While back someone gift me a pile of perfectly functional but unbelievably smoggy SCSI components that I couldn't stand to be around but couldn't bear to pitch in the trash....
So far the best thing I found for getting rid of the smell was a mix of All Temperature Cheer (which will also remove grease) and Fabreze deodorizer. Don't worry about getting boards and cables wet so long as they get a week or so to THOROUGHLY dry afterward. But use only a damp cloth on hard drives and other components that have little holes water might get into.
Plastic parts like cables were the worst as they'd absorbed the smell and refused to turn loose of it. I finally soaked them in straight Fabreze and left them to dry and "age" outdoors for a couple months. By that point the reek had been diluted to tolerable, if not perfect.
"Eau de Boiled Pig" is probably mostly grease; vapourized, recondensed, and gone rancid (much akin to that other popular fragrance, "Bachelor's Kitchen"). Dawn dishwashing detergent is hell on grease; I'd try that.
I would NOT use an alcohol-based solvent (nor Windex even tho it will take off aged grease) as there are too many possible interactions with the plastics, and if not thoroughly wiped off afterward, the residue can be worse than the disease.
BTW some professional carpet cleaners use undiluted 409 to remove "unremovable stains" (such as blood, chocolate, and aged grease) from carpet. So it's another possibility here.
Yeah, the job market in Montana is pretty limited. Great Falls is a farm/freight hub and Air Force town (during the Cold War it was the #2 target in North America, due to being NORAD's backup HQ), and that about covers everything you'll find there.
OTOH, housing costs haven't skyrocketed to the degree they have in trendy parts of the country (the average middleclass home still has a nice roomy YARD, too, which I consider an important asset in raising well-adjusted kids), and while there are very few rich, there are also very few truly poverty-stricken folk, and nowhere near as many outright morons as in less-stressful climates. It's still a good safe place to raise well-educated kids (and not nearly as "tribal" as most farming states). Of course the tradeoff is that jitterbugging at the J-Bar-T is the weekend social highlight, and you get plenty of winter (tho not steady due to the Chinook winds -- it can hit 70F in February).
But that's pretty much how the industrialized world has become. There are economically flat but socially stable descendants of farming communities, good for family life -- but ultimately going nowhere. And there are thriving metropolises with a lot of jobs in both high-income and sub-minimum-wage brackets, replete with high-priced housing on one end and slums on the other, plus too many shit schools and social stresses that are beyond what evolution has equipped kids to deal with (hence gangs, drugs, and dropouts) -- but if you can handle it, you can get ahead.
I left Montana because of the crap ecomony and having had enough of winter. Eventually I'll leave California because I've had enough of the crush of stupid people. *sigh*
In my high school (Great Falls MT, class of 1972) the school heroes were the nerds and geeks. EVERYONE knew who they were and wanted to be like them (and it had been that way since grade school). GFHS had a big sports program and were state champs in football, wrestling, and several other sports, but sports heroes still took a back seat to the geeks. (And sometimes they WERE the geeks.)
I don't think it's coincidence that in my class (some 572 of 1500 total students) there were only two dropouts. Nor coincidence that the Montana school system did everything the "old fashioned way" (you WILL learn this material, like it or not) and on a shoestring budget, yet was rated #1 in the country.
Methinks the textbook industry has a good thing going, and is milking it for all its worth...
RECENT history etc. may be changing, but the vast majority of history is, well, history. So it really isn't necessary to constantly revise, reprint, and repurchase history texts -- all that's necessary is to create and print addendum volumes. Which it seems to me could even become a print-on-demand item.
The textbook print houses wouldn't like this one bit.
Actually, I was thinking not of general-purpose computers of any sort, but black-box specialty appliances (which would each do a single job in the realm of storage, networking, firewall, database, whatever). Instead of one machine that does Jobs n thru n+x and a random assortment of odd jobs too, we'd see n+x machines that each do one job only. I don't think it would do any harm to the general-purpose end-user or workstation market as such, since that is never expected to do only a single job. But general purpose servers could wind up fractured, that's the end of things I was looking at, where there's already some tendency to specialize. It would be an opportunity to get a lock on various niche applications for one end of the market, and an annoyance and expense to the other end.
Anyway, I don't think your concept is a bad thing, but I do think it would have some unintended consequences. Which might in themselves be good or bad depending on how things fell out in the long run.
