To be continued.

I followed the fanfic particle's Via link, then that blog post's link to Charlie Stross (because I like Charlie) and started reading the comments (the quality of the comments is why I don't read Charlie's blog all the time - they're so good I'd do nothing else) and they linked to this:

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality

Go. Read. It. It is essentially "What would happen if Harry Potter had been replaced by Miles Vorkosigan at birth" and it is fantastic.

The Vorkosigan Saga does not appear in that fanfic list, by the way - despite the fact that Cordelia's Honor started as Star Trek fanfic, then had its serial numbers filed off for later publication (according to an author's note somewhere).

* * *

I keep a pair of heavy work gloves in my work place and in my car specifically in case I'm called to handle something sharp or burning in an emergency.

What we need is a lightweight folding Halligan Bar that fits in a glove compartment.

Then, along came VS Ramachandran and his colleagues with their discovery of Mirror Neurons. These neurons essentially allow us to "feel each other's pain". Once you experience, or even imagine, the pain of touching a hot stove, you will feel an echo of that pain when you watch another person do the same thing.

This is an oversimplification but, the discovery of mirror neurons may well provide the neurological foundation for the empathy that most humans feel for others.

By the way, am I missing something? I did not see any reference to Fanfic in this post. I know it was discussed before but, nothing here.

Top one under "TNH's Particles."

* * *

RE Mirror Neurons:

Jeremy Rifkin (!!!) lectures on "The Empathic Civilization," illustrated on the fly:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7AWnfFRc7g

Fascinating and compelling.

It takes Littell only 220 pages to do what it took Ludlum 544 pages to do in The Bourne Identity; the plots are very similar.

That said, I agree with you that what used to take 150-160 pages (Stout's Nero Wolfe books) now seems to take 300-400 pages. Do authors subconsciously feel they need to justify the $7.99 - $9.99 price for paperbacks by adding more plot or pages? ;)

As for shorter— 200 pages or fewer— I think the problem is that the books will disappear on the sales shelf at that point. Even at home I can lose track of, say, Little Fuzzy when it's overwhelmed by a book of K.J. Parker's.

*This is from memory, so I will gladly take a length correction if I'm wrong.

Flew into Madison today. A sign at the airport reads STAND AND DELIVERIES ONLY.

Preferred parking for the TSA?

(If anyone can explain why poems I've not read in 45 years suddenly come to mind simply by reading a single phrase, I'd appreciate it.)

(Me, I think of Adam Ant and his beautiful hussar's jacket.)

Huh. Imagine that they were literally swapped at birth. "Harry Potter" at Hogwarts with Miles' physical limitations, intelligence and drive, and no magical ability whatsoever. Still bearing the scar and the protection from his mother's sacrifice. "Miles Vorkosigan" who's a lot healthier than his parents had any right to expect, not quite as stellar intellectually, but occasional random magical effects pop up in his vicinity -- the "Warrior's Apprentice" story comes out closer to the "Sorcerer's Apprentice" than it used to. He'll never receive any training and will never find a wand, so never will be much of a wizard.

Stefan Jones @764:
When you hear the letter 'A'
Andropov is the name to say
The letter 'B' is next in line
Brezhnev's dead, so he'll do just fine
'C' is for Chernenko
It's the ABCs of Dead Russian Leaders
The ABCs of Dead Russian Leaders

Xopher @791:
"Pangs of dispriz'd love," I thought.

ajay @802:
I'll guess that the Marx Brothers Hamlet you refer to is "A Night in Elsinore," which can be found by searching. I recommend this to anybody who didn't get enough Marx Brothers dialog already and is ready for a pretty good pastiche in a Hamlet mode. It seems like a patchwork of quotes, which is impressive as it seems to be original material. I'm afraid that one more URL will put me in the tank.

Casting caution and my laughable excuse for a daily schedule to the winds, I read the rest of the currently finished part of the fanfic in question, and it only gets better throughout. And I get exactly the same sense of joyful delight from it as I do from reading about Miles Vorkosigan. Truly amazing, that somebody could have captured so effectively what I considered Bujold's unique genius. Occasionally I read Vorkosigan fanfic (there isn't much) and I've never found anybody to get it right.

A Civil Affair ranks in my top five favorite books of all time, and I still plan to do some architectural drawings of Vorbarr Sultana someday. Real Soon Now.

Anybody remember the Brunching Shuttlecocks feature on Harry Potter? Would have been around the time of the first movie release, I think - the basic premise is that you find yourself at Hogwarts, and it's a choose-your-adventure, but there's only one segment in the graph: you are immediately killed because you're a Muggle. Which in retrospect is hilarious because it inverts the implied Mary-Sue premise, but when I read it, all I had available was, "What the hell is a Muggle?"

Good times.

It's inspired me with an idea for a project: to get people to record the parts in Jo Walton's Tam Lin Shakespeare pastiche and edit them into a production, which would then be released under a Creative Commons license. (And distributed...somehow. I'll think about that when and if I actually get it done!)

The play has five male and five female parts. I have a couple of people lined up already, but I need more. Anyone interested, please contact me via email at goldfarbdj@example.com.

(where "example" is actually "gmail"...I don't want to put the whole unmunged string out, lest the spambots get it.)

Recording is pretty easy, you just need a microphone and some free open-source software. Also, if people are going to this year's Farthing Party, I may be able to work with you on doing recording there.

Featuring Amy X Neuburg on vocals, Ryan Avery on violin, Tom Dambly on trumpet, and Mark Jeffery on guitar. If you like geeky, nigh-unto-filk pop music, this should tickle your fancy.

זכר קדוש לברכה (Zekher kadosh livrakha)

Note, for example, what happened to the length of the Harry Potter books once Rowling got a word processing program.

What kind of underclothes did he mean? The possibilities are unsettling.

Here's a trivia tidbit in trade: recently I was reading a memoir of 1960s San Francisco (the Owsley era.) When the author has occasion to refer to Mordor, he describes it as "Mordor, from the Trilogy." Not "Tolkien," not "The Lord of the Rings" but The Trilogy.

Second paragraph.

I discovered that I have the first three paragraphs of that book memorized when I started reading it in Dutch. And that particular sentence is really delightful in Dutch:

Ze waren vegetariër, rookten niet, dronken niet en droegen een speciaal soort gezondheidsondergoed.

The translator (Madeleine van den Bovenkamp-Gordeau) manages to work the concept of "healthy", which is only implied in the English, into the term for the special underwear.

Given the other characteristics of Eustace's parents, I'm guessing Lewis had something in mind along the lines of Dr. Jaeger's woolen underclothing. Jaeger's clothing reform movement, which, among other things, argued that wearing wool against the skin promoted health, was popular among some British vegetarians of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, George Bernard Shaw being one of the more prominent examples.

There were various other clothing reform movements around the same time, though this seems to have been the most popular one involving underwear. (Bloomers appeared around the same time, though while that term is sometimes used nowadays to describe a particular kind of underwear, bloomers appear to have been originally intended as outer clothing.)

Julia Twigg wrote an interesting-looking dissertation in 1981 that's now online, called The Vegetarian Movement in England, 1847-1981: A Study in the Structure of its Ideology, which talks about this and related social trends of the time.

Harry, in Miles' situation, with a high serendipitous/random-magic factor... would be a Rowling character.

LDR @ 29 -- Perhaps Tolkien was thinking about something like Mormon underwear?

and ddb @921 said Not sure what's going on with my appetite for reading. I still love all my old favorites, and my latest discovery is the thrillers of John Sandford, so I don't think I'm acquiring refined literary tastes in my old age. But I'm definitely reading less SF and very little fantasy outside of rereads.

I have the impression that there's less I really like being published than there used to be; whether that represents ignorance, a change in my tastes, or a change in what is being published is less clear to me (probably all three to varying extents).

I used to never read nonfiction by choice. When I was in grade school, my school had a contest every year where students were supposed to read 5 fiction, 5 biography, and 5 nonfiction books over a 6-week period. Fiction was laughably easy - I probably read 5 books a week. Biography was okay; if you picked good ones, they had a narrative drive like fiction. Nonfiction, bleah. Dinosaur books, some archaeology adventures, and drawing books were the only things I had the least interest in.

Later, nonfiction meant textbooks and it was never very interesting. Essays were sometimes okay. Biographies were sometimes okay. Otherwise, no. But I've slowly acquired a taste for good nonfiction, though I still prefer it with some kind of a narrative or adventure involved.

And like ddb, I find there's less I like being published in fiction, and I'm not sure how much is the books and how much is me. I do find new things I enjoy, but I find more that I dislike than I used to. I'm less omnivorous of a reader. I think, in me anyway, there's some "you kids get off my lawn" reaction. Although when I go back to the "good old stuff," some holds up and some doesn't.

Even earlier, I read anything marked SF in the library, because it was all I had (no budget for books in any significant quantity before 1969).

The flood has gotten so big now, and the publishing so weirdly fragmented and so much more expensive (especially with the quirky stuff now being all in hardcover), that I no longer feel that kind of connection to the field. So I no longer read stuff I don't have pretty strong expectations of enjoying. And I'm probably not finding the things I'd enjoy as reliably, either.

Snort! I envision the tolerance of your Dutch acquaintances when you greet them by wishing them healthy underwear.

I've been experiencing the same thing of late (late being the last 5 years or so). The problem is finding that good narrative nonfiction that doesn't bend over into light fluff. My wife and I both have a fondness for footnotes and our ideal nonfiction has both a strong narrative edge and copious footnotes. Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire* pretty much set the bar for my wife and A History of Reading for me. Problem is, not every non-fiction author is as good as Alberto Manguel and Amanda Foreman has only written the one book so far.

_________
*This was the book that was butchered on film as The Duchess. They took an amazing, strong vibrant, complex woman and turned her into a simpering Hollywood romantic damsel.

Flew into Madison today.

Welcome to our fair city!

You're up one "t" there, and being a little...emphatic about whether the gezondheidsondergoed is the addressee's own, as opposed, one supposes, to his or her partner's‡.

Should be Goedemorgen*, ben jij† in je gezonheidsondergoed?

-----
‡ Speaking of moving from samenleven to creepy...
* Whether this is prononced "goo-de-morgen" or "goo-ya-morgen" is a difference of idiom and dialect; I was taught the latter but meet native speakers who do each.
† I don't really know why this is "jij" rather than "je"; I simply know that it is. I think you need it to not repeat the "e" sound in "ben"

I cannot, alas, recommend the one other book by the same author that I happen to own, Drake. The writing is just as good, I think; but the difference in documentation between the time periods and people is sufficient that just about every paragraph, if not every sentence, has to be qualified with markers of this being conjecture and somewhat uncertain facts. It probably makes it a better history book, for keeping the Known from the Presumed separate; but it makes for a much clumsier casual read.

The little one is being autopsied today, but the coroner was sure the cause of death is hyperthermia. The near-drowning is recovering in a local hospital.

The quarry victim is the second football player on a local team to meet death by misadventure. The first one was hit by a train while walking on the railroad tracks. He didn't hear the train because he was listening to his Ipod...

Let's be careful out there, please? I don't want to read about a Fluorospherian becoming a statistic.

Have a safe holiday weekend everyone!

The blog members of Humid City are very clear on what to do and how to do it. Many of them have more experience than the birds should have to have them possess as to how and what.

Please go here, to the latest entry, How 'Bout the Birds? if you want more information as to the state of the natural life on the Gulf during this disaster that cannot help but have global impact, or if you have any shekles you can spare from the other, many, calls upon your giving.

At least one member of Humid City, btw, is related to the sf/f community, a friend of Poppy Z. Brite, New Orleans novelist, Louis Maistros. He and his wife were down at the coast at the beginning, trapping and cleaning birds. His wife is a brilliantly skilled animal handler, who works in animal rescue.

Love, c.

Oddly enough I recently read "Garibaldi's defence of the Roman Republic" by G M Trevelyan, the 1935 reprint of the 1920 original. Despite the dated language and viewpoints, it really brought home to me much of the politics of europe in the 1840's and the state of Italy at that time. Not to mention the importance of having your revolution at the right time...

* Ever since I've wondered why the Dutch word for war is "oorlog" rather than "krieg". One of the mysteries of language. The big payoff was learning to say "Ik houd van jou." A sentence I have never, actually, had occasion to use in earnest in Dutch. Being able to say "Een bier, alstublieft", however, I found most useful in Paramaribo. Roll out the borrel. Learning, while there, to say, "wan djogo" also came in handy.

A couple years ago I bought Rubicon and Norman Cantor's The Last Knight in the same Houston bookstore crawl. What a pair of extremes. The Cantor was so awful, I couldn't even imagine how his editors had allowed the thing to be published. I could only diagnose senile dementia on the part of all concerned. Holland's book on the other hand, was indeed excellent.

How does this differ from the average elevator movie pitch?

Your comment went into moderation because your link was munged. Check at preview, please.

Because you provided me with enough clues, I was able to go find what you were trying to link to, and have restored it.

Thanks for the prompt notification.

Matthias @54:
Generally, yes, but my (admittedly still embryonic) ear tells me that it really should be "jij" in this sentence.

Happy to be corrected by a native speaker, though.

How NOT to do promotion....

I got an irate response to the email response I posted in a Yahoo newsgroup... the apparently self-published author Clayton Bye seems to lack clues about such things as, readers have limited time and interested in following link to get information the message author couldn't be bothered to provide, that might tell message recipients what, if any, value there is likely to be for them to bother following the link....

Interspersed italicized comments are mine

----- Original Message -----
From: "Clayton"
To: [ a yahoo group]
Subject: New release: What I Found In The Dark

> Poems with a story. A poetry book with a theme. These offerings have been
> called very good to sometimes brilliant.

By whom, and why? About what?

> Easy reading. 70 FULL SCREEN pages. Immediate download upon payment.

How much? What are these poems about? Who wrote them? -why- should I care or have any interest? Why shouldn't I regard this solicitation as noise and a waste of bandwidth and space on my hard drive?! There is NOTHING in the solicitation to "hook" me with reasons to be interested/intrigued in following the link, even.
>
> Go to:
> http://shop.claytonbye.com/index.php?route=product/product&path=29_40&product_id=64
>
> Support Independent Authors. I do.

I buy stuff based on what I consider "value" I don't see ANY value promoted by the solicitation.

====================
====================

The email sent to me in response had four inane obnoxious points of response, the first complaining of about "the drivel" in the forum he regards as "worse" than his promo material, the second with similar "other people do it here" lame excuse regarding telling the recipients to go to the link for description of book, the third point stating that following the link provides author information, and the fourth point saying that polite inquiry works better for getting more infomtion than "your rude comments (even if they are valid).
Then he ended by saying irately that the price was $3.99 and "Get a life."

My life would be improved without incompetent marketing by self-published author emails exacerbated by arrant cluelessness ontop of the original incompetence....

Yay!

If you're reasonably up on/interested in biology, and not listening to Futures in Biotech podcasts, you're missing out. Episode #60 was a panel discussion of four recent big biology results, of which three were absolutely mind-blowing. (One was Ventner and company's construction of a cell with entirely synthesized DNA, and that was about 3rd most amazing. My favorite was the synthetic 4-base-pair-codons and the synthetic ribosomes that can read them.)

Episode #57 is about the role of prions (aka proteins with some low-probability variant folding which then spreads to other copies of the same protein in the cell) in a kind of non-genetic heritable change in phenotype of an organism.

Listening to this, one thing that keeps coming to mind is that our minds are biased toward assuming much less change in the world than we should rationally expect, given where we are on the technology curve. The world in 30 years will be more different from now than now is from 1980, and probably way more different. More different than we can imagine, in many ways.

Amazing, mind-blowing, wonderful stuff, re-enforcing the fact that I live in an SF novel.

Much, much shorter than that, more along the lines of a flash of insight; either the reader gets the implications or they don't. I suppose the elevator pitch version could be abbreviated to "DeNiro. Ronin. Book Detective!", followed by jazz hands. Then the prospective movie exec either says "continue" or calls security....

Or, are movie pitches usually really that short?

I have long had the opinion that one should do general web-browsing with javascript *off*, and only turn it on for specific sites when performing specific tasks.

It is an Old-Fart-style opinion, and I hate being the person who talks like that, but there are more annoying security holes enabled by javascript every week. And it's not like the blogs and webcomic sites are inaccessible without it.

Seconded. In fact, I'm itching to read it again even though I only read it a year ago. Thames: The Biography is almost as good.

Graham Robb's The Discovery of France has come up here a few times, I think. It's quite mind-blowing.

One of my very favorite favorite piems★ is Ben Newman's Highwayman (text here), which he wrote after falling in love with McKennitt's setting of it, just to get circular for a little bit. His Highwayman is a hacker, and the echoes and samenesses are just beautiful.

I'll give just a little sample for the teal deer☂ among us. Context is for the weak and sickly, but the girl in the following passage is "Jess, the sysop's newbie daughter," and the FBI have invaded, suspecting her of being the hacker they seek:

They awakened the girl with their shouting, and with many a sniggering jest,
They read her her rights and they frisked her, and they shredded her chemistry test.
"Would you kindly log in to the server?" Her face was as pale as ash.
"I'll look for thee on the server. I'll finger thee on the server.
BUT THERE'S NOTHING TO SEE ON THE SERVER, though all the Net should crash."

The rest of his songs are equally inspired, IMHO, and many have mp3s up there so you can hear what they sound like.

----
★ If a 'folk song' is a 'filk song' when it's been fannized, surely a poem is a piem? For very narrow values of 'o', anyway.

☂ Teal deer comes from attempting to pronounce the common message board shorthand "tl;dr", which stands for "too long; didn't read". It has of course gained a life of its own, including several colorized vintage photographs of particularly odd deer. :->

I did check in preview. Hmmmmm. This isn't the first time this has happened.

It must be on my end. My pooter is having some troubles. I'm just hanging on to it until we get to Maryland and catch our breaths, and then upgrade. Three more months. Of Extreme Busy. Argh.

I saw the advice you gave someone else in this same situation, in terms of hoping you didn't have to re-calibrate all the numbers. OK. More astonishing, I REMEMBERED it.

Love, c.

Most people, when setting their default journal security level, went for "Could possibly be offensive", because, hey, it's for all the posts on their ever, and who really wants to rate individual post? So if you're reading without being logged in, you're going to find that warning on a lot of posts, regardless of their actual content.

Sigh. Giving last rites, or reading him his rights. Reading him his last rights would be something like "You have the right to remain sinful. If you give up the right to remain sinful anything you've ever done can be used against you before the Throne of Judgement. You have a right to a Savior; if you cannot afford a Savior one will be born unto you, and his name shall be callèd Wonderful, Counselor..." Something like that.

Constance @ 50: Nice to see some publicity about the oiled birds, although I would add (for anyone watching the video linked to in the comment on the page Constance linked to) that the Elf machines are not the be-all and end-all of washing oiled birds, that it's not stripping the natural oils from the birds' feathers that results in loss of waterproofing after washing (it's loss of the alignment of the feather barbs and barbules that does that), and that washing oiled birds with bare hands (as shown in the video) is a big no-no. Done properly, hand-washing oiled birds is effective and safe for both the birds and the people. The Tristate and IBRRC people certainly know what they're doing (as I saw when I worked with them on the 20,000 oiled penguins in South Africa in 2000).

* Proposed new acronym, from the all-purpose New Yorker cartoon caption.

While waiting I wandered around Costco. I spent a good chunk of time in the TV department, watching the climactic battle in Avatar.

Since I'd seen it before, my mind went kind of meta.

As in, how would someone from somewhen else think of this?

And not just Avatar, but the whole Costco package.

The diversity of humanity alone in that place was pretty astonishing.

Am I the only one who indulges in this?

The only way I could make any sense out of Lost was with a Star Wars analogy: it was like watching 5 episodes of Star Wars, being pumped, wanting to find out how it ends and then, when you start the 6th episode, you discover that all that stuff about the Empire and the Rebellion, Luke and his father, the Force and the Jedi didn’t mean a thing, that what the story was really about this whole time were these two ewoks and a magic cave. And you can’t pull the plug out of the tub in the magic cave or something unspeakably bad will happen. But it doesn’t matter anyway because what really happened is everyone died n a Pod Race back in episode 1.

The finale confirmed my suspicion, reached back in season 2 that the writers had no idea what they were doing.

