I'd better even though I wasn't sure if anyone was in real danger or not. I could not quite say where we were bec/ of no landmarks but someone gave me a street number. 911 wanted to know if everyone was out [yes] and were there flames inside [no]. Then they put me thru to the state patrol and I told them what I knew and they said they were on their way. The driver came back and said that another bus was on the way. I think he had gotten the fire under control. Long story short, lights and sirens were soon evident, stories were taken down, and the new bus arrived and from then on I only had to deal with the usual crappy traffic. I think we had been stuck for about 20 or 25 minutes. I also think that Jim's posts/threads helped me think and do what was needed, so some major thanks from here.
And the other lesson? If there is (any chance of) weather less than appealing, bring one more layer of clothes than you think you need...

I echo Steve C's endorsement of the Tattered Cover.

If you can get to Boulder, another attractions is McGuckins, the One True Hardware Store.

*sign* Sadly, the light at the end of the tunnel turned out to be an oncoming train. In brief: the original kidney stone that caused all the trouble is out; they could not reach the one on the other side, so it's still there like a ticking time bomb; and now he's got TWO stents instead of one, and will be mostly out of commission for at least a week.

Dammit, this was not how the day was supposed to end.

Lee, deep sympathies and continued good wishes, with hopes that these will be more efficacious than the last round.

Angiportus, ugh. I also came home on an intercity bus last night. It wasn't raining here, but if I'd needed to get out because of bus trouble, my sweater was in my bag under the bus and I wouldn't have had access to it. Will rethink "what I need with me" next time.

Also relevant to emergency discussions here, I went to a meeting in New York City yesterday. As the leader was instructing us on agenda and where the restrooms were located and so forth, she mentioned that since we were in a New York City skyscraper, there were go bags for guests in a closet in the lobby, that they included instructions on where to assemble once we got out, and that employees had theirs at their desks. I didn't ask what else the bags included. But I thought it was simultaneously a nice touch and a bit discouraging that this should be routine.

Lee, commiserations and hoping that things will get better soon.

Lee #186: My sympathies. Both my brothers have had kidney stones, as has Gail. They are not fun, and I can just imagine all that the two of you are coping with. Good thoughts are heading your way.

Sympathies for your partner, Lee, and for you, you're clearly feeling worn down by this. Remember to care for yourself and take things a little slower than you might. Good wishes to both of you.

Lee, I am cursing the universe on your behalf. Sorry I can't do something better.

Lee, my sympathies to you and your partner. I've never had a kidney stone but those who have had the misfortune tell me it's agonizing. I hope your partner has some good meds for that.

Lee @ 144 (re WFC trophy): "That's a step forward I hadn't expected to see so quickly." Any particular reason why not? (Note also that there has been rising opposition for some time; 2014 is simply when it got much more public.)

@186: sympathies on the stone problems; I've never had anyone close suffer them, but Asimov's autobiography makes clear just how awful they can be.

The comments about oven safeties are giving me flashbacks; my first thought was of the ]OPEN[ / ]CLOSED[ signs I had to put on safes of secret info ~30 years ago. (Not that unhappy a time, except when we had trouble closing because some induhvidual phone tech had decided our alarm line was unused because there was no tone on it, but interesting memories.) The dishwasher we bought in ~2010 has a number of indicators, one of which goes on only when the cycle is utterly complete and goes off when the door is opened AND RECLOSED (important tweak, that) -- but that wouldn't work for ovens.

Steve Wright @ 172: how up-to-date is isfdb.org?

Mycroft W @182: I'm hampered by the fact that I don't get down to Denver very often, and when I do, it's generally a very targeted experience. Standard "Let's go do something" I'm aware of:

• Denver Art Museum (as mentioned)
• Denver Zoo (which I need to do)*
• Denver Museum of Natural History (proximal to the zoo)
• Sakura Square

Something that's very "home-grown" (though possibly too touristy):

• Molly Brown's house

Steve C.'s suggestion of Tattered Cover is a good one.

Generally, I'm afraid my knowledge of Denver is more at the "tourist board" level.

Come up to Boulder, now, it's a whole different story. We'd take you out to Dushanbe Tea House, then maybe up to NCAR to play with their science toys, then out on the Mesa for a wee hike....

And then, of course, there's going up to Trail Ridge (which is a reasonable day-trip—from Boulder; not sure about from Denver), though it's not unlikely that the road would be closed by then. Stop off at the Stanley for lunch, maybe. (I've never actually been in there.)

Touristy but still fun: the Celestial Seasonings tour.

I know we have more Denver locals, but they tend to lurk.

Oh! Oh! Here's one: Domo Restaurant and museum. It's a trad Japanese country house, and the cuisine is "Japanese country." Most emphatically not your standard touriste trappe.

Bruce H. @185: If you can get to Boulder, another attractions is McGuckin, the One True Hardware Store.

::EVIL GRIN::

Lee: Jeez. The guy can't catch a break! :-(

In #172, we learn of Steve Wright's quest to find the artists illustrating 2015 books and magazine stories.

When I want to identify a cover artist, I turn to the marvelous site ISFDB.com.

I'm typically looking for years-old books, though, so I don't have a feel for how up-to-the-minute ISFDB's database is. I am in awe of the effort it took to create and maintain this site.

As an example, suppose I am interested in Ann Leckie's 2015 novel Ancillary Mercy. I ask ISFDB for Ancillary Mercy's summary page, showing its various editions. It offers publisher, ISBN, cover price, and, yup, name of cover artist: John Harris.

Another trick, if you are looking at Amazon or some other site that's got an image of a book cover, is to use Google Image Search's "Search by Image" lookup, which finds pictures similar to the picture you've got.

Go to the page with the cover image. Ask your browser (in Firefox, a right-click menu) to "View Image." This should get you a page which holds the image, and nothing else. Go up to your address bar and copy the URL appearing there.

Now head for Google Image Search. Ignore the text-entry box and instead click on the little gray camera. You should get the message
Search by image
Search Google with an image instead of text. Try dragging an image here.
(Image-dragging works if you've got the right browser, but that's not the feature I'm describing here.)

See the box labeled "Paste image URL?" Paste your URL there and hit Carriage Return. I guess people call that Enter these days.

Google will give you a page like this one. It'll have a thumbnail of your cover picture, links to some guesses at what the picture is about, usually a fascinating row of "Visually similar images," and finally links to sites that have more or less exact copies of your picture.

Why is this relevant? I'm thinking that some of the other sites that feature your cover may also mention the artist's name.

Rabbit Hole Warning: Following "Visually similar images" and images that are similar to the similar images can lead to fractal loss of time and a dazed sensation.

@Bill Higgins - thanks a lot! (I had a feeling ISFDB might be my saviour on this one; I just don't use it often enough to know my way around it. Or possibly often enough, full stop.)

Delving around other sources online has led me to some other interesting possibilities, anyway. I am determined to try and contribute something to this discussion, even if it's only "stay away from anything that Steve Wright fellow recommends, his taste is appalling."

Steve W., #196: Another possible point of approach is to look at the websites for various conventions and see who their Artist GoH is, then go looking for that person's website. (Many con websites will have a link right there.) This has the advantage that you don't just get 2D artists, and there are a number of people who work in 3D (hence no book covers) who are well worth consideration.

I have a LOT of SF/F art. If you'd like a list of names of artists I particularly like, drop me a note via LJ.

(195/196): Note that the Internet Speculative Fiction Database is at www.isfdb.org (not .com).

Ma Larkey @164: Great to hear from you, and that you have a sane and stable partner; sympathies for the continuing spoon shortage - good luck for more spoons coming your way soon.

Lee @186: Sympathies to you and your partner.

Chip @193, Lee @144: I've heard that part of the reason it's happening now is because they've just run out of the last bunch of cast-in-large-batches-to-make-it-cheap weirdo Lovecraft heads.

If they have to cast a new batch,t hey might as well cast them NOT him.

Mary Aileen, #198:

Org? Arg!

Thanks for correcting my error in #195.

Michael I, lorax, and Lee at 179-181:

Good job! "The Flowering Inferno" from Mirabile appears to be what she was looking for.

CHip, #193: For some reason I had the impression that the Old Guard had a much tighter grip on the administration of WFC than appears to be the case, that's all. Mind you, I know very little about the inner workings of WFC (far less than I know about Worldcons), so I'm not all that surprised to be wrong.

Elliott, #200: That makes a lot of sense.

I lay before the collective wisdom of the Fluorosphere the following two sentences. I would dearly love to know what they mean. Suggestions involving calling the Samaritans may be considered.

Rousseau felt that human should not lose any power when it can down to making a social contract. This meant that the state had do a power toward the people and in an essence that state in Rousseau social contract never existed.

I picked up my kid's 1st-quarter report card for first grade today, and the teacher actually walked me through a rubric for skill levels relating to writing and comprehending English that show where she is now and where the teacher would like her to be by the end of the year.

I'm realizing that by the time she's out of second grade, if she achieves roughly the median of what her teachers want of her, she will know better than to produce sentences like the ones that bedevil poor Fragano every day.

I think I LIKE the writing curriculum my kid's school is using ...

Fragano (204): I'm guessing† that the first sentence should be "...when it came* down to...". The second sentence is a bit too word-salad for me to even venture a guess.

*not 'can'
†meaning, completely uncertain

Fragano @204: I think the person is claiming that Rousseau believed that there should be no limits on social contracts between individuals, and that states therefore shouldn't exist. This one is, I expect, largely a result of someone using a poorly-trained speech-to-text program and not checking for sense. Thus, "can" in the first sentence is replacing "came"; "do" was probably "due" in the second sentence, and "a" and "an" were spuriously added, and probably the author was referring to "the state and Rousseau" rather than "the state in Rousseau." They're all pretty close homophone errors, and entirely not the error that someone typing would make.

Arggh. For a while, my Ubuntu system had been managing to get photos imported from my iPhone, but now it's reverted to worse behavior than ever -- not only is it repeatedly disconnecting and connecting, but it's hanging not just Shotwell, but the X system.

I thought nothing could top whatsisface, the radio host, insisting that women only take birth control pills when we are planning to have slutty slutty sex, the more sex on the menu, the more pills in the dose. Then I found out that there's an anti-BCP preacher out there insisting that women who use the Pill have a uterine lining studded with teeny tiny dead babies. And then I found this:

http://gehayi.tumblr.com/post/133454492906/profeminist-myfeministawakening-i-was-inspired

TL;DR: Woman reports that a former boss didn't want to let her go to the bathroom when her period started in the middle of her office work because he thought that women could turn off their bleeding at will, but wouldn't because women amirite, and furthermore that pads and tampons were sex toys. Her boss was a state legislator.

#209: That's . . . mind boggling.

How was that guy elected?

We don't know when the legislator was elected, or in what state -- both of those would give us more of a sense of how he was elected. I'd believe in a story like that from the 1970s or earlier without much trouble -- from the 2010s, though, I wouldn't (and can you imagine the trouble he'd have gotten in today's social media world?).

"But Joe", said I, "you're 100 years dead"
"I never died," said he

Today (or tomorrow, depending on time zones) is the centenary of Joe Hill's execution. Back then, union membership was only about 10%, and about 50% of income went to the top 10% of Americans.

Jenny, #209: It's worse than that. In an office job, nobody should need permission to go to the bathroom -- we're supposed to be all adults here, right? The fact that he apparently considered her an elementary-school student and himself the teacher issuing a hall pass is even more appalling than his ignorance about female biology (for which, at his age, there might have been at least the excuse that he was never taught anything about it).

@Lee no. 213: She was an intern, which apparently means that she could be treated like that.

On the good side, he was apparently open to being educated. She describes his shock when it got through to him that she couldn't just stop bleeding whenever she wanted.

I tentatively take

This meant that the state had do a power toward the people and in an essence that state in Rousseau social contract never existed.

IANR

I just dropped my partner off at the emergency room. He's been in continuous pain for 2 full days, unable to do anything, sleeping poorly. The hospital called for a follow-up, and he told them how he was doing, in detail. They said it was time to come in.

We know exactly what the problem is -- it's the goddamn stents! Fortunately, those can be removed as an outpatient procedure, which we have some hope of convincing them to do. I expect it to take all day for them to get to him, but if it gets done today, he should be mostly recovered by the weekend. GoodThoughts would be welcomed.

Elliott @ 200: I was not part of the final discussion, but I've been involved with many WFCs over the past ~20 years (co-chaired 1999) and doubt there was any such stash; each committee with any sense ordered enough to cover some ties, usually after making sure that the successor committee would buy any surplus. IIRC, the one time I was involved in ordering the heads, there was (at best) a modest discount for ordering enough to cover two conventions. cf. Peter Weston's discussion of making Hugos (in the N4 program book), especially the point that they'd be cheap (and high-quality, which they weren't before he took over manufacturing) if only someone would front a run of many hundreds to make injection molding worthwhile.

HLN. I did not get into the teacher training program that I wanted to. I am determined and will try again, but my mental schedule of when this will work out is all upside down.

Looking for book recommendations.

A friend's 15 year old son has been reading mostly YA. His mom says she knows some of the adult SFF would be of interest to him but it's not what she reads, so she doesn't know what authors to recommend.

He has read and enjoyed the Ender series and books by Catherine Fisher.

I did tell my friend that YA isn't necessarily something you outgrow; that many adults enjoy things packaged as YA. But broadening his horizons isn't a bad thing either.