So, who do we have to bribe to get your idea a test run in the real world? Maybe you should patent it as a business model.;)
[laughing] Like I said, I don't know, really, other than it's relatively ancient as browsers go. Some of the files are dated way back when, but I don't know for sure what they all do. The guy is very conservative with version numbers... it's now up to something like 1.2 (or was it 1.12?)... what I have, I installed in 1997 and it was v1.08, I think.
But on that note -- I know it was patterned after lynx; when was lynx created??
It would certainly be interesting to watch such a "no non-proprietatry patents" scheme at work in the competetitive market. (Could it be more broadly applied to the rest of the patented world??)
But I still think we'd see a rash of specialty appliances (such as "if you want to run Our Big Database, you have to buy Our Big Iron too") and market splintering as a first effect, and a long-term effect of breaking such markets back down into subsets that can't gracefully interact, much as in the era when non-IBM-PC hardware was more common in the workstation, and all the heavy lifting was done by mainframes. Business might whine but business will still buy what it needs to function, and pass the costs on to consumers as they always do. Users would be stuck with it until someone wrote a commodity solution. More'n likely *that* would start as one or two commercial apps, followed by a straggle of opensource apps. As you say, the proprietary solution would then have to be the best quality product to survive in the marketplace.
IOW, I think the net effect would be to rewind the IT market back to 1980. Even so, it would be better (for everyone but patent lawyers) than the current patent minefield, where you can't breathe without infringing on someone's patent for "a mechanism for transporting O2".
As another side effect, I think it would kill unnaturally restrictive EULAs (patents' natural cousins) on commodity anything, such as that one where if you bought Specialty Jigs Brand A, only one person was allowed to use them -- any jig that fit a standard saw would be immediately exempt from patent, thus from silly EULAs.
While that sounds like a good concept on the surface (and I think the concept deserves further exploration), it could have the side effect of splintering innovation into deliberately incompatible (unless you license it under their patent, of course) subsets of proprietary hardware and its matching software. Commodity hardware and software might be strong enough to withstand this effect, but what about business middleware, networking products, and the like?
That would be especially good if the various tech review publications (in all sorts of fields, not just computer-related) pick up on it and make it a regular feature, which asks for public input -- not as an exclusive place to do so, but rather as one that is handy and obvious:
That would give people interested in a given field a known and reliable place to comment, would make it relatively easy to collect comments for forwarding to the USPTO, and keep the noise level down (imagine asking slashdot for input -- egads!!)
On my system I have NetTamer (a browser for DOS), which has both textmode and a sort of graphical mode, and allows keyboard navigation (including, IIRC, use of the TAB key to move between links). I don't recall when the program was first developed, but it runs gracefully on an XT, so that should tell you something about its age!! (1993ish origins, I think)
This reminds me of one of my common typo patterns: I'll get all the right letters in a given (longish) word, but in no order whatsoever except for the first and last letters, which will still be correctly placed.
I don't usually catch them by sight, but rather because my hand "felt it type wrong" and goes back to correct the typo without consulting my brain.:)
Speaking as a writer, my personal pet peeve is "had had". It annoys me, so I always find some other way to express it, if only by "he'd had" or the like.
And when confronted with the nearly-as-annoying "that that", I usually drop one of 'em, so instead of "he said that that thing blah blah" I'd write "he said that thing blah blah".
Back to the previous comment, proofreading must be a dying skill, or at least publishers no longer pay for one. Frex, in a TOR book of recentish vintage, I found an average of one typo every 10 pages, plus one major gaffe (missing word, garbled sentence, or wrong word entirely a la word processor sleppchecker) every 50 pages. Used to be I'd see about only one typo every 10 books. Argh!!
As to the the example... proofread carefully to see if you any words out.;)
I'm an efficient reader who reads a lot, and I *know* that I use a lot of different techniques, from phonics-on-the-fly to skimming for keywords. See my reply to your other respondant for more on the phonics thing.
I've sometimes noticed myself "leapfrogging", especially when I'm a little tired of some part of a book and my brain wants to skip ahead. So I might go from the front of one line to the middle of the next, then back to the end of the previous line, having evidently snagged the middle of that line as I went by on the line below it. This works fine for comprehension, tho a tracking camera would likely conclude that my eyeballs were having some sort of fit;)
Probably related to that -- being the I-hate-studying sort who never read the assignment til an hour before the test, I had to develop skimming skills in high school. I discovered that some texts could be scanned diagonally, and that stuff worth remembering would usually catch my eye, at which point I'd skim in a more normal horizontal fashion til I passed the "important-looking" stuff, then go back to diagonal scanning. Of course, this doesn't do much for fine detail or exact quotes:)
One thing I've noticed with dyslexics, is that all the ones I know (quite a few) read by way of some form of "whole word recognition", and they don't get phonics at all; attempts to teach them phonics are generally counterproductive. I'd guess that they don't *have* some of the alternate mechanisms that normal readers use.
