My aunt found this photo in Italy. Taken in the thirties or fourties, on a roof in Greenwich Village.

My grandmother is in the middle; the rest are great aunts or great cousins (if that is a thing):

https://www.flickr.com/photos/stefan_e_jones/16355493371/

I've always wanted to cuddle. capybara.

I'm sorry I missed the Gathering of Light at Arisia. Quartermastering it ate my weekend, pretty much from Tues. before the con to the time of the dead dog.

Which reminds me, I should get to work on dinner. Tomato soup and grilled cheese has been proposed, and I approve.

I'm coming round to capybara as a thing. I Parheliated a Tumblr called Animals Sitting on Capybaras because they have such noble faces as they carry their various animals around. But this blissed-out rolling over makes me want to be a capybara.

I may have to adjust my userpic on social media.

I came here. :-)

(I also go read schmoopy fanfic when I'm feeling down, or watch cartoons online.)

Dogs in Elk

*though I like the 2010 music best.

Oh, and there is a small but slowly expanding list of fanfic I read when I just can't even over at my rudimentary LJ.

Rotate your owl for Science, indeed.

is a good one too.

(I thought it was going to be the one about an animal eating something red and looking like it was bleeding to death. I'm pretty sure that was also a squirrel. Anyone know that one? I don't have enough useful details to find it again.)

My favorite version of Dogs in Elk is the one with vegetable illustrations.

Particularly brilliant because he's style-parodying Crosby, Stills and Nash.

But it's worth it for these shots of what the new Canadian passport looks like under black light. Wow.

However when Google led me at first to the Chaos Manor link, I thought perhaps... well, let's just say I kept looking. And though the original link at some prehistoric Salon chat forum is long gone, with only part of it remaining even in the Internet Archive, I did find a version lovingly illustrated with carved pumpkins and lots of tomato sauce.

And then I continued reading and saw Cally's link. But the pumpkins are really something special, so what the hey.

Elliott got me to thinking about The Duck Song (and watch the sequels, too) which I found by way of The Elephant Song. And of course, who could forget Simon's Cat?

Heck, sometimes when I've got to distract the kids, all I need to do is go to YouTube and pull up something good, usually involving cats or the Muppets.

Having done a lot of work with beet pulp (we had a lot of horses), and later Maia, and her sister, and mother, getting to know her (she's big in the clicker training world) I should ask if they've ever met the squirrel (probably still alive, as they can reach 20-25, in the wild).

I don't evn have cats, and I still think Breaking Cat News is hilarious. The link is to the first comic; I recommend regular application of the "next" button.

Also, I am a devotee of positive self-esteem shark. There's nothing cuter than an apex predator that understands its role in life.

> I've always wanted to cuddle. capybara.

That's a perfectly normal urge. I suggest watching capybaras take showers, at:

http://www.vice.com/video/capybara-the-cute-show

Actually I suggest watching pretty much every episode of The Cute Show.

And to http://lars.uaf.edu/. I think I want a musk ox calf.

Of course, our cat might not like her new companions. Nor might our hens. Nor might our neighbours, once the wombat starts burrowing, and the calves grow up.

Or there's big kitties playing with pumpkins.

I suspect I got both those videos here, originally.

And I just discovered that there are like six years' worth of cat-and-pumpkin videos. BRB.

Mostly, watching (and occasionally re-watching) episodes of Table Top make me happy, because people having fun (well, mostly, at least) is encouraging.

Basically, we're looking at a problem that's probably a hard-to-diagnose interaction between cardiac and GI systems, resulting in intermittent but severe fluid retention and shortness of breath. Not that we didn't already have enough doctors, but there are further specialists in our immediate future.

As usual, olding sucks, except compared to the alternatives.

Big-cat rescue/shelter/display sites have found a fertile ground in accepting donations of strongly holiday-related perishables right after last date of relevant sale, for use as enrichment objects.

I hope the New Englanders amongst the crowd here can stay home and safe.

Also from my bookmarks, Holy Cuteness.

I have some more "when everything sucks" links for you all:
Chris Hadfield sings "Space Oddity", in space.
Belayed dancers waltz orthagonally.
Foxes discover a trampoline.
Baby capuchin sings to you.
There was a second lizard?!
The Owl and the Pussycat. (Check out the rest of the channel for more.)
The best 35 seconds on the internet. It just gets better every time you watch it. (No cats were harmed in the making of this video.)
Baby bear and baby wolf get up to mischief in the zoo gift shop after hours. (More videos in the rest of the channel.)
Red pandas are adorable jerks.
Multitracked cover of Imogen Heap's "Hide and Seek".
Imogen Heap performing "Just for Now" live.
Gorgeous ad releases millions of superballs down a San Francisco street.
The most pathetic baby panda ever.
The chillout song. "Hey. It's okay. You'll be fine, just breathe."
Another ZeFrank, "Invocation for Beginnings".
Musings on trust, set to a slow contact pas de deux.
True facts about marsupials. (You'll probably realize quickly that this is a non-standard definition of "true".)

I guess what I'm saying is you should watch Ze Frank.

http://www.weather.gov/okx/

"Blizzard Warning for NYC, 1PM Mon-12AM Wed morning: 20-30" of snow + wind gusts to 65mph."

Panic buying of Corn Nog, Wadded Beef, and Creamed Eels in Three, Two, ONE . . .

Another guaranteed laugh for me is this home-brew commentary on Olympic sailing.

"Kiwi" is NOT bittersweet, it should in fact have a TW

This New Englander has a sensible boss who isn't crazy enough to try to open the shop in a blizzard, storm preparedness measures informed by Uncle Jim's sage advice, and an off-street parking space, something of a luxury in Dorchester. Catch ME going out in the forecasted weather! Hope everyone else is similarly situated.

It is 53 F, blue skies and sunny outside of Portland.

I like Calming Manatee too Em #12, but my normal tactic when something riles me up is to disengage & do something completely different until I calm down. So I'd take time away from the keyboard if I'm het up over something online.

Other times, I get a buzz out of seeing some of the neat, cool things people do & put online that I'd never think of myself, as a counter to some of the awful stuff that is also online. Two recent discoveries (though they've been online a while) are:
- A Sketch Towards a Taxonomy of Meta-Desserts
- Shakespeare in the Bush, ("What you get when African tribal elders interpret Shakespeare for you ").

Abi and the gnomes, would it be possible for you to remove the entire kiwi line, or add a trigger warning in front of it?

Asking for a friend . . . all the folks back there!

And speaking of scritching capybaras, Rabbit is desperate for someone (i.e., one of the boys) to scritch her. But we have enough guinea pigs, thankyouverymuch. (If you get my drift.)

A few yards away, the bull put some drift into his hindquarters, skidded to a stop just out of goring range of the scientist's tender vittles...and presented the backs of his ears for scritches.

Really glad to hear Teresa's back home, and that she was able to get home before the storm hit.

Also, Modern Farmer is probably gone (one more quarterly issue on the way, website still there, but full-time editorial staff is gone.) A great source for pictures of goats (which are apparently the new cats on the internet, according to several people.) It's partly intended for people who want to raise chickens in their back yards, partly for people who occasionally want to hear about trends in small-scale farming, and partly for people who don't actually plan to have livestock in their apartments but still enjoy reading articles about What's the best goat for you?

In these videos Kili the Senegal parrot plays dead on command, a wild raven asks for a helping hand, and a whale shark, ditto.

My wife and I first encountered it on our honeymoon, and I've made it a few times over the years with varying success. (I'd never had artichokes growing up; we were neither Italian nor Californian nor New Yorkers, so they were alien thistles or else canned things, but she introduced me to her family recipe for them.)

It turns out you can get frozen artichoke bottoms in the local Persian grocery, which aren't quite as good as starting with a fresh artichoke, but are close enough and far easier and better than canned, and having acquired a stick blender for Christmas I've been experimenting with hollandaise (reasonably successful) and aioli (failed badly :-) And I'd gotten a big bag of spinach at the store, so it was time to make this. As with many dishes that have lots of ingredients, all needing to be hot at the same time, the last minute of throwing all the parts together was a bit hectic, but it worked pretty well.

A few years ago, this dish inspired my contribution to one of the local SF folks' Alien Food party. You can get canned artichoke bottoms, which are big enough to hold the yolk of a fried egg, and sturdy enough to stay up on a tripod of toothpicks, couple of tobasco sauce eyes, looking slightly like War of the World Martians; I forget what the landscape under them was, probably Cheetos or canned nopales or something dubious-looking.

Wandering off topic, we were told in Svalbard of the arctic fox researcher and the barnacle goose researcher who were living next door to each other. The former's research subject kept upsetting the latter's research subject.

I've removed the link.

Stefan Jones @ #45, Rikibeth @ #62: The town in which we're staying sent out an emergency warning call last night. We're already stocked up and making sure we have important items ready to go in case of evacuation.

We're already experiencing some flurries.

I am reminded of the Water Buffalo song from Veggie Tales. Youtube link here.

I had to laugh at that ep of Doctor Who that takes place Out West. Traditional desert ranch house, traditional rickety gate down at the end of the drive, with the bar overhead holding—wait for it—water buffalo horns. *snerk!* Um...no. I strongly suspect the scriptwriter wrote "buffalo" horns, and the props dept (not being USAn) failed to translate that as "bison."

I have done a snark. I am proud of my snark, but really, really unhappy about the need to do it on several axes.

I am proud of my snark, but really, really unhappy about the need to do it on several axes.

Sympathy. But sometimes the snark just takes too many words to fit onto a single axe.

(I'll get my coat.)

Foxes and Trampolines!! Yes, that!

Other gotos:
Simon's Cat
And Ballooooooons! Timelapse webcams from the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta
http://www.balloonfiesta.com/event-info/2014-web-cams
Friday, October 10, Lobo Internet GOPRO webcam, at 19 seconds, is ME! I'm in the gray-blue wine pitcher on the far right side, following the fire engine, with a shark above.

I spent the past year in all the horrible treatments possible, and no longer have any detectable cancer. But I'm young and otherwise healthy, and we're being very aggressive about making as sure as possible I have no cancer at all. Thus a few more sessions of mop-up chemo. I am otherwise as healthy as a person with a metastatic cancer diagnosis can possibly be.

Hooray for medical science!

Writing is good therapy. The only problem with it is that I can't do it absolutely all the time. :-)

Man's made entirely of rubber, not just the face.

The entire episode is interesting; the interviewer is very good at getting more manic, improv-oriented performers to actually engage with their process (though Robin Williams ended up derailing him, in the end).

I will have to spend lots of time on the links in this thread when I'm next at the library. Can't do videos over my dial-up connection at home.

The Matt videos are wonderful, as is the music (which is frequently listened to on the way to work - iPod FTW!)

Moose have a very soft spot for the xkcd and ML "Boomdeyada" videos, too.

The juggling which still makes me happy.

And then I found , which is a combination of thinking about the possibilities in juggling and some delightful juggling.

https://outwalkingthedog.wordpress.com/2015/01/26/7472/

What a handsome beastie. I was across the street from one who looked a bit like her last month. He looked miffed that I got in the way of his walk to a wetlands area on my side of the road. He didn't bolt when he saw me, but ambled away quickly enough that I couldn't get a decent picture.

Thank you for the edit, apologies for the necessity.

Fox by the roadside
Looks up from her bug-hunt, laughs,
And chases the bus!

It really happened. These days half of the kids on board would have had their phones out, but back then, all I could do was make a poem.

It was really odd seeing this particular one in full daylight. The road we were across from each other on has quite a bit of car traffic, but very little of the pedestrian variety. I think he was used to crossing unseen from the field he had just crossed to the pocket-wetlands area on my side.

I wish I had a real camera with me. He had a very nice winter coat, with a dark tail.

The boldest one I encountered stood on the other side of a road and looked at Kira and me. Side facing me, head turned to look. Ready to scamper into his creek-side tangle-brush I suspect.

The literal translation of the Swedish for "raccoon" is 'wash bear' (as in "a bear that washes things", not as in "a bear you wash things with").

Make of that what you want (but I think it is to the superficially ursine look of the raccoon).

The toxic gas (carbon monoxide) is purely a combustion product, so if you've dumped all the coals and ashes it's perfectly safe to bring the hardware inside. (As long as it's cooled down enough to avoid being a different kind of hazard, of course.)

I'm assuming you're trying to add additional heat to your house, rather than simply safely storing your charcoal grill inside. If that's your goal, then ignore me...

@121/129: I concur with this analysis. My first estimate for "a place to put them" and "a way to carry them" would be something like a metal colander, placed on the back of the stove. Assuming you aren't using very many bricks.

Apparently there are different types of bricks and the main difference is density. And, of course, whether you have a pile of bricks off to the side of your house left by the previous owner, as I do.

This time around, I saw how rough a lot of Chris Bliss's movements were, but i have no idea to what extent he was at the limit of his skill, or was choosing a staccato style and inefficient posture (not to mention mouthing the words) because it works better as a performance.

Less tech-y version: use a solar plant of whatever ilk to generate steam. Fireless steam engines are a known technology: they carry superheated water/steam in a thermos tank and run back to the source for a fill-up whenever the pressure runs low.

Ingvar M@122: In German too, according to this flowchart of German animal names (which I think must have been linked here before).

Nancy Lebovitz@133: Having just seen both videos for the first time, I agree. I think that the "simple" 3-ball juggling let me focus more on the overall performance than on the technical difficulty.

Thanks to everyone for all the links. At the moment I want to be following them all, but schedule and snow clearing mean that I'm instead just bookmarking the whole thread for later.

Warning: may cause uncontrolled giggling. Especially if you ride a motorcycle.

I recently discovered the Sirius Mystery. The claim is that upon contact with Europeans, the Dogon tribe already knew that Sirius was a double star. [More common theories are that the Dogon tribe was told this by Europeans; they did not know of a planet beyond Jupiter with rings, for instance.] And the "I'm not saying it was aliens, but..." people seized upon this to say it was aliens.

I thought "Well, what would it take for a relatively low-tech tribe, or a fallen empire, to find that out? A good telescope?" The parabola doesn't require much pre-existing math. Clear glass is difficult and, like clay, would leave evidence for centuries. Ground glass lenses would be even more difficult. Then I thought about parabolic reflectors. One large mirror to focus, one small one to reflect the image over to the eye. And I realized probably the best material - easy to work, low melting point, metallurgically simple, very reflective - was gold. A golden bowl, if you will.

And if the observatory got sacked, you KNOW the looters would destroy the telescope and take the gold. So there'd be no archaeological evidence of its existence.

I don't think the Dogon looked at the sky through high-powered golden telescopes. But they could have, as far as I know, and I love that.

Sandy:

This kind of thing always makes me think of all the technology and genius that must have been lost through history. Stuff like the Antikythera mechanism gives a hint of this--one instance of what was probably some really impressive technology, built a couple thousand years ago and more advanced in some ways than anything we know about for another thousand plus years.

*Most* human genius has been lost. Most of the amazing stories and beautiful art and subtle philosophical reasoning and clever bits of technology didn't get saved. The project ended and everyone knew nobody would ever want to do such a thing again. The genius innovator died and his wastrel nephew inherited a bunch of boring meaningless tomes and weird mechanical gadgets that he sold off for wine and whore money. The waterwheel worked perfectly for years, but the designer just couldn't manage to explain to his son (who was also his apprentice) exactly what was so clever about it, and when it stopped working in *his* son's time, nobody knew how to fix it. The software that ran the control system was a genuine work of genius, but when the new systems came out it was obsolete, and the new programmer who was supposed to maintain it never did understand it anyway.

Apparently someone two blocks north of us noticed her hanging around their place for the past few weeks; they've been feeding her occasionally, thinking that she was a stray (her collar was gone). They took her in during the blizzard yesterday and decided to adopt her, so took her to the vet today, who discovered her identification chip. That service called to let us know, and we picked her up before they closed this evening.

She's in great condition; looking at her, you'd never know that she had been outdoors for over four months.

As soon as she finished eating, she took up her rightful place on my lap and demanded that I make up for all of the lost skritches NOW. I'm okay with that.

A previous time he'd gotten out, at a previous place, the landlord had left the door open when doing some work, and he ran outside and around the house (a couple of days after I'd moved in.) I locked the other cat in the bathroom, left the doors open, and went looking for him. Saw him down the block, ran after him, he ran across the street and down the canyon, and I tried running down the canyon (in shoes that weren't made for it :-), couldn't catch him. Got back home, terribly depressed. Cat walked out of the bedroom saying "Yeah, what?". The next morning I saw a very similar cat walking across my back porch, presumably the one I had *actually* chased down the canyon :-)

Every couple of years I see them near my home, usually groups of young ones that aren't quite big enough to leave their mom. One night I heard a bunch of scratching from one of the trees near my door when I got home, and looked up expecting to see a couple of squirrels; instead there was a possum up the tree, and a couple feet below him was a young raccoon, plus a couple of other raccoons were farther down the sidewalk. Raccoons took off, and my guess was that if I hadn't arrived when I did, there'd have been leftover possum bits on the sidewalk in the morning.