I know we've done the recommendation thing here before, but I think he's a bit older than the previous recommendees.

Not-So-YA: I've been recommending Vatta's War (Elizabeth Moon, first book "Trading in Danger") a lot lately.

@Lee - all good thoughts to you and yours. (I've had kidney troubles of my own, and your partner's sound worse than mine ever were, so, well, ouch! and best wishes for a fast improvement.)

Mary Aileen #206/Tom Whitmore #207 Those are interesting suggestions. My own suspicions involve chemical alterations to the brain. Speech-to-text is an intriguing idea (especially given some of Siri's interpretations of my speech). My own poor brain, however, is in danger of exploding.

I'm also trying to figure out why, when I warn students that I will inflict condign punishments for plagiarism, inflict such punishments, and make no bones about it, students insist on committing that crime?

Jenny Islander #209: I would expect a 10-year-old boy to be so ignorant. An adult man, however, should have learnt about the facts of life.

I've lived in a place where there was a cultural objection -- by women -- against tampons. They preferred pads, apparently in the belief that tampons damaged the hymen. But nowhere have I heard that tampons and pads were sex toys. That deserves a special prize, one involving a mallet and the idiot's head. I'm not sure what the belief in menstrual flow control deserves; possibly application of a foot to the fool's posterior.

Fragano: I too grew up hearing that tampons "wreck your virginity". But the voluntary shut-off idea is new to me.

Lee @216: Hm...what's that word...? "Iatrogenic?"

Here's best wishes for all speedy healing....

Fragano Ledgister @222: I'm also trying to figure out why, when I warn students that I will inflict condign punishments for plagiarism, inflict such punishments, and make no bones about it, students insist on committing that crime?

"Don't think of a blue horse"?

Lila: But the voluntary shut-off idea is new to me.

"But there's sphincters, right?"

Um...no.

I've heard of similar cluelessnes WRT lactation.

AKICIML: When dentists in the USA put the letters "SC" after their names, what does it stand for? (I can't figure out a way to search for this without getting all the dentists in South Caroline.)

Allen Beatty @226

While I have no idea what SC stands for, it should be possible to craft a search for "Dentists" and "SC" but not "South Carolina". You may have to go to the Advanced Search facility. If there isn't one, this is a good reason to be using another search engine.

J Homes.

@Fragano Ledgister no. 223: I can see it happening in the generation before mine (graduated late '80s). After all, there were boys' and girls' sex ed classes with separate information streams. Women were expected to be "discreet" about their bodily functions, including pregnancy, menstruation, and lactation, which practically speaking meant that the only people who knew about them were other women. Also, many men were socialized to think that learning about topics like that would give them unmanliness cooties. So they were thrown back on male analogies (menstruating = farting all the time, putting something in your crotch = getting off on it).

Actually I saw it in my own generation. I'd been married for 15 years before my husband learned that a speculum is not "um...a...cylinder?"

It's still scary that men with the power to legislate against women's access to basic health and hygiene could be this ignorant. Let's never do that type of mincing, secretive sex ed again.

*sigh* After 14 hours at the hospital, and being seen by 2 different doctors... the stents are still in place. However, he's got a much more effective set of painkillers, and they identified a UTI which was causing some of the pain and he's on antibiotics for that, and he's got an appointment for Tuesday when the stents should actually go away. From where I sit, he's looking and sounding much more normal (at least, what's been the "new normal" for the last couple of months), and he thinks he'll be able to get some stuff done over the weekend.

And yes, Jacque, "iatrogenic" is a word that's been much on my mind since early September.

Jenny Islander @228: Not even women knew about the basics of their own physiology, actually.

When I was 11 (so, 1987) in summer sleepaway camp, I got the nickname "Dr. Ruth" from the Counselors-In-Training (who were 18-19) for my cabin, because in their words I was "short and knew EVERYTHING about sex."

I didn't know EVERYTHING about sex, but I'd read several (aimed at adults) nonfiction reference works on the subject, including a rather extensive dictionary of terms, and my mom had sat me down and drawn diagrams of endometrial tissue and hormone cycles so I'd understand the mechanics of periods.

The 19-year-old CIT for my cabin literally thought "there are rocks up in there that God put there when Eve sinned, and when you're meant to get pregnant he takes the rocks out" was a valid explanation for how periods work.

At least, it was the most coherent one she'd ever gotten.

I ended up doing a little five-CIT intervention with diagrams and basic rundowns on what activities CAN and CAN'T make you pregnant and some basic sex safety tips in all the remaining free periods between then and when I had to get home.

This information was radical, mindblowing, and completely new to these young women, which shocked and appalled 11-yo me.

@Elliot: 1987? That's . . . mind boggling. Rocks?

My 6th grade boys-only hour-long sex-ed session (1974, Gym teacher, one other male teacher, corny film strip) had a brief run-down on the nature of periods. I remember the teacher taking pains to not stigmatize menstruation. "Girls get periods, but boys get noctournal emissions, they're both messy but no big deal."

(Girls went to the main auditorium and saw a film.)

@228, @230 & @231

Mom thought I would be shown "Those Films" at school so she never said word one to me about things like menstruation. Ever. Lucky for me, one of my older sisters had been through nursing school and left one of her text books at home. If it weren't for the illustrations in that book, and the fact that I would ready anything beginning at an early age...

As it was, I think I was more prepared for "The talk" than Mom was. That was something you just didn't chat about. It felt like a furtive, back alley exchange of information. Instead of getting a bag of heroin in exchange for money, I was given sanitary supplies in exchange for the assurance that I knew what was going on with my body.

At the time, I was impatient with what I now know was dithering on her part. Looking back - it's just surreal.

The "rocks" hypothesis is memorialized in Louise Fitzhugh's "The Long Secret", sequel to "Harriet the Spy".

Lila #224: Sex ed at my school was pretty general (including an all school lecture on the subject), but I took a class in human biology (and got an O-Level in the subject), which meant that I learnt about such matters as menstruation in clinical terms.

Plus, I was educated on the subject in my teens and twenties by female friends (emphasis on the 'friends') and by my first wife, who was not shy on the subject. In addition, when our children were born we went the natural childbirth route at the Childbearing Centre on the Upper East Side. Yes, we were unbearable overeducated young N'yorkers.

Also, I spent my teens on a farm. I've seen more live sex than anyone who doesn't direct porno films, and the other end of the process as well (and am equally awed whether the end product is a lamb, a calf, a piglet, a kid, or a child).

Jenny Islander #228: I agree with you. I'd only add that some of the people voting in favour of fear and ignorance are women, and they're voting in favour of keeping other women repressed in order to maintain what they see as benefits of kyriarchy, in particular access to powerful men, and restricting pleasure only to the 'worthy'.

I don't see how the "because rocks" explanation wouldn't have raised more questions than it answered. Is the bleeding caused by the rocks? Is menstruation the rocks themselves coming out? Were the rocks damming the flow of blood until puberty, when God teleports the rocks away? Why is menstruation monthly rather than non-stop, in that case?

Elliott Mason @230: When I was 11 (so, 1987)

Sometime in the mid-late '60s, I had met my mother at the drug store where she worked as a bookkeeper. On our way home, she bought some stuff, and as we were standing at the check-out register, I looked at the pile of items, and saw amongst them a very enigmatic box. Now, being an avid watcher of TV, I think it is safe to say that I was well up on what was available to the American consumer of the day. I studied this box, and puzzled, and realized that, for the life of me, I had no clue what was in it. So I asked my mom.

She mumbled something unresponsive, and said she'd "tell me later." Which, being my mom, she never did.

When I was 11, we had "health class" in 6th grade (1969), and they went through all the anatomy and functioning of male and female physiology. Which was when I found out about periods, and a damn good thing, too, because it was probably three months later that mine started.* On the strength of that knowledge, I went to the teacher (as we had been instructed to do), and she took me off to the teacher's loo, and issued me my first pad (and belt—!)**

The health class had one conspicuous omission, though: they never covered how the sperm actually got from the male parts to the female parts, and I wasn't quite cluefull enough to make the, er, conceputal leap. (Moot point anyway, since no boys were ever interested in me.) That I had to learn over the back fence from a classmate. "Ew! He puts it where??"

TMI:

* One of the most miserable*** weeks of my life, with all my nether parts feeling like they were going to burst through my skin for a solid eight days.****

** Thank all the ghods and 3M for the stick-on variety! I still have the scar on my tailbone from those old-style pads.

*** My brother once actually had the gall to ask me if menstrual cramps might just possibly be all in my head. This was in 1991. I was so gobsmacked, it didn't occur to me to suggest to him I demonstrate just how imaginary the pain was.

**** Which, of course, coincided with our class trip to Estes Park—with a class from whom I was already thoroughly isolated. Ghu bless my friend Glenda; she was the one classmate who spent any time with me. Uncharacteristically, my mom went, too, as a chaperone. Oh, that was such a comfort.

Sarah: You're presuming the ability to ask questions, the repression of which (I can tell you from long, bitter personal experience*) also supresses the ability to think of questions.

* I had to manually retrofit curiosity, well into my adulthood.

Sarah E @235: Believe me, I asked all those. Apparently them being Magic God Rocks of Destiny solves all objections. Though she did start getting uncertain looks on her face as I chased her down the logical consequences. Hence why she was willing to join our intervention/study group.

Someone needs to come up with a fantasy-story race for which the rocks thing is how things actually work.

Instead of Flow . . . Aggregate.

* * *
And again . . . rocks?

In this century?

The present is not easily distributed.

I once wrote a fairly terrifying yet plausible where-babies-come-from hypothesis for a fantasy society. It involved a baby attempting to eat the mother from the inside, and the mother's body fighting it, and then blood. Semen fed the baby so it didn't eat the mother, and then baby. Better than rocks, but I'm really glad that's not how it actually works.

(I was the kind of clueless that didn't figure out the mechanics of sex for ages... and I read Auel until the books fell apart when I was ten. *No* idea. I was some kind of armored weapons-grade self-healing clueless.)

Allan @ 226

The best way with google is often the simplest:

Googling "What does "sc" mean" returns this result:

"The quick answer is: “S.C.” is an abbreviation for “Service Corporation.” As with other, “regular” corporations, the S.C. is a creature of state law. In Wisconsin, Service Corp.s’ are addressed in Subchapter XIX of Chapter 180 of the Wisconsin business corporation law.

The S.C. is sometimes used when a group of commonly licensed professionals (e.g. lawyers, accountants, doctors and other health care professionals, etc.) partner together to form a common business concern."

www.mgbusinesslaw.com/ive-seen-the-initials-s-c-in-the-name-of-some-businesses-what-does-s-c-mean/

Also, googling "what is a service corporation" returns a lot info including the fact that "personal service corporation" seems to be the preferred term.

Diatryma @ 240

Except pregnancy kind of does work that way:

War in the womb: A ferocious biological struggle between mother and baby belies any sentimental ideas we might have about pregnancy:

"The cells of the human endometrium are tightly aligned, creating a fortress-like wall around the inside of the uterus. That barrier is packed with lethal immune cells. As far back as 1903, researchers observed embryos ‘invading’ and ‘digesting’ their way into the uterine lining. In 1914, R W Johnstone described the implantation zone as ‘the fighting line where the conflict between the maternal cells and the invading trophoderm takes place’. It was a battlefield ‘strewn with… the dead on both sides’."

Stefan Jones @ #239:
Someone needs to come up with a fantasy-story race for which the rocks thing is how things actually work.

Instead of Flow . . . Aggregate.

Ow. I think there was already a discussion upthread of kidney stones.

Diatryma, #240: armored weapons-grade self-healing clueless

I can think of a number of people who fit this description. You aren't any of them. (But I am SO stealing it for application where appropriate!)

Sarah, #243: Indeed there was.

Oh, and @Elliot? Kudos to your mom for teaching you, and kudos for you for passing on your knowledge.

You can bet that those CITs won't be passing on the "rocks" theory to their kids.

Thus is ignorance beaten back.

Nzinga #242: That article shows the classic problem of many evo-dev narratives: It fails to cover all the bases.

In particular, it neglects the basic point that if the fetus kills the mother, it dies too. In fact, our dependency on postpartum care is such that if the fetus even weakens the mother too much (unable to nurse or otherwise take care of the infant), the baby dies even if it survived to birth. Not to mention the long-term population-level issue of needing to replace the parents.... (Yeah, currently the advanced societies are getting a partial wash on that because we've massively overpopulated the planet, but that's comparing the millennial scale of history with the much longer scale of species survival.)

222 Fragano

I've heard that a lot of students don't know what 'plagiarism' means. I wonder whether 'piracy' would be clearer, or if it would just make it sound cool.

Thanks, Nzinga. I did find the same link you quoted. No idea why the examples I noticed were all dentists, which led me down a blind alley of reading up about dentist credentials.

I think my approach to searching leans too heavily towards keywords and not enough on connector words.

HLN:

Local woman has had her hair dyed purple. "I'm pleased they were able to keep a white streak," woman says.

Nancy Lebovitz #247: I make the term clear in my syllabi. It's mentioned in the Student Handbook. The department passes out a booklet mentioning it (and we're revising the department handbook right now, and will sure as hell be mentioning it). On t'other hand, I'd be interested in calling it 'piracy' if I could hang the culprits from the yardarm pour encourager les autres. I've already complained to students about living in effete days when I'm forbidden from using the cat o' nine tails on such miscreants. For some reason they seem to think I'm not altogether serious.