I remember when "whole word recognition" as a system for teaching kids to read went around the educational systems, and produced a generation of kids who are poor readers. In retrospect the reason is obvious: this method attempted to teach ALL kids to read as if they were dyslexic, effectively crippling normal kids' reading ability!!
My mom read to me every day when I was a toddler, and by the time I was 4 years old, I could read at about a 4th grade level, just from visually following along the with words as she read them. When reading by myself at age 4 to 5, I remember working out new words as I came to them, essentially by way of self-taught phonics, and sometimes working out a new word's meaning by how it broke down phonetically. (When I encountered phonics in grade school, the concept seemed quite obvious, and I only needed to learn the notations and special characters.)
Generally this "self-taught phonics" worked well, with a few notable exceptions. At age 5, I could not for the life of me make "Bartholomew" sound right. I had never heard the word pronounced, and by my "observed rules of phonics", it came out "barth'-o-LO'-mew", which just plain sounded wrong -- but at the time it didn't occur to me to change the accent to another syllable!! And I never thought to ask anyone, because by then I was already used to reading just about anything on my own. (Puzzling over this was why I never quite finished reading "Bartholomew Beaver" in kindergarten:)
Back to dyslexics -- a friend has been in a university research program for ~25 years, and they've ID'd at least one gene responsible for it -- as happens, adjacent to a gene ID'd for ADD (on the same chromosome). In his case, one partial cause is that one eye leads and the other lags; special glasses to force them to track together improved his reading comprehension considerably. Before that, he did best at reading stuff written in a choppy style with short paragraphs, and had trouble with longer passages. With the glasses, he could now follow longer passages much better.
Latin is also perfectly comprehensible with the words in any which order -- in fact one of the standard exercises in my high school Latin text was to translate scrambled sentences, and it was quite easy to do even after only a few weeks of study.
Sometimes myself amuseness word disorderliness; people understandings regardless. Consistent syntax beeshavings, even tho not appearings.;)
Is sentence diagramming even still taught? It's been a long time since I've run into anyone who even knows what it IS, including some English teachers of recent vintage. Very useful grammatical tool, tho.
And as to whether the ending preposition is really a split verb... "It is precisely this sort of pedantry up with which I will not put." -- Winston Churchill
Your note re Pres.Garfield reminded me of my 7th grade Ancient History teacher: He could write on the blackboard in English with one hand, Egyptian hieroglyphs with the other, and talk a blue streak about something else at the same time.
Since we were expected to remember all of it, note-taking was a frantic affair to say the least, and we consequently all developed absolute minimalist handwriting -- anything that requires time, such as dotting "i", was dropped because it wasted precious microseconds!
To this day, I don't dot my i's, and I still suffer from degenerative handwriting disorder;)
*********************** 20. Presidents who are related to other presidents. [genealogy]
Presidents known to be related to other presidents (updated for 2001) [BPL 7]:
George W. Bush - 16 at least
Franklin Roosevelt - 16 other presidents
William Howard Taft -14
Calvin Coolidge -14
Gerald Ford -14
Millard Fillmore -11
Richard Nixon -10
Grover Cleveland -9
Herbert Hoover -9
Benjamin Harrison -8
John Quincy Adams -7
Rutherford Hayes -7
Ulysses Grant -6
Franklin Pierce -5
James Garfield -5
Warren Harding -5
John Adams -4
William Henry Harrison -4
Theodore Roosevelt -4
Jimmy Carter -4
George Washington -3
James Madison -2
Martin Van Buren -2
John Tyler -2
Zachary Taylor -2
Abraham Lincoln -2
The close relatives were:
John Adams, father of John Quincy Adams
George Bush, father of George W. Bush
William Henry Harrison, grandfather of Benjamin Harrison
James Madison, second cousin to Zachary Taylor
Theodore Roosevelt 5th cousin to Franklin D. Roosevelt ****************
The fact is that people in power tend to be related to other people in power, regardless of the era. Congressional genealogies are doubtless even more fun...