Unfortunately, we seem to have a significant number of residents who can't figure out how to open the dumpster lids to put the trash in, so leave their full trash bags on top of the dumpster. Which, of course, makes it much harder for everyone else to throw their trash away....

She was so glad they never figured out pull-tabs and can openers.

But they'd left raccoons on board...

Temple is an interesting fellow, and I think he somewhat redeemed himself with one of his later books, that points out that all these lumps of rock crystal in museums around the world, usually found in the middle east in strata from 2 or 3 or 4,000 years ago, are actually magnifying lenses. His book is "The crystal sun", it's worth a read and has lots of photos to help convince you. It even seems possible that they had telescopes, but they were special and rare; it is hard work to make a lense and somewhat skilled.

His Foundation is also funding the translation and publication of modern scholarly editions of various important texts of alchemy, the first one, appropriately enough, being the Physika et Mystika of pseudo-Democritus.

This explains why Chomsky once jumped onto the kitchen table, ripped open a packet of cantuccini biscuits I had been given for Christmas, took out two of them, and ate them. Except for the almonds, which he left in the middle of the carpet. It turned out he didn't like almonds - who knew?

The image is better because it eliminates the possibility of word wrap, but here's the text for anyone who needs it:

Word Crunching

I
wrote
a poem
on a page
but then each line grew
by the word sum of the previous two
until I started to worry at all these words coming with such frequency
because, as you can see, it can be easy to run out of space when a poem gets all Fibonacci sequency.

Not unexpected, but sad nonetheless.

Now imagining alternate histories where Columbus "discovers" . . .

[ ] Coyote civilization, with tales of fur-less trolls who once invaded over a land bridge from the northwest. AND NOW THEY'RE BACK!
[ ] Coyote / human civilization.

Yes, I was thinking coyotes specifically, because they have such a reputation for intelligence and determination.

Nominees for other continents?

It may be a literary tradition, but I would nominate Foxes as a possibility.

Cunning as a fox, and the idea of the Coyote as the Trickster... There's a lot of overlap.

The squee isn't a spoiler, methinks -- no plot impact. It has to do with nonwhite, nonstraight representation on TV. I'll rot13 it anyhow for those who are sensitive: Gur pncgnva bs gur cbyvpr fgngvba jurer gur cebgntbavfg jbexf vf fheanzrq Fvatu. Va na rc V jngpurq ynfg avtug, gur znva punenpgre pbcf ner qbvat gur "tb gnyx gb gur pncgnva ba yhapu orpnhfr jr'er haunccl" fpugvpx -- naq gur pncgnva fnlf, "Zl oblsevraq unf qrpvqrq jr'er rngvat URNYGUL ng ubzr, fb abj V pna bayl trg sbbq V YVXR jura V'z urer ..." Whfg n guebjnjnl yvar jvgu ab cybg vzcyvpngvbaf. Vg vf PBZCYRGRYL VAPVQRAGNY gung ur vf tnl. Naq abajuvgr. RRRRRRR!

The other thing, which doesn't make me particularly happy, is possibly spoilerific by tendency and mentions one specific plot incident from Episode 6 (season 1): Gur jevgvat fgnss, sbe nyy gurve novyvgl gb jevgr terng qvnybthr naq pbzcyvpngrq punenpgref (jub unir nepf vafgrnq bs orvat pneqobneq fgnaqrrf cergraqvat gb or crbcyr), frrz gb ivrj nal bs gur grpuabonooyr, fpvrapr, naq "cbjref fghss" nf na havzcbegnag rkphfr sbe gur "erny zrng" bs gur fubj. Vg srryf yvxr gurl qrpvqr nurnq bs gvzr, "Gurfr ner bhe guerr cbjref orngf, yrg'f jevgr gb gung naq tb ba jvgu gur cnegf bs gur fubj jr pner nobhg," rira jura gur fcrpvsvp cbjref orngf gurl pubfr znxr ab frafr be jbhyq znxr n ORGGRE FGBEL vs fbzrbar npghnyyl gubhtug bs gurz.

Va Rcvfbqr 6, gur onq thl vf culfvpnyyl uneq gb gur gbhpu. Chapuvat uvz oernxf Oneel'f unaq. Gur fpvrapr areqf jbex bhg gung vs Oneel ehaf ng bire 800zcu, naq uvgf gur onq thl jvgu uvf svfg sebz WHFG gur evtug natyr, vg jvyy jbex; nalguvat fyvtugyl bss naq Oneel jvyy "funggre rirel obar va (uvf) obql." Qrfcvgr gur snpg gung snfg-ivoengvat nggnpxf unir uvfgbevpnyyl jbexrq orggre sbe gur Synfu, gurl qb n genvavat zbagntr naq n ohvyqhc naq gnyx nobhg fcrpvsvp guvatf (ur arrqf n "5.3zv ehaavat fgneg va n fgenvtug yvar" gb trg tbvat gung snfg) ... Gur jevgref pyrneyl qrpvqrq rneyl ba nobhg n yvfg bs Cbjref Penc jr'er tbvat gb qb guvf rc, naq vafregrq vg phg-naq-cnfgr fglyr.

So if they would hire a writer who really likes the part of the job I think their staff is weak on, it would be very close to my ideal. There are major characters who are non-white but not tokens. Non-straight people exist in the world, and are shown to exist, and have lines that aren't motivated by their non-straightness being a plot point.

And yet. Sigh.

I admit I do not watch the show, so I don't know the details of the characters involved. So I have a follow-up question (rot-13 to keep it spoiler-free): Fvatu vf n irel genqvgvbany Fvxu anzr. Qbrf gur pncgnva'f fubj fvtaf bs orvat n Fvxu (gheona, snpvny unve, znvayl), be qvq gurl whfg cybc gur anzr ba na npgbe bs Vaqvna qrfprag?

I think the neighbours who have been watching out for her are as excited as we are.

After various emails threatening ADA violations, a call from my oncologist, a fax from my oncologist, and far more aggravation than should have been necessary, my oncologist actually TALKED TO A REAL PERSON, and suddenly I'm no longer a prospective juror.

Sheesh.

"Joshi is territorial: while I grant him his right to his opinions, he does not grant me a right to mine."

Yeah, I've noticed that, too. Joshi is becoming Derleth, and either doesn't realize it or doesn't care.

We've got a generation of screenwriters (and show runners and what-not) for whom written SF, comics, and games aren't at best a ghetto to be mocked, but something they grew up with, as an inspiration and a way of cutting one's teeth. These offer a rich and inclusive source of ideas and dramatic possibility.

Very SF-ish ideas are finding their way into even mainstream shows. Elementary had two episodes featuring gadgets that would qualify it as SF twenty years ago. Person of Interest, which seemed at first like "The Equalizer" with a gimmick, is turning into dark spook SF.

And just as the new generation of writers isn't afraid that working nanotechnology or A.I. will baffle their audiences, they're increasingly confident about including non-white, non-straight characters . . . not as tokens or the point of a Very Special Episode, but as . . . characters.

And the generation of screenwriters who learn from *them* will be even less chicken.

My kid will grow up just assuming that the President of the US can be black. Because of course he can, he was -- and his pretty wife was black too (and pretty. And wore great clothes, by my kid's lights).

It kind of made me want to cry for happy. And hope that we get another non-white (dare I hope for non-cis-het-male?) very-high officeholder sometime in the next ten years to drive home the assumption.

It wasn't that long ago . . . well, I'm old, so maybe it just seems that way . . . that Star Trek: The Next Generation produced the most squeamish, toe-dip in the waters of suggesting that maybe a non-traditional relationship might not maybe be a bad thing; that episode where Riker falls for a genderless alien (the ones who put their seed in a "fibrous husk"). How chickenshit that seems now.

Babylon 5 really wanted to just show that Ivonova and (mind blanking . . . female telepath character) were involved and really, what's your problem if they were? but JMS reportedly had to dial things back due to syndicate pressure.

And yes: Black president, and if a woman ran for POTUS no one outside of Rush Limbaugh's fan club would tolerate the awful crap and slurs I remember flying around when Shirley Chisolm and Dukakis were running.

Progress. Slow, but progress.

Phiala, #179: Yay for someone figuring it out!

This is related to something that is making me terribly sad right now.

You see, my family is white, and when I was a kid in the 70's we used to have all the Bill Cosby albums on, a lot. And my Dad would quote large sections that he had committed to memory, and there was this black face on the album covers on the coffee table. Nobody lectured me about it; just, there he was. So the message I got was that black people are smart and funny, and that my Daddy, whom I worshipped, wanted to emulate a black man. Far superior to the messages about race that I got in school-- those tended to include the phrase "just as good," which in retrospect makes me rather queasy.

And now... crap. I know, feet of clay, men in positions of power will be men in positions of power, and all that. But still, very painful.

Cosby's album about his childhood -- tonsillectomy, the Chicken Heart, go-karts -- was frequently played in our house when I was a kid.

A positive presence, s'far as anyone could tell.

Now . . . ick. Ugh.

*"The first ten episodes or so were really cheesy, Em. I had my doubts. Thank goodness you told me to stick it out."

And I have to disagree with Zelda: Cosby's apparent crimes go far beyond feet of clay, and putting it on "men in positions of power" is a cop-out. Many men have a sleazy streak, and perhaps most men can be insensitive to relative power and privilege, but there can't be many who respond to power and wealth by systematically drugging and raping women for decades.

(One thing I wonder is just how his lawyers and PR people have been justifying their role to themselves - they would surely know just how many women have been trying to raise accusations and how long, as they're the ones who would have been involved in shutting them all up and threatening any media who might have reported on it.)

This video never fails to make me laugh.

Best wishes for Teresa. I'm glad she's home.

That we know of.

Alright, not that many that bothered with the drugs; most would rely on the women feeling too vulnerable to say anything, or being disbelieved or blamed if they did. (What was she doing in that hotel room/car/stairwell?) And the 'soft no' can allow the man in a position of power to tell *himself* that what he did wasn't rape. (The drugs maybe mean a little less self-deception and denial. I don't much care.) It doesn't even have to get as far as the PR people making threats (and the PR people weren't there; why wouldn't they genuinely believe the woman was just another extortionist?)-- self-rejection and a little scoffing can do most of the job.

Granted, I am feeling very cynical right now. And we are talking about *unreported* crimes, so neither you nor I can ever get good data to say what we mean by "many" or "not many." I think we can agree on "too damn many."

I classify alcohol among the group of "commonly used rape drugs" because there is a growing body of evidence that it is in fact the drug of choice for many serial acquaintance-rapists.

One potentially good thing that's coming out of the "Kids These Days don't understand that online = public" culture is that many of these acquaintance rapists can't seem to resist taking photos and video of the acts in progress, as witness this story. And sometimes that evidence is what convicts them. Men of Cosby's generation rarely did that*, because they didn't record their lives on social media.

* Exception: there have always been sociopathic serial rapists, usually also serial murderers, who took photos to keep as trophies. But I'm talking about the kind of guy who just thinks of what he's doing as "getting laid".

Lrg abguvat pna punatr zl ybir sbe gung fubj. V pna fgvyy frr gubfr xvqf, urne gur fgnyr wbxrf (“V bhtug gb pnyy lbh ‘Fpubby ba Fngheqnl.’” “Jul?” “Ab Pynff!”), naq gur zhfvp sebz gurve whaxlneq onaq; n unec znqr sebz gur gvtugrarq fcevatf bs na byq orq, n qehz sebz n genfu-pna yvq. V fnj gur vairagvirarff bs oynpx yvsr sebz jngpuvat Sng Nyoreg. Gurfr jrera’g puvyqera jvgu zbarl be cevivyrtr, ohg jub hfrq gurve vzntvangvba naq yblnygl gb rnpu bgure gb fheivir. Naq nf V jevgr guvf V ernyvmr gung Pbfol jnf zber bs n qnq sbe zr guna V ernyvmrq. V pbafvqre uvf oblf, naq jbaqre jurgure ur gubhtug nobhg Sng Nyoreg, Ehql, Zhfuzbhgu, Ohpxl, “Jrveq” Unebyq, Qhzo Qbanyq naq Ehffryy jura ur jnf gnyxvat qbja gb cbbe oynpxf, gb puvyqera genccrq ol rpbabzvp pvephzfgnapr, gur barf jub ner fgvyy cynlvat va gur whaxlneqf bs Nzrevpn.

They are 6 months old. Toll so far: 1 snow globe, 1 set of blinds, 1 set of shoe laces, and the ability to fasten the hood on a winter coat.

I'm really looking forward to the next episode.

Methinks this list is way too short.

The book also has a villain I'm exceedingly fond of. He invents a way to use military force that people from his dimension generally have too much sense to use. This brings him into contact with much more dangerous people than he's accustomed to, and he has trouble figuring out that they'll remember what he promised them two months ago. He's an academic, and he's sad that he can't publish the clever thing he figured out.

The book also has very nice world-building. Magic flows through the ground and comes out in the plants unless you kill too many plants, in which case it comes out as monsters. Not being able to clear ground affects everything.

Flickr Set

The goal is to launch an egg to 850' and recover it unbroken with a total flight time of 49 seconds.

"Mostly not needed to mentor" would be a better description. One of the young ladies whose team made it to the national competition in Virginia last year is still a senior, and the school teams' faculty leader is an insanely dedicated teacher who spent a chunk of her weekend stomping around a foggy field dispensing altimeter modules and making sure the kids recorded results. We dispensed some suggestions on fixing a stability problem, and a better method of packing parachutes, and that was about it.

Best thing of all of this: None of the young people were bumbling around with their attention on a tablet.

Part of the problem is context: I feel like I've already seen this setup and most of the tropes, back in the Terminator TV show. ("The Sarah Connor Chronicles".) This is not to say I avoid all retreads -- I enjoyed the heck out of "The Librarians", which is "Warehouse 13" all over again, and *that* was "The Lost Room". But I'm not into this one.

When the whole season is out, I'll look back at reviews and decide if I should change my mind.

Juxtapositions

Ther magazine layout at the bottom has to be deliberate.

Pistol packin' toddler

At the time of writing NRAers have yet to descend on the comments so there are some quite entertaining ones there, including:

"You laugh, but in the last five years, more Americans have been killed by toddlers than by terrorists."

and, from someone with a forensic turn of mind:

"His buttock, her shoulder. Was she giving head in front of the toddler?"

Indeed. I see a future L&O:SVU episode.

Oh, wait. Never mind.

As to whether there were naughty acts being performed in front of a toddler, it's clear to me the answer is: "No. The armed toddler, blinded by Oedipal rage and breast milk withdrawal, stormed into the sexually-charged motel room and shot both 'engaged' parents with a single bullet. The NRA plans to give him their John Connally/Lee Oswald Lifetime/Deathtime Achievement award for Best Performance in a Farce by A Child. No charges have been filed. Re-enactments on the odd half-hour."

That said, the details of the story make me sympathetic toward the parents. Two toddlers, eight months pregnant, living in a motel room. These are not people I would mock on those grounds and I feel a little bad mocking them as I have.

But not enough not to do it.

Even in a motel room--even one where very poor people live, where there might be vice and violence enough around you to make having a gun in the room seem reasonable--you are supposed to keep weapons out of kids' hands.

But man! Some of those commenters are scumbags. Even as commenters go, they're scumbags.

Feorag and I are in New York this week. And we'll be holing up for drinks with friends (and anyone who wants to turn up -- including you) on the evening of Monday February 2nd (i.e. tomorrow). The venue is Pine Box Rock Shop at 12 Grattan Street, Brooklyn, from 5:30pm onwards. Really close to the Morgan Ave L stop (opposite side of the block), good beer and spirits, can feed vegans and vegetarians.

Area residents who had been planning to celebrate Imbolc, the halfway point between winter solstice and spring equinox, have had to reconsider their plans, due to a massive snowstorm making travel risky. Area woman, who had been set to act as hostess, is distressed that her advance preparations may be for naught. It is unknown at this time whether the party will have any guests.

Local spaniel, in 10 inches of snow, remarked: *spronk* *spronk* *spronk* Whee this is fun! spronk* *spronk* *spronk* This is exhausting let's go inside.

This HLN has been brought to you by the perfect and past perfect tenses.

The nervous one does NOT LIKE the fact that (before I shovelled) he had to stand with his junk already in snow to pee. The calmer one enjoys making face-prints by shoving his nose straight into a drift, sniffing avidly, and pulling his head neatly back out to do it again somewhere else.

I have met people so pale they're practically blue from the visible veins, pale-skinned sunburns are decidedly pink, which is red-based, some shades of dark brown do tip away from orange as a base, and jaundice is truly yellow, but I imagine those all fall into the categories covered by use of the word 'most'.

We're not going to be full-time at Boskone, but may make it there Saturday, at least during the day. (Then again, I think it was last year that I hoped to drop in on a Boskone Gathering of Light and got put off by a blizzard. These things happen around here.)

Conversation with a friend during the design phase:
"Would a heart-shaped nose be too over-the-top?"
"Have you seen that picture?!"
"Good point."

David Harmon @226, here’s some experimental verification that, yes, across all races, the hue component of most people’s skin tone is some variation on orange. If you had some other “racist assumption” in mind, you might want to clarify.