*soorfle*

It's been a day when I needed comfort food, and I made myself a grilled cheese sandwich and some cream of tomato soup. I had just had a spoonful of the soup when I read that. Luckily, I managed to not splutter onto the keyboard and monitor, but it was iffy for a moment there. :)

Exhaustion, I can has it.

In elementary school, as a third or fourth grader, I read a couple of juvenile SF books I'd found in the school library.

They were about a doctor on a HEY, YOU MUST HAVE READ SOMETHING BY ALLEN NOURSE. ALLEN NOURSE WROTE SCIENCE FICTION ABOUT DOCTORS. ALLEN NOURSE! No, no, I know about Allen Nourse and I looked into that but ALLEN NOURSE WROTE SCIENCE FICTION ABOUT DOCTORS!

OK, that's what it seemed like every time I've asked folks to help me remember the author and titles of these books about a doctor who traveled to a SF ABOUT A DOCTOR? MUST BE SOMETHING BY ALLEN NOURSE! (Shut . . . Up) colony world and solved intriguing problems.

Finally, I found out the actual author and titles: Alice M. Lightner, Doctor to the Stars and (most likely) The Space Plague.

She wrote quite a few books, as it turns out, and they sound like the kind of thing I loved as a kid.

LDR @40: But wool underwear would be itchy.

Not if it was made out of the right kind of wool, eg merino, assuming you're not allergic. ~All my most comfortable socks are made out of merino, and I could see wearing eg. long underwear in the winter made out of it quite happily.

[0] I actually don't know how many.[1] I just looked up, and it was 4a.
[1] Which is kinda scary, come to that.

I'll have to go check out Lightner -- those titles don't sound familiar.

Kevin, #101: I'm not allergic to wool, and I still find Merino itchy and uncomfortable; it doesn't make me break out or anything, but it's definitely not something I'd want to wear as undies. (Or socks, for that matter.)

Googling around: A.M. Lightner was the pen name-for-fiction of Alice Lightner Hopf, who wrote lots of nature books. She was a busy author; in addition to nineteen YA titles she is credited for writing "Man from UNCLE" fiction. In her sixties!

Sad: Nothing in print, and only a couple of her books have Amazon reviews.

One of my tools for grappling with the world is WWJAT? (What would Jane Austen think?)

And Xopher and jnh?

Good stuff. Bring it up at the plea bargaining stage for sure.

Nonfiction: A couple years ago, my summer beach reading was Hospitality in Ireland, 900-1500. It was Catherine O'Sullivan's dissertation, and then she left academia and I've been sad. I love that book.

"If you stopped tellin' people it's all sorted out after they're dead, they might try sortin' it all out while they're alive."

(I also wrote a long screed analyzing Lost based on Northrop Frye's hierarchy of modes and why it felt wrong to get an ending that fit neither high fantasy nor mystery/hard SF expectations. The key word is long, though.)

Stefan Jones @100, when I hear SF and Doctors my first thought is actually James White!

Mine is Michael Blumlein.

1. Allergic to the lanolin or other sheep proteins on the surface.

2. Reacting to the horrible, nasty roughness caused by the way modern industrial processes TREAT the wool (think the difference between frizzy over-chemicalled breaky human hair and beautiful well-treated conditioner'ed hair). Some overscoured wool can be 'put back' if you wash it with some conditioner in the rinse. Some is a total wash. If this is your reaction problem, moving to items made of handspun, cared-for wool may well solve your problem (if you have a friend who spins). Also try alpaca.

3. Some people -- my mother is one of them -- have skin that just can't handle the tips of hairs touching them. Including her own. She has to keep her hair either short enough not to bend back and touch her neck, or long enough that it can be ponytailed and such; in the odd growing-out period the back of her neck breaks out as if she were wearing an animal-hair sweater (any animal-hair -- she even reacts to alpaca, which is dead soft almost no matter how you overscour it).

Janet, #113: "If you stopped tellin' people it's all sorted out after they're dead, they might try sortin' it all out while they're alive."

That concept came up recently in an e-mail conversation. It occurs to me that this statement, or something like it, is an excellent counter to the "atheists can't have morals" argument.

I can fully understand people's objections to hidden scripts that run things they didn't ask for. When one is a tech-savvy user who likes to control one's on-line experience with the delicate precision of a marionette operator, things like this are not merely frightening from a security perspective but annoying from an esthetic one.

But consider. One of the major fronts in the on-line intellectual property battlefront is between "what is easy" and "what is right". Heck, starting with the invention of the photocopier, perhaps the greatest force pushing the ethical boundaries around is laziness.

I think that most people fail to properly attribute/credit/track-back material cut-and-pasted online, not from some principled objection to citing sources but simply because it's a lot more work. You cut and paste some text. To cut and paste the original author's (or quoter's) name and to cut and paste a url link to where you found that data pretty much triples the work involved.

What the Tynt script says to me is "We acknowledge that we've lost the battle on either the ability or desirability to directly control or limit the re-use of our output. So we want to make the credit/link/track-back process easier to do than not to do."

It's sort of like hidden watermarks in online photographs that only show up if you copy the image for use elsewhere. The message is "This is mine -- and I'm happy to share it with the world in the context in which I choose to present it. But if you want to take it away from that context and use it for something else without consulting me, I'm going to make that harder/more annoying to do."

Like I say, I fully appreciate peoples annoyance and concern about hidden scripts. But I also appreciate the creative way in which the Tynt approach attempts to meet users halfway on the IP battleground.

I took it as an extended metaphor for life. it's hard to figure out when it's going on, you don't have all the answers when it's over, and you have to tolerate a lot of people exhorting you to buy things.

That explains my perception that Lost's writers were making it up as they went. Personally, if I wanted stories to be metaphors for life, I'd ask myself why I bother with the stories, and I'd instead go out and have an actual life.

Wait. That doesn't sound right.

But, as has been previously discussed, there are, out there in the readership, Those Who Will Notice.

nerdycellist @140/908: I abandoned the consensus aesthetic so long ago I don't even remember it. ('Sides, I'm middlin' convinced that It's All A Plot to keep you buying New Stuff ever time the fad fashion changes, which They make damn sure happens every season.) I am rather more of the "Merlin's study" school of decorating. I will concede, however, a serious kink for spherical things. But my taste runs more to designer marbles and mineral spheres than twigs and moss.

One of the most interesting decorating motifs I've ever encountered is a lady who compulsively collects tiny things. Gaming miniatures, broken earrings, eraser toys. She doesn't go out and buy them, she finds them. Half-buried in the mud, abandoned in grocery carts, stuck in seat cushions, what have you. Her house is wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling, every horizontal surface, covered in displays of these things. Shadow boxes. Display drawers. Buckets and cups and bowls. She has them carefully categorized, so over here you'll find a little cup full of tiny metal shoes. Over there, it's tiny plastic cats. It is, as one might expect, a dusting nightmare. It's really weird, but it's fascinating.

So, is jnh any relation to tnh & pnh? :o)

I don't think they were evoking anything quite as fancy as a metaphor; I think they just realized that they could jerk their audience around with total impunity, so they did, laughing all the way to the bank.

Here's what's bothering me today. One of the great things about Lost was that, at its best, it was fantastic ensemble storytelling. Nobody was outstandingly more important than anyone else, though you had a core group (your Kirk-Spock-McCoy group) and a second tier group (your Scotty, Uhura, Sulu, Checkov group). But the way Lost ended obliterated all that -- making it seem the only important story was Jack's, and everything that ever happened was designed to bring HIM through to the afterlife. Now maybe the producers were simply thinking ahead to spin-offs, which is crass and manipulative but understandable of them. Maybe they are planning a rollicking comedy spin-off called Two Guys and an Island, or a buddy cop series called Sawyer & The Ghost-Botherer. But if it was all and only about Jack from the very beginning, their method of telling the story, making me think the other people had real story arcs too, leaves me feeling very cheated. (Perhaps because I never liked Jack, not ever, from the first second he opened his eye in the first shot of the first episode.)

But that's *my* comfort food! <suspicious>You're not me, are you?</suspicious>

Stefan Jones (100): If it helps, those Lightner books are what immediately thought of when I saw your description, before I saw the answer. I found her a bit uneven; my favorite of hers was Star Dog. That held up fairly well when I tracked it down again recently, but it's definitely a kids' book.

SF Medicine: I think James White too. Though Leinster's Med Ship Doc is a recent addition to my mindspace.

Lost: Haven't followed it, barely affected by the hype, but "It was all a dying hallucination/vision" is the lamest possible ending for anything that complex!

Sisuile 111: See ct jnh above.

Things I can buy would be fine; things I could make would be great.

These days, my snack food list usually involves chips-n-dip (i'm not supposed to have much wheat either, so...): White Bean Dip or Black Bean Dip with corn tortilla chips. Also, lots and lots of hummus. I will say a healthy dollop of ricotta or a creamy goat cheese into the white bean dip makes it seriously creamy and addictive, it just means I then have to worry about dairy refrigeration.

Cheap, Healthy, Good (linked from here a couple of months ago) is mostly vegetarian and always tasty. Every time she posts, not only is there a "I could make that", I also get "I should make that!" Recipe archive

Cheese and apples has been a favorite. I'll second the bean dips (or bean soups), without the meat. Yoghurt sometimes fulfils that need for a non-sweet snack, depending on the yoghurt. I even snacked on sun-dried tomatoes in my misspent youth.

For some reason, I seem to be getting hungry now.

I like my omelettes small and runny--two eggs, teeny skillet, 3-4 minutes, just until the top is barely set. So for me, they're a snack, or a supper when I'm just too tired to make a sandwich. OTOH, I have a friend who keeps hens, and her fresh eggs have spoiled me forever.

Open threadiness: this sort of popped into my head.

[SCENE]

FUTURE: Hey, look, we can give you these wonderful devices, they'll fix all of your pollution problems, cure cancer, and give everybody a pony!

TODAY: [skeptical] What will it cost?

FUTURE: You'll never know.

TODAY: Pardon? We'll never know what?

FUTURE: You'll never know what you missed along the way to developing these devices.

[pause]

TODAY: Will we survive long enough to create these devices otherwise?

FUTURE: You'll never know that either.

[FIN]

Also, the fact that Future isn't worried about getting deleted from existence by changing the past has some interesting implications.

Oh, now *I* have the munchies! I think I'll go eat the little baby pea pods I got at the farmers' market yesterday. (TRM: edamame. Also tiny baby okra with kosher salt, microwaved for 30 sec or until they're briiiiight green.)

If you have bread or breadlike objects that are whole-grain or complex enough for you; I know they make all kinds of wonderfully odd low-carb bread out of things like lentils and whatnot.

Let some go stale and cut it into cubes (or cube it first and THEN let it go stale; sometimes that's easier, unless you let it go sooooo stale that it shatters when you try to slice).

Beat several eggs with enough milk to make a royale (think for French toast, only about 3 times more liquid-for-bread than you'd need for French-toasting your volume of bread cubes). Mix in any spices you like; I find cumin and garlic are TEH NOMZ, plus whatever else I feel like. Curry is also very good.

Pour the liquid over the stale bread cubes in a large bowl. Refrigerate, stirring (to get the top cubes into the liquid) until it's all either absorbed or evaporated by your fridge -- wait till there's no noticable puddle at the bottom, at least, or it'll be harder to get off the foil later.

Spread on a foil-covered baking sheet and bake at 300-ish degF (over 250, but not much over) until they're crunchy, or until the whole kitchen smells good.

Peel off foil and eat as soon as they're cool; will keep in the fridge for a week at least (uncovered; they tend to get soggy if covered).

I call them 'Kugel croutons'. The egg and milk make them more substantial than plain bread, plus they carry spices nicely to make them nom-savory as well as nom-crunchy.

Are you talking about diacetyl? Major popcorn manufacturers started removing that chemical additive several years ago after a wave of liability lawsuits hit.

Break it down
Stop, Dinner time

Every time you see me
The Dinner's just so hype
I'm dope on the stove and I'm magic on the grill

Now why would I ever stop cooking this?
With others makin' meals that just don't hit
I've toured around the world, from London to the Bay
It's "Dinner, go Dinner, MC Dinner, yo, Dinner"
And the rest can go and play

You can't eat this
You can't eat this
You can't eat this

Yeah, you can't eat this
I told you, you can't eat this
Too hype, can't eat this
Get way outta here, you can't eat this

Dr. Phil

And, @66 and @72 - new books purchased. Now cuddling up with my iPad Kindle app to read.

"It Was Nothing -- Really!" by Ted Sturgeon. It's one of those frequently-asked-about stories.

That is one of the things that fanfic is for. heh.

Or a Crossman/Dragnet crossover...

It's always interesting how much people's tastes vary. Some of the suggestions above are right out for me - I loath olives, for example, and would gag on what TexAnne considers a perfect omlette (I like mine solid right through with bits of the outside going brown...). Adding dried fruit to couscous had never occured to me, as I've always considered it strictly a savoury dish.

Useful dish for when very tired (minimal preparation effort and doesn't even need chewing): make couscous (simply add boiling water to couscous and leave for 10-15 minutes), add cream cheese or grated cheddar. Mix. Eat.

But I like Bruce's idea @156, too!

...aka Delenn on Babylon 5.

Me, I say dibs on Irene Pappas.

Yeah, I liked her better with the bone ridge on her head.

Tattoos And Violence - Is There A Relationship? Author not listed; posted by "admin" on May 5, 2010.

Tattoos And Violence – Is There A Relationship? by Christian Little, posted on May 16, 2010.

The articles are broadly the same, with minor word changes here and there. Here's the opening of the Custom Hats article:

One certainly does not have to be a sociopath in order to get tattoos, nor does the appearance of a tattoo mean that a person is one. However, a great number of studies have demostrated that most sociopaths do in truth possess tattoos as being one of their most powerful common factors. In addition, a well-known crime writer said in an interview that each and every single one of the numerous serial killers he had spoken with had had multiple tattoos.

One most certainly does not need to be a sociopath in order to get tattoos, nor does the look of a tattoo imply an individual is one. Nevertheless, a great number of studies have demostrated that a large number of sociopaths do indeed have got tattoos as being one of their most powerful common aspects. In addition, a well-known crime novelist mentioned in an interview that each and every single one of the numerous serial murderers he had spoken with had had multiple tattoos.

I'm a little astonished by how angry this makes me.

You can get some amazingly complex culinary results by mixing sweet and savo(u)ry. Not being vegetarian myself, I like to play with fruit/meat combinations: citrus fruit of any sort is a natural to go with sharp or herbal flavors (lemon pepper, lemon dill, orange and onion glaze on your protein of preference...) Raisins / sultanas / dried cranberries / whatever dried fruit is around, into a curry or pilaf or into the glaze for meat or tofu.

We put oranges into a mixed chili once, which gave it a surprising note and the acid seemed to intensify the heat (as one of our friends warned us it might.) (But we're the sort of people who put diced cucumbers into chili once, because we were desperate for something to do with them. They looked weird but took up the flavor nicely.)

I do sweet bread pudding regularly but am hankering to do it up as a savory dish (layers of bread heels, sharp cheddar, diced onion, possibly some minced ham or bacon crumbles, whatever savory herbs strike my fancy, fill up the pan with an unsweetened egg custard and bake in a slow oven for at least an hour or until it's good and set in the middle.) Sort of quichey, but with bread in it instead of a crust.

Hm.

I should probably cook dinner soon.

I donated two more dust-collecting inefficient "CD towers" and fit my whole music CD collection in two neat boxes.

I pried two boxes of Stuff -- ancient computer games, some dating back to the purchase of my first PC 27 years ago -- out of my clutter shelf, and put it on Freecycle.

If I don't crash and spend the rest of the day on the couch, I might tear through the box of CD cases. Somewhere along the line I got into the habit of saving empty CD jewel boxes and now I have dozens and dozens. I suspect the right strategy is to toss the full-thickness ones.

If I clear out enough space to be able to sore my crate of electronic hobby stuff on the clutter shelf then I'll declare myself done for the day.

I had plans to do lots of things today. However, the 12+ mile run this morning (a couple of miles longer than I had intended) resulted in me not doing very much this afternoon. MUST mow the lawn tomorrow.

On the Tynt tagging thing: I agree on making attribution opt-out. I don't like it phoning home, and I don't like the fact that the URL is designed for tracking and is not the URL I actually copied from.

It does at least appear to be competently designed so that it doesn't cause problems if it can't find tynt.com for some reason.

The hosts file in Windows 7 should be in c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc (or similar, depending on where you installed Windows). If you don't want to edit that file, you can add the domain to the restricted zones in IE, Adblock in Firefox, or blocked content in Opera.

Heather Rose Jones @ 120:

The big problem, to me, after altering the fundamental way that copy-and-paste has worked for years, is that Tynt don't seem to be doing it out of any desire to ensure that people attribute their quotes correctly. Rather, their entire business model seems to be taking advantage of companies who still don't grasp how computers work, with added privacy-invading tracking sauce.

I'm willing to bet that their pitch to companies was about tracking and protecting their rights, and carefully left out the bit about it being incredibly easy to snip back out by the end-user.

Back on the "reading him his last rights" thing, remember? "If you do not have a Savior, one will be born unto you"?

Those are the Res Miranda rights.

this

I still have literally dozens of spare slim-line jewel cases. When I've replaced my own broken cases I'll ask the local library about donating spares.

I tossed or donated computer manuals yesterday. It is sad how those things go out of date. Many I couldn't in good conscience donate . . . just too dang old. One item I tossed was a collection of hundreds of fonts . . . for Windows 3.1. Another had a floppy disk of code samples in it. By interesting coincidence, a co-worker asked me to bring in any spare 5.25" floppies I had . . . so he could show he sons what they used in the olden days.

I have 65,000 fonts. If you want one, you'd better know what its name is.

This appears to have broken their server; it's now generating only blank pages.

Sounds about right.

PM me! (initials of stefan edward jones at aol dot com.)

I was thinking of all of the side things we learn when we research anything, and of the necessary intermediate technologies when we create something. It's no good to have a miraculous device if it's indistinguishable from magic, especially if we can't do the maintenance.

It goes back to several old science fiction stories, where an alien race gives us wonderful tech and it cripples us in the long run. Chaotic systems and all- sometimes the journey is important. And to tie in to some other comments, if we can just make pollution go *poof* we won't fix the problem that caused it.

(see the book Making Easy Money With Google for a plan for doing that sort of thing)

First verses:

Coming soon: a book from Baen
About the traitorous (left wing) reign
Of President
Chelsea
Clinton

She's made a deal with devils, literal
Or maybe their just Foreign Liberals
Or Liberals "native" to this land
Who hate in, do not understand
As it never crosses their tiny brains:
*That Jesus just _loves_ capital gains
*That saints are known for packing heat
* ...and Real Americans all eat meat
And little
Else
Beside

The U.N. troops march in, of course
And use the iron hand of force
To 'liberate' us one and all
From God and guns and Freedom's Call
And (look away,should this prove scathing)
Our mania for daily bathing

Hero: a smooth and manly sort
Who wrestles cattle, just for sport
A game pursued, strange though it looks
Whilst fighting wars and writing books
And lending ladies moistening looks
He stumbles on a Clintonian plan
To have our fleet sunk by Japan
Or China.
Or Russia, or
I guess they're terrorists.

His boss: an wry and tired vet
Who finds that there is still life yet
In standing up for our freedom and
Dies protecting a fighting man
Or a lowly woman, quite benighted
Whose white skin U.N. thugs excited
Neal, our hero, kneels,
Howls
No!

The girl: She's lovely, but confused
(She doesn't share the author's views
On God or guns or Modern Art
But though so wrong-headed at the start
Will change: our hero's mighty thews
Will sway our lady's loathesome views
Toward what's good, and rational...right
The author dreams this every night.)
(Figuratively, she is his daughter
But still she's fit for Onan Fodder)

Any takers...perfectly understandable if none...of course, the more you wirte of it, the less I will, and that may be a blessing for all concerned.

Capitalism is not a suicide pact.

It's short, it's sweet, and it applies to both the too-big-to-fail question and the BP affair. It alludes to conservatives' "the Constitution is not a suicide pact" and thumbs its nose at that - because yeah, the Constitution is kinda a suicide pact ("Give me liberty or give me death" has a pretty final ring to it), but capitalism clearly shouldn't be.

It's pithy. If you like it, please use it wherever you see fit.

This has been a public service announcement, and we now return you to your regularly scheduled Open Thread, already in progress.

Someone recently noted somewhere else that many American conservatives speak as if it were, in fact, a suicide pact in that they seem good at finding ways around it lest we die at the hands of swarthy foreigners and/or natives.