Inside info as told to me by my back-when-boss, who used to work for Joe Kennedy Sr.:
It was indeed intimidation -- by the Italian mob. See, JFK's family were Irish mob who came to prominence during the bootlegging era. When JFK got into the White House, he used his influence to make life easier for the Irish mob and harder for the Italians (IIRC, thereby breaking his word to the Italians). Since he refused to change his ways, they killed him.
When Bobby ran for President, they asked him if he was going to continue his brother's meddlesome ways, he said "You betcha", and we all know what happened to *him*.
When Teddy ran for Pres., they asked him, "Are you as stupid as your brothers??" and he said "NO SIR!" and abruptly dropped out of the race (even tho consensus was that he had it won hands down)...and he never ran for Pres. again. You may notice that he's still among the living.
As to family lines... anyone ever hear of the Roosevelts??;)
As an example of that... there's a surplus outlet here that has a CD rack (mostly of '50s and '60s collections). Last weekend these CDs were on sale for $2.50 apiece. As a result, I bought more CDs (even some stuff that's marginal to my interests) that day than I'd bought in the entire previous two years. At that price, it's not worth my while to chase all over the net looking for MP3s of uncertain quality, or even bothering to copy the same CD from the public library. At $2.50 each I'll just buy the real thing, thank you very much.
Back when I was a kid, intermissions in the middle of movies were the *norm*, and theatres did indeed show commercials during the intermission. And of course, that was when you were supposed to go buy your refill on the highly-profitable popcorn, without having to miss any of the picture.
Somewhere around 1970, the practice of intermissions mostly went away (come to think of it, that would be when admission and concession prices started a major climb, too), but I've personally seen it done, with standard 2-hour films, as late as 1978.
Slashdot Mirror
While back someone gift me a pile of perfectly functional but unbelievably smoggy SCSI components that I couldn't stand to be around but couldn't bear to pitch in the trash....
So far the best thing I found for getting rid of the smell was a mix of All Temperature Cheer (which will also remove grease) and Fabreze deodorizer. Don't worry about getting boards and cables wet so long as they get a week or so to THOROUGHLY dry afterward. But use only a damp cloth on hard drives and other components that have little holes water might get into.
Plastic parts like cables were the worst as they'd absorbed the smell and refused to turn loose of it. I finally soaked them in straight Fabreze and left them to dry and "age" outdoors for a couple months. By that point the reek had been diluted to tolerable, if not perfect.
"Eau de Boiled Pig" is probably mostly grease; vapourized, recondensed, and gone rancid (much akin to that other popular fragrance, "Bachelor's Kitchen"). Dawn dishwashing detergent is hell on grease; I'd try that.
I would NOT use an alcohol-based solvent (nor Windex even tho it will take off aged grease) as there are too many possible interactions with the plastics, and if not thoroughly wiped off afterward, the residue can be worse than the disease.
BTW some professional carpet cleaners use undiluted 409 to remove "unremovable stains" (such as blood, chocolate, and aged grease) from carpet. So it's another possibility here.
Yeah, the job market in Montana is pretty limited. Great Falls is a farm/freight hub and Air Force town (during the Cold War it was the #2 target in North America, due to being NORAD's backup HQ), and that about covers everything you'll find there.
OTOH, housing costs haven't skyrocketed to the degree they have in trendy parts of the country (the average middleclass home still has a nice roomy YARD, too, which I consider an important asset in raising well-adjusted kids), and while there are very few rich, there are also very few truly poverty-stricken folk, and nowhere near as many outright morons as in less-stressful climates. It's still a good safe place to raise well-educated kids (and not nearly as "tribal" as most farming states). Of course the tradeoff is that jitterbugging at the J-Bar-T is the weekend social highlight, and you get plenty of winter (tho not steady due to the Chinook winds -- it can hit 70F in February).
But that's pretty much how the industrialized world has become. There are economically flat but socially stable descendants of farming communities, good for family life -- but ultimately going nowhere. And there are thriving metropolises with a lot of jobs in both high-income and sub-minimum-wage brackets, replete with high-priced housing on one end and slums on the other, plus too many shit schools and social stresses that are beyond what evolution has equipped kids to deal with (hence gangs, drugs, and dropouts) -- but if you can handle it, you can get ahead.