“Look closely at this.” Arkady, mystified, accepted it. “If you found this somewhere, not knowing what it was, how would you judge the metalwork?”

“Well... the raised image of the crayfish is actually quite fine. And the lettering, of course, so tiny, but clear to read”—Arkady squinted—“Silver Shoals City Mint, One Cray. And making things perfectly round is harder than it looks, I suppose.”

“Aye. Yet when we all visited the mint at Silver Shoals, back when we were coming downriver on the Fetch, we saw the machine that stamps these out a hundred at a time. One of these disks is a little work of art. Tens of thousands of ’em... become farmer magic.”

Arkady raised his brows; Dag plowed on. “They’re counters, memories of trade and labor that a man can put in his pocket and carry across a continent. They make things move. With my groundsense, I can summon my horse from a mile away. With enough of these, the folks at Silver Shoals can summon a forty-mule tea caravan from eight hundred miles away…”

So here we see a city mint, manufacturing, and inter-city trade. Elsewhere in the book, we see official rules for marriage licenses (with the implication that the system is semi-standardized across the region) and several apprenticeship programs. And on a more personal scale, Fawn is constantly aware of the sheer human labor required to maintain farms, create clothing, and outfit the Lakewalker patrols.

It's true that we don't see any sort of inter-city government, there's no sign of warfare (excepting the malices), and it's not clear who maintains who maintains the Trace, a long-haul wagon road. It's unclear how much of this is justifiable, given historical parallels in the real world. But overall, economics is a major theme of The Sharing Knife.

I've always felt that this series is underappreciated among Bujold's works. There's a lot of stuff going on, but it's a bit more subtle than Paladin of Souls, one of my other favorites.

This topic reminds me of my conviction that civilization is more robust than a lot of apocalyptic scenarios posit -- but then my definition of civilization is something like "a critical mass of humans agreeing that record-keeping is useful, and that trade with the people over the next hill is more convenient than having to constantly fight them."

It's long gone, but in advance of Y2K, somebody posted a massive article with scads of links about how to survive TEOTWAWKI. Such things were as common as mushrooms after rain, but this one opened with (paraphrase): "Your first priority, after getting your shelter-in-place checklist rolling, will be your neighbors. You should have at least one skill that you can trade with your neighbors, and they should have at least one skill that they can trade with you. Consider bicycle repair, clothing construction and repair, manual typewriter maintenance and usage, double-entry bookkeeping, babysitting, or Red Cross certification in first aid for all ages. Get to know your immediate neighbors, all of them, well in advance of any emergency. People need other people, and civilization is founded on communities. Mad Max is just a movie."

It was the first time I had ever seen this advice. It's become my litmus test for telling the extremely but humanely prudent from the people for whom TEOTWAWKI is a vindication fantasy. If you expect to handpick your neighbors, or not to need any, you're just playing with guns.

Amautaliit (pl.; sing. amutalik): Roughly, "the Baby Carrier Ladies." Wander off inland, and one of these horrible ogresses may snatch you up, stuff you into the baby-carrier hood of her gigantic parka, and leave you there to marinate in a pile of rotting seaweed infested with huge lice. If you manage to escape, which is rare, you will never be quite right in the head. So don't wander off! (This is the dust jacket illustration, and like all of Austin's illustrations, it's both realistic and freaky as heck.)

Iqallijuq, AKA Aningaapajukkaaq: Creator of the Arctic char, this being has the head of one of his fishes. He chops driftwood by the riverside. Each piece that goes flying away from his ax turns into a fish. (Some say that Arctic char are so darn slippery because Iqallijuq rubs his semen all over them. That bit wasn't illustrated.)

Nanurluk (pl. nanurluit): Sea-polar-bears the size of icebergs. If you see one, paddle like hell. It eats whatever it can get into its gigantic maw, and even a harpoon won't faze it.

Now, that was assuming a present-day situation. If you postulate TEOTWAWKI, my situation becomes even worse, because those few things I can do which might be considered valuable all rely heavily on access to... well, the equivalent of the fabric store. Or the place that sells axes.

But at that, I would still be better off in that latter scenario than a lot of my friends, because my life and health do not depend on medication that wouldn't be available after TEOTWAWKI.

I can weave poorly, but I can teach it and I can get better with practice. I can spin poorly, but I can teach it and I can get better with practice. I can learn most skills, and teach them to others. Everyone in a TEOTWAWKI situation is going to need apprentices, so if you don't know a skill now, you will learn, you will become skilled.

But, yeah... I'm not going to Mars because I can't pack enough meds for the trip.

Maybe if the challenges they faced had been farmer challenges, rather than Lakewalker ones, Fawn would have been able to act more often and with more effect. But there's only so much you can do when you bring an inexplicably pregnant woman to a malice fight.

On doomsday scenarios: one friend has said that her plan is to be charming enough that other people do the immediate survival work for her, then she'll costume the postapocalypse. My plan for zombie apocalypse, besides considering getting to my family's accidental fortress, is to stay put, help people, and loot JoAnn Fabrics because you know what we'll need? Blankets. And in five years, there's going to be a family desperate for a Frozen birthday party and I'll be the only source of pale blue tulle in town.

I mean, I can also do childwrangling and water treatment if you don't mind me complaining about the latter. But given that I know better than everyone else how to do things and will you stop doing it wrong, maybe I need the insurance.

Apocalypse: I would be useless. I know nothing and have no skills. But I do react well in emergencies, so I might at least make it through to post-apocalypse alive.

It also means that the lighting in our houses, which is changing from that tungsten-filament orange, affects the colours seen on a TV screen, while the general darkness of a cinema is pretty neutral.

In the pictures with that article, the still from "The Imitation Game" looks like what you might get from a combination of film and mixed lighting. It looks like something in a shadowed room, with daylight through the window and some electric light in the room. So you have more-or-less realistic skin tones with the bluish light through the window. If your eyes were seeing if for real you might not even notice the colour difference.

It can still be a design choice, but it has roots in reality.

Some of the other shots look rather contrived. An orange man against a cloudless blue sky? Do you know how bright a blue sky is? That needs fill lighting or the difference is awkwardly large, and the colour mix suggests that the fill light was actual light sources, coloured, rather than reflectors. It's more likely done with grading, but it's a distortion. Getting that blue for the sky needs maybe a couple of stops underexposure, but the figure doesn't look underexposed.

Three-strip Technicolor, The Wizard of Oz, was tightly controlled by the Technicolor company, and I have a feeling that Natalie Kalmus would not have approved of the colour choices of these modern movies.

Unlike most such stories, this one is so ridiculous that it doesn't sting.

Much.

And how the lions became groundhogs, we may never know.

I recently had 2001 come up in an entirely unexpected context - I’m TAing again this semester, and the professor I’m teaching for opened the first lecture a couple weeks ago with the first 10 minutes or so of 2001. It was even (relatively) topical - a chunk of that first lecture was talking about hominid evolution, and the opening of 2001 is an eminently watchable illustration of how the screenwriters thought hominids might behave. Certainly a way to hold 650 students’ attention on the first day of term. I should probably rewatch the film - I don’t think I’ve seen it in about 15 years.

And if I can drift from spoilers to observations, last week’s Agent Carter episode hit me right in the feels. I’m trying to pinpoint why – and I think it’s her shitty interim boss, and Stark being an asshole, and Jarvis lying to her. When she got back to her apartment I’m pretty sure she had been crying – not like This Are Important Dramatic Scene And Woman Cries Because Emotions!! But just a couple of tears like you get when you’re frustrated and everything sucks. Her confrontation with Stark (and later Jarvis) about his betrayal and the hurt on both of their faces afterwards was well acted. Yes, there was an explanation from Stark, but the writing somehow enabled the scene not to end with Stark being right, but everyone being human. It’s so little, but so many other TV shows and Films are more about the ManPain, and would make that scene about how the betrayal hurt Stark as much as it did Carter, but this one validates her feelings. There was a similar sub-plot in the sci-fi show Defiance, where the Patriarch and supposed Hero is actually wrong and his daughter is right – and the script had him apologize to her with no excuses. I thought I was going to fall over from shock. Isn’t it neat how much film and TV have lowered my expectations that some really simple, subtle things can make all the difference.

I know it was a mispost, but picking up on this more general point, we were just watching and enjoying The Paradise (based on a Zola novel I've never read but will now happily accept translation recommendations for) and appreciating the complexity of the characters: cartoon villains become interesting and believable people. Agent Carter has been similar (also having excellent period costumes), which made us notice how low our expectations are for TV. "This is great! It isn't completely simple-minded!"

"A proper catalog [of the 30,000-piece collection at Locus] would be the first step towards a private library. I would love to do it."

My question, which I also posed over at Clarkesworld: Is this the sort of project that could be a capstone project for a student or team of students in a library degree program? Or even an information science degree program?

I see that San Jose State and Berkeley both have programs that could be relevant.

I tend to stay away from "Harry Potter, Slytherin Student" stories because they are generally "Harry Potter and the Only Nice People in a School Full of Monsters" with a side order of "Harry Potter and the Actor I Want to Bang" and a topping of "Harry Potter and His Ever-Growing List of Superpowers" sauced with "Harry Potter and the Author's Fascination with Badly Researched or Physically Impossible Sexual Kinks." Meanwhile the plot wanders off into the bushes and goes to sleep.

This one is different.

It only took a brief, unremarkable encounter for eleven-year-old Harry Potter to decide he didn't like eleven-year-old Draco Malfoy. It might take just one more brief, unremarkable encounter for him to change his mind. But--and this is the huge difference between this series and most Slytherin!Harry fics--the resulting plot plays out with, as far as I can tell, everybody firmly in character. Not only that, but the author deftly copies Rowling's technique of making the narrative only as reliable as the comprehension of a child of Harry's age. I give you the Green-Eyed Snake series by Tathrin.

http://archiveofourown.org/series/21047

(things one learns as the Arisia quartermaster)

I got no cancer growin' on-a my tongue, ain't-a that good news!
I got no cancer growin' on-a my tongue, ain't-a that good news!
I'm a-gonna lay down this world—but not as soon as I feared!
Maybe gonna live right into my eighties, ain't-a that good news!

So our survey is about gender and online harassment. And I was thinking, for the poster, that it would be cool to have screencaps of actual online threats/harassment--but only with identifiers removed or blurred, and only with the consent of the person being threatened/harassed.

Has anyone here who's been the recipient of such unpleasantness got a screen grab they wouldn't mind my using? With appropriate credit to whatever identifier you choose?

Re: Boskone. I haven't decided if I want to go. I haven't attended an SF con for the sake of a con rather than as a place to be with a bunch of friends who are attending. Perhaps I'll try the free Friday part and see how it goes, assuming I have time.

Devin, what a fascinating article! Shared elseweb.

Lila @ 276: A lightning rod for such abuse posted one week's worth of the awful tweets she receives. Would sharing them publicly like that constitutes the consent you'd require?

Devin Singer@279: Thank you so much for that pointer. I love that sort of thing.

I feel like I should post this in the Marvel Continuity thread just for symmetry... but I'll refrain.

On the further adventures of my job:

In September, they announced they were going to offshore the XX "Clerk" jobs (which were coincidentally the Union jobs) in January 2015.

In November the Union reached a reasonable settlement with the Company to retain us through the end of 2015.

In December, a co-worker left and I took over her duties without anyone taking over mine.

This afternoon, I accepted a promotion to Subject Matter Expert in my department. I will be making more money (even after figuring in what I'd be losing in the Union) and was able to negotiate for an extra week of vacation. In the likely event that the Company decides to pull further boneheaded moves, I will have a job title that reflects my abilities and an easier time of finding another job.

Plus, my state and federal tax refunds came in just in time for rent. So, all in all a good day.

Devin, #279: That's fascinating!

http://www.vevo.com/watch/modest-mouse/Coyotes/USSM21500035?syndicationid=bb8a16ab-1279-4f17-969b-1dba5eb60eda&shortlink=xGVW3E&country=US

The scenes the coyote and train pass through are very familiar!

On the other hand, the EU has staff interpreters, and also employs freelancers, to interpret Maltese, all of whose speakers are fluent in English. I am fascinated by the way that the politics of language and nationalism intersect.

1. There's a difference between "fluent in English" and things like "enjoys using English", "can understand mumbled English in noisy rooms", and "sounds like a well-read, native adult when speaking extemporaneously about politics." Plenty of people are socially or professionally fluent without ever feeling at home.
2. In a multi-lingual environment, whoever is forced to operate in their weaker language is at a social disadvantage. It's often an unavoidable social disadvantage, of course, but that doesn't make it any more pleasant for anybody. So you oftentimes see fairly sophisticated etiquette around negotiating language use and sharing the burden as politely as possible.

For everyone's amusement, I present this Tumblr thread on the etiquette of "Bonjour hi" in Montreal, with several variations on the basic theme. Worth noting: "Bonjour hi" is a query about your preferred language, and responding "Bonjour hi" may annoy your interlocutor.

I've also found if I walk around Montreal with a French SF novel in my hand, far more people will begin conversations with full-speed native French. This is a mixed blessing, especially when they ask me my opinion about the book—I can't access the necessary vocabulary quickly enough to have a real conversation. So do I force my conversational partner to put up with slow, halting French? Or do I switch to English, and put them at a disadvantage?

And this is why, I imagine, that the UN keeps interpreters available for even minor national languages where nearly all speakers are more-or-less fluent in a larger language. It's an inclusive gesture, and it simplifies many otherwise tricky questions of courtesy.

Oh, that's perfect. My mother often has this; her French is fine, it's just French with the accent of someone who grew up in the UK and never quite got the hang of some of the phonemes, and people swap to English for her all the time. It drives her nuts. "I need to practice or I'll forget!" she says.

I like them. They are in an alternate universe, so the timeline ISN'T going to match TOS.

Given the above, I like that in the first film we get to see the Academy. I enjoyed watching the cadets meld into the Enterprise team.

For those decrying the second excursion, Into Darkness, I submit my theory on that film: It's not supposed to be Wrath of Khan -- it's a remake/revisioning of Space Seed with riffs on Wrath, only the war-crazy Admiral finds the Botany Bay first...

And I wonder if I'm the only one bothered by the fact that all they did at the end of Into Darkness was put Khan in cold storage.

The UN interprets into English, French, Russian, Chinese, Spanish, and Arabic I believe.

The EU, on the other hand, has a commitment to use the official languages of all its members. Some members have languages spoken only within their borders, obviously, others are speakers of multinational languages (as is the case with German, Greek, and English, the last-mentioned being official in the UK, Ireland, and the Netherlands).

It happens that Maltese is a language with few speakers, and that Malta's population has English as a strong second language (cf., Finland with Swedish, Lebanon with French). However, Maltese is a language of everyday use and is Malta's actual language of rule. The interpreter of whom I enquired happened to be the one who trained the Maltese-language interpreters at the EU. (This should clue in Pendrift as to whom I asked!)

Irish really isn't, and every so often I encounter a lament for the steady decline of the language and the failure of state policy (and universal education in Irish) to inculcate it as a heart language in the general population. When Irish is used by an Irish-speaker at the EU it is done to make a point of some kind, or on some ceremonial occasion.

Sequel to "We Live Underground, We Speak With Our Hands"

It ended up getting nowhere, but I had a Village in a story, on a mostly Polynesian-culture island, where everybody spoke Welsh. There was never a geologically plausible reason for the Italianate architecture, but every year, at the end of the tourist season, the village choir would go down to the Wicker Tourist event and sing a song about strangely coloured goats.

Two people with a common pair of grandparents are called cousins.

Two people descended from (for instance) the same grandfather, but by different wives of that grandfather, are generally called half cousins. (I believe that in estate law and certain other domains they're still considered simply "cousins", but nevertheless.)

My question, however, is about two people who have the same (let's say) grandfather, and who are descended from different wives of that grandfather...different wives who were full sisters to one another, sharing exactly the same parents.

What is the proper name of those two people's relationship? Cousin? Double half cousin? Note that these two people have exactly the same set of common great-grandparents that they would have if they were both descended from the same grandfather and grandmother.

I'm curious simply because I recently got an email from a woman who shares some common ancestry with me, asking what I know about some people who are distant relatives of mine and (probably) closer relatives of hers. Our common ancestry is that her great-great-great grandfather Jasper Newton White (1848-1909) is also my great-great grandfather. Normally this would make us third cousins once removed (the "once removed" part being an expression of the fact that she's one more generation down from Jasper than I am), but the complication is the fact that she's descended from Jasper's first wife Susan Parker (1853-1879) while I'm descended from Jasper's second wife Rutha Parker (1863-1890). But! Susan and Rutha Parker were (you saw this coming) sisters, both of them daughters of William Henderson Parker (1824-1898) and Sarah Patrick (1831-1867).

I realized that I actually have no idea what the technical term for how we're related would be. Does anyone?

As an aside, one of the things I enjoyed about A Natural History of Dragons: A Memoir by Lady Trent is that it handles the minor details of multilingualism well. Lady Trent has no particular talent for languages, and yet she often needs to speak them. And so she struggles, and she appreciates it when people speak clearly, and she practices whenever she can. Little stuff, but it all feels convincing.

Fragano Ledgister @ 306: Thank you for the UN->EU correction.