I was ten years old, had been through one round of your-changing-body class, and read Jean M Auel's books until they literally disintegrated. And yet I had no idea that, for example, a woman's legs had to move for sex.

I may not be clueless now, but I certainly was then.

(I say this affectionately. Past Me had many good qualities and was kind of cute.)

Cartoon: And you thought your sex ed was bad.

I have a sewing question. I have a splendid coat which I found at a vintage store. The outside is a water-repellant nylon or somesuch, and the inside is a plush fake fur. It is warm and rain-proof, with a hood big enough to keep rain off of my glasses. Just the thing for someone who waits at bus stops in a cold climate. The hood is secured by a button on one side, and an elastic loop on the other. Alas, the elastic broke and raveled. It's too short to just re-attach. The elastic is rather sturdy, flat in profile, and 3mm wide.

The nearest sewing store is an hour's drive, so I'm searching online. At JoAnn Fabric, I find elastic that's flat, and wider than 3mm.

At other suppliers, I find 3mm round elastic cord that seems to be called "shock cord" and intended for sports/outdoor sorts of uses. I fear it may not be feasible to stitch it to fabric.

Any suggestions?

Shock cord would work. Rather than sew it to the garment, I'd pick open a bit of the seam in the right spot, knot each end of the elastic, poke the knots through to the inside and then sew the opening securely shut.

Violin-playing Folks: Is there any strong reason someone wishing to learn to play this instrument should NOT start on a 3/4 or 1/2 scale instrument, especially if their hands are small?

I know that learning small and then later changing up to full–scale would involve a significant retraining period. But is there a strong reason why it's bad to just play a smaller one?

Elliott @255:
It's totally standard to start on a smaller instrument and move up as you grow. I started on a 1/4-size many years ago, and I don't remember it being a problem; in fact, it was kind of exciting to graduate from one size to the next. (Maybe we put tape on the fingerboard again to get me used to where the notes were? Or maybe my ear was sufficiently trained by then to work it out?)

There are excellent reasons not to attempt to play a full-size instrument before your hands and arms are big enough. Most important is the avoidance of injury and bad habits from trying to reach notes that your hands are too small for. Relatedly, if you can't reach the notes, you'll play out of tune...

Suzie @256: I'm 39, I don't think I've much more growing to do. :->

David Harmon @252: Cartoon: And you thought your sex ed was bad.

Oh ghods, I haven't thought of this in years: senior year of high school, science survey class, taught by one of the (less clueful) science teachers, who was also a coach. To convey the shape of female reproductive organs, he stands in front of the class, hands raised above his shoulders. Fingers are splayed, pointing downwards: "Okay, imagine me without my head."

It can be hard to facepalm inconspicuously, when everybody in the class is doing it simultaneously.

Elliott Mason: most double-bass players play a 3/4. All 3 of my kids play strings (2 violiins, 1 bass) and none of them had difficulty adjusting to changing sizes as they grew.

OTOH, if a 3/4 fits your hands well, why change?

Janetl, for that kind of thing, I would probably use a flat hair tie. Snip it at the seam bit, do whatever you have to do to it, make sure it's soundly fastened to the hood, and you should be good. It's what I used for the button loop on my bag as well as the key loop. Plus they come in different colors.

Elliott @257: Pardon my leap to conclusions!

Is there a violin teacher you can consult in person about what size fits you? I'd recommend starting with the size you intend to play long-term.

My hands are smallish -- can't reach a tenth on the piano -- but I'm fine with a full-size violin. If the quality of the instrument is a consideration, you'll likely have more choices in full-size than in 3/4 or whatever.

JanetI @253

Sewing cord to fabric is a very standard and old technique.

"cording", "couching", and "piping" are key jargon terms. Replacing a button loop can be complicated, however they're made.

I'm not sure how the elastic cord you've seen is made. I'll assume it has some sort of braided casing tube. One answer would be to fix one end by stitching through the tube to the mounting fabric, then make up the loop structure using ziz-zag stitching over the cord, Adjust the length by pulling the loop through the zig-zag, and fix the free end. That's the basic method for an elasticated gather.

Would it need knots at the ends? I'm not sure. I've seen Fray-check recommended at the ends.

It does look like a lot of stitching.

AKICIML: What the hell just happened with the Organization for Transformative Work (the organization that sponsors Archive Of Our Own)? Apparently the board of directors just resigned?

(disclaimer: except for reading and posting on AO3, I know nothing at all about the organization or any of the people on the board)

Lila, I don't quite understand it myself, but I can quote the explanation that was offered elsewhere. (Anonymously, so I can't attribute it usefully, except via link on request.) Namely:

"Apparently there were elections for two new board members, but also a third seat open that wasn't put up for election. Right after the elections were over (but before the new board members were officially in place and able to take part in votes) the current board voted to appoint the person who came last (out of six) in the election to that third empty seat. Everyone not on the board collectively went WTF and started talking about votes of no confidence, so the entire current board promptly flounced in a huff."

Every other explanation I can find of this event is either much longer (and thus harder for me to evaluate) or even more clearly written by someone too irate to pretend objectivity, so that's the best I have to go on so far.

Lila @263:
I've just done a bit of searching, and the best information I've found so far can be found here:

http://iphysnikephoros.tumblr.com/post/133764696751/lookninjas-lookninjas

Short version as I understand it: There was an election where those currently in power would have come out behind. Those currently in power pulled some possibly legal but ethically questionable maneuvers to retain a 2/3 majority. They got called on it, tried to quash dissent with further less-than-ethical moves, and the outrage reached a point where they had to quit or let the whole organization tear itself apart.

Open Threadiness: Could I ask for some media recommendations?

I've been listening to Hamilton more-or-less on repeat for the last ten days. It is lighting up the same circuits as giving speeches in my fictional governmental capacity does. I want more of this sort of thing.

What I think I'm looking for: Politics, as in the activity. High-level decision making. The intersection between principle and personality. Acquisition and use of power. The business of government, the compromises it involves, and the means by which it is done.

Media I can identify as having to some extent scratched this itch: Hamilton (massively). Les Miserables, Evita, Wicked. The bits of Strange and Norrell that are about manipulating the British government. The bits of the Temeraire books that are not the adventure story. The Cabinet scene in Torchwood: Children of Earth. Empress by Karen Miller. The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. Daughter/Servant/Mistress of the Empire, with my favourite parts being very strongly the Game of the Council sections over the romantic or military plots.

What should a person read, listen to, watch, to observe how the sausage is made? It's four months before my next chance to make speeches and high-level decisions. I can't listen to Hamilton on repeat for the next four months. The neighbours would get annoyed.

duckbunny @266: I haven't gotten deep into it yet, but something that's on my "add to pile" list for exactly the same things you say you want is the The Weeds podcast.

House of Cards?

abi @268: Oh! The On the Media recap podcast for House of Cards Season 2 is AMAZING (and I say that as someone with no interest in watching the show).

Brooke Gladstone gets all kinds of jaw-droppingly amazing people to come and geek out with her about what it's like to make the sausage of US government.

duckbunny, #266: It's a bit simplified for the audience, but 1776 gives a decent overview of what the process of the American colonies declaring independence from Britain probably looked like. Even better, find the libretto, which was published as a book with the creators' notes at the end.

Also, The Goblin Emperor is pretty much ALL about politics, albeit in a fantasy setting.

The parts of S.M. Stirling's Changed World series which aren't focused on warfare have a lot of political discussion. Fair warning, you'll have to wade thru a fair amount of travel and battle scenes in the process, but Stirling's world-building is thorough.

From what I've heard about The Goblin Emperor, it'll be my cup of tea.

1776 I'll definitely look into - simplified is probably about my speed, because I have only the very vaguest notion of how American independence came about. I went to some pretty poor schools and humanities were a low priority, so I have mostly studied the Romans, the Tudors, and the First World War, but only the bit with the trenches. We might have done the Civil War at some point, but I like the Civil War and so do documentary makers so I might just have watched a lot of things about it. The Empire, the colonies, and the various independence struggles ought to have been on the curriculum, but.

(If I could write music... scratch that. Give me twenty years to figure out how to compose an acceptable tune or team up with someone who can, and I'll write a musical about Cromwell and it will all be Lin-Manuel Miranda's fault.)

I spent much of last night lying awake rehearsing political speeches to the ceiling. Easter seems far too far away. Although since I have several major documents to write before then, I won't be saying this come February.

Duckbunny @266 -- try Clancy, and begin with Patriot Games followed by Red Rabbit -- there's a lot of government maneuvering going on in addition to the derring-do. I'd say read up to Bear and Dragon, I abandoned the series when I found Clancy had had one of my favorite characters assassinated.

Duckbunny @266 -- Since you said "media" and indicated what to read, watch, listen to, etc, I'll recommend The West Wing. It's a longish (7 seasons, 156 hour-long episodes) centered around the senior Presidential advisers who work in the west wing of the White House. While the show features a decent amount of non-political drama, almost all of it is tied back into how the White House operates to accomplish their political goals (which includes passing legislation, crisis management, running the country, and getting re-elected). It had a most impressive run for a political drama about how the sausage is made.

I am watching the West Wing right now- I recommend it.

Open-threaded pop TV -

I've been enjoying the episodes of Supergirl. It's has a vibe reminiscent of Lois and Clark, which I thought was a perfect blend of adventure and romantic comedy.

I think the best thing about the show is the James Olsen character. He's superbly portrayed by Mehcad Brooks.

The stories have been fun. I'm still not sure about the "Devil Wears Prada" characteristics of Cat Grant, but Callista Flockhart is an engaging actor. She's growing on me.

re 266 et seq.: Add me to the list of those recommending 1776 and Goblin Emperor. And in the case of the former, it's worth it just for the wordplay (much of it roughly verbatum from the subjects) and especially the double (and occasionally single) entendres. But make sure you get the restored full edition.

I've been enjoying Supergirl as well.

Duckbunny@266:
In The Loop, a black comedy film about politicians and generals not avoiding a slide into war, and the cultural clash between British and US government advisors?

(The same producer made The Thick of It, a British comedy series about a dysfunctional government department with lots of very creative swearing, and also Veep.)

duckbunny @266, your examples are all fiction, but good memoir or biography might scratch the itch too.

Duckbunny@266: The "Expanse" sci-fi series (now becoming a SyFy TV series) has a continuing element of politics. (Also spaceship fights and alien-goo horror.)

Speaking of TV: Supergirl! I... almost like it. I want to like it. I don't think I'm going to keep watching it.

It's cheesy, but gods know I watch cheesier shows. I see what they're trying to put together, and it's a good idea. I guess it's just somewhere on the spectrum between "this doesn't quite work" and "this doesn't quite work for me."

I had the same "enh" reaction to Gotham. Contrariwise, iZombie, Killjoys, Arrow, and Librarians hooked me. I don't think there's a consistent set of parameters you can pull out about what I like in TV shows; it's up in the realm of intangibles.

The good news is, there's so much good TV on that I can pick and choose the shows that ring my chimes.

Duckbunny #266: I'd second abi's suggestion of House of Cards, but add that the British miniseries is of, perhaps, greater interest than the American one.

The miniseries based on Geoffrey Archer's First Among Equals is also worth watching, if you discount the soapy element, since it does show the sausage being made. Sticking with British television, there was also A Very British Coup based on a novel by Chris Mullin, a journalist turned politician.

A film I used to show my students when I taught US government some years back was Bob Roberts, about a senate campaign. Another film I used was Warren Beatty's Bulworth.

Charlie Stross's Merchant Princes series does some interesting work on politics, with a hell of a lot of sausage-making on display, to come back to sf/fnal works.

Fragano (281): That's Jeffrey Archer, not Geoffrey. /kneejerk pedantry

At last, good news -- the stents are out! And since the larger kidney stone (the one they couldn't reach) appears to be firmly embedded, we have some breathing space before that needs to be dealt with.

Anybody going to be at Chambanacon this weekend?

Lee, good news indeed. Wishing both of you a restful break before you have to deal with this again.

Mary Aileen #282: Thanks!

I can't sort out who wanted this.

Excellent general history of the US is:
A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn

If you want to know more about the founding of the country, I'd suggest the biography, which covers a lot of the events:
Abigail Adams: Witness to a Revolution by Natalie S. Bober

OtterB @ 219: If you think he can handle complex text, try some Cherryh; Merchanter's Luck, Finity's End, and Tripoint deal with adolescents or near-adolescents without in any way being written as YA (AFAICT). I (like Sandy B.) liked Vatta's War, but felt that book 1 was weak (surprising considering Moon's experience by then); later books are better. Bujold's Miles books may go down well -- not necessarily in order, but the most recent few may need too much backstory to start with.

Fragano @ 222: Some people don't need drugs to be confused; see my answer to you in the Paris thread. And some people just don't believe they'll get caught, or think they can outface the charge when they are -- sort of the opposite of the Sidelight on engineers, some people think \everything/ is malleable. (Yes, I still remember the person who tried to tell me that 325 was 248 (arguing that his story was short enough for a contest).) One reads frequently of children whose parents never constrain them regardless of how badly they behave; what would such a one make of your stricture?

Lee @ 270: I would recommend 1776 only with major caveats, as it plays fast and loose with history (e.g., James Wilson as a coward); YMMV as to whether this invalidates the degree of realism that duckbunny is looking for.