This is not unique to them; my side of the world is more likely to try to get around an inconvenient bit lest someone starve, but this is 1.) somewhat more convincing, at least as far as value received for exception made, and 2.) is a milder blackmail attempt---we're 'Agree with us or be uncouth heartless barbarians,', their pitch is, 'Agree with us or you're all gonna die like effete civilized types in a Conan knock-off.'

So I guess I'm basically on the Left because my temperament is such that the more a religion threatens me, the less likely I am to believe in it---someone whose basic pitch is 'Well, we're good-looking next to Eternal Damnation,' is admitting that they have a weak case.

Neutra Face : An Ode On A Typeface (A Bearded Poker Face Parody)

Is there a reason why a suitable amount of high explosive can't be placed a half mile down the leaking oil pipe and just use the weight of the surrounding earth to collapse in on itself and seal the leak that way?

I mean, it's a mile between the ocean floor and the oil reserve-- you should be able to collapse that pipe on its own, no?

KiethS: Thanks, now I just need to figure out how to make it admit that I am the administrator. It won't let me edit the file.

When I see "oorlog", I immediately think 'navy'. This would be because it used to mean "war" and in the last few hundred years has mostly been used to refer to marine warfare.

Unfortunately, I can't ask SAOB, but sv.wikipedia thinks it's a germanic word that means "breaking of oath".

Jacque #124:
So, is jnh any relation to tnh & pnh? :o)
Only to the degree that dcb is related to ddb.

xopher and jnh: The "reading him his last rights" options will be passed on at coffee hour this week (between sips, not during).

People's sensing sensitivity varies, and different breeds of sheep and other fiber-producing animl have different characteristics to the the fiber. Also, the fiber from different parts of an individual animal varies, and the fiber from animal to animal varies.

"Rug wool" to me is nasty scratch stuff, a black merino lambskin I have is very soft to my touch. But again, different people differ in what feels nice/nasty to their touch. There are people who like the feel of rubber and people who loathe it. There are people who wear clothes made of synthetic materials (or feel-coarse-to-me-natural fibers) which given a free choice I'd never have against my skin (see "scratchy nylon lace" which abraded my skin but probably not all the small "oh how CUTE!"girl children put into outer and underclothing festooned with the abominable stuff--some people -like- the feel of materials which to me are unbearably rough/scratchy, while some fabrics which feel soft and nice to me other people don't like the feel of at all....

Processing can/does make a difference--worsted versus woolen, for example, one is softer than the other (the one processed with grease left in for spinning, versus removal of all grease before spinning, makes a sensory difference.

xeger, #207: Ouch. I'm glad she's out of pain, but still.

Find Notepad on the Start menu. Right-click on it, instead of clicking on it, and select "Run As Administrator", then open the file from Notepad.

The group Medical Justice, which helps protect doctors from meritless malpractice suits, advises its members to have patients sign an agreement that gives the doctor copyright over a Web posting if the patient mentions the doctor or practice.

Incidentally, Medical Justice says that one of the problems they are trying to address by creating agreements with patients is that people falsely claim^* to be patients: people posing as patients- such as disgruntled employees, ex-spouses, or competitors can damage a hard-earned reputation. Of course, an agreement with patients can't possibly help here.

It may be that their tactic is to use DMCA takedown notices, arguing that the poster claims to be a patient, and if this were so, they would have signed the agreement, and so the posting is a copyright violation.

--
^* I don't actually want to link to them, but I got this from http://www.medicaljustice.com/internet-libel-physicians.aspx

In recent months I've had cripplingly severe writer's block, and partly in search of an alternative outlet took up my lil' digital camera again. A lot, lately, actually, and I find that I'm doing pretty well with it, as you may see at my Flickr photostream. I feel like there's something in my better pictures worth saying - it scratches much of the same itch as writing does, for me.

Here I am, wanting to improve my craft, and on a very limited budget. (VERY limited budget. SSI-limited budget.) I don't really want to invest in a lot of equipment, and wouldn't even if I could afford. But I would like to learn more about digital image manipulation, both for basically natural effects and for more fantastic/imaginative ones. First request: What's good in books on those subjects? (And, conversely, what looks tempting but I should stay away from?) Are there good online tutorial collections I should be aware of? And like that.

I also...okay, this is going to sound howlingly ignorant, because I am howlingly ignorant about it and no point in pretending otherwise. I know that people sell photos, because I see some of you talk about it here. But...to whom? How does one find markets, and make use of them? I am coming in really very clueless, and would welcome a few pointers. That's my second request.

Thanks!

With things like car crashes, where their fatality has much less to do with the age of the victims, I don’t mind the terminology so much.

First, format. jpgs are decent, but they are limited in the ability to edit (because the images lose a lot in the camera). Tiffs are more complete, but huge. RAW is best, but requires cameras which shoot RAW, and editors which read it.

I like Lightzone, my father uses Lightzone and Bibble. Both of us make some use of Photoshop (I do it for clean up, filters which only exist in photoshop, and to manage my printing.

You do have some nice stuff. Some of the stuff you shoot in the style I've been mostly doing the past few years is very good; clean, and spare.

You can try selling in places like Etsy, or Zazzle. You can set up a website, and try to get traffic. You can make prints, hang them in local shows; try to get some gallery space.

You could try to make cards, and get them into shops.

For tips, give me a bit, and I'll get some links together, and send them to you. You could also look at my photoblog which is hideously behind on anything recent (i.e. it is effectively dormant at the moment, but has some [I hope] decent stuff on it).

(Hmm, first-time poster posting something that looks like it aims to rile things up.)

Assuming you're not being intentionally stupid, let me point out that healthcare is not only about old people who might maybe live two more years (although, maybe it's two good years; what's wrong with that?). It's also about making sure poorer people don't die of things that even moderately affluent people get treated easily. Infections from an animal bite, proper treatment for a broken leg, vaccinations for nasty diseases, and so on.

So, no, I'm not annoyed about it at all. Thanks for asking.

I find it interesting that you mention the name Mimi; I've looked at your IP address, which puts you in the area of a dear family friend by that name who died nearly a year ago. Did Mimi's last name start with a G? Is she who I'm thinking of? (If yes, and you don't want to identify yourself, tell me what letter her maiden name started with.) If so—or even if not, actually—I'm sorry for your loss. I certainly still miss the Mimi I'm thinking of, and my mother does even more.

In point of fact, the statistics that are used to compare health care systems are things like infant mortality and life expectancy, although there are also financial outcomes mentioned (proportion of personal bankruptcies precipitated by a medical event, for instance). But life expectancies don't always resonate with people, so there is a tendency in some reports to translate that (with better or worse math and statistics) into lives saved. It's not how the CDC or the UN track these things, but it makes nice headlines.

It bugs me, but it's rarely to the point of annoying the hell out of me.

Healthcare does include plenty of things that dramatically lessen lifespan, or outright kill you, but it also includes tons of things that simply trim off time from the end. If the balance isn't overwhelmingly tilted towards the former, then the terminology is misleading, and if the balance is tilted towards the latter, as I believe, the terminology is worthless.

On copying text and having the URL added: I've only seen this on one site, and I thought it was really cool, because I actually wanted the URL and I didn't have to go back and get it separately. The tracking is a bit weird . . . but IMO user tracking has become part of the Internet. And when were cookies invented anyway?

On vegetarian snacks: surprised no one mentioned rice cakes. Hope you don't mind a little product placement: I love Lundberg's Mochi Sweet brown rice cakes. They are flavorful, and some of my friends have been impressed by them too.

Arancini (Italian rice balls) are something you can make yourself. They're good hot or cold, and make good vegetarian substitutes for meatballs.

No, it wasn't Northeast Texas. Coincidence, then. It's just that we're almost a year to the day from my Mimi's death.

What brings you to Making Light?

Also, on 222, I suspect you may mean "lack of healthcare" at the start of your second paragraph. Or smoking, perhaps?

Another aspect to health care is disability rather than death, of course; we have a member of this community (without health insurance) who suffered a disabling stroke a year and change ago. He delayed calling the ambulance because of cost considerations, and time is of course a factor in stroke treatment.

Actually, that's an issue with smoking too; do we count the people who are still alive but can't climb stairs or walk more than a block any more?

I used to be a big commenter at Unfogged (like in the top ten for volume there for a while) but when ogged left, things gradually started getting less interesting and now I'm homeless. My blog has no commenters, given that I post twice a month on average. I doubt I'll settle in here, but I did have this question and I wanted someone to talk about it with. I tried at Balloon Juice and got no takers. And I've read a number of really great threads here over the years (mostly after they died down), so I thought of you guys.

Another aspect to health care is disability rather than death

Oh, certainly. I suppose I should expand on the reasons for my irritation, lest I me mistaken for some strain of troll. (I wouldn't want to invite any rudeness, after all. *cough*)

I've been following FireDogLake and Crooks & Liars for the past 9 months or so, and they've collectively mentioned the 40,000/year statistic on healthcare a dozen times, if not two dozen. A couple of those mentions were in expansive posts outlining the advantages of universal healthcare of one sort or another and the costs of our pre-reform system. In not one of those mentions was it explained what "lives/year" is shorthand for. I get the strong impression that none of those writing about it (on those sites) even realize that it's only a shorthand, and that really concerns me. Especially since, in that context, life expectancy is a much preferable metric. "Lives/year" is just sensational and inaccurate. I'm a liberal, and I don't like it when other liberals make bad arguments.

But those people adequately acknowledge the disability issue, so I have no beef with them about it. And I believe healthcare studies do treat the quality of life issue to some extent.

And even with life expectancy, there are complications. For instance, if you don't count deaths from lung cancer or COPDs, do smokers still have reduced life expectancy? I don't know, but it's an interesting question.

I don't understand. Why wouldn't you?

> Is Adam Ant as adamant as Atom Ant on a rant?

Have you heard of Adam Adamant? Old British TV which was meant to be competition for The Avengers (Dashing Edwardian gentleman wakes up in 1960s from suspended animation, meets swinging 60s chick. Together THEY FIGHT CRIME!)

I've never managed to see an episode, but I'm more than interested.

A very bad idea.

Srsly.

But... but ... there's no sodomy!*

*... and no dinosaurs either!

This 2004 news summary is out of date and doesn't reproduce the complete list it describes, but it might provide a starting point for further inquiry.

Let's look at my second stepfather. He died of complications from diabetes. He was 62. That is a bit off the US average. He did not have healthcare (because he happened to make a good choice, at the time, for a job... not his fault mainframe computers are going the way of the dodo).

If he'd had healthcare the odds are he would still be alive.

So he's one of those umpteen thousand. He died because of diabetes; it was the proximate cause of his death, but lack of healthcare was a (major) contributing factor, and so it caused him to be one of the people a lack of healthcare killed.

Speaking of spy stories, can you name one movie or TV show in which actors from Get Smart appeared along with with actors from Mission: Impossible. No, I don't mean the episode of the former where Maxwell Smart disguises himself as Martin Landau.

Do you have good medical insurance? I don't have any, being self-employed and over 50 -- any plan I could buy would bankrupt me. I am only too aware that I could be one of that 40,000 at any time; all it would take would be one drunk in a car with resultant serious injury, or one bad cold turning into pneumonia, or one stroke. With a little bad luck, that could be you too.

Cardiovascular disease is the big one. Smoking increases the hazard of heart attack by a factor of two or three, and this results in more excess deaths and much more reduction in life expectancy than the lung cancer increases do, because heart attack is much more common and happens earlier in life than lung cancer.

This one is also important because the risk goes down quite rapidly after people stop smoking, and is down to nearly the level for never-smokers after a couple of years. The cancer and COPD risks take a lot longer to go away.

Second-hand smoking would be a better example if you want to accuse public-health types of exaggeration in the service of a higher cause. When Washington (and before that, Tacoma) were voting on a ban on smoking in bars and restaurants there were ads saying that waiters or bartenders (I forget which) had a fourfold higher risk of lung cancer than the population as a whole. There is no way this could be due to environmental tobacco smoke exposure -- it's almost an order of magnitude too high -- and they didn't actually claim in so many words that it was, but that was certainly implied. They also refused to admit that an aim of the rules was to inconvenience smokers, when this is one of the main points of smoking restrictions and is how they get much of their beneficial effect.

On deaths prevented for a short or long time. In the case of air pollution there was a serious concern as to whether the excess deaths on high air pollution days are of very ill people who would have died within a few days anyway. In this case the evidence suggests that they are not, although they are, of course, more likely to already be unwell.

You can read about this issue in the Health Effects Insitute report
http://pubs.healtheffects.org/view.php?id=228 (HEI is an independently-run, joint EPA-industry funded, organization that commissions and reviews research on air pollution)

Turkey has stated that future humanitarian aid will be escorted by the Turkish Navy. Israel said, "Well, the soldiers acted in self-defense."

The convoy included two members of the German Parliament, a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize (no, not that one), and the brother of a lady who spoke on Saturday at Clear Creek Monthly Meeting's picnic, which was the first I had heard of any of this.

Anyway: interesting times. America may be forced to choose between Israel and the continued relevance of NATO.

It certainly sounds at this point like excessive force, but further judgment should probably wait for more confirmed details.

Yes, I am.

Especially when it’s about lack of healthcare.

No, not especially for healthcare. Abuse and gross oversimplification of statistics annoys me in discussions about any public policy matters.

I haven't seen any reports that the other boats had been boarded and inspected. The impression I've gotten is that this was more in the nature of a midnight (or rather 4 AM) raid to take control of the ship and force it into port.

The chief sticking point as I understand it is that the ships had been inspected by the Turks to make sure there were no weapons, but the Israelis wanted the flotilla to land in Israel and ship the cargo over land into Gaza (where they could inspect it and control its shipment). The Turkish NGO running the flotilla refused, on the grounds that they didn't trust the Israelis to let the aid in, so the Israelis boarded the ships in international waters with a view to forcing them into port.

It seems clear to me that this was a carefully planned provocation, but Israel trying to win sympathy by pointing that out is rather like telling the cops that you shouldn't get arrested for glassing that guy in the bar because the things he said about your mother were really nasty.

There are three ways the whole Israel/Palestine thing can play out: A slightly smaller Israel and an independent Palestine, a secular, democratic, majority-Muslim Greater Israel, or a Jewish apartheid state. Palestinian groups and their allies have been eager to paint the Israelis as hell-bent on the third option. I think that's wrong as a factual matter, but it wouldn't work nearly as well if the Israeli government and a large minority of its population weren't helping.

I'd also like to see a comparison of life-expectancy, but couldn't find one quickly, and expect that it is a harder number to calculate, especially since essentially everyone gets medicare on their 64th birthday, which really complicates things.

The 2009 Harvard Health Study

As a miniseries, it would have been, "Lost . . . on an uncharted island . . . a band of strangers struggles to survive. But they take themselves along wherever they go and their pasts may destroy their future. Meanwhile, mysterious danger lurks at the heart of the island . . . "

As an ongoing series, it was, "Lost . . . on an uncharted island . . . a band of strangers strugSQUIRREL!"

Also, possibly because I had to pass a survival course to get out of junior high, I was very annoyed at the stupid things people were doing who should have known better. Mister Survival Expert lets all of those corpses just lie there in the jet until the pigs show up? Really? I mean, okay, his personal Issues mean that he doesn't really care about signaling for help, but, dude. Tropical. Island. Heat. Flies. Crabs. Pigs.

I certainly read a fair bit of criticism of that study and its numbers. Megan McArdle and Marginal Revolution both discussed this. But I honestly didn't follow much of the discussion in depth. Here is Megan's post after the healthcare reform passed, when she challenged the claims made justifying health care reform. I wasn't entirely convinced by her arguments against healthcare reform (but she made real arguments, not accusations that Obama was an evil Socialist Muslim Commie), but I think it was interesting to see a lot of people who'd made very strong claims about what healthcare reform would do for us kind-of backpedaling after it was passed.

I tend to be a bit doubtful of this kind of claim (it looks like the sort of estimate you could change a fair bit by playing with your assumptions just a little bit), though it seems broadly plausible. I do know that there's older research that failed to find much difference in life expectancy or health outcomes (in the 70s) between people given full medical insurance coverage, and people given nothing but catastrophic coverage (like a yearly cap on medical expenses, above which everything is covered). This is a link to a summary of the project and its findings.

I made a cheese spread this weekend that was cream cheese, a bit of sour cream to make it loose enough to spread, sun dried tomatoes, chopped red onion and kalamata olives (all of the stuff aside from the cheese was finely chopped). it would be good without the olives too and possibly other savory thing added.... it kept well, we put it out on a bowl of ice when we put it out (Dawn patrol suite, not consuite.... smaller audience).

I can see the same mix with any manner of sweet or savory items added, including nuts. it was really nice on pitas and whole grain crackers.

All in all, I'd say Israel is in the wrong (then again, blockade is an act of war, so there are some serious questions about the way they are handling their relations to Gaza any way one looks at it).

That could be because we didn't actually get the kind of health care reform that would have done those things. When you say "getting X will give us A, B, and C" and then what you get isn't X but a very different and scaled-back Y, you have to scale back on your predictions of what it's going to do.

Congratulations!

What did he major in? What's next?

It'll take several years after all the current changes are implemented to be able to see statistically significant results, and as others have noted, with a watered down law you get watered down results.

This debate is important to me. My own life expectancy is significantly impacted by my access to healthcare. At the moment, I can't leave Massachusetts because I need significant continuing medical care, and the federal law excluding restrictions on preexisting conditions doesn't take effect until 2014. With preventative care, I'm a robustly healthy person with some major treatable health problems. Without, my quality of life drops quickly and dramatically.

Serge #261: Thanks. The important thing is that he did it. The sense of pride in achievement that we felt coming from him was wonderful.

To my eye, the best of your Flickr sets are a few of the macro shots -- IMG1718 stands out for the lighting and composition; IMG1848, maybe 1663. (Although 1585, the sidewalk with sloping side ramps, is rather interesting.) Also 1543 (the wood surface). From what I know of the markets, though, this is the hardest kind of shot to sell.

The easy way to get a few sales is "microstock", where people pay very little and you get a tiny pittance. The only way to make any measurable money is to give them a LOT of photos that get a lot of sales. istockphoto.com may be the leading practitioner. I don't know what their numbers show, but generally what sells from stock is shots with people in them (with model releases), and then landscapes that can be used as backgrounds and clean shots of objects that can be used as collage elements.

All the real money is in doing custom work for clients; but that has its own difficulties of course.

The software is expensive. The Gimp is free and capable, though; it just doesn't support my preferred lossless workflow (you change the actual pixels, not just layer changes on top of them). Bibble is great for working batches of raw images (like for weddings and event photography), and is now pushing into the same space as Lightroom (adding some local editing, and cataloging). Photoshop is still THE tool for producing final results of the highest quality.

I have little idea what good introductory books are; all the ones that were good for introducing me are about B&W and developing your own film and so on. (The Ansel Adams basic photo series is STILL good for real understanding of what's going on with exposure and tone rendering, and with lens tilts and shifts, and when thinking about printing, but the methods he does most of this are now archaic.) (Ctein's book on digital restoration is actually terrifically valuable for lots of kinds of Photoshop work beyond that, but is very much not a beginner book.)

I'm sorry to hear that. Spider Robinson's Callahan's Saloon stories are a kind of model for what a voluntary community can be.

Most excellent for all concerned!

But, at one point, when the lady of the castle was helping Robin remove his armor prior to bathing she had to be instructed on how to remove said armor. Worse yet, she failed her hospitality roll and left Robin to bathe himself.

Doesn't anyone bother to get the details RIGHT anymore? Every chatelaine was expected to bathe their guests, and would have known how to remove the armor when there were no squires available.

Totally blew my suspension of disbelief. I'd been happily immersed in the film up to that point.

Otherwise, the plot was plausible, especially the set up for the sequel.

albatross @268: I can't count the ways that Spider and Jeanne have influenced me. Spider's account indicates she went about as well as one can. I only regret I didn't get more time in her company. She was a Class Act.

How many people who are in the theater know those things?.... (How many people accept the completely inane and bogus bank and turn crap in supposed space environments (bank and turn requires a strong central gravitational field and for winged things an atmosphere...))

Playing up based on ignorance and keeping them clueless....

John Robb is discussing the control of media reporting on the Gulf spill. The interests of the Obama administration and BP seem to align nicely here in favor of keeping us in the dark as much as possible.