Isn't Irish still the community language for 15 thousand people or so in core of the Gaeltacht? I mean, that's not a lot, and they probably don't visit Brussels in great numbers. But combine it with Irish's official status, and I can see why they keep a few interpreters available. To me, doing so says, "We really are a multilingual society, and you may absolutely speak your strongest language if you wish (assuming that it's official in your own country)."

1. the closest relationship wins, even if there are interesting connections elsewhere in the family tree; or
2. you name all relationships separately.

Crossing the streams with the language subthread, I've had some fun conversations (in English) with a Brazilian when trying to explain the "nth cousin m times removed" terminology. It wasn't that she couldn't understand the details, it was that the whole idea of describing cousins with tree indices didn't match any scheme she knew from Portuguese; but she kept trying (and failing) to understand it better by looking for a way to translate it

It falls into the category of "mixed relationship", I think.

If you want to be precise, I think dotless ı is correct.

But usage varies.

Whenever I hear discussions like this, I think of Thorby in Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy, talking to the anthropologist (who I suspect might be a Tuckerization of Margaret Mead) about the familial terminology in the Free Traders.

English relationship terms, AIUI, are using the 'Eskimo' system, which is one of the less-precise systems. Other languages are more precise in some ways, and less precise in others.

The kind of sentence is one in which each successive word is longer than the last, like this:

I do hop into green wagons.

(I don't actually care if they increment by one; it just made it more of a challenge.)

This seemed like the kind of place to ask...

I find "rhopalic" as the word for a sentence where each word is longer by one "unit" (letter or syllable) than the previous one. I don't know if there's a word for the weaker form or not; some sites suggest "snowball" as a synonym for rhopalic, and you may be able to co-opt that, if you want to emphasize that you don't insist on incrementing by exactly one letter per word.

So what were the children of that marriage to one another? Apart from siblings?

I think the general rule is to use the closest relationship, so "siblings", but since you want to ignore that one...

Let's look at the middle generation (the children of the two interwed sibling couples). Let's call them Alice and Bob, for easy reference. Since Alice is Bob's mother's brother's daughter, Alice is Bob's 1st cousin. Since alice is also Bob's father's sister's daughter, Alice is Bob's 1st cousin (again), so Alice is Bob's 1st cousin, twice over.

The children of 1st cousins are 2nd cousins, so Alice and Bob's children are not only siblings, but also 2nd cousins, twice over.

I think I've heard the "twice over" terminology when people are cousins in multiple ways, but I can't find a reference for it.

To be more specific in this case, because of the genders involved, Alice and Bob are "cross-cousins", twice over. I don't know if the cross-cousin designation would carry on to their children.

And for some reason my attempts to link in HTML aren't working, so here's the link in plaintext: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/some-icelanders-are-accidentally-dating-a-relative-and-now-theres-an-app-for-that-25175819/?no-ist

Fawn isn't highly capable physically -- but have you noticed that, mentally, she's the spark that gets things going? Dag doesn't know how to think outside the box; Fawn pulls him out of it and into wider, greener, worlds. They are partners, with different things to contribute.

P J Evans #330, Lee #331: AIUI, in "open" large populations (like most of the modern U.S.), cousins marrying is not a significant problem, and in fact it's been commonplace through most of history. The problems show up when it happens repeatedly in a small, reproductively isolated population: Say, Iceland before modern transportation, or royal/noble families who are forbidden to marry commoners, or much of Appalachia before they got modernized in the 1940s.

See also progeny of sperm donors.

I like to say to my genealogical clients that if I can successfully get back four solid generations, the chance that I will find either a cousin marriage or bigamy approaches certainty -- just to prepare them.

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/audioquest-coffee-26-3-hdmi-cable-white/1267512.p?id=1218245467893&skuId=1267512&productCategoryId=abcat0107020

which is the REVIEWS of the Very Expensive Audio Cables, which is akin to something that was posted here a while back, namely:

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/012724.html

I have good pronunciation, decent comprehension, so-so grammar, and moderate fearlessness.

Jon has better vocabulary; and grammar, but an almost incomprehensible accent.

Merav has skills somewhat between mine and Jon's, but gained her accent in Canada.

No matter what the combination, the French would tend to steer the conversation to me; at ridiculous speeds. The conversation about how to reprogram the router at our flat was... interesting.

My brother did some online genealogy research at ancestry.com - crowdsourced information has a sufficiently different quality of error-checking than, say, the Mormon databases, so we're not sure the site's claim that we're descended from Thor and Odin is entirely correct...

I was hoping to add this link on Do's and Don'ts of Gasoline Poisoning. (Found by way of today's XKCD.)

Obesity and estrogen mimics get their mention, but the really interesting thing to me is, the authors are apparently claiming that psychological influences (family stress, unstable environment, lack of a father at home) have been confirmed as at least a statistical factor. And the issues they cite are all well within a plausible category of "born into a chancy environment, so try for early reproduction".

And wouldn't it be interesting if that last bit (father-absence) wasn't psychologically mediated? But I don't think we understand human pheromones or development well enough yet to tell the difference.

But to those of us who know that the redhead in question is a trans woman -- with all the "if I date this guy will he murder me?" pent-up trauma that involves -- it is a gushing moment of wet-eyed relief.

Or maybe that's just me.

I do know I'm not the only person who's been reading this storyline half-tensed, repeatedly chanting "oh please don't screw this up oh please don't screw this up please Jeph don't turn out to be an asshole, suck fairy STAY AWAY" under my breath.

From First Lensman:

Norma the secretary was a smart girl, and observant. In her position, she had to be. Her eyes followed the man out, then scanned the Lensman from toe to crown.

"I've never seen anything like it, Mr. Samms," she remarked then. "Except for the difference in coloring, and a sort of . . . well, stoopiness . . . he could be your identical twin. You two must have had a common ancestor-or several-not too far back, didn't you?"

"We certainly did. Quadruple second cousins, you might call it. We have known of each other for years, but this is the first time we have met."

"Quadruple second cousins? What does that mean? How come?"

"Well, say that once upon a time there were two men named Albert and Chester . . ."

"What? Not two Irishmen named Pat and Mike? You're slipping, boss." The girl smiled roguishly. During rush hours she was always the fast, cool, efficient secretary, but in moments of ease such persiflage as this was the usual thing in the First Lensman's private office. "Not at all up to your usual form."

"Merely because I am speaking now as a genealogist, not as a raconteur. But to continue, we will say that Chester and Albert had four children apiece, two boys and two girls, two pairs of identical twins, each. And when they grew up -half way up, that is . . . "

"Don't fell me that we are going to suppose that all those identical twins married each other?"

"Exactly. Why not?"

"Well, it would be stretching the laws of probability all out of shape. But go ahead- I can see what's coming, I think."

"Each of those couples had one, and only one, child. We will call those children Jim Samms and Sally Olmstead; John Olmstead and Irene Samms."

The girl's levity disappeared. "James Alexander Samms and Sarah Olmstead Samms. Your parents. I didn't see what was coming, after all. This George Olmstead; then, is your . ."

"Whatever it is, yes. I can't name it, either-maybe you had better call Genealogy some day and find out. But it's no wonder we look alike. And there are three of us, not two--George has an identical twin brother."

I often wonder how audio interpreters deal with translating German sentences (often verb-participle last) into Irish (which in common with other Celtic languages generally has VSO order).

I'd call Patrick and his correspondent "third and fourth cousins once removed". That is, they're third cousins through Grandpa Jasper, and fourth cousins through his wives.

(Probably only available in the UK, sadly).

I'm not sure about identical twins specifically, but multiple births in general certainly do. My sister was warned that having had natural twins, both she and my other sister had much higher odds of another pair of twins.

Carol Witt @144, again belatedly, I am delighted to hear this.

Alice and Betty are sisters.
Carl and David are brothers.

Alice marries Carl and has a child, Eve.
Betty marries David and has a child, Frank.

Eve and Frank are now double-first-cousins, and are genetically as close as siblings, I think.

My father has two double-first cousins. I only met them at my grandfather's funeral; they were the only members of my immediate family I've met who shared my interest in math. (One is a mathematician, the other is an electrical engineer.)

I have one family with two sets of twins in two consecutive generations. I can't say that they're identical, but they are same-sex. That's the line that my first-cousin-once-removed ancestors are on. I am somewhat surprised that they didn't have twins themselves.

A WWII vintage navy training manual for ship's electricians. Looks like an ARC.

A catalog / technical manual for wooden pipelines. A few years after finding this I saw the ruins of an actual wooden pipeline, near a dam in Sullivan county.

An engineer's pocket reference, perhaps of between the wars vintage.

Memory hazy: A Freshman level college English textbook, WWII vintage, with a U of O cover. It has newspaper clippings about battles in the Pacific inside.

Eve and Frank are now double-first-cousins, and are genetically as close as siblings, I think.

I'm pretty sure they're not quite that close; rather, they're genetically as close as an uncle-niece pair. (I could be mistaken, since I'm working this out in my head on the fly.)

I've also dabbled a bit in genealogy, and while there's nothing so exciting in recent generations of my family, one of my great-grandfathers did have some double first cousins (a pair of Renick brothers married Brown sisters), and a few generations further back on the same line, my fourth-great grandfather Clifton married his uncle's granddaughter (apparently, this worked out so well that after she died, he married her sister). I haven't yet figured out whether there's a connection between Clifton's mother and his paternal grandmother, both of whom were Thompsons.

I expect this, and other overlaps, is/was fairly common in small, isolated communities. If there are only about twenty families in your village, and the next village is a day's travel, you don't have a lot of choice of mates.

In my capacity as an occasional Heinlein expert,* allow me to point out that there was an earlier effort to make a film of "All You Zombies,"** rather faithful to the story, but apparently on a very tight budget. The sets look homemade.

That said, everyone seems to be saying that Predestination is terrific. Trailer here.

It's only "last year's" release in the very strict, goofy, Hollywood-awards-eligibility sense. I missed its short run at art-house theater in Chicago this past month, and will probably need to seek it out in some online venue. It's seven bucks to rent on Itunes.

* But even more in my capacity as someone who was idly fooling around with Youtube's search engine.

** Not actually a zombie story. Heinlein's best short story, I think.

How so, since each is drawing their chromosomes from identical pools? Siblings don't have a consistent genetic similarity anyway, they have a binomial/Bell-like distribution. Mutation aside, I think the children of matched twins would provably have the same distribution.

I'll tell you what does stretch credibility: The two sets of grandparents are not just siblings, but twins to each other, even before their kids got married. Has this shiny spacefaring future no occasion for family gatherings? I find it implausible that Mr. Samms reached adulthood and high office before he so much as met George.

(Personally, I wouldn't think it was an advisable marriage, because of the high degree of consanguineity. I'm sure it wouldn't have passed muster in previous centuries!)

If you're talking about the kids of the twins, that's what I'm saying -- despite being formally cousins, they will be exactly as similar as normal siblings. Regarding the twins themselves, certainly there will be developmental differences, and so? Even after psychological differentiation, the similarities produced by of identical genomes are still fairly spectacular. (There are reasons people used to get superstitious about identical twins....)

Jenny Islander: Thank you for the HP fanfic link. I think it's a much sadder world there...

Followup on Dave Harmon @ 366: First Lensman was written in 1950, when the meme of the nuclear family was very strong; he may have assumed that father/mother/children sets would go their own ways, connecting to neighbors and coworkers rather than kin. Mine certainly did: I grew up in DC, with aunts/uncles in LA, Tucson (met these just once each), Texas, and midstate NY. AFAICR I first met the first cousin closest to my age when I was 48, at my mother's memorial.
      Consider (from the same period) Gladiator-at-Law, in which the lead doesn't think of turning to family; contrasting with my parents' splits, both sets of grandparents got help through crises from relatives. (Note that much of GaL takes place in a Levittown; Pohl and Kornbluth would both have seen the fragmentation that caused.)

Xopher: Belated congratulations! But are you still Halftongue rather than 49.97%tongue?

They'll be as similar on average as siblings, but they will share shorter segments of DNA identical-by-descent, and their overall allele sharing will have different (I think smaller) variation around its average value.

With sequence or dense SNP data you could probably distinguish them from siblings

ObSF: I've encountered several post-apocalyptic stories in which one or another relatively small and isolated group was very happy to have their women entertain the men of the protagonist's traveling company, specifically for the influx of new genes.

I can see where the first part would be from chromosomal crossovers and rearrangements (plus mutation), and that would of course change the full sequence. Indeed, chromosomal rearrangement makes a significant number of humans into genetic chimerae anyhow, but that's usually assigned to developmental variation.

But how does the allele sharing get modified, let alone narrowed? If anything, I'd think the chromosomal acrobatics would widen the variation.

Diatryma @ 341: In a lot of ways, I think Berry has a much more active role in book 3 than Fawn, although I do enjoy the interactions between Fawn and the flatboat crew.

In general, Lois McMaster Bujold seems to write a lot of romances between people of similar age and experience (Cordelia/Aral, Iselle/(spoiler), Ivan/Tej, and many other background relationships, including Alys/(spoiler), Gregor/(spoiler), most of the Koudelkas' relationships, Nicole/Thorne, etc.). She also wrote two where the female partner is older and more experienced (Berry/(spoiler), Taura/Roic). Miles and his wife are a trickier case; they're matched in age and bitter experience, but Miles has more worldly power.

But there are three or four of Bujold's romances where the woman is significantly younger or less experienced than her partner: Fawn/Dag, Silver/(spoiler), Betriz/(spoiler) and Taura in the very beginning. Taura is perhaps a special case, thanks to her physical prowess and her lack of time. But the romances with Silver and Betriz have always struck me as even more extreme than Fawn/Dag, even if Betriz has a much smaller age gap than Fawn.

Diatryma @ 341: In a lot of ways, I think Berry has a much more active role in book 3 than Fawn, although I do enjoy the interactions between Fawn and the flatboat crew.

In general, Lois McMaster Bujold seems to write a lot of romances between people of similar age and experience (Cordelia/Aral, Iselle/(spoiler), Ivan/Tej, and many other background relationships, including Alys/(spoiler), Gregor/(spoiler), most of the Koudelkas' relationships, Nicole/Thorne, etc.). She also wrote two where the female partner is older and more experienced (Berry/(spoiler), Taura/Roic). Miles and his wife are a trickier case; they're matched in age and bitter experience, but Miles has more worldly power.

But there are three or four of Bujold's romances where the woman is significantly younger or less experienced than her partner: Fawn/Dag, Silver/(spoiler), Betriz/(spoiler) and Taura in the very beginning. Taura is perhaps a special case, thanks to her physical prowess and her lack of time. But the romances with Silver and Betriz have always struck me as even more extreme than Fawn/Dag, even if Betriz has a much smaller age gap than Fawn.

I do like the unbreakable walnut.

It's more complicated than that, because there are multiple ways of getting twins, and some of them inherit. Some of the heritable ones can be passed through the father's side and some can't.

Fraternals happen when (a) multiple eggs are ovulated simultaneously and in the system at once, and (b) get fertilized and implant, and (c) more than one of them survives to gestate to term, instead of self-terminating for any of the reasons blastocysts do, or being absorbed into a sibling's body (chimerism).

Tendency to ovulate more than one egg at once is heritable and runs in family lines, though it only ends up in a given pregnancy because of the provider of the eggs (so usually the mother). A boy can pass the tendency to his daughters, though.

Many modern fraternals are due to IVF, with doctors imserting two or three embryos in the hope that at least one will stick (and sometimes more than one does). That one's not heritable, of course.

Identicals happen when a single fertilized entity splits, at some point in its development, into multiple entities. If it happens very early you get identicals. If it happens somewhat later, after the body has a "handedness," you get mirror twins. Later leads to more and more complicated cases.

Now, why does a single entity calve off into two? Sometimes it's completely random (and those aren't heritable, usually). Sometimes, though, genes in a family can make it more likely an embryo will twin itself, and THAT is heritable, even through the parent who provided sperm to the embryo in question.

I don't know how to describe the relationships involved when (several times great) grandmother married the oldest brother of a daughter-in-law. Five children by her first husband, remarried at 32, and had seven more children. (D-I-L was the next-to-youngest child in her family.)

Oh. The mitochondial DNA of that love baby might have come from The Instrumentality of Mankind setting. Or that might be a Recurrence.

I like the fact that closest thing good guys out in the galaxy are fgne pbcf bs n fbeg, punetrq jvgu xrrcvat gur fjnttrevat cbjreshy snzvyvrf va purpx.

Nygubhtu gur Nrtvf unira'g sbhaq n jnl gb fgbccvat gur crevbqvp znff zheqref gung xrrc gur rpbabzl bs gur tnynkl ehaavat, fb gurer'f gung.

No way it will happen, outside of a graphic novel or novelization, but I'd love to see a sequel where that gets sorted out.

I think these children would come closer to 50% allele sharing than siblings would, because of the shorter segments of DNA -- just the law of large numbers in action.

WRT Floyd's daughter, I was struck viewing it that the daughter was not a modern "commercial-perfect kid" in appearance or behavior: A bit chubby, and sulky (with a hint of potential brattiness), showing kid-style unhappiness about Daddy not being home enough. In a modern movie, I think that scene would have been horribly "airbrushed".