AKICIML: I am trying to reconstruct a recipe for soft molasses "drop cakes" (cookies); unlike all the other file cards my mother left me, this one is a straight copy of the bland-looking Joy of Cooking recipe rather than the one sharpened by coffee and vinegar -- perhaps 1/4c and 1/2tsp respectively for a batch (2c flour? cinnamon/ginger/cloves, probably not nutmeg). Googling finds references that look good by summary but get 404'd; does anyone have a starting point?

287
The molasses cookie recipe my mother had in her file had 1 Tbsp of lemon juice and 1 cup of molasses, but no coffee.

Elliott Mason @ 255 ...
Violin-playing Folks: Is there any strong reason someone wishing to learn to play this instrument should NOT start on a 3/4 or 1/2 scale instrument, especially if their hands are small?

Well -- for one, the full sized instrument almost always sounds less scrapy/tinny... and it's much easier to get a good range of instruments, bows, strings and other bits.

That said. IIRC, your hands are in the same size range as mine, or slightly larger, and a full sized violin isn't a problem for my hands[0].

The main literal and figurative pain that I'd expect is the process of training and stretching your hands into positions you'd describe as "WTH is your problem" if you weren't trying to make music.

[0] A viola, OTOH, is a stretch

xeger @289: Yeah, my left-hand pinky and ring finger gave me a lot of that guff while I was learning to play guitar (on, initially, a 3/5 scale teeny that STILL felt insanely wide). I've got them broken in now, so there should be less insanity on any new instrument I actually do manage to pick up. :->

I also know how to keep a neutral wrist position and not f*&^ up my carpal tunnel while chording, which is a life skill.

Fragano@222 et al:

A lot of teenagers get told a lot of crap about a lot of bad consequences that never happen. And getting caught cheating requires teachers to care, and to pay attention, and to take any heat that may result.

I remember a prof in one of my hardest grad-school classes giving out grades on the first homework, something to the effect of "Three students made the exact same mistakes: those are all zeroes. Two students handed in the homework late, just after I posted the answers: those are all zeroes." There was one other category of cheater that he hammered flat, and it was a really small class. And everyone in that class had presumably made it through four years of college without learning that lesson.

In that same class, instead of solving a homework problem by grinding it up with a computer (as recommended), I tried to fight it with math. I ended up with a horrible botch and he gave me very close to full marks. (The course was Heat Transfer: my first attempt was off by something like 24 orders of magnitude. I'm sure people have been wronger in the past, but not many and not often. You usually have to go to Stat Mech or Relativity to get those kinds of mistakes, I think.)

CHip @287: wrt the soft molasses "drop cakes", what are the approximate target dimensions/consistency? Crumbly cake-like domes? chewy flat discs? If you already tried the JoC recipe, what were the most salient differences from what you wanted?

duckbunny #266. Scalzi's Old Man's War, not so much the first book but increasingly thereafter.

J.R. Pournelle's Outies

In a weird way, Max Gladstone's 'Craft' sequence.

Quite a lot of Elizabeth Bear, eg, Carnival and the Scardown/Hammered/Worldwired trilogy.

Unfavorite neologism of the year: A radio ad extolling the wonderfulness of a pre-Black Friday sale on Thanksgiving itself actually used the word 'Thanksgetting'. Bleargh!

Can't we have one holiday not corrupted by "Gimme!" culture? Please? Just one?

I am looking forward to exactly one Black Friday sale, at a sporting goods store within walking distance. My youngest needs a new winter coat and gloves. I would rather buy quality than settle for Wal-Mart's offerings; if that means getting up at chicken o'clock to go stand in line on the one day a year when the prices are down at my level, OK.

Jenny Islander (295): Black Friday sales do have their uses. But that's the next day. Turning Thanksgiving, as in giving thanks, into 'Thanksgetting' (Bleargh!) is just appalling.

Happy 100th birthday to the General Theory of Relativity.

Mary Aileen @294
I second your Bleargh!
I generally feel like it is a feature rather than a bug that the commercial steamroller usually runs right over Thanksgiving on its way to Christmas. Pass on by, nothing to see here, just ignore Thanksgiving (other than food and recipe discussion)

I think the corruption of Thanksgiving is one of the reasons Halloween has taken over all of October, and refuses to give an inch of ground. We've lost the Thanksgiving border, but Halloween grows in power every year.

Once my generation became too old for trick-or-treating, Halloween became the holiday of community and camaraderie. Halloween is all about making things with your own hands, hosting and attending parties, human emotions, deep thoughts, genuine engagement with things outside the material plane, and enduring friendships.

With our nomadic lifestyles, Thanksgiving is often more about loss, distance, or obligation. It can involve weighing inflated expense and stress against familial connections. The history of Thanksgiving is dire and depressing, and the politics that come up when multiple generations are gathered around the table are starker and more potentially upsetting than ever before.

Thanksgiving won't get its old feeling back until the finances of young people change so that the yearly pilgrimage isn't a substantial burden, and/or until modern society fully embraces a mode of thanksgiving that doesn't include physical proximity with your family. It's at a very weird place culturally right now.

duckbunny @ 266:

Yes Minister, and Yes Prime Minister, perhaps? (Disclaimer: they're still on my to watch list, but I've only ever heard good things.) Also seconding the recommendation of The Goblin Emperor.

Leah Miller @ 299:

I wish Halloween would complete its takeover of October. Unfortunately, the outlet mall near me decorates for Chistmas starting in the middle of October. They do up the facade to look like a giant Christmas present, and brag that they have the world's largest bow. Psst, guys, I don't think that's a category anyone bothers to compete in.

Leah Miller: Thanksgiving won't get its old feeling back until

Doesn't help that Retail starts champing at the bit on freakin Labor Day to start the OMGHOLIDAYPLZGIVEUSURMONEYPROFITZZZZ!!!!!1!11!eleventy!! holiday advertizing blitz.

You know, with all the psych horsepower that goes into marketing, you'd think they would have had a class on extinction somewhere in there.

Duckbunny @266: Keith S. got to 'Yes Minister' marginally before me, but it's excellent: both shrewd and funny. The books are also good, and in them there's some excellent play with a series of differently unreliable narrators.

Sandy B #291: That's it exactly. The important thing, as I see it, is that students learn. Nothing frustrates me so much as when students actively resist learning or try to skate their way through without making the effort to master the material.

May I make a short appeal for a local-to-me charity? If it's inappropriate, please delete this.

I volunteer at a food pantry, the Elmhurst Yorkfield Food Pantry, which is currently building a new, purpose-built food pantry to replace the terrible, tiny, not-very-accessible but better-than-nothing old cottage basement we used to operate out of. The new building is mostly built (hurray for getting rid of the Terrifying Stairs that shattered a volunteer’s leg!), but can still use money for fittings, operating costs, and being able to buy food for pennies on the dollar from the Northern Illinois Food Bank.

If you have any available money in your charity budget, on-line contributions given at http:/eyfp.org/how-to-donate/ on "Giving Tuesday", December 1 (Central US time; for calibration purposes it's 4:00 pm here as I post this), will provide individuals a one-day opportunity to receive a match of $1 for each $2 of donation. The match is made possible by Thing 1-2-3 Foundation which is sponsoring EYFP’s #Giving Tuesday campaign.

Thank you.

HLN: Area family sits down to watch first episode of new PBS show. Wonders aloud what a relentlessly peppy cat in a Robin Hood costume, a mouse behaving like a stereotypical dumb blonde, a hamster con artist in a Donald Trump wig, and a dog with problems distinguishing reality from fantasy have to do with learning about nature. Oh, and the One Reasonable Person, a rabbit with super-science powers.

Now they've wasted five minutes of the next segment trying to get to the Moon using a giant rubber band. And use the blueprints for a rocket as a rocket.

Oh and hey they recycled a classic Bugs Bunny gag using one of their own protagonists as the butt because why not.

Eight Deadly Words said and done.

I third Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister. The two main characters are (at the beginning of the series) a newly minted Cabinet Minister and his chief career bureaucrat, whose job is, in part, to show the new guy how things are run, and to keep him from changing things.

In the sequel show, the Minister we've been following gets promoted to Prime Minister, with his bureaucrat following.

Both shows were made in the 1980's, and were a favorite of then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. It's the only sit-com I've ever seen that used the word "Quango". One of the creators is quoted as saying "there was not a single scene set in the House of Commons because government does not take place in the House of Commons. Some politics and much theatre takes place there. Government happens in private. As in all public performances, the real work is done in rehearsal, behind closed doors. Then the public and the House are shown what the government wishes them to see."

Politics, not in media, but in novels: Allan Drury did a really good job of verisimilitude in the novels starting with ADVISE AND CONSENT. I read them back in the 60s, and still remember just how convoluted he showed lawmaking to be. Sort of like Dorothy Dunnett without the language, history, and romance.

I just heard 'Thanksgetting' used to describe the day before Thanksgiving, when everybody's getting out of town and trying to get home at the same time.

That was a Verizon ad. Not sure if they were having a sale or not. I never listen to the details.

Xopher (308): That was probably the same ad, since the one I semi-heard was from Verizon. I was trying very hard not to really listen, so I may have the details wrong.

It's still a horrible word.

It's still a horrible word.

No disagreement from me on that point.

Tom Whitmore@307: Drury's is a name I know from his two historical novels set in ancient Egypt - A God Against the Gods and Return to Thebes - and, as I remember, there's a fair amount of politicking in those, too, in among all the other... err... umm... details of the court of Akhenaten.

A surprising amount of the better milSF stuff, too, goes into politics and the reasons behind all the fighting. (Obviously, I'm not talking about the boring stuff where all civilians are cowards and all politicians are corrupt... but some milSF has pretty serious thinking behind it, and the political manoeuvring is sometimes more fun than the battle scenes.)

Happy Thanksgiving!

Randall made another world. Ignore the flashing red warning to "return to the game area". ;-)

Thanks to all (esp. Carol, Jacque) for the suggestions! Sorry for the dead air, lot of panic to get everything done before I went. Landed in Denver, staying at a lovely tiny place. Already went to two things on people's lists - and so, again, thanks! Also: with the way the public transport works, I think I will take a trip to Boulder - just for the fun of it.

I think I may do nothing today, in the inimitable "what am I thankful for?" tradition. On that note: Happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate in November.

duckbunny: One thing I just found, from a "side-eye" view of politics: "Absolute Power" (the BBC series, not the movie). A story not of politics per se, but of the manipulation behind the politics. One warning: the main characters are self-centered to the point of abusiveness; sometimes it bites them, but not often enough.

Buddha Buck @306: You've missed out the.*junior* civil servant, who constantly needs instructing in the ways of the world by his very senior boss (and whose POV in the books is that of the Head of the Civil Service reminiscing about his younger days.

This is just to say
I love the distelfink
Bedecking the Google doodle
Today.

It took me a perhaps shamefully long time to realize that this is xkcd, and the game area might be larger than I thought. I got stuck in the big black tower to the west, though.

A side note, does anyone know where I might find a cartoony/chibi-style drawing of Oliver Cromwell? Because I really need more embroidery projects to ignore.

I couldn't figure out the XKCD game well enough to exit the initial game area.

Use the "up" arrow key. A lot. And press it many times in rapid succession; don't just hold it down.

I liked the corridor peristalsis.

XKCD: Also, there's at least one hidden passage to a secret area under the lava (there's a second hidden area there, but I couldn't get from there to anywhere visible). And wow, that starship is a whole realm unto itself.... I got 142 coins, but I doubt that's all of them.

Indeed, someone early in the forums got 154, and they didn't even find the volcano lair... oh there, someone hit the source and says there are nuhaqerqfvkglavar.

Also, hidden passages show as color #010101 instead of #000000, so you can see them by turning your contrast way up.

I didn't figure out how to tell how many coins I have. How do you know?

Tom Whitmore @ #323:

By returning to the play area and depositing your coins (however, that resets ALL the coins, so...).

Tried that. It didn't say anything anywhere I could see (or hear) about how many coins I'd gotten.

Tom @325: Just to the right of your starting position it says "Deposit coins here".

Yes, I've been there and seen that. There just is no place where the number of coins shows up, in my system and under my observation. I've deposited coins there several times. No number.

For me there's a pop-up, listing coins and time taken.

I see the text with coins and time taken in yellow letters on the black area below the game, blinking up for a pretty short time (and I just gave up on exploring that starship, it's truly massive)

I certainly don't see it using Firefox on a Mac.

I didn't get either the coin counter or the red letters telling me to "return to game area" the first time I played. After I restarted my computer (for unrelated reasons) and ran the game in a new chrome window, I did. Weird.

I never got red letters telling me to return to the game area, either. Ah well.

Julie L @ 292: I haven't tried the JoC recipe -- wanted to start with something closer, if possible, because it has been a \long/ time since I had these. (IIRC, last made them for Disclave's International Cookie Conspiracy early in the 1980's.) Definitely domed (heaping teaspoonful dropped on sheet was 1.5-2" around and easily .5" high when cooked), not quite crumbly but break smoothly&easily rather than abruptly (i.e, not a snap -- rather like Archway's molasses cookies if you've seen those).
    I should probably just try a single batch (or even half-batch, vs the minimum-double batch my family always made) with added coffee & vinegar (and flour to balance, or reduce molasses a bit but use the strongest) and see what I get. It's not as if I shouldn't have the time, especially with the weather about to be too vile for outdoor projectile practice....