The only believable explanation is that they don't care.

For their business, they're financially right not to care. On the other hand, I do think their consistent sloppiness is eating away at their credibility year by year. But maybe it's just giving geeks like us a stick to beat them with, and it really doesn't matter.

Mark @243 - Sounds like "aggravated failure to kowtow" again. Why did Israel think it would be a good idea to let US border guards into their navy?

Fragano @258 - Congratulatory things!

Congratulations to Jeremy and his family!

How happy you all are!

Love, C.

One more of my own... Which "Star Trek" actor was in two versions of the Gunfight at OK Corral?

They do the "bank and turn" nonsense because they're plotting the action on old WWI or WWII dogfights. IIRC, the final fight sequence in the first Star Wars film was done that way.

Also, it's more attractive to the eye that straight motion in whatever direction would be.

(Although that bit in "Wrath of Kahn" where the Enterprise sinks straight down through the nebula is a classic submarine move.)

Movies are big on borrowing what works.

But expecting space combat to have anything like a convenient human attention span kind of time scale is a mistake, I think.

Re: Lost—There's got to be a genre-name for the sort of free-floating, never-quite-solved, iterating mystery style of story telling (aside from "soap opera"). X-Files had this same characteristic. I seem to have an extra sense that alerts me when there's nothing substantive behind the "mystery." I find this particular brand of gratuitous titillation deeply annoying.

If memory serves, this is an argument advanced by characters in Delany's The Einstein Intersection for why people in the rational future (the book's setting) consider the ancient (to them) religions to be immoral.

At the time I read it, I thought the argument was that final nail so plainly needed for Xtianity's coffin. Soon enough, though, I discovered that people who believed in life after death were strangely unconvinced by the argument. Even worse, I found myself at a friend's funeral starting to believe in life after death. I was shocked.

I got better, but it taught me something about how well we can fool ourselves when we have a mind to.

Those aren't mutually exclusive--there are copious opportunities for Americans with Bachelor's degrees to teach conversational English in East Asia. China is desperate for native speakers, and Korea actually pays wages that mean something in US dollars. If he's Oberlin, he ought to know about the Shansi program--it's no doubt too late to apply for the next year, but I'm sure the Shansi fellows would be happy to give advice and maybe even find him a job. I suspect it would be FAR easier for him to find a job in China than here in the US.

(and congratulations!)

ddb @ 275: "On the other hand, I do think their consistent sloppiness is eating away at their credibility year by year."

What credibility?

More seriously, I think that getting it right doesn't just lack a clear benefit, but is in fact a net negative: people of any given social setting expect everyone else to act just like them, and modern Americans are no different. If the characters acted in historically appropriate ways it would probably just confuse and upset the audience.

Anybody else remembers "Twin Peaks"?

Congratulations!

Serge @ 287:

I discovered that while I don't mind the dogfights or the sound in space in Star Wars, the sonic bombs in space (or whatever they were) in Episode 2 really annoyed me.

As for the man stepping into the tub, the camera would be focused on the face of the lady, and we would only see the gentleman again once he was seated in the tub.

After all, it's what the camera DOESN'T show that makes the scene sizzle...

I'm crushed. I'm appalled. I can never respect him again.

For instance, some of the American characters in Charles Stross' Merchant Princes books occasionally lapse into British rather than American word usages. Not a big deal, since it wasn't anything that really affected the story development. But it was still a bit jarring sometimes. (The bit that jarred me the most early on also included a line where a character is sent to an Amtrak station in a city that's not served by Amtrak. This suggests that there may be some cumulative effect of minor discrepancies jostling one out of the story's flow.)

Likewise, I usually don't mind when things like lab test results come back much faster and unambiguously than they do in real life, unless forensic science is actually the story's main focus, rather than a background device invoked to move the main story forward.

On the other hand, when in "Her Fearful Symmetry", several of the major characters start behaving implausibly idiotically midway through the book, *and the story then depends on that* for its resolution, that was enough for me to basically write off the book. (And once I'd done that, it was easier to spot various other flaws in a book that had started out promisingly.)

Serge @286: Anybody else remember "Twin Peaks"? Oh yeah. That was another one my brain skidded off.

And what's really annoying is that these often so damn popular.

Jenny Islander @294: fan dance: And instead righteous nudity under the feathers, the dancer is just wearing sweat- and pizza-stained boxers and t-shirt.

* Every time I see that name, I can't help but think, "But what does a Ledgister ledgistate?

But it is probably a mistake, along with the Briticisms.

Similarly (and more egregiously) for space opera, and the depiction of space battles. If any of the people who make those films had read Arthur Clarke's "Earthlight" they might have gotten some ideas of how to stage a battle scene in vacuum^✈ over astronomical distances that was still pretty spectacular. But they got their ideas from WWII aerial dogfight scenes, and then built on top of each other.

^☹ Sorry.
^✈ Stanley Kubrick excepted, though that's primarily because he had Arthur Clarke for a writer on "2001: A Space Odyssey". The scene in which Keir Dullea jumps through vacuum from the work pod to the ship's airlock is taken from "Earthlight".

Assume one gets .25USD per image used. Also assume the payments are made quarterly, and only in the quarter subsequent to the attainment of the payout minimum. If you clear the 50USD mark (pretty much standard) on the first day of the second quarter they will pay you within 30 days of the start of the third quarter.

You can usually demand a check, if the balance is less than the threshold, but a fee will be charged, the standard seems to be 10-15USD. The .25 payment to you is completely independent of what they charge. In a traditional stock agency the payment to the artist is a percentage (these days the standard seems to be moving to 40 percent, it used to be 50, and some agencies paid 60. Microstock competition seems to have moved that downwards). I have seen some agencies which charge 25-50USD for an image. They pay between .25-1.50USD to the artist.

All in all, I don't like microstock. I think it's a business model meant to take advantage of amateur photographers, and detrimental to the person trying to make a living with a camera. Not least because the amateur who tries to get a small stream of income from microstock is working as hard as the person who does traditional. and getting far less for her efforts.

Fragano: I have a friend (now working South America), who did two years in China after she graduated from Oberlin. Then she took a masters in international relations. She's doing work on keeping Bolivia in good shape.

Huzzah!

Jacque @ 267:

Oh, damn it, yet another good one gone. I"ve never met Jeanne, but her worth as a person shines through Spider's writings about her. I'm glad that at least she went out well.

While his physics was not of course at all realistic ("Einstein is only a theory; these distances are observed facts!"), he did quite well designing the tactics and even strategies of space combat to fit those rules. It even changed a time or two in the Lensman series as the technology changed. Tractor shears, tractor zones, etc.

John Mark Ockerbloom, #295, the Merchant Princes series is not our world -- the base world is not our world. (The British bits that didn't get fixed for the American books is a problem, though, and Charlie always tries to get them fixed.)

I have gathered from elsewhere that none of the worlds seen in the first few books is exactly the same as our world, though exactly how the backdrop of the world seen on the first page differs from ours hasn't yet been made clear. (The points of divergence as far as I've read are subtle enough to make them look more like errors than deliberate differences.) But as I said, the apparent errors are incidental enough to the story that they don't bother me that much.

Albatross @ 268: I too have fond memories of Callahan's place, though I've always associated that with Spider; I don't know what influence Jeanne had on it. I have since been attracted to online "voluntary communities" that have some of the same vision. I joined the Alt.callahans newsgroup pretty much as soon as it began, and read and participated in it for a number of years.

Later on, I moved on to other online forums. These days, the forum that best exemplifies the Callahanian spirit for me is this one.

Fragano @ 258: Congratulations!

Yes, I make mistakes. I also get annoyed when my American editor and copy editor let Britishisms slip through in a book set in their own back yard -- but I probably shouldn't air dirty linen in public. And anyway, it just turns out to be a good example of how damn hard it is to write a book set in a different English-speaking country and get it right. There's a lot of cultural cross-contamination, such that bits of American usage creep into the UK, and vice versa -- and it varies from region to region, as well.

I just finished a book by an author who shall remain nameless, in which a couple elope to Gretna Green to get married. Ahem. Except they elope while in Scotland. (The whole point of the Gretna Green thing was that English couples could go there to take advantage of the Scottish marriage law that didn't require parental consent.) Not as bad as the ghastly-beyond-belief book which opens with a Provisional IRA squad massacring an entire battalion of SAS soldiers in Belfast (spot the two errors in that sentence) and follows it with a train from London to Edinburgh crosses the Forth rail bridge on its way into that latter city -- that's a really weird diversion: 180 degrees and about 75 miles -- but you get the picture.

One of the big problems for operating remailers, besides the legal hassles, is that they're trivially abused for spamming. I think that probably forced more to shut down than legal battles did. I used to know of one or two with specialized purposes - don't know if they're still extant - but for at least one of those, there were strong reasons to doubt the ethics of the operator.

If you get info on one, I'll be interested to hear about it.

As Xena taught us, the past is another country -- that is, at most one other country.

Mostly, screen writers get their information about historical and technical details from other screenplays and novels.

I think the epitome of this is Gladiator, a movie where every single element is cobbled together from other Roman movies, TV shows and books, to the point that I wondered if the writers had any knowledge of Ancient Rome that didn't come straight from pop media.

(SPOILERS)

The whole plotline, of course--Marcus Aurelius' son subverting the Imperial succession, leading to the disgrace and then redemption of his adoptive brother, who's in love with Marcus Aurelius' daughter--is a remake of The Fall of the Roman Empire. The focus on gladiators is from Spartacus. The preoccupation with restoring the Roman Republic--truly bizarre in a second-century context--is from I, Claudius, as is the story Commodus tells of Claudius and Messalina. And the hero, General Maximus, the great Roman general, fiercely loyal to the idea of Rome without ever having seen the city, is the protagonist from Wallace Breem's novel Eagle in the Snow.

I'm sure there are others I'm forgetting.

I'd assume that the knitting pattern has an ugly neckline!

Is it just me who is confused by the system they're using? Surely they can't track clicks of the link generated, because everything after the # is stripped off by the browser before it requests the page...?

Two reasons: either the neckline is plain/ugly, or it doesn't fit right.

In Knitting in Plain English there's a whole chapter about this sort of thing. It's very entertaining reading.

I'm also confused about the utility of a heavy sweater like that with no sleeves. If it's cold enough for the body, your arms will be freezing!

A few examples:
✿ From Samurai Knitter, Vogue Knitting Winter 2009
✿ From Obsessed With Knitting, Vogue Knitting Winter 2007
✿ From A Good Yarn, Vogue Knitting, Spring/Summer 2009

Googling for the name of your favorite knitting mag and 'review' will probably turn up some, though it's generally the more cracktastic rags that get the snarkiest reviews -- Vogue in particular, because, among other criticisms, (a) they mostly only make sizes for small women, like sub-size-10; (b) they claim over and over that their stuff is High Fashion Trend-Setting Awesomeness when it's usually both behind the curve and impractical, and (c) they have a really high percentage of unwearability.

I'm reminded of back cover blurbs for fantasy books, where at some point I realized that the blurbs that used to be a draw to me were now a turn-off. Up to a certain point, I wanted very much to read a certain Type of book, so if a blurb contained the right sort of keywords--magic! dragson! epic fight between good and evil!--I would pick it up right away. Later, I wanted something new, and those exact same stock concepts were a turn-off.

When I want to go see a movie for the pretty visuals and great fight scenes, "made of tropes" is often exactly what I'm looking for: it's not going to distract me from the pretties with a complicated plot or a lot of ambiguity that I have to keep up with, because every character is out of central casting, and every plot twist can be seen a mile away. When I want to see a movie for the plot and characterization, those exact same things I liked before are suddenly turn-off.

I guess I'm just saying that I don't think "made of recycled materials" is necessarily a bad thing, in movies or in books. It's a less challenging thing, both for creation and consumption. But that's okay. Sometimes I really don't want my entertainment to challenge me.

Ridiculous. Huskies don't have thumbs, they can't knit. Even if they could, why would they want to? They've got nice thick coats already.

The movie's design looks more like a mad combination of Byzantium, the early Roman Church and the early European middle ages than it does, you know, the later Roman Empire. Is this due to it being shot on location in Spain?

Samuel Bronston produced this, with Anthony Mann as director, and Sophia Loren as leading lady (and the only lady in Fall), all them repeating for El Cid. A very young Omar Sharif plays a not so good guy, the Armenian king and husband of Lucilla, who, of course, lurves Livius.

You will never see so many reaction shots of two people turning their heads to look at each other to note each other's reaction to something someone else says – sets of couples, doing this, in sequence in the same scene. 3 hours long with intermission and overture, these were some of most drawn out talky scenes you'll ever find this side of the BBC I, Claudius. The first part is Marcus Aurelius philosophizing with Timodes and Livius and with Charon. Not even Sophia Loren cheers up the monochromatic dreariness of the snow and smoke and forests of Germania. Many fights, many battles, much posturing, blowharding and parading. The last hour, though equally plodding, is more colorful, as we at last get to Rome.

Never will you see so many restive horses on screen, particularly the chariot horses. It was as though the equines kept trying get you to look at them instead of those people talking. The horses were indeed more interesting to look at.

Did The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) put an end the sequence of Hollywood's big budget spectacles:

The Ten Commandments (1956);

Ben Hur (1959) – there's a chariot race in The Fall too, outdoors, not in a stadium, i.e. not really a race, and pointless in terms of the movie's plot;

Spartacus (1960);

El Cid (1961);

Cleopatra (1963)

The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) tanked financially, while the others made big profits – well, Cleo didn't, despite its grand world-wide global box office – the highest grossing film ever, up to that time - because it cost so much.

The Fall's cost and box office failure bankrupted Bronston and put an end to his production company and career.

Love, C.

I guess what frustrated me with the latest "Robin Hood" is that the screenwriters were doing such a good job building their story with certain plausible historical bits that when they completely missed a common custom of the period I had a hard time getting back into the film.

I must admit I had mental giggles at the folk in chainmail making a beach landing. I ask the military history types, didn't the invasions of that time prefer to get their troops on dry land before starting the battle?

ISTR that Joss Whedon did this a few times in Firefly. Remarkably effective, especially in contrast to the usual run.

And Fade @322, "My God, It's Made Of Tropes!" wins you a niuce shiny internets, from me to you.

Cameliard!

Which goes to show just how much Hollywood "creative" types listen to their technical advisors. Will Durant was a professional historian and writer, best known for popular books about history and philosophy written with his wife Ariel. I believe he's been deliberately forgotten because of his early history of Leftist politics. But no matter what his politics I find it difficult to believe he'd let that farrago of nonsense go unchallenged.

Re Sir Patrick Stewart: does that mean the Brazilian World Cup logo can use "by appointment to the stars"?

It need not be complete silence--the strained voices of pilots, the whine of over-worked engines and the thudding of non-lethal hits would provide a dramatic counterpoint to the grave-like silence.

Willy (and Ariel) Durant's politics probably had less to do with their books becoming outdated. It was probably more that more granular historical approaches became more useful, such as that of the Annales.

Love, C.

Ah, but they SHED that nice thick coat. Incredibly soft undercoat comes out in clumps. Once, while strolling through a craft fair, I asked a woman what kind of material she was spinning. It was, she told me, several years of spring shed from a Siberian husky named Tasha.

http://www.vipfibers.com/

Now entropy can NEVER be reversed.

So does the graffiti an elevator shaft in a Dr. Who episode of some years later.

Mind you, that probably is historically accurate - weren't people writing that everywhere they could reach all through the 'forties and 'fifties?

Omaha Beach, Saving Private Ryan.

Tor (The onion-routing network proxy anonymiser thing) never was about ensuring the secrecy of what is sent across, only about concealing the identity of one end-point from the other, as long as no end-point tells the other end-point who it is.

Good for disassociating your identity from your writings, not so good for sending sensitive documents that should not be seen by anyone except the intended receiver.

Similarly, there was the rather amusing scandal back in 2007, when Dan Egerstad operated a Tor exit node (by far the easiest way of intercepting data across the network, expect your adversary to run AT LEAST one) with the express purpose of sniffing embassy staff mail passwords (and ended up getting quite a few).

Some examples of out-of-period terminology (from things I've read in the last month) have included a published Call of Cthulhu adventure set in 16th century London where Christopher Marlowe refers to another character threatening to expose his "lifestyle;" and another story (can't remember where I read it) set in 18th century America where General Washington says that he's "been under a lot of stress." In these cases, it really feels like the authors didn't read enough primary sources to get a feel for how the people of the time actually expressed themselves.

For a small example of taking words from our world and using them in another, there's a point early in Sanderson's Warbreaker[0] where some guards search a character's "duffel." To me, it feels wrong to have a world with "duffel bags" but no town of Duffel, Belgium to name them after. It's as if Tolkien had Frodo eating Boston Baked Beans,[1] or keeping his belongings in a Saratoga Trunk.

Does this kind of thing bother others too?

[0]No offense or complaint is intended to the delightful Mr. Sanderson or his editors: Warbreaker was great fun, and my obsession with luggage-related etymology didn't stop me enjoying it.

[1]Yes, I know about the "'taters." But at least Tolkien didn't have Samwise pining for Idaho 'taters, or taters O'Brien or pommes anna or something.

Yep. The same researchers who were involved in the Ghostnet investigation wrote a really nice report called _Shadows in the Clouds_, where they continued their investigation. They commented that this was one way they found stolen information.

The moral of the story is obviously that you should be encrypting stuff you don't want other people to read, before you send it over the network in any form. In the case of something like Tor, you *really* want to encrypt stuff if possible, because the service itself attracts attackers.

This kind of scheme is really hard to use to get strong anonymity against someone who's watching both ends of a conversation, just because packets arrive at the entry node and depart from the exit node at times that are pretty closely correlated. (More generally, anonymity is really hard against a serious attacker, on all sorts of levels.)

When Wikileaks put out the video of the US soldiers in the helicopter killing those reporters/civilians on the ground, there was a claim that they'd spent several months cracking the encryption on the video. This makes me wonder if the digitized video was actually sent over Tor, encrypted under a decent but not great password[1]. That would be a natural way to do this--encrypt the file using a password (using GPG, PKZip, whatever), transfer it in pieces over TOR to a server where some reporter or other person could get it, and then give them the password over the phone or by some other channel.

For reference, if you want a strong password, you pretty much have to generate it randomly one way or another. Just something that seems hard to guess is usually not, and humans are immensely bad at making randomness. If you have a dictionary with 160,000 entries (the Webster Collegiate dictionary has about this many), that's about 17 bits per entry. The practical limit of brute force attacks right now is probably somewhere around 80 bits, so you'd want at least six words chosen at random from that reasonably thick dictionary to get a password that simply couldn't be guessed.

[1] If it was encrypted under a random 128-bit AES or CAST5 key, they could never have broken it. But under a password-derived key, they could have run a dictionary attack on it. There are all sorts of other possibilities, assuming some kind of implementation error in the RNG or public key encryption or keypair generation used. It's also quite possible that their "decryption" was either just a delay to protect their real source, or work needed to decode an unfamiliar encoding or unfamiliar video compression or something.

Of course, it's also very possible that Wikileaks didn't get their information this way, but instead that this is misdirection to keep the heat off their real sources.

Eleven months later, Ms. McQuestion has sold 36,000 e-books through Amazon.com Inc.'s Kindle e-bookstore and has a film option with a Hollywood producer.

Fun for the whole family!

Husky down: I've done that! The result was a yarn with a delicious softness like alpaca. But spinning it gave me a dry throat and an itchy nose--and I'm not even allergic. Next time, I think, a bandanna across the mouth and nose. Or a painter's mask.

(Avedaggio could tell you about the wonderfulness that is shi-tzu fur. And I'm currently in a long-term project involving the fur of a medium-hair black cat, which when spun looks more like dark gray.)

One easy way of making readabletypeable passwords, easily, on a unixoid machine with the right pieces around is:
dd uf=/dev/random bs=6 count=1 | mimencode

That should, if the host's "device of random bits" has the usualy name (/dev/random) suck 48 bits of random, encode it as mime, ending up with 8 characters that should be typeable on most keyboards with ease.

Only 48 bits worth of key, but that's pretty much stringer than any single password you're likely to come up with on your own and into "decent pass-phrase territory" for not much investment (you'll be wanting a password safe, because them thar random passwords aren't easy to force into your head). Saying that, I still remember the first half of the mainframe password I was issued in 1991 (I don't remember the second half, but I could take a stab at it and probably get it in 10-12 guesses, if there was a way of verifying it again).