Also, we did discuss the hair and clothing styles on the way out of the theater. Ada Palmer discussed how realistic medieval hair and clothing styles often send the wrong message to modern viewers. I don't think she mentioned the opposite problem of trying to indicate futuristic styles... I present for your consideration the thought of 1930s viewers' reactions to 1970's styles, or 1950s viewers response to the hair and clothing of the '80s and '90s. I suspect that it is not possible to project hair and clothing styles more than about 10 years or so into the future (and even for that you'd need some luck).

All this genealogical discussion has inspired me to share some stories about my late great-grandmother. Biologically, she was the sister of my great-grandmother. Apparently she was quite the wild young woman in the 1920s, so when her older sister died and left an infant daughter she was married to her sister's husband. I speculate this was as much to get her out of trouble and into a respectable status as to provide a mother to the baby who would become my grandmother. She raised my grandmother as her daughter, and never had children of her own. I don't know whether this due to being in a possibly loveless marriage, or due to the abortion she is rumored to have had in her wilder days, which was presumably illegal and unsafe.

She learned to drive at age 50 (!), after my great-grandfather died, and proceeded to travel the world independently until her late eighties. She was well-to-do and generous in her gifts, but for herself she would always go to the cheapest markets, in public transport when she could no longer drive, to save as much as she could for my father's inheritance, who is her only grandchild. She lived to be 93, despite being a heavy smoker, and until the last year of her life she volunteered at the local nursing home, socializing and playing cards with residents a decade or two her junior.

Thank you for the link! I can't believe they found some of the Doves type after all this time.

(As a bookbinder, I'm kind of a fan of Cobden-Sanderson, and it always seemed one of the great losses of the artistic world that he dumped it into the Thames. What kind of despair he must have been in to do something like that? This news feels like...a kind of redemption, maybe.)

Welcome! Your great-grandmother sounds like an amazing woman.

The movie begins showing us Jupiter's morning routine, getting dragged out of bed by her mom and aunt to start a day with the family house cleaning business.

Nsgre n pbhcyr bs ubhef bs nznmvat nqiragher nzbat gur fgnef naq zrrgvat ure inzcver-pncvgnyvfg (nyzbfg yvgrenyyl) trargvp eryngvirf, fur'f onpx jvgu ure pybfr-xavg ohg obbevfu vzzvter snzvyl. Bayl qvssreraprf: Fur'f hc orsber ure nhag naq zbz, pbssrr nyernql znqr, naq fur unf n oblsevraq. (BX, ur'f n jbys-uloevq fgne fbyqvre jvgu jvatf ohg fgvyy.) Naq gur snzvyl cerfragf ure jvgu n avpr gryrfpbcr, yvxr gur bar ure yngr sngure unq; gurl qba'g erzrzore ure urycvat erfphr gurz sebz jvatrq qvabfnhe fbyqvref, fb vg vf n trfgher bs harnearq fhccbeg sbe ure vagrerfgf, ohg fgvyy . . .

Vg jbhyq or avpr vs fur naabhaprq fbzr punatrf. Tbvat bss gb pbzzhavgl pbyyrtr, wbvavat gur nezl, jungrire.

I may have posted before about the case in my own family, where great-grandmother and sister married great-grandfather and brother. My grandmother and her double first cousin, while twelve years apart, were as close friends as could be; I did not call him "Cousin Chris", but "Great-Uncle Chris" (totally correct if you elide "step-uncle" to 'uncle" in the previous generation).

The extra marriage you mention didn't happen quite that way in my family; instead, when one of the brothers died, the widow married yet another brother.

Add to this the fact that the sisters' mother remarried--to the brothers' father. Those girls' mother was also their mother-in-law.

That family tree still drives everybody nuts 125 years later. All without doing anything illegal or genetically improper.

(As an aside, I've got to go on for a second about small-town newspapers' gossip sections. A century ago, these were the equivalent of the book of face and the noises of birds. Status updates every week. I got interested in trying to figure out how my grandmother and grandfather met--a story which my grandmother never got around to telling me. Still haven't done so, but have been greatly entertained.)

I'm getting frustrated with Goodreads. I signed up about two weeks ago, based on a recommendation from someone at a con. The person made it sound as though she was in a community there.

What I have found is that the opening page has all the same discussion topics, day after day. New posts come into those topics, but I've seen all the topics that interest me. I've found two groups, but they all have the same discussion topics every day. I can't find a place where anything is happening.

What are other people's experiences with Goodreads?

In my grandparents' case, I can only conclude it had something to do with lawyer/politician grandfather being one-time president of growers' association for grandmother's family's principal crop. Otherwise, how do persons of two different denominations, twenty-three year gap in ages, one of whom lives in town and the other on a mountaintop six miles away, at the ending of the horse-and-buggy period, manage to socialize?

My mother's stepmother met my mother's father through Boy Scouts - she was the secretary for the local council, and he was a leader (Eagle Scout and Silver Beaver).

I've been giggling a lot lately when I see people out jogging in their winter Spandex; canonically "future" attire; viewed, at least, from the '70s.

This article discusses the issues surrounding the CIA spying on its overseers in Congress. But it remains a little too polite and respectable to draw the obvious conclusion: There is no meaningful oversight of US intelligence agencies.

The oversight committee members can be spied on, whistleblowers who report abuses to the oversight committees can go to jail, and committee members cannot reveal what they know for fear of the consequences. When intelligence officials get caught lying to the oversight committees, there are no consequences. All these things have happened.

Our intelligence agencies have become a power unto themselves. They may more or less follow the law or obey the president, they may try really hard to make the US safer and prevent terrorist attacks. They're probably often made up of basically well-intentioned people trying to do a hard job as well as possible. But if they should happen to decide not to follow the law, not to obey the president, should they decide to actively subvert democratic government or the safety and well-being of US citizens, there isn't really any mechanism in place to stop them, nor even to detect that fact.

Even without malign intent (and that's a big assumption when you have people with a lot of power and very little oversight), they will wreck important things, simply by being focused on doing their jobs and not so focused on the long-term consequences of how they do their jobs. (For example, the use of polio vaccination workers as a cover for the CIA guys who found Bin Laden may have horrible consequences in the long run. Subverting cryptographic standards almost certainly makes the world much worse off forever in order to make NSA/GCHQ's job a little easier today. The malware attacks on the Iranian nuclear program set some truly awful precedents, which we should have been very reluctant to see established.)

I have no idea how to fix this. Neither party has any interest in addressing it, probably because the intelligence agencies make really scary enemies. A few politicians seem willing to fight it, but they have very little ability to move things forward, and it's not clear to me what would happen if they did begin to get some traction.

We are not going to like how this turns out. If there's something we could be doing to stop it, I sure wish I knew what.

I have been recruited to a panel called "Ask a Trans Person," which is probably going to be the most basic 101-level questions and has the possibility of descending into horrifyingly problematic sludge, depending on who ends up in the audience (which is sort of why I volunteered; I enjoy re-railing after sludgers while making them look like fools).

I could certainly pre-arrange a Saturday dinner run/order of takeout with congenial folks if such folks were available.

This is a Hail Mary. If it can't be cleaned up tomorrow, forget the rest of the week.

I would almost suspect the author of being a denizen here, except that the quoted excerpts have grammatical and punctuation errors.

This is all breaking (in every sense) too fast now.

On the other hand, Boca de Beppo (sp?) is across the street and they do takeout.

Cassy

(welcome to the 21st century, where I can tappytap a screen to order and pay for food without having to talk to a human with my voice)

Related: Women shut down a creepy harasser in an amazing way.
Summary: Dude on the train, harassing a young woman for her phone #. She finally responds with a line from the chorus of "No Scrubs" by TLC. A second woman speaks up with the second line; yet another woman provides the third, and then they all sing ("loudly and off-key") the last line. And then they just laugh at the creep, who has been totally PWN3D. (Video of the song provided at the link.)

Speaking of snow days, and just too much snow in general, our usual recourse is cooking of various sorts. In addition to turning many frozen bones into stock, high points have been recent trials of:

• Breakfast martinis (first encountered at Roast, in London); and
• Rosa Parks' (yes, that Rosa Parks) Featherlight pancakes

Also, we have verified that it is better to light a candle and cook s'mores on it than to curse the snow.

Also, I saw Jupiter Ascending, and while it was by no means a good movie, it certainly was a gloriously batshit awesome movie. Passed Bechdel, no problem. Fabulous effects, pretty costumes, capital scenery chewing and just good honest silliness. Not sure about some of the subplots and random characters who must have some back-story lying about - not even sure about the main plot. Alls I know is they must have gone way over budget with all the Alexander McQueen gowns for Mila Kunis, because they could apparently only afford one shirt to be shared amongst the male cast (alas, Sean Bean was the designated be-shirted one but that was OK because they let him keep his delicious accent). Basically, if the idea of Channing Tatum beating the snot out of a sapient dinosaur-man whilst speeding about on anti-grav roller-blades sounds like a good time to you, I highly recommend this movie.

If one of the more advanced IT people who stop by here might be able to shed some light on the following, I'd be appreciative:

I occasionally do Google vanity searches on my name, and over the years have become pretty familiar with the links that usually appear on the first 10 pages or so of hits. I googled on my name, yesterday, and was surprised to see that about 5 or 6 pages into the results the usual links were interspersed by links to a wide variety of garbage websites. Those garbage links were never there before. Clicking directly on any of these sites shows no trace of my name.

However, when I look at Google's cached version of each site, they're much different than the live versions. The cached garbage pages consist of nonsense text strings that include "$myfirstname $mylastname $streetwhereIlive" embedded in the gibberish text content. If I search Google for $myfirstname $mylastname $streetwhereIlive it turns up hundreds and hundreds of these garbage sites that have my personal string embedded within the nonsense text on the cached versions.

I know I can ask Google to mark sites as spam and request removal of my name on a URL by URL basis; but there are far too many of them for this to be practical. Eventually I hope Google will refresh its caches and all the spam links for searches on my name will disappear.

My question is, can anyone make a good guess as to how the text string of my name and street found its way into all of those garbage sites? What did I do? There's no evidence of my email accounts being hijacked or hijacking of my small website. My Livejournal and GooglePlus pages haven't been comment spammed and I don't think either contains my street address.

I have found some discussion of malware that can infect Wordpress blogs and websites that use JOOMLA for the purpose of spamming Google's searchbots. But I'm not aware of having entered my street address into any of these sites. The only guess I can make as to what happened is that I've been vigorous over the last several months in browsing job boards and submitting my resume to a number of job ads. Maybe one of those job boards got hacked or sold me down the river? Could my name and street have been picked up through simple web browsing? Should I be worried about changing passwords?

My good news is that I've found a new job after searching for many soul-deadening months; so I won't need to hit all those job boards again for four or five months.

Haha, yeah, that about nails it! Can I quote you on Twitter?

If George Lucas hadn't gotten all serious and self-important with the Joseph Campbell stuff, the prequels set in the declining days of the Republic might have looked like Jupiter Ascending's Commonwealth.

I *think* my step-grandfather's late wife is on the right hand side of the photo linked to in the first post in this thread; my grandmother is in the middle.

I'd spotted that on the schedule Friday and already planned to be there. I figure I can a) be a friendly face for you and Andrea, and b) continue my master plan of shutting up and listening.

What time do you have in mind for Saturday evening? If the small gods of traffic are with me, I may make it up there after work just before the Cheshire Moon concert...

How does one properly scan a poetic "Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!"?

I started with a single accent beat.
But then I started thinking musically,
Like, if the sound was tied, where every ee
increases accent beats proportionately.

I also wondered, what, appropriately,
Would be the base for calculating eees.
No less than two or three, assuredly,
Unless increasing adds intensity...

But measuring mere length, objectively,
introduces variability,
And pairing it up correspondingly
with other rows caused inconsistency.

I also thought that alternatively,
The middle might be unaccentedly
contrasting, on a technicality,
not said undifferentiatedly.

Thanks in advance!

(I believe this affects Avram as well, but I don't know what alternate email addresses he has.)

The Silver Line bus from the airport is still running. Those moving luggage from the World Trade Center stop to the Boskone hotel may want to use sled runners, not wheels.

All the individual pieces show up very often in ML... and I've lost a very enjoyable half-hour looking at house-foxes, reading con stories, reading posts from the Esteemed Author herself, etc.

I don't have time for all this awesome; I have an 800-page book on steam turbines to read. How would you describe a self-set goal like that? "On purpose" and "Voluntarily" don't seem quite right.

:->

I have complex feelings about Tepper.

There are two possible ways for me to drive to work. My usual route is shorter but has a couple of steep hills so I avoid it in snowy/icy conditions. The roads weren't too bad this morning after yesterday's storm, but I decided "don't take any chances, take Other Road."

My question is, is this zeugma? It doesn't quite fit my understanding of the definition, but it definitely seems related.

http://flavorwire.com/378513/20-embarrassingly-bad-book-covers-for-classic-novels/10

Keep watching the skies, Boskonians.

*and also a fantastic scrabble word!

The woman in the video, Michelle Baggerman, is also involved in a number of other interesting projects, as you may find if you explore her site.

You are more than welcome to quote me on Twitter. I may actually go see this movie again. I don't have a problem with respectable sci-fi movies per se, it's just that I'm just not in the mood for that kind of SRS BZNS this year.

"She let go her glass with a shy little cry;
crash-tinkle it fell to the floor.
When he said, 'What in Heaven?', she made no reply,
up her mind, and a dash for the door."

Ask a serious question, get a seee!rious answer?

So, for any tasty citrus (I did it with yuzu this weekend; you could profitably do it with lemons, oranges, limes, kumquats - whatever you’ve got and like), do the following:

1. Take a portion of the sugar for the recipe (for mine, to make two cakes, I took a single cup of the 2.5 the recipe calls for) and zest your citrus directly into the sugar. Once it’s all zested, stir it in and let the sugar pull the oils from the zest (you’ll know it’s working when the sugar changes color on you).
2. Add your citrus sugar to the rest of the sugar, proceeding as normal with the recipe (but omitting the vanilla beans and extract if you’re using my recipe).

[In fact, steps 3-8 are optional, unless you’re doing my usual simple syrup soak for the cakes]

3. Juice your citrus (well, if you’re using kumquats or key limes or something, maybe not, but if possible, juice ‘em). Reserve the juice.
4. Remove the membranes from the juiced citrus pieces, chop the peels and reserve.
5. Make a heavy simple syrup (something along the lines of 2:1 sugar to water), bring to a boil and turn off the heat.
6. Add the zested peels, denuded of their membranes, to the syrup and let steep while your cakes bake.
7. Once the cakes are done and unmolded, remove the peels from the syrup, stir in your juice, and brush all over the cakes. If you’ve got appropriate citrus alcohol, a shot of that won’t go amiss in there too.
8. Let dry completely (either overnight at room temperature, or plunk ‘em back in the oven and let the residual heat do it for you).

End result? More citrus flavor in a cake than should probably be allowed. One of the two my Amazing Fiancé and I made went into lab on Monday (and was rapidly consumed by the Science Horde) and the other is in transit to its recipients.

And I figured this out *after* I bought the $100 book on steam turbine operation. Oh well, it's not as expensive a hobby as [fill in your craft of choice.]

Does the gap show up in your inbox? Is it possible they were just caching incoming while they got the server issue sorted, and then delivered it when things were working again?

It's weird how "trying to see with only one eye" having my email down felt.

Saturday and Sunday - still the possibility of 8".

The trains are (sort of) running.

I will say this for the modern sci-fi-spectacle genre of movie: even when the script is crap, the visual designers do a *crackerjack* job of inclueing technological and cultural background through visual detail. JA leaps into a series of high-tech action scenes with about two lines of dialogue about how the tech behaves -- but all the action is clear anyway.

(I wouldn't say JA's script is crap, but it's nothing to write home about either. Bonus points for the protagonist having a family which is neither idealized, offscreen, nor dead.)

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@nielsenhayden.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

I have discovered that the taking-forever part of cakepainting is serious business. You really should allot an hour for that, at least. For values of you that are not Benjamin Wolfe, who knows this.

*It has something to do with exactly what stage it gets stuck at; I'm not clear on the details.

If someone in Oregon wins P0werba11 tonight, and chooses the lump payout, and pays their state taxes by June, everyone in the state gets a tax refund:

http://www.oregonlive.com/money/index.ssf/2015/02/powerball_jackpot_could_trigger_oregon_tax_kicker.html

I'm hoping this doesn't happen. The "Kicker" rebate is a stupid taxpayer-rights phenomena. We've got crumbling roads and bridges.

Wash the fruit if you think it's likely to have wax on it.

Grip it in non-dominant hand; apply pokey side of microplane to it. Using long smooth strokes (like peeling a potato, only towards you instead of away), remove the colored layer.

Turn the fruit, continuing to zest, until it's all pale (in corduroy-looking faint stripes, usually).

What collects on the top of the microplane zester is the zest. Tap it off as it makes a pile.