I left Montana because of the crap ecomony and having had enough of winter. Eventually I'll leave California because I've had enough of the crush of stupid people. *sigh*
In my high school (Great Falls MT, class of 1972) the school heroes were the nerds and geeks. EVERYONE knew who they were and wanted to be like them (and it had been that way since grade school). GFHS had a big sports program and were state champs in football, wrestling, and several other sports, but sports heroes still took a back seat to the geeks. (And sometimes they WERE the geeks.)
I don't think it's coincidence that in my class (some 572 of 1500 total students) there were only two dropouts. Nor coincidence that the Montana school system did everything the "old fashioned way" (you WILL learn this material, like it or not) and on a shoestring budget, yet was rated #1 in the country.
Methinks the textbook industry has a good thing going, and is milking it for all its worth...
RECENT history etc. may be changing, but the vast majority of history is, well, history. So it really isn't necessary to constantly revise, reprint, and repurchase history texts -- all that's necessary is to create and print addendum volumes. Which it seems to me could even become a print-on-demand item.
The textbook print houses wouldn't like this one bit.
Actually, I was thinking not of general-purpose computers of any sort, but black-box specialty appliances (which would each do a single job in the realm of storage, networking, firewall, database, whatever). Instead of one machine that does Jobs n thru n+x and a random assortment of odd jobs too, we'd see n+x machines that each do one job only. I don't think it would do any harm to the general-purpose end-user or workstation market as such, since that is never expected to do only a single job. But general purpose servers could wind up fractured, that's the end of things I was looking at, where there's already some tendency to specialize. It would be an opportunity to get a lock on various niche applications for one end of the market, and an annoyance and expense to the other end.
;)
Anyway, I don't think your concept is a bad thing, but I do think it would have some unintended consequences. Which might in themselves be good or bad depending on how things fell out in the long run.
So, who do we have to bribe to get your idea a test run in the real world? Maybe you should patent it as a business model.
[laughing] Like I said, I don't know, really, other than it's relatively ancient as browsers go. Some of the files are dated way back when, but I don't know for sure what they all do. The guy is very conservative with version numbers... it's now up to something like 1.2 (or was it 1.12?) ... what I have, I installed in 1997 and it was v1.08, I think.
But on that note -- I know it was patterned after lynx; when was lynx created??
It would certainly be interesting to watch such a "no non-proprietatry patents" scheme at work in the competetitive market. (Could it be more broadly applied to the rest of the patented world??)
But I still think we'd see a rash of specialty appliances (such as "if you want to run Our Big Database, you have to buy Our Big Iron too") and market splintering as a first effect, and a long-term effect of breaking such markets back down into subsets that can't gracefully interact, much as in the era when non-IBM-PC hardware was more common in the workstation, and all the heavy lifting was done by mainframes. Business might whine but business will still buy what it needs to function, and pass the costs on to consumers as they always do. Users would be stuck with it until someone wrote a commodity solution. More'n likely *that* would start as one or two commercial apps, followed by a straggle of opensource apps. As you say, the proprietary solution would then have to be the best quality product to survive in the marketplace.
IOW, I think the net effect would be to rewind the IT market back to 1980. Even so, it would be better (for everyone but patent lawyers) than the current patent minefield, where you can't breathe without infringing on someone's patent for "a mechanism for transporting O2".
As another side effect, I think it would kill unnaturally restrictive EULAs (patents' natural cousins) on commodity anything, such as that one where if you bought Specialty Jigs Brand A, only one person was allowed to use them -- any jig that fit a standard saw would be immediately exempt from patent, thus from silly EULAs.
Acto http://homer.ssd.census.gov/doc/lookup/bugs_webexp lorer.html 1) bug references to V0.95 are dated back as far as 6/22/95, and 2) there seems to have been a version for Win95.
[Sounds interesting, must see if I can track that down... ]
While that sounds like a good concept on the surface (and I think the concept deserves further exploration), it could have the side effect of splintering innovation into deliberately incompatible (unless you license it under their patent, of course) subsets of proprietary hardware and its matching software. Commodity hardware and software might be strong enough to withstand this effect, but what about business middleware, networking products, and the like?
I just checked with Mosaic 0.9 (dated 10-10-1994), and it at least SEES imagemaps, even tho it's not entirely sure what to do with the link.