Temporary Password: 51DQdk?CiCL

*sigh*

Please tell me this is untrue. I'm willing to admit that most people can't identify the Liebestod or the Siegfried's Tod from Götterdamerung, but surely, SURELY most of us could recognise the Treulich geführt from Lohengrin.

Google it and if you don't know it within two bars, you lead a more insular life than I can comprehend.

Yup. I did a little quick Googling for support groups and such (a la AA) but didn't turn up much. I've actually know a few people who deal with this over the years, but in this case it's clearly negatively impacting her ability to cope generally, so I thought I'd bring my networking compulsion to bear on the question.

(This all makes me grateful that my coping compulsion for years was sucking my thumb. Only negative consequence: crooked teeth, about which I don't much care.)

was originally a mystery running gag until the original Kilroy came forward. He had been a rivet inspector in a shipyard, and used a system of chalk marks to keep track of what he had already inspected, planning to erase them later, which he ended up not having time to do. Then soldiers saw the mysterious chalk marks in transport ships, and copied the mark over the world.

Hmmm... The premise of a dieselpunk story could be Kilroy teaming up with Rosie the Riveteer to fight the Axis, with the wench swinging her wrench as if she were a female Thor.

Lets say my anchor word is based on the name of an aircraft carrier (the USS Constellation), and I am setting up a password for HuffPo, I might use

HUFFycoN38

For Blogger it might be

ConnieBLOgS25

The virtue is I can keep a generalised set of anchor related snippets, and brute force my way of thinking when I forget the password. The risk is I might get lazy and become over patterned. On the other hand, the odds of someone deciding to try and hack all my accounts is slim.

I actually tend to mix up where I put the digits, and sometimes use special characters.

According to my dad (see italics above), the little guy peering over the horizon is named Chad and seemed to him to have been introduced into things by Australian soldiers. It raises the question of how Dad would know, he being an American aviator who never went overseas that he's ever mentioned.

At any rate, he wasn't Kilroy, although he seems to have become Kilroy (or perhaps to have had Kilroyness thrust upon him). I made a visual pun on him at the time of the 2000 election and "hanging chads," which in fact seem to have been named after the character, though I forget where I read it — I'm like Ronald Reagan and his goddamn file cards sometimes.

Leonardo DaVinci writes:
OF THE WAY OF REPRESENTING A BATTLE.

First you must represent the smoke of artillery mingling in the air with the dust and tossed up by the movement of horses and the combatants... The more the combatants are in this turmoil the less will they be seen, and the less contrast will there be in their lights and shadows. Their faces and figures and their appearance, and the musketeers as well as those near them you must make of a glowing red...

The air must be full of arrows in every direction, some shooting upwards, some falling, some flying level. The balls from the guns must have a train of smoke following their flight. The figures in the foreground you must make with dust on the hair and eyebrows and on other flat places likely to retain it...

And if you make any one fallen, you must show the place where he has slipped and been dragged along the dust into blood stained mire; and in the half-liquid earth arround show the print of the tramping of men and horses who have passed that way. Make also a horse dragging the dead body of his master, and leaving behind him, in the dust and mud, the track where the body was dragged along.

You must make the conquered and beaten pale, their brows raised and knit, and the skin above their brows furrowed with pain, the sides of the nose with wrinkles going in an arch from the nostrils to the eyes, and make the nostrils drawn up -- which is the cause of the lines of which I speak -- and the lips arched upwards and discovering the upper teeth; and the teeth apart as with crying out and lamentation.

And make some one shielding his terrified eyes with one hand, the palm towards the enemy, while the other rests on the ground to support his half raised body. Others represent shouting with their mouths open, and running away. You must scatter arms of all sorts among the feet of the combatants, as broken shields, lances, broken swords and other such objects.

And you must make the dead partly or entirely covered with dust, which is changed into crimson mire where it has mingled with the flowing blood whose colour shows it issuing in a sinuous stream from the corpse. Others must be represented in the agonies of death grinding their teeth, rolling their eyes, with their fists clenched against their bodies and their legs contorted. Some might be shown disarmed and beaten down by the enemy, turning upon the foe, with teeth and nails, to take an inhuman and bitter revenge.

You might see some riderless horse rushing among the enemy, with his mane flying in the wind, and doing no little mischief with his heels. Some maimed warrior may be seen fallen to the earth, covering himself with his shield, while the enemy, bending over him, tries to deal him a deathstroke. There again might be seen a number of men fallen in a heap over a dead horse.

You would see some of the victors leaving the fight and issuing from the crowd, rubbing their eyes and cheeks with both hands to clean them of the dirt made by their watering eyes smarting from the dust and smoke... And there may be a river into which horses are galloping, churning up the water all round them into turbulent waves of foam and water, tossed into the air and among the legs and bodies of the horses. And there must not be a level spot that is not trampled with gore.

from The Notebooks of Leonardo DaVinci

Its one that was used by an acquaintance of mine, although it is a year since I last spoke to them, I have no idea how good the site is now.

Seriously. I had no idea that was Wagner -- I thought for some reason it was Mendelssohn or similar, and formally entitled 'The Wedding March' ... informally called by everyone I know who knows it, 'Here Comes the Bride' after the most common English joke-words for it.

As opposed to 'Pomp and Circumstance,' whose English joke-words (as I have been taught them) go thusly:

My ... reindeer is purple.
Your ... reindeer is green.
My reindeer's a Girl Scout;
She can dig a latrine!

There are apparently more, but by then I was laughing so hard I don't remember them.

I should note, for fans here of my mother's sense of humor, that she waited to impart this Wisdom of the Ages to me until TEN MINUTES BEFORE I WALKED in my high school graduation.

Look up Saint Chad of Mercia.

I thought chads were named after the Chadless card punch that didn't punch whole squares out of the cards, leaving them dangling.

However, the Jargon File is not necessarily the most authoritative source on these things.

My daughter graduated last week. Which is probably just as well, or I'd be tempted to replicate your mom's trick.

Earl Cooley III @385, full of win indeed. Thanks for the link.

No, Mendelssohn's wedding march (originally an intermezzo in his incidental music for A Midsummer Night's Dream) is the other instantaneously recognisable piece of wedding music, the one you play at the end of the wedding (this link and click on the headphone icon at the top of the text).

Without wanting to share more at the moment, may I suggest searching on the terms "Dialectical Behavior Therapy" - which seems aimed specifically at the difficulties faced by people who go the path of self-harm; accepting their realities, without approving of the damage, and trying to give tools for managing the feelings that drive one to that extreme.

Crazy(and hoping for better things for your friend)Soph

the Local Gossip and the Daily Ghoul, eager though they always are for the personal angle on every subject from the habits of the liver-fluke to the higher mathematics.

Do you think there's any chance that this publication might have its archive on the 'Net somewhere?

Having had an education in Latin not entirely unlike DLS's in both form and upshot, at least as far as ability to read Latin is concerned, I can spot that the first tag is from the beginning of Aeneid 2, where Dido asks Aeneas to tell the story of the fall of Troy, but am wondering if anyone can help with the second?

And I think the idea of getting learners to read mediaeval Latin rather than the Aeneid seems an idea well worth a try. Ploughing through 300 odd lines of Aeneid 1 at 15 years old did nothing for my appreciation of classical liternature. (Although I'm still able to giggle about the class-mate who having been given ikt as an assignement to prepare managed to translate the first line of the Aeneid first as 'A man with hairy arms', and then as 'the hairy arms of men')

SOB's would probably blame an epidemic on immunologists.

The same usage was common in the Army SIgnal Corps when I was in it, 1966-69. It was an official term; we taught it in the Signal School at Fort Monmouth. No one I talked to knew where the term came from, though there were some outlandish theories.

It gets worse if you speak Dutch. "Neuken" is the direct equivalent of "fuck" in Dutch. Now, it's not actually pronounced like an English speaker would pronounce "Nook" (that would be rendered as "Noek").

But it's close enough for snickering.

How is it pronounced?

Dammit.

Goodbye, Mez. We'll miss you.

They did that with HIV.... "The myth of heterosexual transmission of AIDS" and "The wages of sin are DEATH!"

A group of artists has been asked to lighten the faces of children depicted in a giant public mural at a Prescott school.

The project's leader says he was ordered to lighten the skin tone after complaints about the children's ethnicity. But the school's principal says the request was only to fix shading and had nothing to do with political pressure.

R.E. Wall, director of Prescott's Downtown Mural Project, said he and other artists were subjected to slurs from motorists as they worked on the painting at one of the town's most prominent intersections.

"We consistently, for two months, had people shouting racial slander from their cars," Wall said. "We had children painting with us, and here come these yells of (epithet for Blacks) and (epithet for Hispanics)."

Oh, of course:

City Councilman Steve Blair spearheaded a public campaign on his talk show at Prescott radio station KYCA-AM (1490) to remove the mural.

In a broadcast last month, according to the Daily Courier in Prescott, Blair mistakenly complained that the most prominent child in the painting is African-American, saying: "To depict the biggest picture on the building as a Black person, I would have to ask the question: Why?"

Good Lord. Pardon my language, but what kind of fertilizer must we be using to grow such a crop of dicks as the people in these stories?

The 21st century started ten years ago, and these yahoos haven't even made it to the 20th.

Like consonant-vowel?

I'm using a password generator at the moment, but I'm worried that it's not totally random. There are definitely places where the 'special' characters tend to hang out.

Then again, my current pet peeve is people who are totally paranoid about security, or at least, their audits are, then they tell me my password, and it's a combination of my username, a date, and some leet speak. And not in a way that would take more than about 10 tries to find someone else's password once I found a username on the system.

Dang it. I miss you. You were a GOOD one.

"But the coral polyps, soft rippling little critters that they are, wrap themselves in a rocky carbonate home and leave it as the foundation for the next generation when they go, where we wrap our stony hydroxyapatite ([Ca3(P)4)2]3.Ca(OH)2) skeletons in flesh, then (usually) hide it back in the earth."

Mez was a joy to know. I will miss her a lot.

Farewell, Mez.

Yes, elegant.

*Sigh*

Rest in peace, Mez.

Just in case anyone else wants to read back over things.

Now I can spend a little while grieving for someone I've never met. Humans are such strange animals.

I did *not* recognize the quote of her penultimate message. :-(

There's a piece of mine called "Narrative" that watches over Jim Rigney's (Robert Jordan's) remains.

On a different topic, can anyone here point me to an online reference about making personal maps (with multiple points of interest marked) using Google Maps, which I have been told can be done? I have a project for which the ability to do this would be incredibly useful, especially if it's possible to select the color of the marker.

Thank you.

Lee @ 441 - I found this video tutorial.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TftFnot5uXw

Creating Google Maps

I've never tried, so I don't know if different colored markers are available.

He says he's fine; he's just drifted on to other places, on- and offline. He's touched that we worried.

And I just hate finding out about people's deaths in almost accidental ways. Some years back a friend and colleague who I typically saw only every year or two died at an early age of cancer in the brain; I didn't find out until almost a year afterwards, when I realized that he must have been in chemo just a couple of weeks before I last saw him (and he fooled several hundred of us, as that was at a conference where he was both on stage in front of everyone and mingling at receptions and parties the whole time. I actually sat and talked with him one on one for more than half an hour and never noticed anything). The guilt of not noticing comes back every time I find out about the death of a friend or colleague long after the fact.

Sometimes people don't want it noticed, don't want that to be their new identity, and the chance to interact with colleagues in "normal" ways is a gift in itself.

Though admittedly somewhat harder on those of us left behind.

Sad to lose Mez.

Please remember to eat, bathe, and all of your real-world commitments. We don't want to have to stage an intervention.

1) Distances on both map and signs turned out to be pure fiction. I'm not sure how far we wound up hiking, but it was a hell of a lot longer than the 7.1 miles listed on the map.

2) When we reached what we thought was the summit, we had lunch and proceeded onward, following the blazes to what we thought was a slightly tougher, but basically downhill, section of trail. It turned out to be over a mile of insane scrambling up, down, over, and between huge rocks. Indeed, the sign we encountered afterwards called it the "Rock Scramble". (There was one point where we Just Said No, and managed to bushwhack our way around a barrier which would have involved climbing over a 5-foot wall onto a wet rock face.

3) Have I mentioned that my two hiking companions are in their 70s? (I'm only in my 40s.) Now, they're in pretty good shape, and could probably have handled most of this anyway, but one of them turned out to be still suffering from a virus which nuked his energy levels. We took frequent and lengthy rest stops, but this was damn rough on him. By the time we realized how badly off he was, we were well past the "point of no return". (If any of us had had cell signal, we might well have tried for a medevac....)

4) So, we finally got past that to the real summit (with the belated sign). At this point, we still needed to get down the mountain to a fire road, which would be our exit route. Unfortunately, we weren't quite out of the woods when the first thunderstorm hit.... We were soaked to the skin by the time we got to a trail shelter. We waited a while for the downpour to let up a bit, but we still had most of 3 miles of fire road (turned to water road), and the break didn't last.

5) Our total hiking time was over 8 hours, when our usual hikes last 4-5 hours, occasionally 6. By the time I got cell-phone signal (while we were driving back), my Mom and their wives had been calling each other (and in one case, the police). Well over 24 hours later, I'm still aching all over.

is one that has not been domesticated?

192 Lew Dawidowicz Karnstein
That looks like a verse only you can write.
Ain't nobody here can write it for you. You've got to write it by yourself.

Is it a review of a real book?

One might think I would get inured, but no. I spent much of Friday at HuffPo whaling on people who were praising Bush fils for playing he-man and saying he would torture Khalid Sheikh Mohammed again.

And I, of course, wrote a post about it, and my resident trollish sort came out from under his bridge

I decided it was an apt description of tromping around Berkeley earlier this week, looking at apartments (with my monstrous messenger bag, which made it rather more taxing than it needed to be). Word to the wise: do not go apartment hunting with an extra fifteen pounds (minimum) slung across your back. It does not improve the experience.

I occasionally send her advertisements clipped from places like Parade magazine and Sunday newspaper coupon pamphlets; ads offering horrible, cheap knick-knacks like musical snow globes and Christmas village train sets, all associated with Kinkade. I attach a Post-It to each of these, wondering whether she'd like the item for her Birthday or Christmas.

I wonder if that running gag has come to an end.

They said, "It's not a sentence, just a word."
Like life, I wish I'd said. Alas, this stair
Descends. The willing spirit may be there;
The flesh, though weak, insists on being heard.
"You need to..." Need? Or must? What has occurred?
It's really such a trifle, to take care
In eating, drinking, doing, to beware
Of everything. To grieve for this? Absurd!

Why should I grieve? No, take with joy old age,
The wisdom of the years; with dignity
The loss of freedom. When I pass that stage,
When light is dying, then the rage may be
Indulged in, so I'm told. But knowing me,
I won't. I'll be too frightened then to rage.

And the deal on that judgement was to pay by installments. So there was only $1 million coming due when they declared bankruptcy. Still plenty of money to find.

What makes the whole thing worse for the Kinkade business is that a lot of interest has accumulated since the original judgement. And the particular timing looks very bad. It's not as if they didn't know this payment was due.

So, unless there's another company, owing TK a lot of money, which has failed, it can be argued that the company should have declared bankruptcy long since, and has been trading unlawfully. They've been trading with a large, known, liability, and if they knew they didn't have the assets to cover it, anyone else they owe money to may have been defrauded. (But that may be my slight knowledge of obsolete UK law affecting my opinion.)

Maybe you wouldn't want to, but I think it would be a marvelous thing if you were to induce your mom to come here and do her Elliott Mason's Mom thing for at least a post or two. Meanwhile, she is an Evil Child, and you can tell her I said so (with the utmost admiration).

Ah. Thank you. That is new information. (Primary Googling brought up 12-step as the first approach.) That also makes sense, from my very (blessedly) limited experience with it. (Though wouldn't be surprised if the brain chemistry worked out to be something similar to the endorphin-rush produced by capsaicin. But that suggests to me more of an addictive pathway, but what the hell do I know?)

TrishB @376 & guthrie @383: Ah! Very helpful, thank you!

crazysoph @393: "Dialectical Behavior Therapy"

Thank you. Added to the shopping list.

Crazy(and hoping for better things for your friend)Soph

Thank you, and me too. I think she's starting to reach out and take some action. That it's getting conspicuous enough for people to notice and ask questions is, I think, on the whole a good thing. And our circle of acquaintance is a good bunch. Another one in our circle went through serious nasty family health (and associated financial) stuff a couple of years ago and was well-supported emotionally, from what I could tell.

Mez :`( … Life is getting just a little too real, these days.

Bruce Cohen @447: a friend and colleague who I typically saw only every year or two died at an early age of cancer in the brain; I didn't find out until almost a year afterwards

I had almost the same experience with a friend and former HS classmate, who independently turned up in fandom. Fortunately, I had the opportunity—and the courage—to apologize for treating him badly back in the early days. That action on my part had preyed on me for a long time (30 years?). A year or two later, I found out that he'd passed. I miss him.

The worst part of losing people is the conversations you never get to finish.

The weirdest one, by far though, just happened to me today. Since I've been watching TV exclusively on the 'net these days, I don't even get the little en-passant teasers for the local news, so I'm really out of touch.

I was going through newspapers from the last month getting them ready for the guinea pig cages. I have people funneling me multiple subscriptions of multiple local papers. I hit the stratum for two-three weeks ago, and suddenly this story is all over the Front Range. Which means I'm seeing this, like, every third page for a foot-deep pile of papers.

Came back to me that I'd overheard coworkers talking about a murder-suicide, but I didn't pay any attention, as I figured they were talking about another one (looks it up)—wow. Just about exactly a year ago.

Okay, it's spooky enough that this thing happened about a quarter-mile from my house. But I freaking' knew the guy.

Not well, but he was a coworker for a number of years when I was at NCAR, and he was at our B5 launch party.

So I'm feeling a little freaked, this evening. I was wanting to post about it here, but hesitated, 'cause it's, like, freaky.

But then, Mez's thread started….

Oy.

Which makes the VERY good news about ethan all the more welcome.

Dave Luckett @463: <gulp> Um?

There's a 30 day trial option if you want to give it a go.

Also, to any moderator who can fix it, the Particles sidebar misspells Scrivener as Scrivenour.

No grieving, then, but seize the darting joys
that pass like summer birds above the lake;
enjoy the time, and all the things you make;

ignore the pain, avoid the childish noise,
see how the breezes still the reeds do shake.
No grieving, then, but seize the darting joys

before they pass on to new girls and boys
as life requires, since every reed must break.
Eternity's the dream that we mistake;
No grieving, then, but seize the darting joys.

Thanks - I've downloaded it for the 30-day free trial, and I'll see how it works for a few blog entries.

Elliot Mason, re your mom's high school graduation advice: back in the 1930s, my mother and her accompanist were about to walk onstage for a voice recital (they were both teenagers). The voice teacher's last-minute advice was, "Remember girls--bosoms first!"

coates' blog is a constant source of amazement to me. i think he is one of the best things on the web right now.

and dave luckett--i wish you the best of luck with the diagnosis. if the docs say that you can make a good life with it, then you can make a good life with it.

your poem already shows that you know how to turn trouble into beauty. langston hughes' trumpet player:

"but softly
as the tune comes from his throat
trouble
mellows to a golden note".

Indeed. This is why I use the rather buried feature in Mac OS X: launch Keychain Access, choose to add an entry, click the cryptic key icon next to the password field, which brings up a password generator, then choose “FIPS-181 compliant” from the type menu. You will get passwords of just that sort, of any length you like. I find them excellently memorable provided I use them a couple times, and if you need some punctuation or numbers they can be leetspeked, or for uppercase, capitalized in reasonable-looking places.

Hm, I thought I had previously failed in research to find what FIPS-181 actually is, but I now find that it is in fact a standard for password generators — and there is probably other software available that also implements this standard.

For example, a novel I'm working on right now has three main folders: the actual draft, my worldbuilding notes, and a "deleted" folder for stuff I've ditched but may want to refer to again later.

The draft folder is divided up into separate tabs by scene, with notes on the index-card side about what's supposed to happen in each scene. Sometimes these develop sub-tabs as I make notes to myself about something I want to fix in the edit but not just now.

Over in the worldbuilding folder, there are subfolders for lists of all the names I've used, (where each name has a tab with a quick description of the person and note about who they are/where they first showed up/what they think of other characters), all the set pieces I've already described (and each tab there has a quick copy-paste of the description used for the place), lists of organizations and their relationships to each other...