Leah Miller @ 299: IMO you're much too generous; ISTM that Halloween grew as marketroids saw its commercial potential. (cf Halloween looking to me in 1997 like it was taking over from Guy Fawkes in the UK, because Halloween is mostly about buying (costumes, candy, ...) instead of improvising a raggy-looking dummy and shilling for pennies).

Before this week I had never heard of Janet Cardiff, or her installation "Forty Part Motet". I'm in California visiting my mother, and she wanted to go to a craft fair in Fort Mason, in north San Francisco. The installation is also, in its travels, in a gallery there.

It's a setting of Thomas Tallis's motet "Spem in Alium", which I know I've heard Xopher mention before. Forty singers make up the ensemble, and each of them is recorded separately and played back on a separate loudspeaker. You can sit in the middle and listen as though the chorus were all around you; or you can wander up to one speaker or another, and listen primarily to one voice.

It was...breathtaking. When the performance ended, everyone just stood silent for a few seconds. No other reaction seemed appropriate.

We stayed through it twice. We had time constraints, or I might have wanted to stay longer. (I could totally imagine myself spending a whole afternoon.)

The installation is in San Francisco through mid-January. I don't know where it's going after that, but I can say to anyone here that if you can get to it, do not miss it.

Open Thready: Peacocks are an invasive species. I don't have nearly the flamboyance to start the band "Peacock Invasion." Alas.

Mycroft W @314: I'm in Boulder, if you need a local guide, and haven't been through town yet. I was asleep all day today, so (obvy) inaccessible. I'll try to keep an eye on my email, next two days.* (Phone is an unreliable medium for me.)

* See bottom of page linked to my name here.

Diatryma @317: One (1) each chutney, by your command.

David Goldfarb @334: That performance sounds magnificent. I heard a life performance of Spem in Alium last year. They had a magnificent round room, and the choir was distributed in 8 different directions in the room, with the audience at least partly inside the circle where the choir was.

But obviously your experience there depended heavily on where you were seated. Zooming in and out of the different voices as you described? What a great idea!

I have a usage question.

I learned 'startle' as a transitive verb: He startled me or I was startled. More recently, I have been seeing it used intransitively: He startled; I would have phrased that as He started.

Is this a recent change? A regional difference? Did I mislearn it and misuse it for ~40 years?

Mary Aileen, my impression is that it's a recent change, which I've seen discussed elsewhere as well. I've actually noticed it happening to my own usage. When I write 'She started' in text, it feels unfinished; I'm so used to 'start' being used with an infinitive, that even knowing it's the correct (for "traditionally used in my dialect" values of "correct") usage, it reads as ambiguous and jarring to me. Whereas 'startle' feels like it might as well have a middle voice usage. (The oven baked the cake, the cake baked in the oven. The noise startled me, I startled at the noise.)

To what degree it's becoming acceptable in various places that want more formal language, or how wide-spread it is, I couldn't say. My experience with it is almost entirely in casual/amateur fiction writing.

Fade Manley (340): Thanks. That fits my experience, except that I still find the intransitive usage very jarring. I definitely see it in fanfic, but I'm fairly sure I've seen it in professional fiction as well.

Mary Aileen and Fade, I wonder if the adjectival use in biomedical literature ("startle response") has had an influence?

(On a not quite entirely unrelated note, one of my favorite medical terms, "Jumping Frenchmen of Maine", is the name of an abnormally strong startle response, and not, as it might appear, something that Captain Haddock is given to saying when startled.)

Lila (342): Now I want to read a fic in which Captain Haddock exclaims "Jumping Frenchmen of Maine!"

Mary Aileen: similarly, I long to hear Robin say "Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, Batman!"

I have just received the following email, which I reproduce here for your information and (if you like) action:

Dear all

For mental health reasons I have been very quiet online for a long time. I apologise to those of you I've failed to keep in touch with via e-mail or Twitter. I'm not in a good way.

However, that doesn't mean I'm not thinking about you all. I have been learning to draw, which I am finding therapeutic; and I have a little something of an artistic nature for Advent and Christmas which I'd be glad to share with anyone who is interested. It's my Christmas card to you all. And Advent calendar, in a way.

If anyone would like to receive it, Abi has my e-mail address. Please let me know, preferably before Wednesday. Alternatively, I will be posting the images on Deviant Art, where I go by Ottokar von Luftschiff. I can handle that site, because people don't talk about much other than art, which isn't stressful.

Love and best wishes to all of you.

Mongoose

I am, in fact, happy to do this task. abi at this domain will work.

Well. The CPAP I got back in, I dunno… August? …has been working quite well. I'll find out how well tonight, when I sleep without it, having driven 270 miles and remembering everything but the leather bit that straps it to my face. I hope I'll get a decent night's sleep, because in the morning, I'm driving 270 miles back home, and Monday I go back to school.

School's going great, by the way. This art teacher is actually teaching me how to draw. It's the first real instruction I've gotten in the subject in three decades of (not constant) college.

Leather? Huh. All of my masks have had cloth straps adjustable with Velcro.

I had one of those moments, a while ago this year, when you realize something that ought to have been obvious. (Why don't we have a word for that?) I wash the frontal cushion on my mask daily, so that skin oils don't interfere with the seal. I've had problems with water getting into parts of the mask that I can't easily dry, leading to mold growth. The realization I had? That the cushion is detachable. So now I take it off, and the water doesn't get into the places that don't dry.

Here's hoping one night of bad sleep doesn't do significant harm. (It probably won't.)

one of those moments, a while ago this year, when you realize something that ought to have been obvious. (Why don't we have a word for that?)

Where I come from, that's known as a BFO.*

* Blinding Flash of the Obvious

Am I the only one who gets a 404 on Jacque's link @337?

Reading on File770 about seed bombs and why they are (mostly) useless and (sometimes) harmful. Perhaps, The Martian in the movie theater will remind people of the importance of good soil--in two of the senses of that word.

There is only one place on the land I use that is compacted. Much of the rest has a very high carbon-to-nitrogen ratio from multiple years of trees and tree leaves.

Our local government has been putting swales into public areas (like road medians) in an attempt to control heavy rains and run off.

LadyKay @ #350 -

A quote that's been going around on Facebook says "Humanity owes its existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains."

349
No - I think that 'orig03' should be at the end, or at least not at the beginning, and it's borking the link.

Idumea, I do hope that our resident herpestid is feeling much better soon.

P J Evans @ #353

Ditto here, this moose has much affection/respect for the mongoose and hopes they're OK.

Is there anything a somewhat reprehensible ungulate can do to help?

Bruce H. @349: 404?

I just checked; it's definitely there. It's not impossible there's a permissions issue, though....

It is a link directly to the jpg; try the deviantart page, and see if that works any better.

Thank you, Jacque. That one worked for me.

#345 ::: Idumea Arbacoochee, Fond of Herpestids

Thank you for relaying that message from Mongoose. I am gently wishing for the best for that Herpestid.

Not a great night sleeping, but I was able to get up in the morning and drive the fourth 320 mile trip in eight days. NY to MA, visit relatives (including two second cousins I'd never met), take Dad back to NY for a visit, then back to MA, sleep, and drive back.

I was able to have a meal or two in the former town of residence, including korma at Pintu's and (so sorely missed) tortellini soup and a braunschweiger on rye at the Celery Stalk. I played piano/violin duos with my aunt. I organized an excursion to the Pease Collection of Historic Instruments (where Geri Sullivan decided to purchase a handsome deco accordion). All in all, a very active vacation. Now I can go back and enjoy the rest of the semester, which is well nigh over, alas.

Idumea Arbacoochee #345: Pray convey my best wishes to Mongoose.

Kip W re: CPAP

I sympathize with the inadvertent experiment in CPAP withdrawal. I've been using one since just before Worldcon and would have said my judgment was "probably helping a little, hard to tell, couldn't hurt". (My apnea was just barely into the "moderate" zone.) But I decided to do without it the night before my current NYC trip, so that I wouldn't have to deal with packing it in my early-morning fumbling toward the airport. Going without even for one night makes me more certain that it's useful.

Kip W #358: Sounds like an excellent visit with family and old haunts! But now to rest....

Another sending good wishes to Mongoose.

Sending good wishes and some spoons (I happen to have a few extra this week) to Mongoose.

Best wishes to our herpestid.

Also hoping that Mongoose does better soon. I miss our local herpestid.

mongoose: may your burrow be cozy, your nights clear, and all the cobras slow and inattentive.

CHip, #333: I don't care what's driving the Halloween push; anything that prevents Christmas from colonizing October is fine with me. November is pretty much a lost cause already.

Best wishes for Mongoose here as well.

The 'leather' CPAP harness turns out to be some sort of man-made material with a friendly felt-like inner side. I am something of an amateur magician with a small audience. I excel at fooling myself, sometimes for years.

Was it mentioned here that the Higgins Armory in Worcester, Massachusetts, has closed? It was a lovely building that looked like riveted steel on the outside, and I recall seeing it with our host and hostess on one occasion. They had some cool armaments, including a number of suits of armor. Sounds like I'm working up to a pun, but you'll have to make your own.

Mongoose! Best wishes to you are speeding your way. They include wishes for strength, spoons, and fun.

Adding best wishes for Mongoose, and hopes that any buses ridden will not catch fire.

War on People roundup,
you win some, you lose some" edition:
Alabama plays Planned Parenthood's legal fees over attempt to defund them.... while Colorado cops defend PP against a terrorist.

Back in Alabama, A group of police whistleblowers are trying again to get action (after 15 years) on the planting of drugs on young black men by Neoconfederate cops.

More recently, Chicago Police destroy evidence in execution of 17-year-old, but the State Attorney General is calling for a Federal investigation. And partly in response to the shooting, a teenage videoblogger has renounced conservativism, apparently having realized that he's got the wrong end of the (boom-)stick.

Best wishes for Mongoose.

Increasingly suspecting that, for various reasons, which might be related to not formally diagnosed executive dysfunction, I am simply not suited at this time to 40 hr/wk, 50 wk/yr work. But it is more stressful to be broke than it is to go in to an office for 8 hours a day, so any alternative would have to be relatively-high-paying part-time. Seems likely these are highly sought-after work conditions for a lot of people, though, and not easy to get.

I was hoping to get a bit of advice from the collective wisdom. I have computer and programming skills. Is consulting or contract sysadminning a viable solution, if I have the skills and knowledge? How brilliant do I actually need to be to be a successful niche consultant? Friends elsewhere advise that for contract sysadminning I will want to learn Windows Server (possibly getting a certification?), which makes some sense. But there is so much to learn, it is kind of overwhelming.

Alternately, is it normal to feel overwhelmed by the energy demands of a full-time job, and will I get used to it?

I think this goes here, but it might provide some fodder for the "I see you like science fiction" thread.

People who don't usually read Whatever might want to have a quick look this week-
Scalzi's doing his annual posts where authors, craftspeople, and fans can suggest things that people might want to buy for winter gifting opportunities; so far there've been the trad-published and self-published writers' threads, today will be crafts, music, etc, and tomorrow a chance for fans of anything to enthuse about what they like.

I've bought a couple of books and got kindle samples of a couple more from the author threads (specifically: Linesman by S.K. Dunstall, a short story by Patricia Bowne, Hanzai Japan (short sff crime stories from Hakaisoru), Planetfall by Emma Newman- I think I'd heard about this one in other places as well, but the blurb on Whatever reminded me to look it up properly- Derelict by LJ Cohen, and Santuario by LJ Cohen.)
Also Rosemary Kirstein pointed out that there's a sale on the ebook of The Steerswoman, if you've been meaning to get hold of that.

ohnosecond: Santuario by G.B. Gordon.

How a number of people have gotten through times of despair. Check out the link to livejournal, too.

Dear people,

I have passed your good wishes on to our Mongoose. I hope they find them of use.

Kip W @ 358

Somehow, I'd missed the geographical connection. Cross the river and leave off the directional indicator to get to the town where I live.

SamChevre, it was nice to drive through the old place to see what was still there. The second time through I got off the Pike at the town of buggy whips and drove on, I guess, 20. I didn't manage to eat at the White Hut. Good to see that the Big letters, particularly E and Y, still have their place there, too.

HLN: Area retiree wants to know why the heck they can't put screens on the intakes of jet engines.
It's a long story. I had been going thru a bad mood about my life story, so by way of distraction I looked into one of my favorite odds-and-ends blogs, and it linked to a video of huge chunks of ice falling off a tower, filmed by people safe under a roof, and that video site in turn linked to one of a demonstration of how the jet wind or whatever you call it from a 747 can send [empty] cars and buses flying like candy wrappers--so far so good, I'm a bit of a science nut--but there were thumbnails of still others, and one of them had a title (apparently by an ESL writer) about a man being killed at an airport in Abu Dhabi and you saw a little image of what looked like a jet engine, you know, round and white and many-bladed--except this one was crimson.
No I don't want to watch that one, even after the fact, I said to myself; I had once read of something of the sort happening somewhere but I didn't know it had happened more than once. So I got my eyeballs off line and went off to the library to check on the river, but when I came back I had to check the email and that was when the provider's home page told me there'd been another mass shooting.
I read that thing you linked to from '05 in the Not Paris post, but it hasn't worked yet. Also talked to a friend and that helped a little but not much.
I guess it's another reason I haven't been on a plane in 37 years. But I'm a bit rattled right now, in ways I can't even explain...

Angiportus @379:

People ask that a lot, as you'd think that screens would be an easy solution to engine ingestion of birds, debris, or the occasional person.