The zest is the very outer layer of the citrus fruit (a millimeter or so in thickness for the actual flavedo). The best way to get it off is to rest your microplane across a bowl and drag the fruit across it. You should just see little colored flecks, and no white bits. That's zest. If you're getting white and colored bits, you're doing it too hard.

What is a microplane? A very fine grater? Can I use the extra fine side of one of those boxy graters?

You can also zest with a knife or an old fashioned box grater (on the side that looks like "someone punched nails through it and left pokey tiny holes"), but a microplane is The Right Tool.

Also works well on nutmeg or other hard spices.

Also, I wonder how many of the health problems associated with the latter were actually environmental (poverty, and iodine deficiency due to geographic location).

I love living in the future!

I need to find the site that enables one to make reservations for M.J. O'Connors, just in case it is crowded Saturday at 1800.

This sounds like one of those applications where having your knife wicked sharp is a safety thing. Trying this with a knife that takes any force at all sounds like an excellent way to lose some digits permanently. (And then all your pie crusts will have an area of only 3 times the square of their radii.)

When the USSR fell, the coup attempt put the GRU (the military intel part of the troika) out of play. The internal security apparatus was also crippled, and so the 'pure' KGB was able to amalgamate the two, putting only one source of information into Yeltsin's ear.

The person doing the whispering... Putin.

I haven't had a cake collapse, but they do get a bit... soaked, I guess, if I don't take my time with the cakepainting. And that's always the part I rush because it's eleven at night and for the love of everything I just want to sleep.

Also pine, polyurethane, and papier mache.

Dave H.: </me winces at the thought of pine sap in his cheese grater>

Even though I can stay another night if need be, I don't want to and I still have to think of my bunny sitter. My current plan is to look again at lunchtime and then make a decision.

On the plus side, canceling would mean being able to give back my vacation day on Friday and possibly sleeping in the rest of the weekend (unless the storm hits early enough that we close the library and I have to update the website from home).

Possible flurries today.
Predicted -5F Friday night.
Predicted 8"-12" Saturday and Sunday.
The roads are clear. The trains are (sort of) running.

Elliott Mason@448: I was puzzled by the Anne of Green Gables cover; the site is annoyed because the girl on the cover is a redhead, whereas Anne was a blonde; but the girl on the cover looks blonde to me. Do concepts of redheadedness differ between countries?

The girl on the cover being blonde is the problem. Anne is a redhead.

I'm not clear what the problem you are having is, but is it just that the zest and the sugar are completely separate? You run into that when making oleo saccharum for punch; the solutions are either to pound the zest and sugar together, or stir them approximately forever, or to use Jeffery Morgenthaler's awesomely helpful vacuum seal method--with grated zest, just sealing it in a bag with sugar overnight, breathing the air out, and waiting overnight works fine for me.

I guess it all depends on if you think the cover model is supposed to be a "plucky redheaded farm girl" or an "alluring blonde co-ed". I think they believe Anne was the former, the model the latter.

Oh, I dunno; pine sap might add a nice flavor note.</Euell Gibbons>

And then there's Homeland Security.

Added bonus: the rasp, when not in use, slides into the bottom of the holder, thus minimizing the zested knuckles situations getting it out of the drawer.

* The company famously started as "it's really frustrating trying to find *the right* woodworking tool, and when I do, it falls apart. I'm sure I'm not the only one; so why don't I put together a company that sells the stuff I *do* find?" Add to that the spouse, who had the same issues with gardening and cooking, and you have the Lee Valley Catalogue. You also get "stuff we like" sort of at random, like (although I think this is discontinued now) the best tea we've found for making at Calgary/Denver altitudes (as in you can get "strong, but not bitter" tea without using a pressure cooker); and sundial rings and necklaces, and...

"Amazon Is Rebooting Sid & Marty Krofft's Sigmund And The Sea Monsters"

http://io9.com/amazon-is-rebooting-sid-marty-
kroffts-sigmund-and-the-1685420453

The guy behind it used to work on the Whole Earth Catalog, and the seed of this project was when he was contemplating his then-teenaged spawn getting an apartment/going off to college. "I should make up a milk crate of some really useful tools to send them off with," he thought, and then quickly started exceeding a milk crate's volume, so he downscaled to "A crate of just the essentials and a book with where to find everything else."

It is a book entirely full of photos and discussion of The Right Tools (the RIGHT ones for the job, not just ones that will work. The ones that will save you hours of labor if you're doing something that applies), many of which you might not realize even exist until you come across them there.

(I'm only into consensual and ethical disbelief-suspension ...)

I dreamt that I invited Idumea Arbacoochee round. There was a knock on the door, but when I opened it, there was nothing outside, and I mean literally nothing. Just blackness. Idumea explained that it was all right, I just couldn't see her, and she came in. There was a very strange but not unpleasant feeling about the room, and I felt as though I were in a strong gale, but nothing in the room was moving.

So I asked her if she would like to sit down, which she did. I sat down on the sofa next to her, and she said it was all right and not to worry. She then gave me a hug (being hugged by an invisible gnome is a really strange experience), and said that if Captain DuPree came in, she could just make her disappear. [Note for those who don't know Girl Genius: Captain DuPree is an extreme sociopath. She's not so much a serial killer as a parallel killer - likes to get the body count as high as possible.]

On waking up, I realised that this was, in fact, a pretty graphic visual presentation of what the gnomes actually do, where Captain DuPree stands for all trolls, spammers and other creatures of darkness.

(I imagine Captain DuPree wouldn't much like being disemvoweled, either.)

An aside on the description of her as "sociopathic" -- does a murderous bent still count as sociopathy when it's the norm for their society? DuPree isn't valued by her boss because she's a killer, but because she's so good at it, and her boss needs a lot of people killed.

This relates to one of Girl Genius's less original points, and something that's bothered me before: Like many such "adventure tales" (also sword-and-sorcery), it sets up a world where, at least for the main characters, there effectively is no law, and not much in the way of functioning society. This is perhaps realistic for following royal/papal affairs in the Renaissance. (As, IIRC, Ada Palmer put it, "these people are just terrible".). Possibly, it might suit a world that's mostly too dangerous to support civilization -- but it begs the question of who was protecting that village from the orcs before the adventurers came along, and why don't those folks have something to say about adventurers armed and equipped for mayhem, theft, and provoking monster that were safely immured well away from town?

But in sword-and-sorcery, or Girl Genius, this is played as a more general thing: Adventurers, sorcerers, sparks, etc. are free to terrorize farmers, blight the landscape, or turn their lovers into a carrot, not because they're already making the laws (that is, rulers fighting each other), but just because their intrinsic powers place them beyond any human law.

I wouldn't expect the trains to be running (in particular the Red Line Braintree branch, which is still down). The roads are clear - now.

I write him with what would be described in modern language as PTSD; he functions, but he spends a lot more time fighting inside his own head in order to do that than anyone around him would guess.

Somehow, using the term "coed" to describe a woman at college makes me expect the piece of writing to be a Penthouse Letters style bit of tall-tale porn. ("There I was delivering pizza to the girls' dorm, when two coeds answered the door in nothing but towels....")

Between the weather and how awful transit has been, I'm staying home instead of trying it out. Maybe next year!

No subway or bus service during Sunday's expected blizzard. That includes the Silver Line to the airport.

The ice zombies are here.

Microplanes are an interesting case of a tool for one skill set making their way into another skill set. They're originally a carpentry tool, manufactured by one principle company. That company discovered that a not insignificant portion of their customer base was buying the tools for use in the kitchen, so they did some minor handle redesign for the different use and entered the culinary market.

It's about the amateur press associations of the 19th century. I live-tweeted a few times, but then another client came along at the same time as a paper, so I'm keeping my head down again.

Did I post here about some earlier gloss on a word ("fan," I think) that I sent to the OED? Never heard back, and I'd like to rattle their bars again.

Roses are red,
Violets are blue.
I ate the plums
You were saving for you.

and

Red roses bloom bright.
Blue violets shyly look round
While white winter waits.

http://www.npr.org/2015/02/14/384130972/at-the-grand-budapest-a-banquet-of-beards-and-melange-of-mustaches

What fascinates me is not that it's a contemporary book that has become historical (see also Homecoming and Dicey's Song, Julie of the Wolves, and other good kids' books) but that it was always historical. It seems to be intentionally so, rather than being like a kids' book written today that leaves out cell phones and the internet. But that is based on trust of the author.

I'm glad I reread them, and in some cases read them. Now I don't have to for another ten years or so. Not sure what my knitting reading will be for the second half of the blanket which began as a tree hugger.

*I spent October knitting a tree hugger. My tree was rather big. Is rather big, though the tree hugger itself isn't as large as I wanted. So much reading that month. So much reading so I could knit.

So many questions!

What exactly is a tree-hugger that one would knit? I'm picturing those yellow ribbons from the Iran hostage crisis, only knitted, but I suspect that's not quite right.

Does the term "knitting reading" imply that you read while knitting? How do you hold the book? And how do you keep track of where you are in the knitting? Or do you only read when knitting very simple things that don't require counting stitches and use a single stitch that you could do blindfolded in your sleep?

When you say the Anne of Green Gables books are intentionally historical, do you mean that the author set them in a time earlier than the time of writing?

I suspect it's harder to write a kid's book set in the present than one set in the author's childhood, but one set in the present is more likely to engage current kids. I suspect there are a lot of "accidentally historical" books, where the author intends to set the book in the present, but overlooks various aspects of kid's reality today that differ from the author's experiences (such as the prevalence of cell phones, how the internet is used, portable vs. console gaming, how media are consumed, etc.)

It started with breakfast in bed, a new soldering iron, Karen Memory, Ms Marvel, Atomic Robo, Strong Female Protagonist, and the promise of shiny tech to come. Later there will be sous-vide steak and chocolate cake.

I'm sure that being 45 won't all be as awesome as today, but it's a nice start.

Notice the differences in both the tone and the phrasings used by the Canadian police and media.

(I am one degree of separation from this. I know someone who lives in the area, and who might well have been in the target zone if the perps hadn't been stopped.)

A tree hugger is part of my city's community art project. Every year, the downtown district buys yarn and donates it to knitters and crocheters (no weaving that I've seen and tatting would be way hardcore) to decorate trees. We each pick a tree, singly or in teams, and then there's a day of everyone putting them up. The trees range from about seven inches around (so a narrow scarf) to seventy or so (yeah, that's a blanket). At the end of the winter, we get them back. Many are donated, but I'm planning to keep knitting mine until it's a huge blanket. The yarn is Lion Brand Wool-Ease Chunky (I think-- size 15 needles) and it really wears well. Take it off the tree, throw it in the washer and dryer, and it's fluffy and soft.

Mine is a random-striped blanket in 1*1 rib, so simple enough to do without paying attention. I do a lot of ribbing for that reason. I like ribbing.

I'm also one of the few people I know who can read and knit. I have a laptop, so I get ebooks from the library or Project Gutenberg and put it on a tray table. It's not good for thinky books or anything I expect to be great, so no Courtney MIlan, but it works. I can knit, read, hit the down arrow, knit, read, and just keep going for a few hours. I have friends who do TV or audiobooks, but I don't actually like that many things on the screen-- or I don't know of them-- and I used up most of the Disney I wanted to see last summer when I was marathoning the last of my State Fair embroidery*.

*A poem translated by Sofia Samatar, on pillowcases. The subtext is, "Why yes, such a nice pillow on such a nice bed. You don't get to lay your head upon it. Deal."

I do mean that LM Montgomery seems to have set Anne in a time before her own. I'm not a scholar of children's books or novels through history, but even Rilla of Ingleside was published a couple years after the events it describes.

May your year be filled with happiness.

Diatryma @551, I am quite frankly jealous of that ability. I wonder, actually, if I could do it as well... and it would probably work for spinning too.

Also, at the tail end of the blizzard (I hope), good travel wishes to everyone departing Boskone. Be careful: there was a 20 car pileup on 128 this afternoon. The roads may be worse than they look. Also, Boston just announced that a bunch of two-way streets will be one-way until April, but it's not completely clear to me which ones. (Yes, that's as confusing as it sounds.)

Our day, as previously mentioned, was spent at home cooking: mushroom barley soup with a bit of short rib. Our bit of fannish activity was watching Lynch's Dune last night, inspired by having just seen Jupiter Rising. Jupiter Rising is much more coherent, but not handicapped by having a good book to compare it to.

Is it possible that the movie was once titled "Jupiter Rising?" Because I seem to recall an early trailer with that name.

And belated happy birthday, Abi!

I do appreciate the appreciation. It's appreciable, and it seems to appreciate over time. Also, irrelevantly, I like apricots.

Unfortunately, I think there is at least one member of this community whose email address the algorithm traps. If that's you, don't panic. I'll be along as quickly as I can to release your comment from durance vile. (Note that this is a busy week for me, alas.)

It's a filter I'm going to keep in place for the minimum amount of time. Apologies for any inconvenience.

For physical therapy I have to do a lot of "20 reps of this, and then again on the other side," and because of brain chemistry if I do not devote significant conscious attention to this task, I become inaccurate. Considering the activities are already eating my brain, I'm running into a "too few spoons to succeed" bind.

I've been counting in ASL to 10 on one hand and then on the other, but now the activities are becoming spoon-eating enough that even remembering what order the ASL numbers come in is distressing, so I'm wondering if I can outsource it to a device, hack, or -- less ideally -- an app.

When I was a kid I had an attendance-counter (small metal doohickey with a ring to go around one finger and a plunger that advanced numerical go-round discs), but I can't find it now many years later. What sort of store would sell me one?

Or what else can I do that would serve the purpose? Ideally it would ping or beep or something when I hit the set number, though I can make myself check it periodically too.

Tally counter's probably the way to go. My work got ours at a sports store. Aren't they fun to play with? They're just so tactile and the push is satisfying.

The dogs' attitudes range from "which way is the bathroom?" and "the things I do for treats..." to "whee!" and "draw me like one of your French girls poodles". Not to mention the first one, with DREADS! to cower before.... :-)

Find or construct a song/poem with the appropriate number of syllables?

David: I dunno, the only one that seems to be having fun is the Pom. All the others look to me like variants of "Help...?"

For one thing, it makes me feel my age, to realize that contemporary kid lit published after I grew up is now historical. (Although it doesn't make me feel as old as finding out that Laura Ingalls Wilder was still living when I was born.)

I am not familiar with any of the books you mentioned. But I have read a different novel by Cynthia Voight, A Solitary Blue, which Wikipedia classes as part of the same series for reasons not apparent to me. It did not occur to me to think of it as a historical setting, because my mind was busy classifying it in other ways. What with the boy's yearning for a closer connection to his mysteriously withdrawn mother, and trying to overcome her hostile family with their intimations of fading wealth, I thought of it as V. C. Andrews for boys.

I don't know if this will be of any use to you, but if I focus on a fingertip, that fingertip is marked in my short term memory, which means I can count ten without using words, and two runs across my fingertips is doable.

(I used to get A Solitary Blue mixed up with The Summer of the Swans, which was dull and probably meant something except I read it as an adult and rolled my eyes a lot.)

Hatchet, the entire series, is another one I read for this tree hugger. What strikes me now is similar to what struck me then: where on earth does one find a watch's crystal?

And Julie of the Wolves includes draft-dodging and Alcoholics Anonymous.

Most likely in a jewelry store. In case you or a later reader haven't figured it out, a "watch crystal" does not refer to the quartz in the timing circuit, but to the transparent covering that protects the watch's face.

Also known as a "watch glass". I assume they are using it as a magnifying glass/lens to light a fire with? It won't work with all watches since some of them had fairly thick flat glass fitted.

Ideally you want an old pocket watch with a thick convex "crystal" for making fire. (Not to mention a sunny day!)

They chose to name this PDF-cropping tool briss.

It also seems designed to break multi-column pages into multiple pages, which is probably what I'd use it more for.

The glasses thing was one of the Here Is The Right Answer rote-memory things of survival books.

Not wishing to rain on their survival campfire efforts, but the glasses are only useful if they are for the correction of long sightedness, which mostly affects older people. Certainly this moose suffered badly from the opposite (myopia) until cataract surgery supplied distance vision (and cheap reading glasses for close-up work). A magnifying glass would be a much better tool for lighting fires (in sunny weather, and not in the middle of a dense forest) of course.

ObSF: as Scout Pilot Leeming quickly realised, a lens is useless for lighting fires at night. (The pepper-pot worked much better, of course.)

We had a teacher who tried that stunt. When he asked me if I had any ideas I told him I would already be in coma. without my medication.

I'm not sure he believed me.

Normally, however, "wilderness preparedness" implies carrying a tool made for the purpose. In order of descending technology level, I can think of butane lighters, matches, flint&steel, or if you're really stuck, a fire bow.

Here and now, from a watch-parts supplier. In any older milieu in which watches exist, from a watchmaker. Or you find an old, broken watch with an intact crystal and disassemble it. Unless you're asking this for some reason unrelated to availability?

And I see David beat me to it @580.

However, it might be possible, IF you have a source of water. Pool as much water as you can on the inside of the lens, and the meniscus MIGHT be high enough to give you a good enough lens for firestarting. I've never tried it; it's in the nature of a thought-experiment... (My lenses are largely for astigmatism, and I have to assume that the distortion that would introduce in the focal point would probably make them inefficient for firestarting even if filled with water.)

