What with the DSL outage, I'm rather behind on LJ. I might or might not be able to catch up over the next couple days. If there's anything you think I should see/know (since Wednesday) that I haven't yet commented on, please point it out. Thanks.

In an attempt to provide some non-DSL content:

Me: I saw an arrogant license plate yesterday: GODSENT.
Dani: Maybe it was meant to be parsed differently.
Me: Divinely-owned foliage of unusual size would require a space.
Dani: Maybe they want it to be ambiguous.
Me: Anyone who considers that ambiguous is not in their target audience.

:-)

We got a new furnace this year, but I don't yet know how to assess its performance. Just comparing gas bills to last year doesn't help; I can look up the rate difference, but I don't know how to account for the differences in weather. (This winter has been warmer than last so far.) I guess I need to find control data -- local people with the same gas company who haven't changed their usage patterns.

From a FAQ for a new appliance: "What does it mean that this is UL-certified and how do I know it is?". I really doubt that's a FAQ. If people ask anything like that, it's probably "how do I know this is safe to use?". I have no objection to them including this information; I merely object to the misuse of that "F" in "FAQ". :-)

You've probably seen the "rules for being an evil overlord" -- things like "when I'm an evil overlord, I won't reveal my secret plans before killing the hero". Here's an IT spin: security lessons of evil overlords.

Shopping penguin, from gnomi. Bizarre but cute.

In Germany, if you can't muster your party faithful for a protest, you can now rent a protester (link from jducoeur). At those rates, though, I have trouble seeing how it could be cost-effective.

Some coworkers and I ate lunch at Zenith Tea Room, a nearby vegetarian restaurant. The place is pretty quirky, filled with all sorts of bizarre kitsch. (Think Bucca di Beppo with a bit more taste.)

In the restroom, every horizontal surface and most of the walls are covered with statues and plaques of owls. I sat there with hundreds of pairs of big artificial eyes on me. I've never felt so on-display in a restroom in my life. :-)

(The web interface is being wacky. If you saw a mis-formmatted post from me -- I didn't do it. Let's try again.)

Domain names to avoid, from dagonell.

This conversation is funny in that oddly-familiar way (from xiphias).

Quote of the day from dglenn: "The country is run by extremists, because moderates have shit to do." --John Stewart, on The Daily Show. (Meta: I tried to email this to myself and the filter at work blocked due to profanity.)

Last night Dani was explaining the cult of Eye of Argon, an astonishingly-bad SF story, to a friend. Naturally there is a Wikipedia entry. Dani called my attention to the following comment about the author from there: "a malaprop genius, a McGonagall of prose with an eerie gift for choosing the wrong word and then misapplying it".

The new furnace has a display with buttons and a numeric read-out... and no user documentation (but lots of installation documentation). How odd. Fortunately, furnaces usually don't require a lot of user intervention: turn on in October and off in April (or whenever, adjusted for your locale).

Well, we had a few good sukkah nights before rain and cold ended that. And note to future self: the week of Sukkot has the longest morning (weekday) services of the year; anything you can do to expedite (without rushing) will be looked upon with favor by the congregation.

Bruce Schneier has an excellent essay on what the terrorists want. Excerpt: The surest defense against terrorism is to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to recognize that terrorism is just one of the risks we face, and not a particularly common one at that. And our job is to fight those politicians who use fear as an excuse to take away our liberties and promote security theater that wastes money and doesn't make us any safer. (I think I got this from goldsquare.)

On a lighter note...

I found myself wondering the other day about wisdom teeth. What's the connection between teeth and mental acuity, and what does it mean that most of us end up having them pulled out at some point? Do wisdom teeth grant wisdom, or consume it?

Tonight Dani and I drove past a (closed) store called "Bird Bath". This seems rather specialized for the amount of real estate involved. I suggested a garden shop that, perhaps to stay in business, also sells fountains and planters. Dani proposed an avian spa. I kind of like that: imagine your songbird or parrot in an itty bitty jaccouzi, maybe with a shampoo and grooming -- maybe even massage and pedicure. Would the bath end with itty bitty blow dryers, do you think? Or would feathers respond better to towels and time?

From the Dilbert blog (lost the actual entry link, sorry): Allow me to explain the business model of a cruise ship. When you set sail, the ship has a billion tons of food and a few thousand humans. The cruise company's objective is to end the cruise with something on the order of one leftover cupcake and a billion tons of feces. I'm fairly certain that if that goal is not met, a busboy from Mozambique is thrown overboard as a warning to the other crew members. We ate our share just to make sure Pooka Muuwa was safe.