The trouble is that screens strong enough to do good would be heavy and block a significant amount of airflow, all of which cut down on the efficiency of the plane.

Also, given the pressures involved -- you might just strain the offending object through the screen (if the screen wires are strong enough and thin enough). Not pleasant for anyone involved.

estelendur @372: It's definitely possible to make a living as a contract sysadmin. I know more work-from-home programmers than sysadmins, but mostly because I'm a programmer and generally know more programmers than sysadmins. Because of the sorts of places I've worked, more of the sysadmins I know work with Linux than with Windows servers, so I don't know much about the Microsoft side of things.

The most common path seems to be to work on-site at a company, and then either move away, or stay behind when the company relocates, but I also know people who've gotten remote jobs initially. Contracting is a little harder, though I know people making a go of that, too.

Some places to look:

https://weworkremotely.com/

My own employer, ZipRecruiter.com, has a bunch of remote programmers, a few of whom are towards the DevOps or sysadmin side of things. Despite that, we don't yet have a way to search for remote jobs on our site, though we've talked about adding that feature.

If you want to describe your background (what sort of sysadmining you've done, whether you know a little programming or web design, etc.), I might be able to give more pointers, either here or via email (firstnamelastname at the mail service of Google).

Here's wishing Mongoose a sumptuous cobra feast.

estelendur @372: will I get used to it?

I never have. I did a 40hrs/wk for a couple of years at my previous job. One of the few times in my life I actually felt like I had "enough" money. But in addition to being exhausting, I never had any time. It was awful.

Blessedly, my current job came out of the gate defined as 32hrs/wk. Which is still a but much; I prefer 30hrs/wk. The downside, of course, is that I'm chronically broke.

Tom Whitmore: the slo mo guys

"Slow Mo" :-\

estelendur, #372: is it normal to feel overwhelmed by the energy demands of a full-time job, and will I get used to it?

If you haven't been working full-time -- and especially if you never have -- then I can see how it would feel overwhelming. I spent 20 years doing 8-to-5 and didn't have any problems with it. But then I moved down here and changed my lifestyle, and when I got into a show a few years back that was effectively a "day job" for 10 days, it flat wore me out. I would get home too exhausted to do anything besides eat, check e-mail, and sleep. Now, part of that may have been because I'm an introvert and I was having to be "on" all day long (my previous full-time work was programming and involved a lot of time alone in my office), but I am convinced that some of it was just having gotten out of the habit of being a full-time employee.

#379, screens on engines:

(Note: Roadkill, kind of disgusting.)

My dad once hit a pigeon with our old Volvo. Got out, couldn't find anything but feathers, concluded it must have got away. Went to clean up later, took off the radiator grill, discovered he had been wrong.

Given the extent to which jet engine > moving car, I have to concur with Tom Whitmore @381.

#379 see also "Daunt stopper" from early jet engine development.

Also, a grill would tend to, and this is one of my favorite technical verbs, turbulate the incoming air. There are times you want turbulence, but this isn't one of them.

Jeremy Leader @382: I'm not even necessarily looking for remote work, as long as I don't have to move; I do fine in an office, I just don't do fine at 36-40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year. Hence wondering about contracting, where potentially I can be on site for X much more time working with it before I would be comfortable using it for anything important; I've touched enough Java, Python, and Scheme to be reasonably comfortable with the syntax but not enough to have any idea what good practices in those languages are.

I run Debian testing on one of my laptops and do a little bit of server log-diving at work. My workstation runs Windows because of the dialect of Smalltalk we use (Dolphin), which is Windows-only. While I don't have much sysadmin experience as such, I'm partly looking for pointers on what is good to learn or vital to know, so that I can learn it. :P

Jacque @383: My current job asks me to do 35-40 hrs/wk, which is much better than previous job (42.5 hrs/wk, and horrible for other reasons) but still more sustained brain power than I actually have in me. But I stay in the office that long anyway, because... money. (I'm sort of dramatically underpaid for a software developer, but the working conditions are so easy on my psyche that I'm gonna stick it out until the company wouldn't be actively screwed if I quit.) But yeah.... never having any time, that is me.

Lee @385: I've been working full-time for about a year and a half, which feels like it ought to have been long enough to get used to it. But maybe not.

estelendur @372: If you go independent, you will need to spend time on marketing (finding clients), billing and taxes. Also you will need to cover your own social security, health insurance and retirement. I have relatives who are self-employed. It works for them. I seem to be more suited to working at a company (although not literally in a suit). I hope you find what works for you.

estelendur -- check out JobsUSA, the federal government is always looking for IT people.

Any recommendations for sf or mysteries that include somewhat about clothes-making pre-1200?

I'm thinking about a gift for a friend.

Offhand, all I can think of is The Dreamweavers by Margaret Ball and The Spellcoats by Dianna Wynne Jones.

Thanks to the several who answered my engineering question above. I can't say I feel much better about it, but I'm a tiny bit less ignorant I guess.

Nancy Lebovitz @ 392

My wife's suggestions:
Many of the Brother Cadfael mysteries (England/Wales, 1100's)

Too late but maybe of interest:
The Mantlemass Chronicles (just after the War of the Roses)

AKICIML:
I am planning a day trip to NYC on Saturday to take my 5-year-old to the Bronx Zoo, coming in by train. What else should I consider doing?

Nancy @392 --

If you haven't already considered it: Hild by Nicola Griffith. Takes place in seventh-century Britain, includes a great deal of domestic detail including period spinning, weaving, sewing, etc.

estelendur:
Here's my experience. I spent a couple years doing contract software development, and you indeed want to structure your rates such that you get roughly a full year's worth of salaried pay if you work a half year as a contractor. Such rates are considered reasonable, and that's the good part. Another minor benefit is that certain things you'd spend money on anyway - home computer purchase or upgrades, possibly internet connectivity, etc. - become deductible business expenses.

While on one level all of that is kind of nice, my experience was that it introduced a whole new level and kind of stress. I was spending the other six months per year trying one way or another to line up that half year's work, because if I didn't get that lined up somehow, it seemed likely it wasn't going to happen. In essence it's a sales job, and I found that a lot harder than programming. I knew that; I'd willingly signed up for it; but it was stressful nonetheless. Further, I was in fact having a general sense of executive dysfunction at the time and this made for a really bad combination. (Hours spent replaying Half-Life 2, randomly browsing the web, etc. do not result in contract jobs magically appearing.) You also kind of need to understand at least the general principles of business and bookkeeping/accounting, even if you are paying a bookkeeper, so you can operate as an S Corporation or proprietorship, keep your books correctly, dish out the appropriate chunk of your income to yourself while filing all the right taxes, etc. etc. I do understand those and have a very good sense of what I should and shouldn't do as a business owner, but even so that definitely creates some extra work with the minor associated stress of keeping on top of all that.

After a couple years of that, one of my contract customers wanted me to come on full time. Going back to regular employment meant a slight drop in net annual pay - which was made up by raises and bonuses within a couple years - and a pretty strong reduction in my general stress level.

Your mileage may vary, as they say.

I'm retired now, but but here's some of what I went through.

If you are a fully independent contractor, yeah, you have to do all the administrative crap - bill them, pay estimated taxes, etc.

If you go through an agency, you often have a choice of doing W2 where the agency deducts taxes and FICA or of going 1099, where you handle it. Either way, the agency gets its cut. You often won't know what the bill rate that the agency is charging.

When I last did a contract, it was W2, and I got $50/hour. When I did a totally independent gig before that, I bill $80/hour. It all depends on the market and how hot your skill level is. I known a few independents with really hot stuff who billed $200/hour.

Here's something I found: http://www.itstaff.state.nc.us/ConvenienceContracts/SuppStaff/CategoryRates.asp

I am thinking--not that idly about rewriting The Martian at a lower reading level, maybe much lower. At about the Stage 4 Easy Reader level. (Just starting paragraphs). My nephews are fascinated by Mars.

If it is going to be done by a professional, I wouldn't do it. But how do I find that out?

@Nancy Lebovitz no. 392: There are lots of details about textile production, conservation, etc., scattered throughout the Brother Cadfael series by Ellis Peters, which is set in 11th-century England and Wales. In particular you might want to look at The Sanctuary Sparrow, and One Corpse Too Many, in which items of clothing provide vital leads.

LadyKay @ 398:

By completely amazing coincidence, today I ran across an announcement by Andy Weir that he's adapting The Martian for school-aged kids.

Also, I finished reading The Martian today and it was amazing. I hope the movie's just as good. Judging by comments in the previous open thread, it should be.

KeithS #400: My favorite line from the comments: "I told my 13 year old that he could use all the swear words he wanted the next time he was stranded on Mars." Sounds about right....

But I think this is not going as far back as LadyKay was considering.

Saw The Good Dinosaur this afternoon.

I was astonished. I didn't know Pixar had it in 'em.

It was terrible. Oh, it was gorgeous to look at. But it seems like they totally forgot their commitment to Story. The script was a bizarre pastiche of the most hackneyed '50s and '60s movie tropes—except for the bits that made no sense at all.

::sigh::

I suppose it was inevitable. :-(

I too loved that swearing comment.

Jacque: that's because it was a Disney movie, not a Pixar movie.

Nancy Lebovitz @ 392 ...
Any recommendations for sf or mysteries that include somewhat about clothes-making pre-1200?

Hm... that puts the Dame Frevisse books out of era (they start in 1431) -- likewise the various books written by Candace Robb, set in the 13th century.

A number of the books written by Rosemary Sutcliffe are probably era-appropriate (but they're generally considered to be YA).

IIRC there's a bit in the Doomsday Book, depending on the extent to which 'clothes making' needs to be involved.

The Druid's Tune is again YA, but does have some memorable (although I can't speak to accuracy) descriptions of clothing and creating thereof.

The bits I've mentioned are specifically european -- is that where you'd be wanting to look?

I'd read that "The Good Dinosaur" was tossed around and rewritten a few times. Early impression was that it was a kiddie entry along the lines of "Cars." That one had pretty scenery and a nothing plot too . . .

Elliott Mason @404: Then why does the Pixar logo appear at 0:17 of the trailer?

Found something cool:
A cool popular presentation of bacterial/unicellular types. Clicking on the cartoon version gets you a dossier (with a real image of the critter). The "bad" bugs get cartoons with teeth. ;-)

Pixar has made commercial duds before. Disney Animation has made some winners. I'm not worried about either.

I still need to watch "Inside Out" again. That film was an achievement. It wasn't made to sell toys.

Jacque @407: Since the merger what logo is on it is not descriptive of what quality of movie it is.

Frozen was a Pixar movie, really. The Good Dinosaur is classic Disney, made in all the broken ways Disney has always made movies.

Elliott, #410: made in all the broken ways Disney has always made movies

That's an argument I haven't heard before. Could you expand on it a bit?

Lee: What was revolutionary about Pixar qua Pixar, Pixar in its heydey, and how Brad likes to make movies (which is now true of some "Disney" productions since he's head of animation there) is a creative team gets built and stays iwth the movie, and gets to workshop it out and really make it good, with skilled, empathetic curation from the higher-ups (but without sticking their oars in to micromanage). Each working group is a ministudio with creative control, but with full access to the expertise and resources of the whole studio.

In the Pixar Method, each movie is a love project that has the love of everyone working on it poured into it for five straight years.

At Disney the movies are made in tranches and basically everyone works on everything in tiny broken segments, disconnected from anyone else's. Management gives notes, changes scripts, and generally dumbs the whole process down to what they imagine a 'normal' audience in 'middle America' will want to spend money on.

This is basically how all Hollywood movies are made, for the most part, in the big studios, and it's how Disney has long worked. They don't take risks. They don't privilege story and character over ... anything else.

@Nancy Lebovitz no. 492: Just reread The Rose Rent. That one features a weaving business.

Elliott Mason @410: Since the merger what logo is on it is not descriptive of what quality of movie it is.

I would say no longer descriptive. Otherwise, yours is a true statement. They held it together pretty well while Jobs* was still around to glare at the Disney execs. Since then, um, somewhat less so.

Your @412 makes me even more afraid for SW:TFA.** The low-altitude B-52 squadron level of industry "buzz" leaves me rather less than optimistic about its quality. Oh, sure, it'll be pretty; but that's the easy part these days.

* Whatever else there is to be said about the man, he was able to make quality happen.

** I don't know what to think about Disney's hoovering up of all of our cultural assets, except to be very afraid, in a hard to pin down*** sort of way.

*** I mean, aside from its not-so-subtle attempts to monopolize cultural vision,**** and all.

**** There's a better term*^5 for what I mean, but I'm out of brain.

*^5 "Cultural Imperialism"? "Cultural plunder"?

Jessica Jones, on the other hand ... sweet holy Creation—!

How can something be so hilarious—and simultaneously make you want to just crawl out of your skin?—! Somebody really knows their stalkers.

And David Tennant. Wow. I mean, just. wow.

#400 ::: KeithS :
I looked carefully at that link. And then I wrote a post asking about a younger version, which would actually be a group of stories because the attention span doesn't stay at that age.

Oh well, I may have to build it if I want it.

WRT Jessica Jones: Xvytenir vf jub Puneyvr K jbhyq unir tebja hc gb or vs gur Gunfvnaf unqa'g pnhtug hc jvgu uvz.

I just got back from a relatively-shallow dive into TV Tropes. They were discussing "Arc Words" (e.g. "From Beneath You It Devours" or "Save the Cheerleader, Save the World" ) and they mentioned Gossip Girl: "Three words. Eight letters. Say them and I'm yours."

