short takes

[cellio]

Some people on my friends list will be interested in kittenbreak (daily cute picture).

One doesn't expect tales of structural-engineering woes to be interesting to non-engineers, but this story about how a chance phone call led engineers to discover that a new building could not stand up to heavy winds makes for interesting reading. Link from siderea, who got it from worldchanging.

dglenn recently raised the question of what the difference is between nooks and crannies. To me, nooks are more open while crannies are enclosed and, well, cramped. That space between the wheel well and the hatch door is a nook; the space under the passenger seat is a cranny. A dormer is a nook; an awkward corner cupboard is a cranny. Now I'm curious about the history of these words, though I haven't fired up Google or checked an OED yet. (The OED is a great resource in principle, but I find it physically challenging and I don't have it on CD.)

Amazon has a lifetime limit of three claims under its guarantee covering their associated sellers. It seems to me that it would make more sense to make the lifetime limit one of dollars, not incidents. When the seller fails to deliver a $20 book, I don't want to play the "will I need this for a bigger purchase later?" game -- but I don't want to eat the loss, either. It's a demotivator for using the third-party sellers for small purchases.

What's with all the Linux-related spam lately? I would have expected the corollation between Linux users and people who respond to spam to be low.

Comments

[dagonell.livejournal.com]

Mistress Cori once referred to an old house as "having lots of nooks and crannies to hide all the crooks and nannies". To my knowledge, the phrase is unique to her. :)