That would be especially good if the various tech review publications (in all sorts of fields, not just computer-related) pick up on it and make it a regular feature, which asks for public input -- not as an exclusive place to do so, but rather as one that is handy and obvious:
That would give people interested in a given field a known and reliable place to comment, would make it relatively easy to collect comments for forwarding to the USPTO, and keep the noise level down (imagine asking slashdot for input -- egads!!)
On my system I have NetTamer (a browser for DOS), which has both textmode and a sort of graphical mode, and allows keyboard navigation (including, IIRC, use of the TAB key to move between links). I don't recall when the program was first developed, but it runs gracefully on an XT, so that should tell you something about its age!! (1993ish origins, I think)
No, I got it... I was poking fun at it from the other way around :)
This reminds me of one of my common typo patterns: I'll get all the right letters in a given (longish) word, but in no order whatsoever except for the first and last letters, which will still be correctly placed.
:)
I don't usually catch them by sight, but rather because my hand "felt it type wrong" and goes back to correct the typo without consulting my brain.
Speaking as a writer, my personal pet peeve is "had had". It annoys me, so I always find some other way to express it, if only by "he'd had" or the like.
;)
And when confronted with the nearly-as-annoying "that that", I usually drop one of 'em, so instead of "he said that that thing blah blah" I'd write "he said that thing blah blah".
Back to the previous comment, proofreading must be a dying skill, or at least publishers no longer pay for one. Frex, in a TOR book of recentish vintage, I found an average of one typo every 10 pages, plus one major gaffe (missing word, garbled sentence, or wrong word entirely a la word processor sleppchecker) every 50 pages. Used to be I'd see about only one typo every 10 books. Argh!!
As to the the example... proofread carefully to see if you any words out.
I'm an efficient reader who reads a lot, and I *know* that I use a lot of different techniques, from phonics-on-the-fly to skimming for keywords. See my reply to your other respondant for more on the phonics thing.
;)
:)
I've sometimes noticed myself "leapfrogging", especially when I'm a little tired of some part of a book and my brain wants to skip ahead. So I might go from the front of one line to the middle of the next, then back to the end of the previous line, having evidently snagged the middle of that line as I went by on the line below it. This works fine for comprehension, tho a tracking camera would likely conclude that my eyeballs were having some sort of fit
Probably related to that -- being the I-hate-studying sort who never read the assignment til an hour before the test, I had to develop skimming skills in high school. I discovered that some texts could be scanned diagonally, and that stuff worth remembering would usually catch my eye, at which point I'd skim in a more normal horizontal fashion til I passed the "important-looking" stuff, then go back to diagonal scanning. Of course, this doesn't do much for fine detail or exact quotes
One thing I've noticed with dyslexics, is that all the ones I know (quite a few) read by way of some form of "whole word recognition", and they don't get phonics at all; attempts to teach them phonics are generally counterproductive. I'd guess that they don't *have* some of the alternate mechanisms that normal readers use.
:)
I remember when "whole word recognition" as a system for teaching kids to read went around the educational systems, and produced a generation of kids who are poor readers. In retrospect the reason is obvious: this method attempted to teach ALL kids to read as if they were dyslexic, effectively crippling normal kids' reading ability!!
My mom read to me every day when I was a toddler, and by the time I was 4 years old, I could read at about a 4th grade level, just from visually following along the with words as she read them. When reading by myself at age 4 to 5, I remember working out new words as I came to them, essentially by way of self-taught phonics, and sometimes working out a new word's meaning by how it broke down phonetically. (When I encountered phonics in grade school, the concept seemed quite obvious, and I only needed to learn the notations and special characters.)
Generally this "self-taught phonics" worked well, with a few notable exceptions. At age 5, I could not for the life of me make "Bartholomew" sound right. I had never heard the word pronounced, and by my "observed rules of phonics", it came out "barth'-o-LO'-mew", which just plain sounded wrong -- but at the time it didn't occur to me to change the accent to another syllable!! And I never thought to ask anyone, because by then I was already used to reading just about anything on my own. (Puzzling over this was why I never quite finished reading "Bartholomew Beaver" in kindergarten
Back to dyslexics -- a friend has been in a university research program for ~25 years, and they've ID'd at least one gene responsible for it -- as happens, adjacent to a gene ID'd for ADD (on the same chromosome). In his case, one partial cause is that one eye leads and the other lags; special glasses to force them to track together improved his reading comprehension considerably. Before that, he did best at reading stuff written in a choppy style with short paragraphs, and had trouble with longer passages. With the glasses, he could now follow longer passages much better.