I started off with the obvious "Is that it?" and then I thought, "What show would that go with?" So here's the challenge. Pick three words, eight letters, and a show.

ostentatiously drops a gauntlet, exits

I'll go with a movie.

"It's a trap!"

Return of the Jedi

Agents of SHIELD, an early series: Is Ward good?

Oops, too quick and therefore too long. "Is Ward us?"works better.

"Let me he'p." from STA' TREK.

"Wut U want?" -- Bab'lin 5

"Make it so" ST:TNG

Unfortunately, "boldly go" is only two words.

"Wesen r us" Grimm.

"Beam me up!"

I'd just like to say that I am SICK of having my grammatical editing second-guessed by people who don't know an emdash from a crowbar.

Sigh. I need a new job.

Alternatively for the empire strikes back: "I'm your pa"

Xopher: A project for your (no doubt copious) free time: Find or write explanations for the points in question (a la Jon Singer's wonderful essays—if the links worked, Jon ::looks sternly over glasses::), boil them down to a paragraph or two. Maybe add droll clip-art, a la Ashleigh Brilliant.

Print these onto 3x5 cards, and keep nearby to hand out whenever one of your back-seat copy editors annoys you.

Then publish (and/or sell!) them online, for all your copy editor friends to use and enjoy, too!

"So it goes." —Slaughterhouse-Five

"Let's do it!" —Animal House

I have spent the weekend marking term papers. I reached the depth of despair when I read this less-than-brilliant offering:

Although the façade of them seeming to share the power to the people both the systems are riddled with and economic and political structures that calls for the government to be in control of all the capital and industry in the country in an effort to remove the economic equality.

I have managed to keep my resolution to stay away from the hard stuff until the final exams are completed, but it is truly difficult so to do.

I had an almost-full container of ricotta cheese left over from making Thanksgiving stuff. I asked my mother if she had any ideas. Turns out that my grandparent's restaurant, Fugazzi's, served a sort of cheesecake pie.

I have two left over graham cracker pie shelfs left over as well, so now I have two of the pies baking.

"I used to have a knock your socks off ricotta pie recipe using grated orange rind, eggs and a frozen bottom crust; our waiter, Paul, in Fugazzi's used to make it and the customers loved it. Found Lydia's recipe!

Preheat oven to 350 degrees

1 large pie crust ....10 inch
2 tbsp. grated orange peel
3 cups Ricotta
1 tbsp. vanilla
1/4 cup flour
1/8 tsp. salt
2 tbsp. grated lemon peel
1 cup sugar
4 eggs, well beaten
aisins, if desired

Defrost pie crust.

In large bowl, combine all ingredients gently and well.

Pour into crust; bake 50-60 minutes.

An inserted knife should come outclean when it's done.

PS: I plump the raisins up by simmering in a small amount of water an cinnamon.

I decided I wanted to make tacos de chorizo at home. I've made it twice now, and enjoyed both times.

The first time, I had some cubed chorizo, some onion, soft corn tortillas, and salsa that incorporated some amount of pico de gallo. Sort of a compromise. I chopped the onion fine and sauteed it till it started to turn, then added the chorizo, and when that was cooked enough, I had supper. Simple and effective.

The second time, I had chorizo in sausage skins, which I disrobed and cut up. I finely chopped onion and some poblano pepper and sauteed those like the first time. When it was sufficiently cooked, I put in a bit of chopped-up chilpotle in spicy adobo sauce (this came in a can—Goya—but I had to chop it myself, using one pepper, about a teaspoon) and stirred, then I added onion that hadn't been sauteed, and had it in the soft tacos with some salsa verde (also Goya, I seem to recall). I crumbled some queso fresco over it. That was good, too.

Next time, I'll use the same ingredients as the second time. Since the chorizo wants to stay intact and not crumble, I might run it through a cheese grater next time, to try and get the texture I've always liked.

I was guided by a recipe I found online, though the final decisions were mine.

Fragano, #432: Whoa. That's not even into "yes, that's a sentence" territory.

@everyone playing my game: Delightful!

... "I am Groot."

"He is dead." -- Game of Thrones

"No, he's not" -- Game of Thrones

Well, for one particular value of "he", maybe not. But there are at least a dozen others I could mention for which he most sincerely is.

I and Thou.
— The Left Hand of Darkness

By the way, Patrick, Teresa and I were discussing the text in the original post (which I had forgotten was there! Sorry!). In particular, this:

...in memory of his good service done to the earl in raising the siege of the Welsh-men, who had beset the earl in his castle of Rothelent in Flintshire; for the constable having got a promiscuous rabble of such like persons together, and marching towards the said castle, the Welsh, supposing a great army to be coming, raised their siege and fled. [...] that rabble consisted of players, fidlers, and shoe-makers.

I pointed out that this is the plot of at least two movies: A Bug's Life and Galaxy Quest (It was Martin that first pointed out that those two have the same plot.)

Except maybe the shoe-makers stayed home for the movie versions. And, um, made shoes?

I don't know if this will add to or subtract from Fragano's despair, but I'm pleased to say that I'm giving my mother her first ever academic citation in the term paper I'm currently writing. I am crediting her as "Ann (Lastname), cozy mystery enthusiast".

This is the for the same professor for whom I cited a plastic bag last summer, so I think it will be all right.

I hope.

HLN: Area man visits Finland; goes further north than ever in his life before (Jyvaskyla); enjoys academic business, but fazed by darkness at 9 am; returns to Helsinki; wakes in time for sunrise; and says 'thank goodness it gets light at a reasonable time down here'.

I pointed out that this is the plot of at least two movies: A Bug's Life and Galaxy Quest

Also, Seven Samurai.

Abi, it's been nearly thirty years since I saw it, but isn't that also the plot of "Three Amigos"? I remember something about Our Theatrical Heroes rallying a village to make costumes to imply an army, in order to dissuade attack. Unless I'm thinking of a different movie....

Also, Seven Samurai.
Though it's an influence, I don't remember that trickery about the number or nature of the warriors appears in that one (other than Mifune's character claiming to be a samurai).

Every year after doing Nutcracker I say I'm going to take the Monday after the show off. And every following year, I don't take the Monday after the show off. I need tea. Lots of tea. Also, to remember to take the Monday after the show off.

Xopher Halftongue @ 428:

On the other hand, I got a document from a vendor to review that was so bad that halfway through I gave up and left a note in the margin that basically said, "get an editor". On the front I left a rather large paragraph dryly detailing the document's numerous deficiencies. My boss loved it. Some of the sentences in it were nearly as bad as those produced by some of Fragano's students.

Speaking of which...

Fragano Ledgister @ 432:

At least they spelled façade correctly?

I saw Spotlight (a movie about the team of journalists at the Boston Globe who revealed the pedophile priest scandal) last night. It was excellent.

I wrote a thing.

Actually, I had to rename that file, so that link won't work. Try this.

I wanted to remind you that, on December 14, I'll be shutting down my "Making Light and Faces" photo gallery. No point in my paying LJ for a blog i don't use anymore beyond the basic free stuff so off my pics will go. The gallery can be found HERE.

I wanted to remind you that, on December 14, I'll be shutting down my "Making Light and Faces" photo gallery. No point in my paying LJ for a blog i don't use anymore beyond the basic free stuff so off my pics will go. The gallery can be found HERE.

abi @441: It was Martin that first pointed out that those two have the same plot.

Except for the shoe-makers.

Carrie S. @444: Also, Seven Samurai.

Except for the players, fidlers, and shoe-makers. :-)

Xopher @ 428: are the carpers native speakers of English? One of my unhappinesses with my former employer was their shutdown of the local doc group, which was replaced by people in another country. I know there have been brilliant authors who wrote in a language they weren't born with -- but brilliance isn't common enough to document an array of large software products.

praisegod @ 443: wow. I thought it was weird watching the sunrise during morning exercise when I went to Calgary for the World Fantasy Convention (~Halloween), but you got further north and closer to the solstice. Not a timing I'd choose, I think; I remember Keillor grumbling about early dark in Copenhagen.

Nancy L. @ 448: Spotlight, for all its virtues, appears to have moved a light-grey (at worst) character into the dark side; there's been local kerfuffle in which the moviemakers have claimed artistic/editing privilege in a way that pretty much acknowledges their screwup (e.g., by putting someone else's lines in this guy's mouth). We'll see whether the movie is remembered a few years from now.

Carrie S. @ 444: having seen Seven Samurai recently, I'm puzzled by this. The villagers were clumsy fighters -- but they fought; at the worst, they split up bandit groups that got into the village and held them at bay until somebody with a sharper weapon showed up. The force they were facing was not scared off by a dust cloud.

I have a pretty strong memory of, when a bug's life came out, people writing articles going, basically, "This movie is Seven Samurai with insects." But I could be remembering incorrectly.

For what it's worth, I have a vague memory of learning in school about a fort that, during either the French & Indian Wars or possibly the American Revolution, was successfully defended by a handful of soldiers... and a whole bunch of snowmen. The memory is <mumble> decades old, and I cannot remember enough details to successfully google whether or not the incident actually happened.

#454 ::: CHip

I'd be interested in some more detail about that.

The thing I was wondering about with the movie was whether there really was so little push-back when the article came out.

When talk began about remaking "Seven Samurai" as a "The Magnificent Seven", James Coburn - one of the few actors already familiar with the original - declared that *he* should play the equivalent of the World's Greatest Swordsman.

What about John Boy and the seven space mercenaries?

Many years ago, I talked to someone who'd gone off to college in Alaska, where she only lasted a year before transferring to a school in southern California. Her comment was "I knew it would be cold and dark all winter; nobody told me it would be cold and dark and depressing." (Though I'm sure there are people who don't have that reaction, de gustibus non est disputandum and all that)

Lee #435/KeithS #447: All of that student's energy seems to have gone into the correct spelling of façade.

Isn't there a [historical] Vlad Dracula story where he scares off the Turks with the vzcnyrq pbecfrf bs uvf rarzvrf?

Jacque, thanks for sharing your lake mower tale with us.

I can picture some of those Minneapolis city lakes, having taken time out of a Minicon decades ago to bus and then hike out to one of them.

When your bard rolls a 20.

Jacque 430: They're seldom in the office, and when they are I dodge them the best I can. Also, they have a deep belief that their opinion of how something looks should trump correct grammar and punctuation.

Fragano 432: I think I know some people who went to that same high school.

KeithS 447: Are they hiring where you work?

CHip 454: Yeah, native speakers. I've actually never had a non-native speaker tell me my correction to their English was wrong or irrelevant. I don't tend to correct people unless a) they ask me to or b) it's my job, as it is now.

Sandy 462: Yes, Vlad the Impaler is a real historical figure, and he really did that (though they weren't corpses when he impaled them, if I understand correctly). He also ordered some Turkish diplomats to remove their fezzes in his presence; when they refused, he had his people nail them on.

IIRC 'Dracul' was a kind of knighthood, the Order of the Dragon, which he was given after successfully repelling an invasion by the impaling tactic, but before he sank into depths of depravity well beyond what war could justify.

December 5 marked the 8th anniversary of Abi becoming one of Making Light's moderators.
Happy belated anniversary, Abi!

Happy Anniversary, Abi.

I find the mid-latitudes hard to endure in mid-winter. Europe's population is distributed more to the north than the US population, so the experience of short days and dark nights must get pretty extreme for Europeans.

I once read a parody of Lovecraft set in a world of anthropomophized animals, a sort of post-humanity setup, and one character had long graceful horns, which the narrator thought meant he could have been a descendant of Vlad the Impala.

LadyKay @ #467:

As someone who grew up at 59 degrees North (this is south of Achorage and Yellowknife, but north of pretty much all of Canada's larger cities, the Orkneys and the entirety of the continental US), I have no noticeable problem with the winter. However, I find summers in London to be freakish, because it gets dark around the solstice and that's just wrong. I've considered getting a lightbox for the summer, but it feels a little bit silly. I might try to pop North a bit, around the summer solstice, though, next summer.

Serge @466:

You know, for the first year since Patrick IMed me to ask if I wanted to join the front page, I totally forgot the anniversary. We were in the midst of some travel chaos here (Martin got back from Scotland on December 4 and was scheduled to fly to New York on December 6*. So the 5th was busy in all kinds of ways.)

I remain honored and humbled by this community. I haven't been very good about writing posts of late, because of a bunch of other stuff. But I love Making Light, and I'm glad to be here.

-----
* Then his flight on the 6th was cancelled because reasons, and after 7 hours at Schiphol he had to come home again. He flew on the 7th on a specially laid-on replacement flight for the people who hadn't been rebooked. About 30 people on the plane, cabin crew who had been through the tail end of the cancellation drama with them. Many jokes about a private jet, and apparently an excellent flight.

Xopher @ 465: Keep in mind that the history of Vlad Dracul is mainly written by the Turks, who hated him. Naturally, they wanted him to look bad.

Xopher Halftongue @465: they have a deep belief that their opinion of how something looks should trump correct grammar and punctuation.

So the issue is less their writing skills than their willful ineducability? Feh.

HLN: area man had tooth extracted 2 hours 45 minutes ago; anaesthetic now wearing off; self-pity mode engaged.

(I have painkillers and after-care instructions, and anyway it's my own silly fault for not going to the dentist at least eighteen months earlier. But whining is traditional in these situations!)