Beyond the wrong-shaped lenses, I think the diameter of the glasses would be barely sufficient to ignite a fire. I never had any luck as kid starting a fire with a small magnifying glass as a kid. Sure, you could make a burn mark and a little smoke, but that was about it.

*Girl Guides is awesomesauce.

Small magnifying glasses worked if you started with something that was 1) thin and 2) dark in color, is my recollection. By the way, the difference in light level between a clear and hazy day is invisible to the eye, but can be a 20%-30% difference in light coming directly from the sun vs. light coming from "nearby, but not something that a magnifying glass can focus to a point." Losing a quarter of your power can make starting a fire a LOT harder.

Examining my own glasses, I think the main problem astigmatism would present to the water method is that the cylindrical element means that you just can't get much water on there before it spills off the edge.

eric@605: Teenagers tend to be involved when I go camping. They're usually very responsible (see above, when I was the teenager in question!) and I'm glad to camp with 'em. Even with stable magnesium, I'd still rather go with the dryer lint. Better for the budget, I imagine!
*yes, in a thunderstorm, Canadian eight-year-olds are tough!

I read somewhere about using drying lint kneaded with vaseline as a firestarter. I have a plastic container full of the stuff in my emergency bag, along with the magnesium block.

Customs officer: Name?
Putin: Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
CO: Occupation?
Putin: No, just a short visit.

* although there were probably very few Bostonians there not on the con committee by Sunday.

Sigh.

Nsgre lrnef bs qrprcgvba naq znavchyngvba ol gur onqqvr, Xngr Orpxrgg vf xvqanccrq/cynaarq gb or xvyyrq, va beqre gb pncgher ure uhfonaq Evpx Pnfgyr. Ure 'erfphref' ohefg vagb gur ebbz jurer fur unf orra uryq, gb svaq ure ubyqvat gur oybbql fpnycry gung, juvyr fgenccrq gb na bcrengvat gnoyr, fur hfrq gb xvyy ure vzzrqvngr pncgbe. Rfpncr sebz 'Qnzfry va Qvfgerff' gebcr. Obahf cbvagf sbe gur rneyvre 'Pbzr fnir zr Pnfgyr!' cyrnqvat orvat n pbafgehpgvba sebz inevbhf choyvp nccrnenaprf ol Xngr.

'Grimm' has also been doing well in this area of late (although it took a while to get there).

Nsgre lrnef bs qrprcgvba naq znavchyngvba ol gur onqqvr, Xngr Orpxrgg vf xvqanccrq/cynaarq gb or xvyyrq, va beqre gb pncgher ure uhfonaq Evpx Pnfgyr. Ure 'erfphref' ohefg vagb gur ebbz jurer fur unf orra uryq, gb svaq ure ubyqvat gur oybbql fpnycry gung, juvyr fgenccrq gb na bcrengvat gnoyr, fur hfrq gb xvyy ure vzzrqvngr pncgbe. Rfpncr sebz 'Qnzfry va Qvfgerff' gebcr. Obahf cbvagf sbe gur rneyvre 'Pbzr fnir zr Pnfgyr!' cyrnqvat orvat n pbafgehpgvba sebz inevbhf choyvp nccrnenaprf ol Xngr.

'Grimm' has also been doing well in this area of late (although it took a while to get there).

I just found a manuscript written by my great-grandfather, who died in the 1890s. I don't think it's going to become a bestseller, but if it were, who would own its copyright? Would it be in copyright at all? After all, the author's been dead for more than 75 years; but it's never been published, so when would the copyright clock start? And he has a quite small number of direct descendents living -- I think it's just my brothers and the first cousin I found out about last year, though there may be others that I don't know about. I suppose I could "edit" it as a collaboration and start a clock around my own name, but that seems like cheating.

(The manuscript is on "Recent Events in Madagascar" and is unsigned, but all the evidence available points to it being by my great-grandfather -- handwriting, the provenance, the presence of the books referred to in the ms in his library which was sold in 1900 at auction, etc. This probably complicates the copyright question even more, however: there's no smoking gun attaching it to his estate directly, only the fact that it was with a bunch of stuff that was his passed on through my grandfather to my father.)

Any thoughts?

According to the US Copyright Office, it's unquestionably in the public domain.

Until 1978, common law copyright protections on unpublished, unregistered works was perpetual. Then, it became life+50, with a minimum of 25 years from 1978 (and some bonuses if the work was published by then), so until at least Dec 31, 2002. It would be longer than then, if the work was published by then, or if the life+50 hadn't expired by then -- if the author died after 1933.

You say this work has never been published, and the author died in the 1890's. That means it's been in the public domain since Jan 1, 2003.

For them the catacombs of Ptolemais and the carven mausolea of the nightmare countries are. Climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles they do, yes, and down black cobwebbed steps they falter. Beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia those are, mmm, far beneath. Haunted wood and desolate mountain their shrines are. Linger around the sinister monoliths on uninhabited islands they do, yes. But the true epicure in the terrible esteems these not. He to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness the chief end and justification of existence is? That one esteems most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England. It is there that the dark elements—strength, solitude, grotesqueness, ignorance—combine. Form the perfection of the hideous they do.

My best friend I must tell. He a stunning impression of Yoda does, mmm. And Lovecraft he likes.

¹ Did you know there's also a language called Toda, with about a thousand speakers in southern India? "T" for typo :)

Superb! Jedi masters and nameless horrors FTW.

dotless @ 556: the streets are close ~south of the Boskone hotel(*), in an area where it seems there are too many two-way streets where two cars meeting have trouble when the streets are clear. My area has similar issues, AFAICT on a smaller scale but complicated by hills interrupting the streets. (The area was platted in 1925 -- when personal cars probably weren't common with that size lot -- but built in 1940, so most of the houses have driveways.)

(*) When the next-door BCEC was being planned, Southie ("South Boston", although it's east of most of the current city) was not happy with having such a large and trafficked neighbor so close. There were promises that it wouldn't be used for gate shows; those promises were broken, and we're all wondering what will happen when the area gets built up so parking for the auto show becomes scarce.

Elliott M @ 562: I count on my fingers in binary, which I learned to do at age 14; it doesn't require a separate device, but I don't know how long it would take to become automatic. I don't know ASL, so I can't guess which is more systematic.

John A A @ 566: "The law in its majesty...."

Allan B @ 574: I was similarly croggled when appearing in Arms and the Man in high school to find how much later Shaw had lived -- because Raina's mother mentioned being blown off when she asked for an autograph. Europe that long before World War I seemed so distant, even from 1971.
      The mention of Laura Ingalls Wilder reminds me that I just found out that an acquaintance (who shed that name (given by book-loving parents) for something less bulky) is related to Richard Shaver. Now there's a blast from the past....

*It really bothers me when someone in my age bracket starts on the anti-vaxx train. I got to hear stories about my dad's toddler sister dying from measles (that "harmless childhood disease") or my parents coming back from summer break to notice classmates gone for good because they'd died. No sense of history (or science) to these folk.

Note that these are usually the folk pushing "natural health" and "you can cure cancer with [insert remedy here]." (That's a whole additional kettle of slow burn for me. Cancer treatment is not your philosophical football.)

Here is the reason for that statement:

America says that they are separated from the church, but yet and still do people get incarcerated because they broke one of the Ten Commandments that pertain to American law. To clarify, is someone steals they will be arrested, and one of the commandments says do not steal. Although it is not specifically stated that they are being reprimanded for breaking one of the Ten commandments, but for breaking the law of the land. Inevitably it correlates, but they are entitled differently. An American cannot kill an American, but the American Government can kill Americans. The regime of this country is said to be illegitimate with flaws that can be fixed. Once America takes the stance to initiate reforms to abolish capital punishment, many will be relieved.

The same bright spark also wrote Because of some legislation’s that are currently active, many issues have been created, and confusion has been amongst the American people.

I wonder what led to that conclusion?

I'm wondering how this person graduated from high school.

I met the couples behind big model rocket companies of the 60s and 70s.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/stefan_e_jones/16422624929/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/stefan_e_jones/16422630299/in/photostream/

Really nice people.

Unless, of course, everything else (including standard, and experimental) has failed. At which point... well, I can tell just from my experience with my guinea pigs—it's a lower ganglion reflex: Do Something!

HLN, meanwhile: this reporter strongly suspects certain area residents of suffering from Snowpocalypse-envy. Starting Friday, local HOA began sending out Dire Warnings of Catastrophic Snow. Here we are, now, in the depths of this winter storm, with an accumulation of (reporter squints out the window) four inches? "Je suis not impressed," one resident is quoted as saying.

(If that's not too hyperbolic.)

From the account of events, I would say that their mushrooms had a toxic species mixed in with the usual button mushrooms, perhaps contaminating a bowlful during prep. Probably not psilocybin, because the reports would be more distinctive.

And it is indeed unusual, but occasionally freak accidents happen. And note that this was a "local pizzeria" in LA. They might have been sourcing from a local supplier who slipped up... or they might well have offered "wild mushrooms" as a topping, which would drastically raise the odds of such incidents, no matter where they got them from.

<plaintive> Can it be spring now? </plaintive>

Waiting a day did tell you it wasn't one of the first two cases. The people who end up in the newspaper are usually immigrants who go mushroom hunting and see something that looks just like the really tasty ones they'd pick back in the old country, only they're one of the poisonous North American versions. You didn't wait long enough to know if your friend was the third case.

billboard

Spring is _here_, it's just not evenly distributed.

David H., #657: You nailed it. He has no idea how much more money he'll need here to have the same quality of life that he gets there.

Not to go into tedious detail, but I'm having a really rough time right now, and my usual support network is unavailable for various reasons. Any spare encouragement you have lying around would be welcome. I'm willing to be prayed for, spellcast at, patted on the head in effigy, sent links to cute animal pictures, whatever.

Thanks.

Live puppy cam

Hope it helps.

All the sympathy, and a whole pile of prayers too. I'm sorry you're having a tough time.

I am shocked that my city (Ithaca, NY) is not represented on that bigotry map.

I hope whatever you're going through turns around quickly. It seems like a lot of people I know are having a difficult time lately (and though I hate to admit it, I'm doing so-so at best myself.) My good wishes go out to all who are struggling right now.

I know we've been told several times, but it never sank into my head. How do I switch email addresses and still have my VAB pull up all my comments? My old address quit sending quite a while ago, and I finally gave up on using it last spring. More recently it neither sends nor receives. I'm still typing it in here to tie my comments together, but would like to go with the one that actually works. What do I need to do?

For the first one put your new address in the email box, and a link to your old VAB in the body of the comment.

For the second one put your old address in the email box, and a link to your new VAB in the body of the comment.

I think it's kind of pretty, though some of the stones are a trifle massive for my tastes.

They've chosen list the bids by order of acceptance, which is fine, but they also broke them out by year, with some strangely arbitrary language (i.e. they included a day of the month for both categories, with an odd specificity: since the only requirement is 180 days prior to the first day of Sasquan).

Not only does it look bad (as if there was some flaw in the non-US bids), but it's confusing, (sort of like the infamous "Butterfly Ballot" in Palm Beach).

Which is one of those things which I have to do because the modern world has overtaken the past. Back the old days I could just set the oven to 140, crack the door and leave jerkies to dry overnight.

I could make yogurt by placing the innoculated milk in a closed oven.

But modern thermostats all seem to bottom out at 170F, and there is no longer a pilot light (which I understand,and [mostly] agree with) to keep the internal temp of the oven a convenient temperature.

So have to have two gadgets for what used to be a standard functionality of a present piece of equipment.

If you liked "The Fifth Element", you'll like "Jupiter Ascending": Visually spectacular, silly plot, bags of fun.

Me, I loved it.

¹ Funny thing, it's kind of hard to hide that sort of abuse from the populace you're abusing. As in, "I don't care how many of officials claim the special squads don't exist, everyone on my block knows people they've taken away."

If you're not from Chicago you may not realize what a jaw-dropping piece of WTFery this statement is.

In Chicago, Mayor and Alderman are nonpartisan positions, supposedly. This means nobody ever states a party or runs 'as' a party candidate, though of course everyone's views are generally known. There is no primary: all candidates who can get the petition signatures to run, run all at once in a single election in February/March (we had our yesterday).

If one candidate gets more than 50%-plus-one-vote, they win: that's easy.

However, if they don't, the top two candidates go on to a runoff in April. Usually there's a few aldermanic races this applies to, and only their wards (sub-city legislative districts) even have an election.

However, yesterday, the sitting mayor, Rahm Emmanuel, only got ~45% of the vote -- I went to bed and quit watching returns with about 1000 precincts yet to report, but the result appeared to be representative.

This means he's going to go to runoff with the second-placer, Jesus "Chuy" Garcia, a community organizer from the Hispanic and economically-disadvantaged side of Chicago. Rahm is widely viewed to be governing for the 1%, for downtown and screw the neighborhoods.

This election is as mind-blowing as the time Tom Bilandic, the anointed successor of jefe-for-life Dick Daley, lost his first election (he was appointed to finish Daley's term after a death in office) to insurgent Jane Byrne, whose main advantages were (a) realizing non-downtown areas existed and (b) campaigning heavily among non-white Chicagoans and poor whites.

But even Byrne won outright: no runoff.

We've never HAD a runoff for mayor, not once.

It's sort of offputting. You mean we ALL have to go back in April? Not just five wards?

And, in re the wards, about a third of them (we have 50), are going to go to runoff. This is also a surprisingly high number, as incumbents historically have a strong advantage unless there's a specific individual opponent who's running strongly against them.

I would suggest that it has something to do with how messed up our last ward-map redistricting was -- an awful lot of wards were moved across the city, redrawn to not include the house of the sitting alderman, or gerrymandered to a fare-thee-well. Neighborhoods used to acting in political solidarity are now split among five separate wards, with complexly wiggly boundaries among them mid-block. There are wards shaped like a dead earthworm thrown on the pavement. Side-by-side comparison of the 1960 and 2015 maps makes clear how out of line it's gotten.

I hope to hell one of the first things this new crop of councillors does is pass new redistricting rules strongly privilieging compact, governable districts, because this map is insane. And the sitting aldermen started trying to govern their NEW wards from the day it passed; in theory it took effect yesterday with the election, but in practice it's been a nightmare of emailing two DIFFERENT aldermen anytime something needed to be done and hoping at least one of them would pay attention.

Although from a distance, it looks like the local Chicago press may be largely ignoring it. As I write this, I can't find anything on the story on the Chicago Sun-Times website front page, and in their story that comes up in a Google search, they don't do anything besides mention the Guardian story, pull some quotes from it, talk to the police, duly quote the police's denial, and leave it at that. They don't seem to have made an effort to check it out further themselves. What I can find at the Tribune website isn't much different.

I'm not in Chicago, though. Is other local media coverage of the story getting more play, and I'm not seeing it? Do the local papers have particular reason to either doubt or downplay the Guardian story? It's very puzzling to me how little attention seems to be getting paid to the story in the mainstream local media I've seen.

Oh, and please to be turn in at least fifteen pieces a week -- all great! -- or you could be canned.

Yeah. There's a reason all the investigative stuff is now coming out of Pro Publica or the Grauniad.

This caught my eye because I myself recently bought a new Lenovo system. Fortunately, The first thing I did with is was to install Ubuntu, but I do still have a Windows partition (which really needs updating, as I almost never use it, sigh).

http://gothamist.com/2015/02/25/secret_g_train_portal_whoa.php

I always figured there were places like that. Frex: I know someone who saw a special flatbed subway car that prowled about at night collecting sacks of tokens from the stations; I imagine there was a special platform where they were collected.

First, the snark: It's just a centralized version of the back rooms of Chicago's police stations.

Second, the serious: The Guardian is a serious, reputable newspaper.*

Third, the cynical: The Chicago Police Department has officially denied it, which brings Claud Cockburn to the microphone: "Never believe anything until it has been officially denied." Not as strong as Pilger's Law (which I have just met)--'If it's been officially denied, then it's probably true'--but strong enough.

*Funding for an American edition was dropped in favor of (I believe this is correct) the Air America radio network, which was and is a fucking shame.

And remember, this is a slimmed-down version the same press that exposed all the lies in the case against Iraq and kept us out of a self-destructive war. I'm sure they're doing the same bang-up job on this.

2) How long before some politician or pundit blames Obama?

It was a pretty good talk, although there was less technical detail on how they were flown than I'd have liked. Naturally, there was quite a lot about the Hindenburg disaster, including the words of the reporter who was there on the scene. The reporter, obviously, was horrified; he thought he'd just come along to report the landing, and the disaster unfolded right in front of him.

And one of the things he said was "Oh, the humanity!"

That brought me up short. I didn't run across this phrase until maybe a couple of years ago, and I've never been entirely sure what it means, except that it always seems to be used sarcastically (and therefore I've never used it myself). I thought it was a recent coinage. I didn't expect to hear it being used in the late 1930s as part of a deeply emotional reaction to a horrible tragedy.

Does anyone here happen to know whether the Hindenburg disaster is the first recorded use of the phrase, or have any insights as to why it has suddenly become popular nearly eighty years later?