But then, I use Scrivener as my default text editing software for anything more complex than "list of books I want to check out from the library" or the like. I have a whole subdivided project for tracking short story submissions I have out. It's a very, very flexible program, and I love it to pieces.

Dave...I like the sonnet, especially the Thomas reference. Is that about Mez, or...well, are you all right?

Eternity's a dream; and reeds must break.
The summer sky must fade, the sun recede,
And birds will fly no more across the lake:
But this is scanty comfort to the reed.

478 Xopher: Not about Mez. She would not have been so weak. I wish I'd known her. She was my compatriot, and the charity of her writing and her courage commends us to the world.

And as for me, I'm all right. I can be cured of my diabetes, it only requires that I completely change my entire lifestyle. Old age begins here, though.

And I won't see the ships leave. Damn.

Disney and Kincade, that sounds like an unholy alliance.

My mom likes Thomas Kincade, and she did a very elaborate cross-stitch kit of one of his garden pictures -- all except for a bazillion french knots. I volunteered to finish them, but they are appallingly wearying. IF this thing is to be finished, it will either be with cross-stitching, or I will abandon the fiddly chart and take a wild stab at filling in the colors.

Even more unholy than our very own Mary Dell's transformation of a Kincade fishing trip into a scene of lovecraftian horror, but not as unholy as her transformation of the Love Boat into the Lovecraft.

All in the end believe we fail the test
since every summer passes like the last;
the sun sinks, redly, into the dark west
but we shall be remembered not just past.

Indeed. You reach old age precisely at the moment where you realize that entropy is starting to win, and that there's no turning back the clock. I've found that having to make drastic changes in lifestyle because of entropy can become acceptable, if I face the changes with the attitude that I'm going to make them work for me. I hope that your experience is the same.

Something I don't think of very often: sometime in the early '90s I found out, quite by accident, that a guy I went to high school with had died in 1970. He was in grad school at Princeton, going for a doctorate in physics. He was headed home, late at night, and was stabbed to death, probably as part of a robbery. I don't think they ever caught his murderer. We weren't close, but in a class of 33 people, it was inevitable that we'd have had a fair amount of interaction. For one thing, he liked Ray Charles a lot and so did (and do) I, so we had that to talk about.

Incidentally, I've seen one piece by him that I actually liked. It's a Gold Rush picture in the Auburn courthouse and rather well executed. I was surprised when I read the attribution.

He wasn't well thought of by my aunt.

Bonus unicorn: the MIT Science Fiction Society's review of Twilight.
'Nuff said.

I am far, far too excited about that. And happily spreading the link to as many people as possible. I mean... Octocam! With a real live octopus! On camera!

*gibbers joyously*

This composer named Eric Whitacre composed a piece called "Lux Aurumque" (Light and Gold). Then he sent music to people in 12 countries, along with a video of him conducting the piece. He then assembled the 185 videos they submitted* into one, mixing all the sound down into stereo.

The result is here. I think it succeeds quite well, amazingly well in fact. The composer's website. Lyrics and translation.

They say you (yes, you!) can join the Virtual Choir. I really want to, but wow, I bet that's quite an audition.

____
*He says they used all the videos that were submitted, which doesn't mean that everyone who got music submitted a video

A bit off topic... In case you're interested, there will be a Gathering of Light on Friday, July 16, in Oakland. There'll be a special guest from Amsterdam.

Well, if you had the book in one hand and a pile of horse excrement in the other, that might be defined as "balanced" and if you smeared the book with it, that would seem "fair" to me.

"Actually, I'm from Iowa. I just work in outer space."

Any preferences, re earthly cuisine? Breads of India is close to Oakland's 12th Street BART station. There is also Shan Dong. I liked the Pacific Coast Brewing Co, but it's always been too noisy.

There will, of course, be no consequences for any of this. We look forward, not backward, in Obama's America. I mean, unless your crime is disclosing embarrassing classified information that made the CIA or NSA or Pentagon look bad.

Quite seriously, when have we looked backward, as a nation? I'm quite pissed off that Obama has so thoroughly dropped the ball in terms of human rights abuses (both those of his predecessors and those on his watch), but I wouldn't say he invented, or even perfected, the art of sweeping forward in the hopes that people will forget the awkward past.

And without getting all "Clinton did it too" on you, surely while we're blaming Obama, we could put a smidgeon of emphasis on Bush as well, considering that he's the one that kicked that particular noxious process off? It's not like there's a shortage of blame to go around.

You seem to have turned very...partisan on the subject these days. It makes, well, unproductively uncomfortable reading. (As opposed to productively uncomfortable reading, which inspires people to actually go out and change things.)

Eek! We do have some Spanish-speakers here in the office, but they're all out. "Una momento!" (This is about a third of my Spanish repertoire.)

Quick scramble: Oh look, Google has a text-translation page! I hastily type in, "No Spanish speakers here now. I'm making Spanish with a computer. Please call back tomorrow."

Took a couple of iterations, but he finally said "[Something] Ocho?" Which after a moment of thought, I took to mean, "the Eighth?" "Si!" "Okay!"

Whew!

Ghu knows if that's actually the conversation that happened on his end....

(fwiw, I have a bookmarklet just entitled "English" that's supposed to translate anything selected on the page to english with google translate. It's somewhat useful for moderation duties when people occasionally post required info in some language that I can't puzzle out)

So we're making our periodic pilgrimage to Budapest, flying out of JFK on the 10th and returning August 11th. Problem: the plan was to rent a car one-way each way (Dayton to JFK), but this is not only difficult (because we're not in Dayton) but pricier than I thought. Since when do one-way rentals cost $200 a day? That's really out of hand.

So I looked at long-term parking. Um. The rock-bottom lowest I could find is $13 a day, which over 62 days plus 10+% city parking tax comes to about $900, which is pricier than even the high one-way-two-ways car rental.

Is there some cheaper option? I don't mind leaving the car (actually minivan) in town someplace and taking a taxi out to JFK - I could even leave it on the street, because our van is crappy enough nobody is likely to bother it much (thanks to the anonymous person who opened their door right in front of me one cold day at the high school and snapped the passenger-side mirror off, sigh), but that's out due to street cleaning, I gather.

Monthly rates are less exorbitant, but I probably can't get a two-month monthly rate at this short notice.

Anybody want a couple hundred bucks to store my minivan for a couple of months? You can even use it if you like. You look trustworthy.

My parents live in Branchburg, NJ, for most of the year, and spend summers in Maine. This produces an empty driveway.

I live in Connecticut. But I have a flexible schedule and don't mind road trips. If I were to meet you in Branchburg, ride with you to JFK, and take the minivan back there after dropping you off, you would have a parking space. My parents might even like to use the minivan, as the station wagon they use for hauling things to the beach just failed inspection, frame rusted through.

I am sure there are more convenient solutions, but if you don't get any offers, I'm willing to implement this plan.

Greyhound will take you to New York (probably to the Port Authority terminal) in about 17 hours for about $90 one way, though you might not find that very pleasant. Amtrak has trains to New York via Toledo or Cincinnati with similar travel times (though the train that goes through Cinci does not have a good on-time record; allow plenty of cushion if you take that.) Kids usually travel for half fare on trains and buses, unlike on planes.

Rikibeth, I just asked my wife what she thought of this plan, and she's all over it, so consider your kind offer accepted and think of a nice place to eat, because our budget just got a lot more generous. Also, we'll pay your gas. And bring you T-shirts from Hungary.

My dad said he'd keep our lawn mowed for T-shirt payment, one shirt per mowing. He figured it would need about 20 times mowed over the nine weeks. Ha. We had brought him a shirt from an earlier trip with a map of Hungary on it, which the Amish find terribly strange. (He hangs out with a lot of Amish, for some reason.)

And while there's someone I *might* be able to recruit who could really benefit from the use of a minivan for a month, I don't think I've known him long enough to trust him with someone ELSE'S car. I'm afraid it might turn into the equivalent of Someone Else's Microwave.

New Jersey may well be a good place to look for parking alternatives; lots of places in north Jersey have doable access to NYC via NJ Transit. If there isn't a Fluorospherian with a spare driveway, there might at least be long-term parking places that are cheaper than NYC.

Looks like we'll just fall back on the one-way rentals. It was worth a try, though.

(I was really getting used to the relaxing idea of being able to leave some stuff in the car, though, like the cooler.)

Thanks for trying, Rikibeth!

Oh, Mez. Rest in peace.

and since AKICIML: Does anyone know where and how to acquire the 3rd edition (1950) of Perry's Chemical Engineers' Handbook, short of filching it from a university library somewhere? Abebooks has it back to 6th, but not earlier.

(LIRR and the New York subway require pets, other than service animals, to be in carriers, but you may well have something like this already for the plane trip.)

I'm not that familiar with the geography or parking possibilities of Long Ialsnd, but folks who live in that area might be able to help you out there.

email is the name of the livejournal linked here, @ juno.com

What was that Peggy Noonan quote about our torture policies under Bush? "Some things in life need to be mysterious," said Noonan, adding, "Sometimes you need to just keep walking."

The most productive thing I can think of to do with the continuing revelations about:

a. The unspeakable crimes of the Bush administration

b. Their coverup and the sheltering of the criminals by the Obama administration

c. The Obama administration's continuation and even extension of some of them

is *not* to just walk on by. We need to look at this stuff, to recognize what has happened and is happening and what looks like it will continue happening. It's too damned easy to just not look at the ugly stuff your side is doing.

Patrick's comment to me here seems right. There should be a reckoning for this, but there probably won't be. The best I can do for right now is not to look the other way, not to forget it, not to excuse it when the guy I voted for does the stuff I was screaming about three years ago.

Perhaps it's pointless to keep bringing it up. But not bringing it up, when we discuss any number of other lesser political/moral outrages, feels to me uncomfortably like what was happening among moderate Republicans in 2005. Like just not looking at something you wish weren't there.

I'm not saying walk on by. I'm saying you seem to be disproportionately pissed off at Obama personally, blaming him for everything rather than what he is to blame for.

Now, I'm disappointed and angry at him that he (a) hasn't stopped these things, and (b) hasn't investigated them and brought the guilty parties to justice. I don't know—and to a certain degree don't care—whether he never really meant to clean these things up or whether something we don't know about changed his mind.

But that doesn't mean that I bring up or think about every monstrous thing we're doing purely in the context of Obama. I think we need to hold a wider range of decision makers accountable, the same way that I wish we'd held Cheney, and Congress, and others with mens rea about these things, accountable as well as wishing we had done so to Bush.

When you make it All About Obama, I think you're missing a good deal of nuance and structure. Particularly because the transformation from someone who talked about change to someone who's doing the same old things tells me the story may be weirder and more complicated than we know, and may require a different solution than throwing the bastard in the White House out in favor of someone who says they'll do better.

Shine the light,yes. Be angry, yes. I'm just uncomfortable that you focus it purely on Obama. It seems a little overly simple, and usually you're more nuanced than that.

After getting off the transporter booth?

Interestingly, I met someone from Queens once who said he'd vacationed all through the Caribbean except for one place. "I just can't bring myself to vacation in a place called Jamaica," he said, making a face at memories of the Queens location (his primary referent for the word).

I guess I've been taking it as a given that the Bush administration was monstrous, and that the Obama administration is better, just not enough better. But in case it's not clear, I think Obama is a couple orders of magnitude less horrible than Bush. Someone who defends monsters out of political calculation and cowardice, not a monster himself.

Anyway, this comment of yours is really intersting, and made me want to think more about it:

When you make it All About Obama, I think you're missing a good deal of nuance and structure. Particularly because the transformation from someone who talked about change to someone who's doing the same old things tells me the story may be weirder and more complicated than we know, and may require a different solution than throwing the bastard in the White House out in favor of someone who says they'll do better.

This is the question that keeps coming up in my mind. Why did Obama back off so thoroughly on those promises to rein in the national security state?

My guess is that it's easy, in observing politicians, to engage in fundamental attribution bias--to assume that someone's actions reflect their beliefs or nature, rather than their incentives or situation.

I think any president has a particular set of political incentives in this situation, and that Bush and Obama face rather similar ones. And that probably explains a lot of their similar policies.

In particular, the president will be blamed for any terrorist attack. Bush managed to dodge this once, but I don't think he would have dodged it a second time, and I don't think Obama can. A 9/11 scale attack, or even a 3/11 scale attack, will probably ensure a Republican president in 2012.

That means that the president's incentives are all lined up with expanding anti-terrorism policies, even when they're expensive and damaging on all sorts of fronts, as long as they work at all to decrease the risk of terrorism. (And of course, the president often won't know what will really work. I think the Bush and his top guys probably really believed that a program of torture was a good way to prevent future terrorist attacks, and believed the only objections to that were moral or legal ones.)

Further, it's important to be seen to be taking terrorism seriously[1]. In fact, a president can buy a certain amount of insurance against terrorist attacks by being seen to do "whatever it takes" to fight the terrorists. Tough talk and ineffectual but visible anti-terrorism measures probably pay off.

Once a set of alleged anti-terrorism measures are in place, even if they're silly and ineffectual and costly, getting rid of them involves taking a big political risk. Even worse, every such program has a constituency--some employees and contractors who will fight dirty to keep it, by crying to the heavens that the administration is tearing down our defenses against terrorism. The Bush administration originally opposed forming the DHS, but once they went along with its formation, we got an agency that will probably be around when my hypothetical grandkids have grandkids of their own.

And most distressingly, to me, the military and intelligence services are really powerful. They can fight like hell if they're angered, which is almost certainly one reason why Obama decided not to allow any prosecution of CIA agents for torture or destruction of evidence. Massive domestic spying tends to concentrate a lot of power in the hands of the people doing the spying. It would be very interesting to know what inducements were offered to the folks who changed their minds on telecom immunity just in time for the vote.

The only way forward I see is to offer Obama a different, competing set of incentives. That means asking hard questions, and backing primary challengers who will do the same. It means not being willing to give the Obama administration a pass on stuff like his assassination program (with a hitlist including US citizens, with no review or trial or anything) or his program of indefinite no-trial detention for terrorism suspects. It means making it clear, as loudly as possible, that tossing the civil liberties wing of his party over the side and "moving to the center" closer to Liz Cheney is not going to pay off for him--that he's liable to lose more votes doing that than he wins. I think Obama may be more susceptible to this kind of pressure than other Democrats, because he's been so completely vilified, and because a lot of Republicans simply won't ever be voting for him. He can't stay in office without actual liberal voters. He needs to be reminded of this fact.

[1]Look at the clownshow surrounding the question of whether Obama is taking the BP spill seriously enough, where "taking it seriously enough" means emoting for the camera and visiting the area a lot, rather than spending the next six months drafting tighter regulation of offshore drilling and working out how to overcome some of the regulatory capture that plagues attempts to regulate big oil companies.

He did not go of his own accord?

Great Escape Veteran Dies

Looking back over my last month's posts (I love View All By), I counted a number of posts where I was criticizing Obama and his administration, but other than this post (where I was snidely assuming we wouldn't see any prosecution even if it turns out we were running some kind of Mengele-like operation during the Bush years), I think I've been criticizing overt actions by Obama and his administration. The assassination program that led me to say I'm not planning to vote for him again is not just a Bush administration policy he didn't prosecute, it's his policy. Similarly, the allegations of continued torture in Afghanistan, and the legal battle to allow indefinite detention in Afghanistan of people kidnapped from other countries, dodging a previous court decision requiring a habeas hearing, involve policy decisions that seem like they have to be coming from Obama or his top people. Those are explicit actions being taken now, under the authority of the president. Not Bush era crimes, but stuff being done (or alleged--I don't know if there's really still torture being done on a systematic basis) now.

The military commission trial of Omar Khadr, and the decision not to try KSM and various others in civilian court, also seem like they're explicit decisions of the Obama administration. Again, this isn't just deciding to "walk on by" some old Bush administration atrocities, it's explicit action by the current administration. If Obama isn't responsible for those decisions, who is?

That's not quite true. The LIRR runs electric trains well out into Suffolk County. Jamaica is where all the lines come together and lots of people make transfers.

Obama's administration seems to be not just ignoring but fully reversing much of what he expressed as principles when he was a candidate.

How can he reconcile the campaign promises to shut down Guantanamo with a successful legal campaign to assure that the US can instead use the Bagram prison in Afghanistan as a black hole to hold prisoners from anywhere in the world with no legal rights?

Oh, and here - you can add this, which I hadn't seen until today: apparently we're going to continue imprisoning about 1/5 of the Guantanamo detainees forever without trial.

"The administration's Guantanamo Review Task Force, made up of officials from six agencies, completed its work in January, but did not share the report with Congress until this week, according to The Washington Post. The newspaper posted the report on its website Friday.

The task force recommended that 126 detainees be sent home or to a third country, 36 be referred for prosecution in either civilian or military courts and 48 continue to be held indefinitely without charge. An additional 30 detainees, all Yemenis, also were approved to be sent home but only once the security situation in Yemen improves, the report said."

So we're going to continue holding 48 of them indefinitely - effectively a life sentence - even though there is not enough evidence to charge them with any crime. Yay rule of law. Yay us.

Original of report here: http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/pdf/GTMOtaskforcereport_052810.pdf

Nope,it's no excuse to say everyone does it. But everyone does it. I had no illusions when I voted for Obama, and paid no real attention to campaign utterances. All I expected to get is something better than before and I'll live with better.

One of the problems is that we—or at least I—don't understand Obama's cabinet. This is substantially my fault for not investigating it, but it's certainly not being handed to me pre-chewed by the media like much of Bush's cabinet politics were.

There's this projection that Obama really is "the decider", the way that Bush claimed to be. But the Management of Princes is an old game. Since it's impossible to be President without a heck of a lot of delegates and people in force-multiplying roles, I feel like there's probably a lot of complexity that I at least am missing.

I guess you're right, though, that Obama has to carry the can for his administration. It just seems a simplistic contrast to the ways that we looked at the Bush administration. I distrust that kind of simplicity in political analysis.

I fear that one of Obama's strengths--his attention to reality and his willingness to listen to experts' interpretations of that reality--is revealing itself to be a weakness as well. It seems to me that his economic policy (to take one example) has been heavily influenced by Summers and Geitner's idea of what is desirable and possible, much to our nation's detriment. Obama's governance has been characterized by conservative,* deliberate action, and I suspect that's because he's surrounded himself with people who are deeply knowledgeable about the political status quo, but also overly acculturated to its norms. He benefits from their expertise, but also suffers from their blinders. While the intelligence experts he pays attention to are less public than his economic and political advisors, I wouldn't be at all surprised if their opinions held equal if not greater weight with Obama. If they told him, for example, that prosecuting torturers would lead to a revolt in the intelligence community, f'rex, I think he would take that very seriously.

I remember hearing talk when he was assembling his cabinet that he was trying to avoid Clinton's mistake of appointing a bunch of Young Turks with little political experience. I think he over-corrected; too little new blood creates its own problems. One of the things I've found incredibly frustrating about Obama's presidency is his unwillingness to make new arguments. His past suggested that he was good at pushing unfamiliar issues into the spotlight and building a consensus around them, and he built his campaign around that idea--but as president he's stuck to old ideas with a grim obstinacy. I think that's another effect of his old-timer-rich administration: they're very good at making the case for the status quo. This is a moment of transformative potential, and they're squandering it.

--

* as opposed to "daring," not "liberal"

:)

She got so impatient she pulled it out. (It was really loose, but that's still one scary kid.)

Meanwhile, her brother hit is head on the bathroom sink and opened a centimeter-long split in his eyelid. To my very great surprise, they were back from the ER in about 45 minutes (quiet evening, I guess) with the wound superglued shut.

So we have one gapped tooth and one plaster over an eye. Yarr!

----
* Waar kom je vandaan?
  Hoeveel tijd heb je?

Once, early 90s, I got caught there during a phenomenal blizzard. I ventured onto the streets to get dinner. Fried whiting, as I recall. I made it back to the station just in time to catch a Last Coper Out of Hanoi style train to my branch.

Last year I transferred from the "plane to the train" at Jamaica. It had gone amazingly high-tech, with a glass gallery and elevators.

After he tried pulling out an eyetooth?

I seem to remember your telling us a couple of years ago that he had by then determined he'd prove the Tooth Fairy wasn't real by boobytrapping his tooth.

You should be proud of your kids.

