random bits

[cellio]

Having completed the first pass at digitizing or replacing our folk music on old media (we still need to do some proof-listening), Dani and I are merging our iTunes libraries so this might be easier going forward. Oof. We're up to "S" so far. "T" is big because it includes all the "The"s. Tracking changes (e.g. to tagging) going forward is still going to be a bit of a challenge.

Was Joe Biden president of the US for about 5 minutes today? (We were watching in a conference room at work, and it was several minutes past noon before they got to Obama's swearing-in. So I'm curious.)

In English we say "it's all Greek to me". What do speakers of other languages say? Whom do they implicate? Wonder no more; Language Log has a nice graph of some of these. I admit to being surprised by China's designee.

What if the stop sign were designed by corporations? (link from filkerdave)

As dsrtao said, an airline charging a cancellation fee when they rebooked you on a downed flight is near-canonical chutzpah. (Yes, I saw the note that they recanted.)

This story of a mailing list gone wrong (from Microsoft) made me laugh. And sigh, because while I haven't had to deal with quite that level of mess, even 20ish years after mailing lists started to become broadly accessible, there are still an awful lot of people out there who don't behave appropriately.

There's an interesting discussion of filtering and politeness on social networks over on CommYou.

Note to self: if Shalom Hartman Institute is too expensive this summer, the Aleph kallah might be an alternative. It could be good or it could be too esoteric for me; I can't tell from the available information. When they post class descriptions I'll have a better idea. I had a similar concern about NHC but it turned out to be good, so I'm keeping an open mind. Has anyone reading this gone to one of these?

Comments

[siderea]

I was under the impression that briefly Biden was Vice-President under President Bush. Isn't that the whole point of inaugurating him first? First you move the safety net...

[cellio]

That's what I assumed was happening -- we had Bush-Biden, then Obama-Biden. But if Bush timed out at noon and the oath was required (that was my impression when I posted), then for a few minutes the only sworn-in, non-term-expired person there was Biden, so it seemed like that would have made him president briefly. If the oath is just a formality as others have said, then we had a clean transition from Bush-Biden to Obama-Biden.

[siderea]

Right. If the oath is just a formality, it raises the question of what happens if the president-elect drops dead the day before the inauguration. Apparently, "president continues to serve until new election is held" isn't it.

[geekosaur]

Yes, you inaugurate him first, but that's to insure that someone's got the job at noon when Bush's and Cheney's terms expire. So it would have been something like Bush/Cheney > Biden/Pelosi(?) > Obama/Biden. (Except that I think the below is correct and the oaths are merely formality; the succession is already set, so at noon Bush/Cheney became Obama/Biden, oath or no oath.)

[geekosaur]

And it's kind of a pity that it doesn't work this way; if it did, then for 5 minutes we would have had a female vice president.