Latin is also perfectly comprehensible with the words in any which order -- in fact one of the standard exercises in my high school Latin text was to translate scrambled sentences, and it was quite easy to do even after only a few weeks of study.
;)
... "It is precisely this sort of pedantry up with which I will not put." -- Winston Churchill
Sometimes myself amuseness word disorderliness; people understandings regardless. Consistent syntax beeshavings, even tho not appearings.
Is sentence diagramming even still taught? It's been a long time since I've run into anyone who even knows what it IS, including some English teachers of recent vintage. Very useful grammatical tool, tho.
And as to whether the ending preposition is really a split verb
Your note re Pres.Garfield reminded me of my 7th grade Ancient History teacher: He could write on the blackboard in English with one hand, Egyptian hieroglyphs with the other, and talk a blue streak about something else at the same time.
;)
Since we were expected to remember all of it, note-taking was a frantic affair to say the least, and we consequently all developed absolute minimalist handwriting -- anything that requires time, such as dotting "i", was dropped because it wasted precious microseconds!
To this day, I don't dot my i's, and I still suffer from degenerative handwriting disorder
That must be it... them durn hifalutin' words no one knows how ta spell, much less pernounce..
:)
(Speakin' o' fancy words, is the Cow Jones the commodities index?
Your search - "index of /admin" nuclear site:.mil - did not match any documents.
;)
Now look, you broke it!
From http://home.comcast.net/~sharonday7/Presidents/AP0 603.htm
***********************
20. Presidents who are related to other presidents. [genealogy]
Presidents known to be related to other presidents (updated for 2001) [BPL 7]:
George W. Bush - 16 at least
Franklin Roosevelt - 16 other presidents
William Howard Taft -14
Calvin Coolidge -14
Gerald Ford -14
Millard Fillmore -11
Richard Nixon -10
Grover Cleveland -9
Herbert Hoover -9
Benjamin Harrison -8
John Quincy Adams -7
Rutherford Hayes -7
Ulysses Grant -6
Franklin Pierce -5
James Garfield -5
Warren Harding -5
John Adams -4
William Henry Harrison -4
Theodore Roosevelt -4
Jimmy Carter -4
George Washington -3
James Madison -2
Martin Van Buren -2
John Tyler -2
Zachary Taylor -2
Abraham Lincoln -2
The close relatives were:
John Adams, father of John Quincy Adams
George Bush, father of George W. Bush
William Henry Harrison, grandfather of Benjamin Harrison
James Madison, second cousin to Zachary Taylor
Theodore Roosevelt 5th cousin to Franklin D. Roosevelt
****************
The fact is that people in power tend to be related to other people in power, regardless of the era. Congressional genealogies are doubtless even more fun...
Inside info as told to me by my back-when-boss, who used to work for Joe Kennedy Sr.:
...and he never ran for Pres. again. You may notice that he's still among the living.
;)
It was indeed intimidation -- by the Italian mob. See, JFK's family were Irish mob who came to prominence during the bootlegging era. When JFK got into the White House, he used his influence to make life easier for the Irish mob and harder for the Italians (IIRC, thereby breaking his word to the Italians). Since he refused to change his ways, they killed him.
When Bobby ran for President, they asked him if he was going to continue his brother's meddlesome ways, he said "You betcha", and we all know what happened to *him*.
When Teddy ran for Pres., they asked him, "Are you as stupid as your brothers??" and he said "NO SIR!" and abruptly dropped out of the race (even tho consensus was that he had it won hands down)
As to family lines... anyone ever hear of the Roosevelts??
As an example of that... there's a surplus outlet here that has a CD rack (mostly of '50s and '60s collections). Last weekend these CDs were on sale for $2.50 apiece. As a result, I bought more CDs (even some stuff that's marginal to my interests) that day than I'd bought in the entire previous two years. At that price, it's not worth my while to chase all over the net looking for MP3s of uncertain quality, or even bothering to copy the same CD from the public library. At $2.50 each I'll just buy the real thing, thank you very much.
Back when I was a kid, intermissions in the middle of movies were the *norm*, and theatres did indeed show commercials during the intermission. And of course, that was when you were supposed to go buy your refill on the highly-profitable popcorn, without having to miss any of the picture.
Somewhere around 1970, the practice of intermissions mostly went away (come to think of it, that would be when admission and concession prices started a major climb, too), but I've personally seen it done, with standard 2-hour films, as late as 1978.