I think it is a case of getting overwhelmed by a deeply entrenched, persuasive, and utterly self-assured security and defense establishment ("Sure, you can tie our hands, but we'll be on Meet the Press blaming you the first time a bomb goes off on our shores.")

Obama is a domestic policy guy at heart, and perhaps in the interest of picking battles let the wrong people carry the ball on the security front.

OTOH, he has no excuse whatsoever in not pursuing investigations against Bush administration figures who pushed for torture, surveillance, and diminished rights. They are utterly fair game.

OTOH, he has no excuse whatsoever in not pursuing investigations against Bush administration figures who pushed for torture, surveillance, and diminished rights. They are utterly fair game.

I'll have to disagree. A new president as a certain amount of political capital to spend before he has to face the rigors of re-election. Pursuing the indictment of former administration officials would have been seen as trying to "settle accounts" when much more immediate problems were at hand. If Obama had tried that,he would have been politically crucified.

It's quite possible -- though we may never know for sure -- that he sought the advice of top legal officials and determined that the chances of conviction were very small.

Fair game or not, politically it would have been disastrous.

The official name is the Airtrain; I always get it confused with AirTran, the airline.

I've mentioned before that I work a graveyard shift doing Security at an upscale shopping/office development. We recently had our first fancy bar/cocktail lounge open, so the graveyard shift now has that open until 2:00 AM to be concerned with.

About closing time, two idiots augmented by alcohol leave the bar and head into the garage. The woman insists on driving. The guy thinks she's too drunk and, as she's starting to drive out of the parking space, reaches over and breaks the key off in the ignition. Car stalls in the middle of the garage's traffic lane.

By the time I'm notified of the situation by our guy watching the security cameras and get there, a flamewar-style argument is in full-on-crazy mode. Ended up having to call in the police to settle matters.

That's not the depressing part. That's just the setup to the depressing part.

Because of the broken ignition key, the car couldn't be restarted, meaning 1) the car's steering wheel was locked into position, and 2) the driver's side window was stuck in the "down" position. The police and I were able to get the car moved back (kinda-sorta, kitty-corner across two spaces) into the parking spaces, but there wasn't anything to do about the open window. The police asked us to keep an eye on the car until the owner came back for it later Sunday. (Both idiots ended up leaving in separate taxis.)

A few hours after that, the guy on camera duty and I swap places (we tend to spend half a shift on patrol and half watching the camera monitors). About a half hour before my shift is supposed to end, I'm doing a camera scan of that area... and see someone reaching into that open window and taking stuff out of the back seat area.

That's not the depressing part, either.

This is the depressing part: The person stealing from the vehicle was one of our own Housekeeping staff, and he was using his utility grabber to extend his reach into the car.

The Housekeeping and Security staffs don't work closely together, but they come into the Security office every day to check out and turn in radios and keys, we say "Good morning" and all, and we share the same break room. So I may not know this guy well, but I know him.

"You stupid fuck," I say to the monitor where he's now leaning into the car window. "You stupid... STUPID... fuck." And then I sigh, and start the processes and notifications that will get this guy fired and likely in jail.

You want to think that the people you work with are the good guys, that they mean well, that they're honest.

Sometimes you're wrong. And that's depressing.

* * *
A few years back, I had to make my way from Newark airport to Otisville, NY. It involved:

- Airport shuttle train from terminal to a train station beyond the edge of the airport.

- NJ Transit train, one stop (?) to Newark Penn Station.

- PATH train to Hoboken.

- NJ Transit train to Otisville.

Since then NJ Transit added a big shiny transfer station in the middle of the marshlands, so PATH is no longer required.

I've also worked places where music players left in desk drawers disappeared overnight, when only the guards and the cleaning people were around. I don't leave anything at work that I can't afford to lose or replace.

I know. Tunnels are hard to dig in cube farms. No place to put the dirt.

I see nothink, nothink!

I should note the Hindustani taxi driver in Paramaribo who unironically pointed out an Indonesian restaurant as an "Indische restaurant" to me, by the bye.

There wasn't.

The first two ingredients were corn syrup and sugar.

I asked a staff member to call a manager. They pulled them all off the shelves. When I left the manager was calling the company they got them from.

If I'd eaten those, nothing bad would have happened. I'd just have eaten more sugar than I want. But suppose a diabetic with only slightly worse eyes than I had relied on the big type saying "SUGAR FREE," being unable to read the teeny tiny type of the ingredient list? I was really mad, not so much at the store (though they certainly should have noticed) but at the stupid candy company. That label is clearly and absolutely wrong no matter what's actually in the candy.

Were themselves candies actually labeled that way? Not a point of purchase sign?

Were they imports?

I sometimes wonder if, for certain establishments, sets of characters such as "MSG FREE" and "ORGANIC" and "VEGETARIAN" are considered linguistic talismans to be stamped on menus and on signs to increase sales.

Rooms people were sleeping in had unauthorized entry (using a master keycard), and any visible item of worth was stolen: laptops, PDAs, phones, and most especially -- hence the name -- anyone's pants left lying over a piece of furniture to be reworn, because of people's tendencies to leave keys, phones, wallets, etc, in one's pants pockets when one intends to rewear.

Definitely an inside job. Not only because of the use of the master keycard (which ought to be traceable; the hotel claimed all masters were identical and there was no way of tracking which), but because when I called down to the front desk at 3AM Saturday morning and told them, "The Pants Bandit just tried to get into my room, but we were awake and besides we had the (thing instead of a chain) on, so he didn't get in. He's on our floor RIGHT NOW, we're in an end room, it'll take him at least a few minutes to get to the elevator. Send police or security to come get him." ... nothing at all was done. Well, less than nothing; more rooms were hit later that same night (as witnessed by other awake people who saw attempts on other floors).

Needless to say, Windycon got out of their contract instanter and has no intention of ever going back ... the thing that utterly clinches the inside-jobness is that one regular Windy attendee was ALSO at a medical conference in the same hotel the previous weekend, and the Pants Bandit was rampant THEN too. And that conference stinking it up at the management didn't get them to do anything before Windy came in, or even warn us, or have cops around, until Windy's concom (tipped off by the common attendee) confronted them about it with great detail in hand and convinced them that no, they were GOING to have cops around ALL night EVERY night.

I don't know how it came out; as of Sunday when everyone was leaving, no arrests had been made and the hotel was still Colonel-Klinking and claiming it must be due to someone who was fired a few weeks previous who must have somehow illicitly copied a master key.

It must not only have been an inside job, but an inside job with ties up into management, because if it weren't and *I* were them, I'd've changed the lock codes so fast they'd BOUNCE. And kept doing it until we figured out whose key it was ...

So as I understand it, in Dutch as well as in English, the adjective indisch/Indian is used for the part of "East India" the speakers are most acquainted with.

And apparently, for quite a few descendents of immigrants from there, "indonesisch" is no neutral term of geography and culture, but relates solely to the political system starting in the late 1940. Anything else, especially everything older, is "indisch".

This might be comparable to the way an emigrant from Russia would usually not call himself or his parental culture "Soviet". (I neither want to equivocate the two systems nor want to assert that anyone else does so.)

A few months ago, my daughter briefly left her backpack unattended in a high school classroom. When she got back, her ipod was gone. She reported it to the school office, but figured it was hopeless.

Day before yesterday, she got a call on her cell phone from the local police, asking if she'd lost an MP3 player. Turns out the cop had stopped a guy on suspicion of marijuana possession, noticed this ipod with a name nothing like his engraved on it, and confiscated it when his story of how he came to have it seemed unconvincing. (My daughter's name, phone # and email were engraved on the ipod--my idea.)

The cop then DELIVERED THE IPOD TO OUR HOUSE (along with the story of how it was recovered and the info that unnamed-suspect will now be charged with receiving stolen property). It has now been returned to its factory settings, correct name, and original music collection.

Go, ACCPD!

Serge upthread: oh, what I'd give for a transporter system, yes. It would make my life a lot more bearable.

I suspect I need to do something to Firefox's about:config, but I'm not sure what.

Recently, when I highlight text and rightclick it to get to Leetkey so I can rot13 the text, the first thing Firefox does is open a new blank tab. And then the Leetkey menu comes up, which doesn't do much good when the focus is now on the new blank tab. I've had to resort to rot13.com, as in the old days.

Any ideas? I'm using Firefox under Ubuntu.

Elliot Manson, I got hit by a pants bandit like that at a DC Worldcon. Not only lost my pants, but a bag with a Tim Kirk drawing embroidered on it and a copy of a rare book that probably just got thrown out (it didn't look like much -- a poetry collection by Clark Ashton Smith, self-published trade paperback).

Lila, when my car got stolen I did eventually get it back, but I had to pay towing charges. The good thing was, they'd cleaned most of the trash out and left me a couple of nice additions.

But this was a "fresh" candy (or at least many other things of the same brand are), so it might have been pretty local, actually.

Our friends in the village got their motor scooter stolen in Amsterdam. It was (rarity!) recovered, in better tune and with several minor brokennesses fixed.

Altering about:config is way too scary for me at this time of day!

Can anyone tell me how methods work in campanology/change ringing? I keep running up against a barrier that makes my brain go *gronk*.

For example, take Kent Treble Bob Minor, the method Lord Peter helps to ring in The Nine Tailors. I know what the blue line looks like, but for the life of me I can't figure out why all the other bells move as they do. At first I thought it might be "they mirror the blue line except when they have to avoid the lines of bells with higher priority", but that doesn't seem to be the case.

Web resources are distressingly non-specific; they seem to assume that you already know the algorithm by which the movements of the other bells are generated and just need help remembering specific bits. I am lost.

I hate selling things. I hate discussing prices. In Costa Rica and Peru, the fastest way to make me not buy something was to require me to haggle. Even here, assuming that everyone involved is in a similar financial situation, it makes me incredibly uncomfortable because I am screwing this up.

Oh, and a picture in which I don't look like a mole: WHEEE!

No Yahoo toolbar, and I don't remember doing anything to change Firefox's configuration. How do you configure the keyboard shortcut? Maybe that would do it, since it seems to be the act of right-clicking that gets me the new tab...

Some years back I helped to proofread Tintinnalogia: Or, the Art of Ringing, a how-to manual on changeringing from 1671. I don't know if it'll help or hurt, but maybe it'll at least break your brain in a different place!

They'll also appear in the new book listings of The Online Books Page tonight.

*which might result in a 'Hole in my Bucket' situation.

And there I thought the whole thing was "just" a Gray Code, rung with bells. Silly, silly me. No, I have never been a bell-ringer, I found being a (cinema) projectionist sufficiently secluded.

(and also, thanks for both the pointer and the page.)

*Can you tell it's a new netbook? There's a chap sitting oposite me with a netbook, but it doesn't look as good as mine!

<grump>Yeah, but they'd probably have some horribly insidious environmental/health side effects, like throwing the planet off its axis or something.</grump>

Benjamin Wolfe @601: on a work night, I am not allowed to find new and interesting books and read them cover to cover.

Good luck with that. If you manage it, let me know your technique, eh? I've got a bunch of unread Bujold on order. Is it too late to give up sleep for Lent?

abi @602 & Linkmeister, C. Wingate: Our friends in the village got their motor scooter stolen in Amsterdam. It was (rarity!) recovered, in better tune and with several minor brokennesses fixed.

Now, see, this would be the sort of practial joke I could get behind. I'd want to have a friend on the police force, though, that I could clue in ahead of time.

Bill Clinton used to get a daily intelligence briefing after reading his two or three morning newspapers and complain that there was nothing in there he didn't already know. (I have no source for that story.)

I don't know why Obama is doing what he's doing the way he's doing it. I wish he wasn't.

#539, Perry's: Alibris doesn't go farther back than 6th edition either. Powell's has a 5th edition. Biblio.com has a 4th edition .

Obviously if I found one more good online used bookstore I'd be there.

Michael Roberts, 519: I'm sorry I have no van-home of use.

Success! I tried first to map rot-13 to ctrl-r, but the native Firefox force-reload took priority. I eventually mapped it to ctrl-e, which doesn't appear to have a pre-set function.

Six reboots of Firefox later, and I can now rot-13. Whee!

I think there are two pieces of how Obama has governed so far that track with different bits of what you're saying here:

a. When you're being advised by experts, you need to be able to evaluate and compare/contrast expert advice, both to avoid being captured by some self-blinding ideology, and also to ensure that your advisors aren't spinning their advice and information to be consistent with their policy preferences.

I suspect an eight-years-older, more experienced Obama might have done this better, especially after some kind of executive experience, maybe after being a cabinet secretary or something so he'd have the experience of dealing with agenda-loaded subject-matter experts. I also think more connections might have helped him here, so he'd have more alternative experts to call upon. (But I don't know where he'd get the time to deal with that; presumably he really needs his next-tier-down experts to do that weighing of experts job.)

I think the spy agencies are in an especially good position to spin their information/advice to skew toward their policy choices, because they will have information that isn't shared with anyone else. (And some of it may even be true.)

b. After the experts have spoken and you have something like a sensible grasp of the facts and the places where those facts aren't known, or are the subject of an academic/ideological feud, you need to make policy decisions. Those are based on values and politics and tradeoffs.

This is where I've been the most disappointed with Obama. I get that deciding to release probably-innocent detainees involves accepting a risk that they'll try to attack the US again. The actual risk to life and limb is probably many times smaller than the risk to Obama politically from such a decision. But it's ultimately Obama's decision about whether to accept that risk. Similarly, criminal charges for the CIA guys who tortured prisoners and destroyed the videotapes might be really disruptive to the agency, and there's probably some reasonable estimate Obama has to come to about how big the impact will be. But then he has to decide, based on his values and principles, whether that cost is worth bearing to get rid of the torturers. (And perhaps he's simply had them quietly purged from the government; I've never seen any discussion of such a thing, but it would make me feel better about his intentions. Keeping the torturers on staff looks like what you do when you plan to keep using them.) On those decisions, I have been unhappy with Obama's expressed values. Perhaps this is because he's in possession of a better picture of reality than I am w.r.t. terrorist attack threats and such. But it seems at least as likely to me (and more consistent with the evidence in many cases, such as the question of releasing existing torture photos or trying KSM in civilian court) that this is because he's weighing political considerations, and his ability to stay in power and get the rest of his agenda through, more heavily than values like not kidnapping, torturing, and murdering random people all over the globe.

Jacque @ 621:

I have just acquired a bunch of unread Bujold. I don't think I'm going to get any sleep at all.

Just before I left Paramaribo I wandered into a souvenir shop (the Walt Disney Souvenir Shop, as a matter of fact; that's what the sign said) on the Domineestraat) and was examining some of the items on sale. One was a bow and arrow set. "Who made these items?" I asked. "Indians" said the proprietor (a Hindustani). "What kind of Indians?" I inquired, awake to nuance. "Arowak." was the reply.

Well, okay, maybe not. :)

My son has had a hard year in his Catholic school. Not terrible, just kind of unhappy and unpleasant--he and his teacher don't really click (she's not a bad teacher, she and he just don't get each other, and she has a lot of kids to keep track of). Third grade has required a bunch of homework (much of it busywork), and a lot of organizational stuff, which he hasn't enjoyed. And he's had a lot of unpleasant social stuff going on--his best friend left the school (I think for financial reasons), his next best friend is herself going through some really hard stuff that a child that age ought not to have to deal with, and he seems to end up on the outside of a lot of groups of his classmates. (And at other times, he's right in the middle and having a great time--it's kind of different from day to day.) He gets teased or bullied sometimes, but I don't think very often. (But one thing I worry about is if he's going to stay in the position of being an easy target. The school has been pretty good about addressing bullying/teasing concerns as far as we've been able to see, but I know there have been other kids who had bigger problems.)

So, we've been considering leaving the school. There is likely to be an opening for us at the (bigger, newer, richer, whiter) Catholic school associated with our parish. We originally applied to that school and his current school a couple years ago, but they had no openings, so we wound up where he is now. Next year, his younger brother will be starting school, so if we're going to move, this year is the time.

I am really divided about doing this. (It's still a choice.) On one hand, we may move there and have him be just as unhappy. Usually it takes awhile to make new friends in a new school, and he's not all that great at making new friends. (Like me, he tends toward small numbers of close friends, rather than lots of casual ones.) On the other hand, the smaller school is poorer, and in a kind of bad location, and a number of other families have pulled out recently. (It feels almost like a run on a bank--you want to ask whether this is a liquidity problem or a solvency problem.) And we have three kids, one not starting Kindergarten for several more years. We keep wondering what shape this little school will be in, in four more years.

The hard thing is, we're part of this school's community. We really like the school in many ways. We know everyone involved in the school, and they know us. My son has been in scouts there for three years now, and there's some great continuity.

And this is the really odd thing: A community is a little like a marriage, in that you feel a commitment that goes beyond the sort of business arrangement that says "keep filling my needs and I'll keep paying you." If we leave, we'll leave behind a hole in the social fabric of the school. Not one that will be devastating or anything, but it will be noticable. Familes we know will look around and think "gee, it's strange that they're not here anymore." I know because I've done that a few times. Say, didn't _____ used to show up for these meetings, too?

The smallness of the school is in many ways both the best and worst thing about it. There aren't a lot of resources, but it's probably hard to get lost in the shuffle. It's susceptible to a few families leaving and seriously shaking the school up, but every family in the school matters.

This has been weighing on me a lot lately. We've been considering this change of schools rather suddenly. And if my older son were happy in his school right now, as he was a year ago, we wouldn't even be considering this move. But he's not, and this raises the issue in our mind of whether this school is able to give him what he needs.

The bigger school has more resources. It has a playground that isn't covered in asphalt and surrounded by a chain-link fence and busy traffic. It has better equipment and enormously more activities. It's associated with our parish, which has a variety of paperwork and administrative advantages. It may be that we will come to love it as we do his current school.

But I am finding it almost impossible to decide what the right thing to do here is. I can imagine any decision I make turning out very well or very badly.

Anyway, I'm sure this is the source of a lot of my stress and grumpiness in the last couple weeks, in the midst of the usual random paperwork crises and manufactured urgent issues that show up at work and home with regularity. So I'm sorry if I've been more snappish than usual.

There's a Houston connection -- the author is an English professor at Rice.

Is the new place likely to make him more unhappy?

Oh, I hear you on the hard choices and the moving schools. This year is the first year in my son's academic career that he's gone back to the same school*†. And it is tough changing schools, particularly going into a new school with a strong established community. It's lonely, trying to make new friends.

But my parents moved us into a good academic setting in a pleasant area. We've done the same for Alex‡, trusting that in the long run that will repay the struggles with moving schools.

Can you talk to the new school about what, if anything, they do to settle new students in? And have you talked to your son about it?

I'm solutionizing here, when maybe what you want is a listening ear and some sympathy. You certainly have that, and I'll say a word where words are said, if that helps.

-----
* Age 5: primary one in Scotland. Age 6: Groep 3 in a special school for kids just arrived in the Netherlands. Age 7: Groep 4 in the local village school, where he is now in Groep 5.
† Come to that, I did my first three years of school in three different schools too.
‡ Fiona was too young to be affected by it; she started school in the village

You seem to be treating it as axiomatic that it's good for your kids to go to the same school. I think this would depend a lot on the individual children. It's my impression that my sister was not terribly well-served, even ten years after me, by being "David's sister" in school (a number of teachers were still there). (There are no doubt also convenience and perhaps even financial benefits to having them the same place.)

I didn't find moving between schools too strange, but I didn't really make any terribly strong friends until 8th grade, which was when I stopped moving between schools (I went to three of the four gradeschools in town, with only one house move to account for it; there was only one junior high and one highschool, so everybody was together there). So maybe I would have made closer friends earlier if I hadn't moved between schools. But I don't miss it, and didn't miss it; the kids I was casual friends with just weren't that interesting.

Clearly any of the options open to you could work out badly. This must be an actual real-world decision!

I hope things work out very well for you and your children.

My daughter had a difficult social time in 3rd grade (though her problem was partly a new school, which is not your issue). What helped her a lot was making a friend in the neighborhood who went to public school. That bled off a lot of social tension from the school environment, since she was no longer in a position of "be friends with these people or have no friends at all."

Good luck with it.

That's a good point. I like that Obama recognizes that he doesn't know everything, but a little more experience with people trying to spin him would probably have helped him resist the siren call of other people's certainty.

