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

[cellio]

At no point did we have a President Bush and a Vice-President Biden. At 11:59:59AM we had President Bush and Vice-President Cheney; one second later, we had President Obama and Vice-President Biden.

Ah. The oath does not affect state, so just because Biden was sworn in at 11:57 (or whenever; before noon is the point), that doesn't mean anything changed. I was modeling taking the oath as passing the baton, hence my misunderstanding.

[blackpaladin.livejournal.com]

An understandable and common misunderstanding. (And my apologies if my response seemed curt; I'm having this same discussion in a number of venues at the moment. :-) )

Yeah, the taking of the oath is completely symbolic: you'll note that it doesn't say "I hereby assume the office of whatever," it just says "I promise that I'll do a good job at what the Constitution says the person in this job is supposed to do."

(Another offshoot of the conversation in another venue is the idea of swearing on a Bible versus separation of church and state. My thought is, get a copy of the Constitution and swear your oath on that, since that's what you're pledging to "uphold and defend" in the first place. But apparently that's just crazy talk...)

[cellio]

No problem; I assume this is being discussed a bunch. (We weren't watching CBS, by the way, so I didn't know that anyone had asserted my question on-air until I started seeing people mention it. I came up with that little misunderstanding all by myself.)

My thought is, get a copy of the Constitution and swear your oath on that, since that's what you're pledging to "uphold and defend" in the first place. But apparently that's just crazy talk...)

That's what I would do if I were in that position (which of course I never will be). I've always been uncomfortable with the bible being used in official proceedings like this (and in courtrooms). And I do give a bible (not the Christian one) deference, but that doesn't make me more likely to use it; it makes me less likely.

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

That has a circularity problem--you can't swear to respect and uphold the thing you're swearing on, because swearing on it at all has as a precondition that you already respect and uphold it, enough that you are unwilling to stain its honor by lying. Consequently swearing to what you're swearing on is always a no-op: either you already respect it and you swear truly (end result: no change), or you don't and you swear insincerely (end result: no change). The oath is effectively a copy-transfer of respect from the thing you swear on to the thing you swear to--if these are the same then it's pointless.

I'm mostly in favor of not swearing on anything at all, because I think regardless of it all you really have is the person's word anyway.