Have you ever *been* in Britain? There's places where the roads are narrow because the centuries-old buildings were put in when the road had to be wide enough to accomodate cows. If they say the roads are too narrow for sidewalks, I'd assume there's literally no escape on the sides.
Giving up your right to vote for a full scholarship?
Huh. I managed to work my way to full tuition (still paying off the pesky amounts I had to borrow for living expenses.) I did that by working my butt off in high school.
It also means I'm smart enough to not sell my vote.
----
As a side note, did you know that the secret ballot wasn't introduced in the US until the middle of the nineteenth century? We take it for granted, yet it took them decades to realize it might be a good idea...
I'm going on a train trip tonight, as a matter of fact. The Coast Starlight leaves at 11:59PM, which means everybody gets on, stretches their seats back, gets out blankets*, and goes to sleep. You wake up and you're in the Cascades. Lovely.
*And pillows and padding and slippers-- you can take two large carryons AND a purse AND a laptop bag, so smart travellers pack for comfort...
"I will take exception to the idea that there were no allergies and less sickness among rural populations 2 generations ago. There were. The difference is that those kids were just labeled "sickly" and often died back then. Is it a bad thing that those kids have a chance now?"
I concur. My father-in-law, a farming Depression baby, suffered from asthma his whole life, and the last twenty years of his life were a state of constant illness, mostly from the damage he'd suffered pre-treatment. (Though in the later years, there was certainly an element of drugs to treat the side effects of the drugs to treat the primary problem. Certain things stack up over time.)
The irony is that he outlived his "healthy" siblings, every one.
My K-8 days were a decade later, and it's an interesting saga. To begin with, my mother was against skipping grades because of her own experience of always being the youngest in class, and how isolated that made her feel. So when she talked to the Catholic elementary that my siblings were going to, and they said that they could not do anything for me except skip grades, she promptly talked to the public school, which could.
In kindergarten and first grade, I'd being doing other things during the reading sections (learned to read a two and a half and haven't stopped since-- it's not speed-reading, just the natural result of almost three decades of practice.) Then, at a later time, I'd be in the special reading group for those whose comprehension was outside of class norms. (I still remember that the teacher's name was Ms. Redding. We loved her and that little yellow chair that was the universal prop.) Sometime in first grade I was tested but I can't tell you how I scored because as the test kept going I got squirmy and they broke it off. I was apparently reading at a seventh grade level, and even then I thought that said something sad about seventh graders.
As a result I got put into the district Rapid Learner program, a class made up entirely of gifted students at the standard size of thirty (give or take a few.) One teacher per class; the class moved as a unit. I have no "normal" education to compare mine to but I know that we got to do all sorts of things that the regular classes didn't. We got an hour-long dance lesson every Friday. We did a play every year (my elementary had at least five plays a year as a result, with the sixth grade class doing a musical.) In the later years we got to go to places like Yosemite and Marin Headlands. And this was back when the arts were still in schools so we had choir and band (I was in both) along with bi-weekly music lessons and Spanish lessons.
There's some schools these days that are cutting recess. I look on that and shudder.
My junior high had a sort of gifted track but I ended up taking geometry from a local high school. And when I got to high school... well, by my senior year, I had nothing left to take in several subjects, so I got an interesting talk with the administration and the end result that my "guided studies" ended up netting me more credits than a normal year would have.
My point is that I have never lacked for opportunity in educational terms in the public or the private venues. Because of this, I know what education can be like... and the triggers for if I will have to homeschool my children. I'm considering it more seriously as time goes on because my current job works closely with high schools and I don't like what I see. But if they still have RL (which is called GATE-- Gifted And TalEnted-- these days), I may not have to. We'll see.
I think this is what you call "not ready for prime time." I much prefer my county's system, which has a Scantron-like form that you fill in with pen and which gets scanned on-site, giving you an instant total-- and an immediate notification if there's an overvote or undervote. Plus there's that handy little paper trail...
Of course, the part that gets me angriest, as a former poll worker, is the fact that there are people who will mess with someone else's vote. You don't do that.
Bing grew up in Spokane, not Tacoma. His childhood home is now the Alumni center for Gonzaga University.
Despite the rumors to the contrary, he was not expelled from Gonzaga for pushing a piano out of the fourth floor of DeSmet. But it makes a great tale for gullible froshlings.
The ant so affected seems to be Megaloponera Foetens, the "Stink Ant" of the Cameroon. From the article I linked, it is "one of the very few to produce a cry audible to the human ear."
An ant that cries audibly and is enslaved by fungus. And some people say science fiction is implausible.
I am surprised that nobody's mentioned the obvious: the format that will win out is the one the porn industry picks.
As porn drives the Internet, so it drives the rental industry.
(And in terms of backwards compatibility, you'd be surprised what matters. Our VCR died, so we can't watch DVDs... because our TV is old enough to lack the proper ports. So to watch DVDs we either have to get a new TV or a new VCR. Or we can just not worry about it for a while and watch DVDs on our computers.)
It sounds good, except that in a lot of industries, your work schedule is dependent upon other people in other jobs being there so you can contact them.
As an example, my husband works in retail distribution. He has to be there at a certain hour because the warehouse supervisors are there at a certain hour because the shipping companies start at a certain hour. No doubt the shipping companies start at a certain hour because the planes and trucks arrive at a certain hour and the mail centers open at certain hours, and furthermore they all have to deal with the banks being open at certain hours.
It's the law of unintended consequences. No matter what change you make, things will happen that you didn't even think of.
The short story is available in The Complete Short Stories, Volume I, which is still in print. (It's supposed to be 1 of 3 but I don't think they ever got to the third one.)