The fun part, of course, was getting a cab back home afterwards. Apparently "kha'i v tcxi tpikm'upfm X me'i'asntr n tae'mi t [address] soo'z pbbl plee?" is actually decipherable English to the person on the other end of the phone line.

AKICIML:

I have a just-turned-eight-years-old niece who is not an avid reader. I live a thousand miles away from her, so I don’t know much about her tastes or passions. (Her grandmother tells me she likes doing arts-and-crafts projects and playing board games with friends.) I am, according to her parents, the only one who buys her books for the holidays; the “book aunt” as it were. So, I need recommendations for a non-bibliophile child. (I got her Castle Hangnail and The Hamster Princess for her birthday; I have not gotten feedback from her or her parents, alas.)

Anyone have any ideas? Or should I give up and send a gift card?

Cassy B (474): Maybe a book of kids' craft projects?

Mary Aileen, that's a promising idea. Anyone know any good titles in kids-craft books....?

Cassy B. @ 474:

Coloring books for adults are a thing (that I don't quite understand) at the moment. If she likes coloring but finds kids' coloring books too simple, perhaps one or two of those, as they're more demanding. A getting started with origami kit might be well received.

For board games, some that might be suitable for her age and also for playing with the family are Wits and Wagers Family, Takenoko, and Catan Junior.

Also, both the books you gave her are excellent books, and I hope they hooked her even though she's not much of a reader.

Cassy B. @474: How about something from the Exploratorium Store?

CassyB - try the Klutz line of activity books. I think there's still a Website up, but you'll get better results through Amazon. Just search for "Klutz".

Lots of humor, intelligently written when I read them. If she has long hair, and the braid books are still available, those are winners.

CassyB: If Dover still has Jayne's STRING FIGURES AND HOW TO MAKE THEM, that's a possibility -- cat's-cradle figures from all over the world, and it's something her friends are really unlikely to have seen. It's an amazing time-waster.

I can't decide whether today's XKCD is
1) not funny
2) not funny to me, or
3) I'm missing the joke.

... I did invent my own punchline, though, which amused me. Onyybba navzny.

Opinions?

CassyB:

A well done book about weaving that's aimed at kids (but would be suitable for adults, too): Kids Weaving, by Sarah Swett.

Alternately, a kids' novel that's chock full of weaving as a plot point: The Spellcoats, by Diana Wynne Jones.

Thanks all; these suggestions are really really helpful!

Sandy B. @ 481 -

I think Randall was aiming at whimsy today.

One of our go to gifts for kids that age is a nice sketchbook and good pencils or other adult like art implements. It's generally received well by both kids and their parents.

For bookish ones, my 6 and 8 yr olds have been enjoying the Wings of Fire series. They're a little violent, but most of it is dragon vs dragon fighting, and not humans getting eaten.

Steve Wright @473: area man had tooth extracted

Wheee! Welcome to the snaggle-tooth club! I had a top middle incisor extracted two weeks ago, to deal with a chronic infection, and in preparation for an implant. (I've been dreaming about getting that tooth replaced for ages.)

"kha'i v tcxi tpikm'upfm X me'i'asntr n tae'mi t [address] soo'z pbbl plee?"

*snerk* I initially parsed this as rot13. Um, which it's not. :-)

I didn't even bother with the lipless English; my lower jaw was fully occupied pressing the gauze into the slot formerly occuped by Tooth #9, and as a consequence, my tongue was of no help, either. Instead, I wrote notes, and waved my hands a lot. (But then, I was communicating in person.) :-)

Cassy B. @474: Anyone have any ideas?

If you're not dead-set on giving a book: Googling make magazine for kids produced this page, from which Build a Custom Family Tree Board Game for the Holidays immediately jumped out at me. Maybe print out instructions and package them up with the materials?

Also, Googling make your own board games looks like it could be mined to good effect.

One reason our politics is so broken that people like Donald Trump can consistently get attention for proposing awful things[1]. This story points out that Trump alone has gotten more TV news coverage than *all the Democrats* combined. As in all areas of life, we get more of what we reward--in this case, Trump proposing whatever awful bit of nastiness pops into his head. Outrage sells, and nobody beats The Donald for triggering cheap outrage-fests.

[1] Though often, the mainstream proposals are at least as awful, but not widely seen as so because they're mainstream. Most of the GOP presidential candidates are on board with torturing prisoners, but this is a mainstream position (God help us), so it doesn't get the same gasp of horror, even though denying people visas is actually a lot less awful than torturing them to death.

AKICIML: Does anybody out there have a problem with importing documents into whatever version of Word comes pre-loaded on those super keen fast and shiny Windows 10 machines, like the one my husband just bought, and then being unable to actually type anything in them? My school district sent me a form to fill in that is too advanced for this clunky old thing I am typing on now, so I forwarded the form to my husband, saved it to his desktop, and attempted to fill in the blanks, which aren't actually blanks but some kind of macro field thing that can be exported or data sorted or something like that. Anyway, I can make parts of the document big or small, view the whole thing like a webpage, or rename it. That's it.

?!

albatross, #487: You're making the same mistaken assumption about Trump that a lot of other people have made. Check out this analysis to see why "ignore him and he'll go away" wouldn't work. Basically, Trump is the voice of the American Bully, and there are a lot of them.

HLN: Area observer returns from trip to find local river in spate again. People and property are still safe. Observer concludes, however, for the several-th time in 25 years, that this town needs a taller gauge-post.

Jenny Islander @ 488:

My experience is that most people don't make fill-out forms in Word correctly. It sounds like this one is actually properly made, since you say that all the places you need to fill out are form fields instead of only some of them, but improperly protected.

Check the document protection (Review tab, Protect Document, Restrict Formatting and Editing). The document should be protected for filling out forms and nothing else ("This document is protected from unintentional editing. You may only fill in forms in this region."). If you find that it's protected for something else (e.g. read only, commenting), you will need to stop protection, and then protect it for filling in forms. If it asks for a password when you stop protection, you need to get the school district to fix the document and send you a new one. When it asks for a password to protect it, you can leave that blank.

Hopefully that fixes the problem.

@KeithS no. 491: I'll give it a try!

I hate to sound like an old fogey, but just because you can make every field in every document universally searchable doesn't mean you should. The school district's IT department loves to make everything super shiny and is all about the spandex jackets for everyone. They don't think about those of us who don't have a budget that allows us to buy new PCs as soon as the factory smell wears off the old ones. My husband's last computer had a version of Word that simply stripped all the macros out of documents created in later versions, so I could at least open the things--but it ran incredibly slowly. His new one popped up a message that the forms the school district sends me aren't quite shiny enough and it was going to update their format ever so helpfully. Like a dummy, I clicked Yes. Even if I can de-protect this document, my hopes are not high.

Lee:

I'm not really assuming he'll go away, so much as I'm trying to understand why he is doing what he's doing, and why it's working out for him.

Media coverage is like oxygen for presidential candidates. Trump has gotten an incredible amount of media coverage, more-or-less smothering several of his rival candidates, via a strategy of being extremely mediagenic. Partly that's because he's really good at media stuff--he's always been a showman, and he's been pretty successful at various reality TV gigs lately. But he's also understood that the media ecosystem lives largely on outrage. He can get as much media coverage as he wants, so long as he creates outrage. And he can get outrage among a substantial subset of Americans by saying things that another substantial subset of Americans either agree with, or at least don't think is totally crazy[0].

This strategy is working for him. That's why he continues doing it. So long as outrage is the main source of nutrition craved by the media, I imagine his strategy will continue working--not necessarily in the sense that he will win the election[1], but in the sense that he will continue getting a lot of media coverage, which will continue driving his poll numbers and the attention paid to him by other people, which will help him keep getting a lot of media coverage.

The media has covered Trump more than it's covered all the Democratic candidates combined. This seems like something really important to understand--similar to how the Tea Party at its height had about as much public support as the antiwar movement right before the Iraq war, but the Tea Party somehow got *vast* amounts of publicity, whereas the antiwar movement could hardly get on TV at all. Media coverage is what has given Trump the fuel to get as far as he has, and to move the Overton window in mostly really bad directions. I'd like to understand why.

One thing I notice about this: There is a subset of the country that takes attacks by the MSM in the US as a kind of badge of honor. Now, on one side, this isn't crazy, because the MSM is actually pretty bad at reporting the truth, is riddled with biases and systematic flaws, etc. But on the other side, this means that both the Tea Party and Trump have been able to benefit from MSM attacks--there's a big MSM outrage fest with all the empty-headed talk jocks saying how Trump is beyond the pale with his latest comment, and that actually increases Trump's credibility with a subset of the audience. Sometimes, they're people saying "yeah, why don't we deport all the Muslims," but other times, they're people saying "well, he's probably full of shit, but at least he has the right enemies."

There's this interesting feedback dynamic going on there, and I wish I understood it better.

[0] Often it's just factually wrong, or blatantly unconstitutional, or an obviously terrible idea. But that isn't really limited to Trump--it's not that the other candidates are less crazy or evil, so much as that they're more clustered together where their crazy and evil seems normal because lots of respectable-looking people are saying it together.

[1] I think he will have a very hard time winning the nomination, and an even harder time winning the election. On the other hand, both of those things *could* happen. And then, lots of people, both Democrats and Republicans, will suddenly notice what a remarkably bad idea it has been to break down all kinds of barriers to the president doing lots of crazy stuff on his own authority. Gee, who coulda seen *that* coming?

Due to a mixture of poor planning and various spoon thievery, I need a couple of presents for my nephews, as in this Saturday (so online would be too slow). I have something for my niece, but it's not a book, so I want to go not-a-book for the nephews too. I do have an Barnes & Noble and a high-end toy store or two nearby.

David Harmon (494): How old are your nephews? Any idea what kinds of things they're interested in?

(If you're just remarking, rather than asking for suggestions, feel free to ignore me.)

HLN: Area man has less than a week to go before embarking on first ever international holiday.

"I'd like to thank all the folks who gave me suggestions, earlier in this Open Thread, about what to see," he told our reporter.

The venture has meant expanding his collection of winter outerwear, he added. "It wasn't very expansive to begin with," he said, "since we're semi-arid here, and even in winter it doesn't get all that cold except at night."

"And I went and bought new jeans yesterday. My first new pair in about fifteen years, so this is the first time I've had to deal with the Skinny Leg High Waist Boot Cut Stretch Denim wall-of-options phenomenon. Turns out I'm most comfortable in traditional denim, Regular Fit. Who'd'a guessed?"

Mary Aileen #495: They're 13 and 15, both science/techie types (both parents are MIT grads). The older is heavy into robotics competitions, the younger is the family "foodie".

@David: An Arduino or Raspberry Pi? One of the Munchkin games? A copy of the Joy of Cooking?

On Food and Cooking (2nd edition) by Harold McGee is a great present for a science/techie type who is into food — assuming they don't already have it.

David Harmon @ 497: I know you were trying to avoid books, but Alton Brown's "I'm Just Here for the Food" cookbooks have the same kind of "here's the science behind this recipe" quality that his Good Eats TV show did. Splendidly nerdy. I'm a baker, not a cook, and I really liked I'm Just Here for More Food: Food x Mixing + Heat = Baking. The cheesecake recipe is perfect.

The books from the Cook's Illustrated crew are similarly excellent, but less entertaining.

My own fave rec for science-of-cooking cookbooks is Jeff Potter's Cooking for Geeks.

Stefan Jones #498: The hardware is probably above my price range, but the Munchkin suggestion reminded me of my local gaming store, which likely has a lot of possibilities.

To all, re: cookbooks, he got a molecular gastronomy kit a couple of birthdays ago... getting him cookbooks feels kinda like my parents probably felt buying me D&D stuff. ;-)

David Harmon @497: The current Humble Bundle ebook grouping is a bunch of texts on how to program Arduino. They're a pay-what-you-want-for-a-wad-of-books deal that also benefits charity. In this case if you pay at least $15 you get extra titles.

Considering that Raspberry Pi computers (that take Arduino) are now $5 per ... might make an attractive gift bundle for robotics-y kids.

@493, Albatros -- as a resident of Arizona I've watched any number of local candidates run and win for major state office using the same tactics that Trump does. Joe Arpaio, several recent governors, our school superintendent, assorted others.

I'm convinced there's a sizable segment of any population that will vote for somebody simply because that person's name is most familiar. As far as they're concerned, familiar = good, and they're not paying attention (or don't care) about anything else.

That phenomena scares me, because Trump is very, very, familiar to a lot of people ...

Sandy B. @ 481a& Steve C. @ 484

I just figured he was being non-nonsensical. If you ever think a joke went over your head there's
this wiki a co-worker told me about. There are times when I do get the joke, I just don't think it's all that funny. I just wish he'd go back to his weekly "what if" bit.

A possibly-fun cultural reference game: Victorian Christmas Cards Are Weird.

I get some of these because my grandfather bought me bound volumes of the St. Nicholas Magazine (staggeringly popular in the 1870s-90s among the 6-10 year old kid demographic) when I was little, so I actually get the references.

But there are a bunch that are inexplicable even to me, and I don't want to jump right in and go after them all if others of you will find it fun. :->

To get it started, though: I'm pretty sure the dead robin in #12 is a Christ reference. Well, that and folksongs.

I imagine people of two centuries from now eyeing multiple-fandom pop culture mashup memes with the same sort of jaundiced eye. "A leaf on the wind? Why is that related to laundry?"