It gets used sarcastically now, largely because its original reference is nearly out of living memory. Per Wikipedia, the last survivor from the crew, the then-14-year-old cabin boy, died last year at 92. Anyone who could possibly have heard and understood the original incident, is now into or past their ninth decade. Anyone a little younger heard it from their parents or suchlike, and so on, and associates it with the past.

More, those who did experience it as a contemporary disaster probably didn't use the phrase in earnest, precisely because of that association. The phrase isn't the name of anything, or a verb, or even a slogan, so there wouldn't be occasion to use it for something mundane. And if the original "witness" generation found themselves facing a different disaster, they wouldn't copy someone else's expression of shock and horror, they'd be using their own words.

Then, too... in the decade afterward and since, we've gained a grim perspective on mass death and disaster. The Hindenberg was an extremely visible disaster, both locally and (for its time) via the media. But in fact, less than a hundred people were on the ship and less than forty died. And this was 1937, with the far greater horrors of World War II just around the corner.

I do much the same thing with a bad Sarah Barnhardt impression; the back of the hand to the forehead, and an exaggerated "Quelle dommage!"

It didn't occur to me (being, as I am, an old fogey) that younger generations might not know the origin of the phrase "oh, the humanity" until you posted this.

I am, in fact, not so young, but I am British, and I've only ever seen the expression used on the Internet. I've never heard it in conversation over here, and therefore I assumed that, like most use of language on the Internet that I initially find puzzling, it must be American.

Sometimes it's an explicit Hindenburg pastiche (like the Huge Manatee: http://dissociatedpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/oh-the-huge-manatee.jpg ), sometimes not.

Is there a word for that southern-style combo name? Like Peggy Sue or Bob Lee?

The line was also used by Les Nesman of WKRP during the very famous Thanksgiving Turkey promotion. That may be one point when the use of the phrase went from being a pure reminder of the Hindenburg disaster to a joke.

The WKRP episode was in 1978, which pushes it back a bit. I'm sure it's an inspiration, but it feels different to me: the phrase is being used for comedy, but the character saying it means it entirely seriously.

I think it's all because of "The Andy Griffith Show." Oh, sure, there's all that documentation showing that cops beat the crap out of anyone who doesn't lick boot, but look at that Barney Fife! Isn't he funny and harmless?

"I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down,
Livin' in the hopeless, hungry side of town,
I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime,
But is there because he's a victim of the times.

"Ah, I'd love to wear a rainbow every day,
And tell the world that everything's OK,
But I'll try to carry off a little darkness on my back,
'Till things are brighter, I'm the Man In Black."

Johnny Cash--live like him!

San Quentin State Prison
24 February, 1969

So I'm betting the 1990 crest is from Simpsons contagion, and that the Simpsons writers are as likely as not to have gotten it from WKRP and other early-80s references.

Anyway, I think repetition planted Mr. Morrison's incongruous use of "humanity" in the minds of millions of TV viewers alive at the time.

Only with an audience familiar with the quote would it make sense to start joking about it.

By the way, I've always presumed Morrison was reaching for another word when, in the stress of the moment, he uttered "humanity." What word might that have been? Tragedy? Agony? Horror?

There's a theory that he was really saying "all the humanity!" and another that points out that he referred to a crowd as a "mass of humanity" earlier in the broadcast, so maybe "humanity" was just a favorite word.

The TV Tropes article on Oh The Humanity (WARNING: contains link to TV Tropes) chronicles many recent appearances of the phrase in popular entertainment.

The emotions in that radio clip are very, very raw and very hard to listen to. He spoke truth. (I heard once, but do not know if it was true, that he was later reprimanded for unprofessional conduct.)

One friend had pet llamas, and a bunch of us were over at his place for a party and it was time to herd them into the barn. He said that the way to do it was for everybody to hold hands and then gradually surround the llama, who won't crash through a line of people like that. She had, umm, other opinions about the tactic. I was at the end of the line, holding on to the fence. Llamas have no qualms about running you over :-) I was rapidly on the ground watching llama feet flying overhead, and it was probably 5-10 more minutes before she was successfully herded.

The radio station I listen to in the mornings was broadcasting from an out-of-studio location. They were quizzing people on the color of the dress of the left hand image. The options were "gold & white" or "blue & brown."

After some back and forth between the left and right images, I decided it was blue and brown. The non-gray scale made it harder. It took me about three times as long as it usually does to decide.

In the original picture, I see the dress as being light blue and dark tan. It's possible for me to interpret the picture as "this was taken in deep shade, and the dress is actually white and gold", but that's not what I see. I have no idea how anyone can interpret that picture, as presented, as dark blue and black -- which is apparently the color of the original.

I hadn't known that he and his wife donated a million dollars to renovate Griffith Observatory.

I wasn't aware of the Wired article. Thanks for the link.

I read the original photo/dress as light blue and brown. I've also done enough desk top publishing and color corrected photos to look to the background for clues as to what the true color is. I've also made enough clothing and painted enough walls to be aware that matt finishes visually darken a color where as gloss colors visually lighten that same color. The dress is obviously a shiny/glossy/high sheen fabric, so I assumed the camera's flash washed out the dress' perceived colors in the original photograph.

This is why I color match my sewing/crafting colors/fabrics/finishes/components in natural sunlight (preferably on a sunny day). Artificial light borks the perceived color a lot. Time of day a photo is taken also has a huge effect on perceived color when one only uses natural light.

I've often seen the "color match in natural sunlight" bit, but wouldn't it make more sense to color match under lights similar to the intended use? Wouldn't it make sense to use warm lighting to judge the color of an evening dress, which will be worn indoors at night, and not in sunlight?

Sunlight is considered to be "full spectrum" light. That is what the human eye developed to see as "the norm." The thought is if it matches in full spectrum, it will match in any spectrum sub-set (incandescent, fluorescent, LED, etc.). Florescent and most LED lights emit in the blue spectrum/range. Then there's the fact that red/yellow/blue light combines to make white and red/yellow/blue dye combines to make black. What I call perceived color is the result of two color systems playing off (or fighting) each other.

Plus, not all artificial light is created equal. That is to say, not all artificial lights emit the same colors. Lila at 746 has the best example I've heard of. Which is why I mentioned finishes earlier. I'd be willing to bet the shirt and pants material in that costume were treated with different chemicals during the dying process. That would account for them fluorescing at different wave lengths under UV light.

I love optical illusions because it plays with color perception. I actually think XKCD's dress example was more impressive than the actual photos because it was an effective demonstration of perceived color.

I've also never created anything for a stage. Most of my stuff goes to people for everyday use, so they see it in all lights.

#748: Hearing explosions can sometimes serve a useful purpose. Thanks for the reminder (although most of the time I'd rather stick to just hearing an occasional pop).

They compared the sound of the (pre-explosion) Morrison to various recordings of him announcing dancing shows (such-and-such big band live from the whatever hotel sort of thing) and apparently the portable record-cutting machine they used ran a bit slow, so when played on a standard record player the disaster recordings come out fast. The recordings stop several times because Morrison is too emotional to go on; you can hear him talking to Charlie, his recording engineer, telling him to stop for a bit until he can speak again, or to stop while he goes outside to see better what's going on.

One thing that really surprised me was that American Airlines (I think; it might have been a different airline, but that's the one that comes to my brain) was sending a planeload of stewardesses to the air force base; it seems that all (or at least many) of the stewardesses of that airline at that time were trained nurses, and this was to help take care of the victims until they could be transported to hospitals. (This may not have been on the recording; it may have been in some of the contemporary newspaper coverage that the old time radio show host read subsequent to playing the recording.)

If I remember correctly, Morrison and Charlie had to abandon their record cutting machine, and literally smuggle the records (and they were records, not tapes or wire recordings; the shock wave of the explosion actually bounced the stylus of the record-cutter right out of the groove) out of the air force base so they could be broadcast the next day. NBC at the time (and for some years to come) refused to allow pre-recorded anything on their airwaves with very very few exceptions; Morrison and Charlie (whose last name I can ALMOST remember) were recording for a local Chicago station's show (WLS?), not a network show, so the broadcast standards were different, and that's why they were there at all.

Standard network practice at the time, strange as it may seem, was to re-create news stories with voice actors, or simply to interview witnesses. "The March of Time", for instance, was a news recap show sponsored by Time Magazine, and it featured voice actors re-enacting news stories.

The Hindenburg explosion was one of the very few exceptions NBC made; they did allow some excepts of the recording of the disaster to be broadcast.

The prohibition on pre-recorded radio segments or shows was finally broken years later by Bing Crosby on the Philco Radio show, when he pointed out that a) he was a Very Big Name and a busy performer, and wanted to do a bunch of shows and get them out of the way, not come in to the studio every week to do them live, and b) Philco made record players and did Philco really want to give the impression that their record players didn't reproduce sound accurately enough?

(All of the above is from memory; portions may be incorrect.)

The only lighting cue we have is that one washed-out region at the right edge of the photo. Some people (correctly) pick up on that as a normally-lit area washed out because the camera is focusing on the dress, and figure the dress must therefore be strongly lit from the front by the flash, which must mean the dress’s colors are washed out and desaturated, and the real colors must be stronger and darker — blue and black.

Others read it as a brightly-lit area behind the dress, and figure that the dress must be backlit, and the side we see in shadow. Correcting for that makes the grayish lavender color into white, and the dirty brownish into gold.

I started out seeing it as white and gold, then sometimes as blue and black if I hid part of the image. There was a brief period in which I could make it flip back and forth in my head like a Necker cube. Then I got bored and made jokes instead.

ASCAP's unwillingness to work with the broadcasting of recorded music provided an opportunity for somebody to create BMI.

It would make sense for flight attendants to have first-aid training, at the very least, and in an era before paramedics, I believe
anyone with a life-saving certificate tended to quickly get recruited in a disaster.

Very pleased to see it labeled "A Leonard Nimoy Film."

It not only holds up, it remains a total hoot. Special effects still effective; still damn funny.

Its San Francisco is just slightly exotic looking. I never got around to visiting until after the '89 quake.

For example, consider the “Do you guys like Italian?” scene in Star Trek 4. Note how the characters are talking over each other, rapid-fire, and how you need to focus your attention on both Shatner and Nimoy to really catch the byplay between them.

Compare this with the much more leisurely pace of the “mechanical rice-picker” scene from “City on the Edge of Forever.” Note how the actors look back and forth, directing the viewer’s attention, as if they can’t trust the viewer to keep up. And how the lines are punctuated by notes in the background music, like old Looney Tunes! (I was also thinking of the “Check? Right!” exchanges from “A Piece of the Action,” but couldn’t find those on YouTube.)

This might be a difference of budget and/or technology, but it might also be a change in how viewers had gotten used to faster-paced video between 1966 and 1986.

I've noticed something similar watching some of the early episodes of Old 'Who' with my daughter.

Which meant that your viewers might be watching on anything down to a little six-inch "portable" b&w with bad rabbit-ear reception. Notice how TOS's sets and costumes are painted in broad swaths of simple color: they had to be. Not only did it have to "read" on low-res (by today's standards) color, but in black and white as well. And even if you had color, it took no little skill to get a decent picture out of it.

And also remember that TV was still a new art-form: the networks had only been established in the early fifties, barely fifteen years before ST premiered. TV writing (and viewing), in many ways, was still in its infancy.

I kind of envy him; he remembers the wonder of bleak Kansas turning into bright Oz. For me, it's just a given; I was too young when I first saw it for me to remember now how it felt.

This was when colorizing black and white movies was all the rage (when Cary Grant's suit in North by Northwest changed color three times in the cropduster scene, for example). I only ever saw that version aired once; apparently they got snowed under by complaining calls that NOOO, you DON'T have to colorize EVERY b&w frame to get "kids" to watch "those old movies".

$lt;jawdrop> Um... my father was also colorblind (though not completely). My parents divorced when I was 5, but even so, I'm now wondering if Mom had internalized "B/W is OK", perhaps explaining why we were so late going to color....

My grandparents (better off) had two TVs: a bigger b&w and a smaller color. We borrowed their color set for the 1980 and 1984 Olympics, because watching ski jumping in b&w makes it incredibly hard to figure out who's playing for what 'team'. :->

I think my mom finally bought a color set in 1986 or so; she got a new, much higher-paying job about that time and it makes sense to peg it to that.

Here if you want it.

*for the same reason as Elliott's mom
**the Muppet

One of the jokey '60s Batman movies ends with a room full of diplomats arguing. They'd just been reconstituted from powder, as I recall.

I didn't know until college, mid '80s, that the diplomats' skins were a riot of strange colors.

I realized later that my gut answer for "What should a TV cost" was "Nothing." Because that was what I'd paid for my TV and the TV before that.

Ah yes, There was that famous Ted Lowe quote: "and for those of you who are watching in black and white, the pink is next to the green.

And I finally got to watch Disney's Wonderful World of Color IN COLOR. (I knew about the change from B&W to color in Wizard of Oz -- I really enjoyed seeing it for the first time that year.)

Which was deliberate, of course. Star Trek, though currently owned by CBS, was originally broadcast on NBC, which is owned by RCA, which wanted to sell color TV sets.

David Harmon @775: I grew up watching Star Trek (and Batman, and Sesame Street) in black-and-white!

I didn't actually break down and get color until my loyal and true 40-year old b&w finally gave up the ghost halfway through B5's run ('95-ish?). I'm glad I waited; there are still STTOS episodes I'm seeing in color for the first time. Brings back a freshness that I lost once I'd completely memorized all the eps back in the '70s.

David Harmon @778: perhaps explaining why we were so late going to color....

I resisted because, until well into the '70s, I'd never seen a color TV that could produce an adequate picture on rabbit ears, and I find a bad color image far more painful than good b&w, which was much easier to get. And by the time the tech was up to snuff, I couldn't afford to replace my TV without very strong motivation.

Elliott Mason @779: watching ski jumping in b&w makes it incredibly hard to figure out who's playing for what 'team'. :->

That was why my dad got one around '77; he was so tickled at how much easier it was to follow his football games.

Idumea @780: Here...

Thank you. I just glanced at it. Haven't read it yet; the first two lines made me burst into tears. That there's 31 comments already suggests that...there was a need.

Avram @790: Classic Star Trek is rather startlingly colorful. Not only is nearly everyone dressed in bright colors, but the backgrounds are often awash in colored light, for no more reason that to make the scene colorful. ... RCA, which wanted to sell color TV sets.

Note that the color scheme also has a large value range, as well. Interestingly, STTOS, when rendered in b&w, has a lovely, almost "noir" visual style, which permanently influenced my preferences. I've been enjoying Agent Carter, because their cinematography comes the closest to achieving that same tone that I've seen. (Though Babylon 5 sometimes made a close approach, especially in their cgi scenes.)

These days, I'm more surprised when something goes wrong with the enormous plasma screen. Like trying to watch Fantasia 2000 and discovering it was just too blurry in the beginning. Or, on a friend's TV, watching recent shows that have a weird... thing going on. Like they're too much in focus, or too much of the picture is, and there's an effect almost like trying to look at the sides of a Magic Eye picture. Perhaps it's an artifact of mostly watching Dragon Age Inquisition.

I suspect I may veer a bit younger in that I do not remember a time before there was a colour television in my house, though part of that may be that my dad is a gadget-lover who had a job which let him afford to buy neato gadgets (I also don't remember a house without a computer in it, thanks Commodore 64!). My earliest memories are from about 1986. I did, however, have a six-inch black and white television which came with a camcorder, and when I was a teenager I used to sneak it into my room to watch ER (which was on after my bedtime). I found that, because I did know what the colours were meant to be, my brain filled them in and the picture wasn't black and white. It wasn't full colour, but it was... tinted, I guess.

Weird fractally patchy-boxy colory things? Took me forever to work out that what's going on there is and artifact of the digital video data compression.* What's going on is that, for whatever reason, you've dropped into the middle of a sequence,** and the context from previous frames of those particular pixels is missing, so what you're seeing is just the "change these specific pixels, here, because everything else in the image is the same."

There's one scene in Stargate Universe that I like to watch independently of the rest of the ep. But it starts at one of those, so the first couple of frames are always all psychedeliced.

* I think. Somebody who actually knows should speak up if I'm wrong.

** There's probably a word for that, but I don't even know how to look it up.

Em @797: Oh lord, won't you buy me a colour teevee.

Though given the dialect, probably without the "u" in "color." ;-)

I suspect I may veer a bit younger ... (I also don't remember a house without a computer in it, thanks Commodore 64!).

Just a little, yeah. :-) First computer that made it into my parents house was probably ten years after I moved out.

because I did know what the colours were meant to be, my brain filled them in and the picture wasn't black and white.

Even though I didn't know what the colors were supposed to be, for the most part, I definitely colorized the picture in my brain. That's one of the reasons finally seeing TOS in color is so striking is that, not only were my colors often wrong, but the real ones were so much more vivid.

We were also late adopters with TV - it didn't bother me that we got black&white later than any of the neighbors, but we also didn't get UHF until it'd been out for a few years, which meant that there were cartoons I couldn't watch except by visiting friends.