"Similarly, criminal charges for the CIA guys who tortured prisoners and destroyed the videotapes might be really disruptive to the agency, and there's probably some reasonable estimate Obama has to come to about how big the impact will be. But then he has to decide, based on his values and principles, whether that cost is worth bearing to get rid of the torturers."

I guess the question which we can't answer is what the evidence that Obama is being given to weigh. Is he being told "this will undermine morale and make agents grumpy" and choosing not to do it, or is he being told "this will gut the agency like a fish, bringing down every experienced agent we've got, crippling our ability to defend against future attacks" and choosing not to do it? Personally I'd gut the fish and live with the consequences, but without knowing what Obama's being told it's hard to judge whether he's making a decision that I think is unambiguously awful or merely a decision I disagree with.

@ 631: "But I am finding it almost impossible to decide what the right thing to do here is. I can imagine any decision I make turning out very well or very badly."

It seems to me that you're worried about making the wrong decision for your son, but I'm not sure that that's even a useful frame for this situation. Just because a decision is momentous doesn't mean there's a right and a wrong answer; sometimes different choices are just different. If he attends one school and becomes an architect, or attends the other and becomes a philosopher, will one of those futures wrong and the other right?

I never thought of that. I have long had problems making and maintaining friendships, which any of my *mumble-something* friends will find strange, since I'm outgoing and friendly. I have plenty of friends who are close emotionally, but alas, they are not close geographically. It's taken me years at my current city to get some "close" friends, whom I see maybe once every two weeks*...

*My best friend, who has been such since high school, sees me maybe three times a year. She's ADD and a teacher, thus perpetually busy.

Steve C. #632: Speaking of cons (and Houston), any chance that you'll be making ApolloCon this year?

Speaking of cons (and Houston), any chance that you'll be making ApolloCon this year?

I had no idea there was a local con this month -- I have nothing in my calendar for that weekend, so there's a good chance I can go. Sounds like fun! Thanks for the heads-up.

Make sure you ask your son if he thinks it's easier to change schools or to stay.

We moved several times when I was young; I ended up going to three different feeder areas in the same district, which meant I needed to make completely new friends twice, plus again when we moved out of state. And it wasn't particularly easy for me.

The way I got continuity was the friends I made at church, who were around a bit more--and one of whom was at the junior high I transferred to, so I had a bit of readymade. I don't know if you'd be changing parishes or not, or even if your choice of Catholic schools is a function of your religion, but that bit of continuity might not be available to you.

So see if your son feels really uncomfortable about the prospect of switching.

This utterly random and completely bizarre historical digression of absolutely no redeeming value has been brought to you by the letter E (with the high-order 2 bits masked off yielding 0000101).

In Guyana, the term generally used for the aboriginal people is "Amerindian".

One of my favourite bits of political lore about Surinam is the name of the main East Indian (Hindustani or even, back in the 19th and early 20th century, Brits Indiër) ethnic party. That party has kept the same initialism (VHP) since its foundation in the 1940s. It has at various points in its history been the Vereenigde Hindostaanse Partij, and the Vereenigde Hindoe Partij, before settling on the final (one hopes) form of its name: the Vooruitstrevende Hervormings Partij.

Having met you (and having, in fact, taken that picture), I must emphatically disagree with you. You do not look at all mole-like.

(And I'm happy that you like the pic.)

There's an extension for Chrome called Javascript Toolbox, a really dumb name for it, that does some of what leetkey does (rot13 in particular, which is why I use it). It also does various hashing and encoding functions, and even SQLizes text (wish I'd had it a couple of years ago when I was writing PL/SQL scripts to upgrade database schemas).

I have a new low, though: the Iowa driver's license picture. Taken without glasses and with mouth closed and expressionless. I look like a corpse. In fact, when I showed it to the phlebotomists at my appointment later that day, one of them said, "It's morbid, but I think they do that to identify... um...."

I'll take cold and lifeless over my current passport photo. (Ah, passport photos, where if you look anything at all like your photo, you're not well enough to travel.) The overly cheerful person at the post office who took my picture didn't like my first one, because I didn't look happy and smiling, and forced a second one on me.

Only two more years.

Hopefully, the new ID I will get in August will look somewhat better...

My theory has always been that they make the driver's license pictures look that way so that when you're arrested for shooting up a 7-11 at two in the morning, you'll match your mug shot.

I still carry around my UC Davis staff ID, issued in 1972 (I left Davis for the Bay in 1976). On it is the most evil picture ever taken of me; a number of people have remarked that it reminds them of Charles Manson.

Be grateful. Most ID photos make me look like a stunned haddock.

'Starring super-notorious musclebound punk/metaldudes Glenn Danzig and Henry Rollins (with a little help from super-notorious soft-rockdudes Hall and Oates) Henry & Glenn Forever is a love story to end all love stories! The premise of this Cantankerous Titles-released comic is explained at the front of the zine: “Henry and Glenn are very good 'friends.' They are also 'room mates.' Daryl and John live next door. They are satanists.”'

Do haddocks ever look anything but stunned?
How about a surprised salmon?
Or a terrified trout?
Or a bashful bass?

I don't recommend that level of instability--in fact, I strongly recommend against it--but changing schools once is, in and of itself, not a disaster. (Which school is better I cannot say.)

(Waves belatedly from Thornbury)

So there exists one single book, published in 1993, that says "by Dave Howell" on the title page; a role-playing resource book. It's tangentially related to pantheons, and I created a goddess with accompanying religion to invoke for examples of various things. The goddess was Judy, the Goddess of Macramé, and I had a lot of fun providing amusing marginalia to go along with all of that. Herewith, I reproduce an excerpt from the Holy Book so revered by Judy's followers: _Judy's Book of Macramé Projects You Can Make at Home_

Weaving, twining, making knots,
  Hangers for our plants and pots.
Special gifts for all our friends,
  Spool of string that never ends.
Macramé, macramé, making Judy's macramé,
  Macramé, macramé, all hail the name of Judy.

Owls made from beads and twine,
  Doilies that are so divine.
Covers for our cozy beds,
  Lumpy hats for lumpy heads.
Macramé, macramé, making Judy's macramé,
  Macramé, macramé, all hail the name of Judy.

Charming things to hang on walls,
  Over doors and crossing halls.
Crafting a delightful chair,
  Making our own underwear.
Macramé, macramé, making Judy's macramé,
  Macramé, macramé, all hail the name of Judy.

When they say "don't smile", put on a hint of muscle tension anyway. Comes across as bored, as opposed to dead.

I think my ID photos are somehow getting swapped for ones from a parallel universe where there's a violent psycho with my facial features. He must be wondering why his ID photos always have this grinning buffoon on them.

albatross: I don't think cabinet secretary is going to get one elected president. The public sees you as a number two guy. Being VP isn't really good for it either (Bush pere only did it because he was Ronnie's annointed. Like Van Buren; after Jackson, he reaped what was sown in the eight years before).

The plain fact of the matter is there is no good route to getting a handle on the job; though governor might be the closest analogue; certainly Carter and Clinton seemed to benefit from it.

re ID Photos: I, with no glasses, look a bit lacking in human emotion. Maia's comment is I look like a stone-cold killer. Certainly the relaxation which comes of being stone blind changes my, apparent affect.

My first passport photo; military hair cut, white t-shirt, and no glasses, did look a bit disconcerting.

Some of your story reminds me of our own. There are certainly things we're going to miss about his old school. But there are promising and hopeful things about his new school, including what looks to be a rather different set of social dynamics, and a greater emphasis at a school-wide level on *working on* healthy social dynamics in diverse groups of kids.

Do I know for sure that the new school will be the best place for him? No. But I do know that a fresh start will do him good, that he's looking forward to the new place, that there are promising opportunities there, and that we and the school are committed to working together to making it the best experience for him we can manage.

Moreover, no matter what happens in the next year, *my son* knows that he doesn't have to hunker down and simply endure a bad situation. He has voice, and options. We can work with him and the school to fix and improve his situation. Or, if it seems a better (and viable) option, he can change to a different situation altogether.

I made a difficult decision in my own school years to change schools, and while there was uncertainty throughout the decision process, I also had hope when I switched. And it worked out well for me. I'm hoping for the same with our son.

I hope things go well for you however you decide. If you'd like to talk with me about it, feel free to contact me offline (ockerblo at pobox dot upenn and then an edu at the end). I'll be traveling this weekend, but will be on email through Friday noon. and will still have access to a phone after that.

I'm quite unreasonably enraged by this. DO NOT WANT INVOLUNTARY GUI CHANGES. So Fluorosphere: am I an outlier here, or is this the accepted wisdom that I think it is? Second, does anyone else know how to turn off the background image?

solutionizing

I've never encountered that particular usage before, but it's so elegantly compact and to the point. I think I'll work at promulgating it in my own sphere.

Even if I can "customize" it back to white background, I *don't want to have to sign in* to search Google like that. I realize that Google can still track me to some extent without my logging in via IP addresses and the like, but I prefer to minimize the personal info I give in a search by default.

If they don't change it back, I've heard noises about Firefox plugins to kill the background. If Google keeps it on, I may look into finding and installing one of those.

It's also strange in that they've talked for years about how they keep that page clean to make it load as fast as possible.

One workaround might be to set it to the Firefox Google home page (indirect ad revenues from which apparently fund the entire Mozilla project.)

http://www.google.com/firefox?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official

You are not the only one annoyed by this behavior. I don't mind the way they change the logo every now and again, because it's small and cute. This is, well, big and annoying.

I assume that it's a single-day change to show off the feature. If they don't change it back, I'm going to get out the User JS and/or CSS hammer.

Clifton Royston @ 681:

They've talked for years about how they like to keep the main page clean, yes, but they also have offered their cluttered portal with widgets and such to those who want it for a while now. They know that some like simplicity, but lots of other people like fluff.

Which is the exact reason I use Google as my home page: with Google, if I'm heading straight to another site I'm not bogged down waiting for my home page to load. So it's irritating to find them messing with that.

I don't mind them going "Hey look at this neat thing we did!" I mind them not allowing me to admire their neat thing for five seconds and then politely decline.

(seconding tom @ 688: google is back to plain white>)

OTOH, I don't really have a "homepage" any more; I keep half a dozen default tabs open in Firefox, and what comes up when I re-open it after a reboot is whatever page I was last looking at. So I think my situation is different enough not to be much help for you.

* No, not the Google toolbar; the Google button on my Bookmarks toolbar.

Very nice!

Dave Howell @ 667:
Lumpy hats for lumpy heads.

Thank Splotz, the god of liquid nasal discharges, that I'd set my coffee cup down before reading that.

Hmm. I know my husband was quite enraptured when he saw *my* default home page. Maybe some of y'all would like this too. My browser defaults to opening up an HTML file that lives on my computer, and in my browser looks something like this:

Google: [_____________]
Yahoo: [_____________]
M-W Dictionary: [____________]
Wikipedia: [__________]
MapQuest from home to [_____________], [___Seattle__], [WA]
....

The source code is more or less (edited for brevity) . . .
Google: <form method="get" action="http://www.google.com/search?rls=en&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;oe=UTF-8"><input name="q" size="20" tabindex="1" /></form>

Yahoo: <form name="w" action="http://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A0oGkxrL0SdGiJYAPnul87UF?fr=sfp&amp;ei=UTF-8"><input type="text" name="p" size="20" id=yschsp/></form>

<form method="get" action="http://www.merriam-webster.com/cgi-bin/dictionary" id="search_form" onsubmit="return lookup('search_form');"><a href="http://www.merriam-webster.com/">M/W Dictionary:</a> <input type="hidden" name="book" value="Dictionary" id="search_dict" /> <input name="va" size="15" /></form>

<form action="http://www.wikipedia.org/search-redirect.php" id="searchform" name="searchform">
<a href="http://www.wikipedia.org/">Wikipedia</a>:
<input type="hidden" name="language" value="en" lang="en" xml:lang="en" />
<input type="text" name="search" size="20" id="searchInput" tabindex="30"/>
<input type="hidden" name="go" value="Go" />
</form>

It works like so: when I open a new window, if I hit [Tab], the cursor activates the first text field, which is Google. I type a search, and hit return, and the form is submitted to Google, which is all exactly the same as if Google's main page were my default start page. But if I want to search Yahoo, I just hit [Tab] twice. That puts me in the second box. Type the search term, hit [Return] and my form is submitted to Yahoo. And so on and so forth. My 'true' start page uses tables to smoosh things up into three columns, and I have searches for Yellow Pages and White Pages, for Google/Macintosh and Google/Images, and a whole bunch of links to frequently used sites like ITAFareFinder, my various financial institutions, eBay, and the like. The eBay link points to the 'my eBay' page, so when I click it, it goes right to the login page.

Some sites that I visit require login, but I'm quite unconcerned about somebody 'logging in as me,' so those links sometimes look like ...http://example.site.com/login.php?username=me&password=myeasypassword... so I can click the link and go directly to a post-login state. One site's code requires I submit a form; it doesn't check the URL for the login info. So I copied their form onto my page, filled in the form fields, and made them all 'hidden,' so there's just a button. I click that button, and I'm logged in.

And so on.

Tom W @599 - Reminds me of the incident in Good News from Planet Earth where the protagonist finds out that Dadaist punks have broken into his crappy car and installed an expensive stereo system.

Google's image is so ingrained in the public view (including my own) as being so shiningly competent, that it's easy to forget just how often and how badly they screw up once they step outside their main fields of competence, namely web search and contextual ad display. (Google Buzz; Google Groups; Orkut; Gmail's poor outbound spam filtering; etc.)

If there's some sort of prize for awful passport photo, I think you've won it.

Apparently, the background images were not only poorly conceived, but didn't work as planned. Oops.

Andrew 668: My current ID photo was a) taken when I was in the best shape of my life, so my face isn't as fat as it is now, and b) looks like I'm just barely suppressing laughter. Best ID pic I've ever had. Unfortunately it expires this year, so my next one will look like, again, like a serving of mashed potatos that someone has tried and failed to form into a human face.

It also scans well to 'Donkey-riding' (Chorus: Hey, ho, away we go; donkey-riding, donkey-riding. Hey, ho, away we go; riding on a donkey).

It seemed to me like it most belonged over there where there's a chance the anti-vaxers may see it, but it may be of general interest to this audience.

The Nature paper on autism is very nice. It's not so much a 'great leap forward', since there have been earlier reports of similar things (rare genetic deletions) for both autism and schizophrenia, but it is larger and more comprehensive than the earlier research.

This basic strategy of looking for lots of different rare variants is only recently feasible for copy-number data, and is just starting to be used for DNA sequence data (my first sequence data will be arriving in a few months). We may find that this pattern of multiple rare variants causing a spectrum of similar problems happens in a lot of diseases.

While I know we can change the course of rivers, will this REALLY help? If so, how?

(I'm thinking of hitting the library to get a copy of McPhee's "Controlling Nature." I'm sure I remember reading about this...)

Might also wash a lot of nutrients and wildlife out. Rather like a purgative takes the good intestinal flora/fauna out with the bad.

My apologies if I missed a previous reference to this.

Quite apart from my irritation over the non-availability of the shingles vaccine, I have to say that I was extremely amused by this [quotation from the NYT article linked by Thomas]:

Among the increasingly complex and convoluted suggestions for health care reform that were brewing at that moment, here was a powerful intervention that relied on only three things: a needle, a syringe and a patient-doctor relationship rooted in promoting wellness.

Not.

When the NYT adopts a particular expression, that's pretty solid evidence that it's entered the language. If dorky teen-buddy movies had no other value, at least they gave us this.

<makes warding motions>

Oh. Wow. Now that's what a poet is supposed to do: express what you would say if you only had the words and the wit to put them together. Ms. Ian, I wish I could have said that.

And Tom, thanks for the tip on listening first; very good advice.

From K thru 5th grade, I went to 4 different elementary schools. The move mid-5th grade was particularly harsh, because I went from a teacher who was pretty laid back and good at coaxing me out of my shell, to a super-strict teacher with no time to waste making sure I was integrating into her classroom okay. I was utterly miserable for the 3 or so months I was in her classroom. Changing schools wasn't an option for me, but Mom wrote a letter to the principal at the end of the year, letting them know I needed a gentler touch to thrive. Fortunately, they apparently listened to her. My 6th grade teacher, Mrs. Banks, will always hold a special place in my heart.

I don't know if the smaller school would be better or worse at taking your son's personality/learning style into account when assigning teachers, but finding out would give you another point to consider.

Bruce @648: thanks, I’ll give it a try.

hedgehog @666 (absit omen): (waves back even more belatedly from Redland.)

Retirement and free wifi: they rock!

I really hope that doesn't happen. ALL the publications on oil spill response emphasise that you keep the oil out of the marshes and mudflats as a priority. Oil is relatively easy to clean off rocks and sand beaches; you let it go there. Marshes and mudflats are not only very vulnerable to the oil, but will be seriously damaged by any oil-cleaning efforts. (I can provide cites if anyone wants them.)

Someone should make a new XKCD-inspired version, with a burning crocodile on top.

They sometimes fight back when you try to ignite them, too.

"You want to bike up mountains?"

"You also get to go DOWN mountains, Jim."

. . .

"What about bears, Barb? Feral dogs? Weird rural people who think you're the Antichrist?"

"Oh, Jim, that's IDAHO!"

(One of those "Ketchup Advisory Board" sketches from PHC. Garrison Keillor is a shithead, but every once in a while I just have to listen to that program.)

Thank you.

I will try to pace myself a bit better for the next 10 or so. I think I'll go outside now.

(I went googlin on "sea oil-eating bacteria" -- I already knew there were oil-eating bacteria, used on land for remediation of oil-contaminated sites. On land, when the bacteria have consumed all the oil, they die off, as opposed to thing like kudzu and purple loosestrife that colonize and keep spreading...)

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=scientists-break-down-oil

http://open.salon.com/blog/nick_carraway/2010/05/28/oil_eating_bacteria_are_in_fat_city

http://news.discovery.com/tech/oil-eating-microbes-gulf-oil-spill.html

http://www.newsweek.com/blogs/the-human-condition/2010/05/04/oil-spill-answers-are-we-going-to-use-microbes-to-destroy-the-oil-if-so-how-would-that-work.html

exactly my reaction to the nike ad--great to hear that again after, what, 35 or more years.

and yes, it's on youtube.

There was a formatting error on the newest particle. Thanks for the heads-up; I've fixed it.

Good luck with that. :)

--

*Do you work at being a Subversive Influence? Or does it just come naturally?

All I'm doing is making it easier for her to do the right thing, and go outside. As Miles would say, lower the wall.

(Bad and raised by lawyers. Though that may be another redundant term.)

It says something that (in sleep-deprived, relatively-OCDish moments) my brain is reacting to the prospect of us moving into a new house with a better school district where my daughter shall grow up (pant, pant, pant) by detailedly designing a climbing frame/outdoor play thing to be equipped with a shadecloth side. Suitable both for active outdoor climby play and for sitting in the shade enjoying the summer without being, y'know, hot or sunburnt.

I don't know if it'll ever get built, but my brain insists I design it. :->

I got in trouble in university for continuing that custom on campus. Which is a shame; Cal has some really good live oaks and bay laurels. No rope needed for a comfortable perch, even.

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* As teenagers, we stopped sleeping in the cabin with my parents and my younger siblings. We each had our own tents in very different places. I still dream, sometimes, that I've woken up in my great-grandfather's WWI-surplus umbrella tent, just before dawn, with a whole day of swimming in rivers and reading in trees ahead of me.

(I wasn't sure whether to post this in an open thread or in the Evidence & Exclusions thread. Hope this is OK.)

The most sensible quote in the article comes from the Cato Institute^*
"When something goes wrong, the government will attack our infrastructure and make society weaker."

^* and that's not something I say a lot

Good point. Fortunately, one doesn't need to rely on Declan McCullagh. The Bill and summaries are on the website of the Senate committee, http://hsgac.senate.gov/. The article oversells the problem a bit, but it's still worrying.

The good news is that the emergency powers specifically exclude surveillance, and that the 'critical infrastructure' is potentially broad but is defined in advance rather than at the whim of the administration.

Also, the government is required to say what the risk is, and companies can propose alternative ways to prevent this risk (though only if the government agrees they are adequate).

I still don't like it. On the other hand, even without this bill, I have no confidence that the internet companies would refuse government demands if the FBI and Homeland Security showed up in their offices.

Thankfully, there are still plenty of points of differentiation between me and Glenn Beck. heh.

In any case, I never said that my disdain for sports was rational; much of it is driven by envy.