Dani: Which came first, Coke Zero or Pepsi One?

Monica: Pepsi One, as far as I know.

Dani: So Coke Zero is an attempt at one-downsmanship?

( more fluff )

Yesterday I asked what's wrong with this ad? This produced some very interesting answers, which I'll unscreen momentarily.

When I saw the ad I immediately (well, within two or three seconds) said to myself "that's the wrong melody!". No matter what part of the bell you consider the "note head" to be (bottom? center of gravity? something else?), the first seven notes must be the same, and they're not. For the record, I parsed the first six as Bs, though the third is leaning toward A, and the seventh -- the first one on the next line -- as definitely an A. The second line is correct except for all being down a step from the previous line. And there's the issue of key signature.

I didn't notice the repeat markers at all, while most of the people who commented did. (Aside: is the repeat structure on the second line well-formed? The repeat at the end of the first line implicitly returns to the beginning of the song, but doesn't the second line require a |: mark at the beginning?)

I noticed right away that they wrote "jingles" instead of "jingle" in the second line, but I decided that it was a play on the name of the candy and thus not wrong. As someone else pointed out, it's never been clear whether "jingle" is a verb or an adjective in this context anyway. One could make a case for "jingle all the way" being a noun phrase with an implicit "there exist(s)" prefix; if you do that then "jingles" is not incorrect. Of course, if "jingle" is a verb then there's a grammatical problem in that line.

A couple of people noted the absence of temporal values (so did I) and pursued the idea of color-encoded values (a very clever idea I didn't think of). The ad didn't take that approach, alas; the first two trios of notes would have required the same color sequence.

Some people pointed out the scansion problems in their additional text. I didn't try to parse that as lyrics, so I didn't notice that.

Edit: And special kudos to cvirtue, who noticed that those aren't sleigh bells. :-)

LJ is still dropping more comment email than it's delivering, at least to me. If I haven't responded to something you expected me to reply to, that's probably why.

This week I have been blessed with food gifts. First lorimelton and ralphmelton gave me yummy ginger-chocolate bars (and is that crystalized ginger mixed into the batter too?), and then today's mail brought a lovely fruitcake from browngirl. It's beautiful and smells wonderful, and I look forward to savoring it in small doses.

Scott Adams' entry on bluffing literacy could explain some people I've known. :-)

Someone gave me this at Darkover. I've always wanted one! ( image behind here )

The Hebrew word "hodu" is the root for "thanks". (Aside to Ralph: yes, "modah" is the same word with different grammatical dressing.) It is also the (modern) word for "turkey". Heh.

Seasonal humor: Mishnah Hodu (go to the second entry in the digest). It's not as funny as the Halacha of Xmas, but the latter is not yet in its proper season and the former is still pretty good. (For additional fun, continue on to the third digest entry, on the hermeneutics of the stop sign.)

Tomorrow we will go to my parents' house for Thanksgiving, and then Friday morning I head off to the Darkover convention near Baltimore with Robert and Kathy. I'm looking forward to all the good music, and to seeing Harold and Becky, dglenn, Clam Chowder (the group not the soup), and many other friends. I hadn't realized it until recently, but this will be my 20th year for this con.

This year I am thankful for many things (in no particular order):

( Read more... )

The question (not mine): if you were building a thermometer (the kind that lives in your medicine cabinet at home), what range of temperatures would you support? I said the problem was insufficiently specified, but that my baseline would be 96-106 and if there's no appreciable expense in widening it, I'd go in the range of 90-110 or -120, because why not. But the problem was still insufficiently specified; I was assuming digital readout, not a column of mercury in a usually-illegibly-marked tube. In the latter case, you want the minimum useful range, because you've got limited real estate for the markings. If you could have those 10 degrees occupy 80% of the tube and have the rest be compressed that'd be different, I said.

So Dani challenged that -- why assume that the tube is uniform? I said because otherwise you're out of the price range of medicine-cabinet thermometers. This, in turn, led to speculation about how that type of thermometer is manufactured; I argued for a large uniform (hollow) rod that's cut to length with ends then treated (seal at one end, mercury + bulb at other), while he argued for individually molded. (Insert tangent about plastic vs. glass here.) Of course, neither of us actually knows anything about this; we're trying to make intelligent guesses and apply design principles from other fields.

I don't think we're the only people who have weird speculative conversations like this, but I never seem to notice stuff like this coming from other tables in restaurants. On the other hand, we haven't been kicked out of any restaurants for annoying the neighbors either. (On the third hand, it seems to take a lot to produce that result.)