This collection also has Asimov's other two favorites (Nightfall is #2, I believe): The Ugly Little Boy and The Last Question. It's well worth picking up if you don't own all of Asimov's science fiction already.
If you own all of Asimov, including all of his non-fiction (he has books in every major category of the Dewey Decimal System), you're getting a little obsessed...
One of the primary reasons that spelling is so important in the English language (and why 'fonetik speling' keeps getting shot down) is the prevalence of homonyms, words that sound the same. A misspelling can drastically change the meaning of a sentence, and a constuction such as "They're playing with their dog over there" needs the distinct spellings to be intelligible.
More to the point, when a person uses the incorrect spelling of a common phrase, they indicate to the readers that they have no idea where the phrase came from, and that means that they may be using it incorrectly as well as misspelling it. That leads to a decrease in the amount of confidence a reader is willing to give the author of a text.
As an example, take "rein (or reining) in", often misspelled as "reign in." The first, evolving from people riding horses, means to pull back on the reins so as to slow the horse down. The second, having to do with ruling, means, what exactly? Reuling in person?
Another common misspelling is "loose" (as in untie) for "lose" (to misplace) and vice versa. Imagine what "lose the Dogs of War" would be like.
And, of course, there is the constant misuse of "literally", as in "happened exactly like", for "figuratively." If you've "literally had my heart torn out" I'm very disturbed that you're still around to write about it.
The poster's main point is that language is supposed to be an aid to communication, and as technical types, we should be exact in its usage. While the language is evolving, misuse acts as a damper on communication, and misspellings and bad grammar lead to lost time for interpretation.
The user interfaces are supposed to be one of the things getting upgraded this time around to make them more intuitive to those who have never worked in a darkroom. The toolbars were geared toward professional photographers-- the Burn tool, for example, portrays a hand position actually used to "burn" areas of a photo during development. Now that their audience has expanded considerably, they want to move toward icons that explain the tools to people who have never even used real film, let alone developed it.
My friendly neighborhood Adobe employee (source of the above info) also told me to never use their manuals. Personally, I recommend Scott Kelby's books, which actually have honest-to-goodness useful information, Visual Quickstart guides, or task-specific books such as Restoration and Retouching (Photoshop or PS Elements.)
Actually, it's not true that nobody figured on the eruption. Author Tim Cahill went to Mt. St. Helens shortly before the major eruption and asked geologists what could possibly happen; their worst-case scenario was so accurate that his article (republished in Jaguars Ripped My Flesh) was widely hailed as a perfect prediction-- right down to the body found of someone wearing a t-shirt that read "I survived Mt. St. Helens." This, of course, caused great embarrassment to Mr. Cahill, who didn't want to take credit for someone else's expertise.
The geologists knew what could happen, but either nobody listened or the scientists were dismissed as alarmists. People take them more seriously now.
I've been using a Kensington optical mouse for years, and it's symmetrical. A quick search shows that many of their mice are non-ergo, which I prefer since "ergonomic" mice are often countured to fit a generic average-- and my hand is not an average shape. If you use the left button as the left button, you should be able to use one right out of the box, but if not, I'm sure you could re-map the buttons with little problem.
Hmm. That would be an interesting app, the 'lefty mouse button switcher.'
I used to have a lot of wrist and shoulder strain from using a mouse. That strain was completely eliminated by doing two things:
1. Replacing the flat, single-level table with a computer desk, and 2. Buying a good chair with back support that actually cost more than the desk.
Seriously, folks, if you are hurting, figure out what you need to do to fix the problem. This product might well help you, but please look into getting better furniture. Sure, good furniture is expensive-- but it's almost certainly cheaper than your health.
And if you are having the problem at your company, and they refuse to improve the ergonomics, look into such simple things as support cushions.
I *know* there are online services to get that stuff, because my husband buys them all the time. Try CD Baby for some domestic stuff, and Ghostland or Progressiveworld to get more info.
Trust me, we've gotten plenty of CDs from online groups; you just have to hunt them down and wrestle them to the ground.
Pickering, Ken, and Keith Cole. Beowulf, A Rock Musical. Schulenburg, TX: I. E. Clark, 1986.
This item is the libretto for a British musical from the early 1980s. Beowulf, A Rock Musical is meant for school-aged children, and is notable for its depiction of Grendel as a black-hearted, leather-clad punk rocker with a cockney accent--a clear reaction against the punk's place as an anti-establishment icon in Margaret Thatcher-era Britain.
The lyrics go, I kid you not, something like "Beo- Beo- Beo- Beo- Beowulf!"
It's got tattoos, it's got a pierced hood, It's got Generation X It's got lesbians and vitriol and sadomasochistic latex sex It's got Mighty Morphin' Power Brokers and Tonya Harding nude Macrobiotic lacto-vegan non-confrontationa l Free Range Food! It's got the handshake, peace talk, Non-Aggression Pact A multicultural interracial non-segregated historical fact
Say Amen. Hallelujah! Say Amen Certifiable number one smash Hallelujah! Amen. Certifiable undeniable solid platinum number one smash.
-Shaming of the True, Kevin Gilbert, 1999
There's a link to a practice of the song here, but keep in mind that it's done by somebody else entirely (KG died before the album was released) and the original is MUCH cooler.
Once again, the apocryphal tale of bumblebees flying "despite the laws of aerodynamics saying they can't" makes the rounds.
In truth, the only reason such a "proof" exists is that the laws were applied incorrectly; the scientists involved used the explanations for single-foil flight (i.e. birds' wings.)
Whether they did so accidentally or as a joke remains the domain of speculation, but the truth is that the laws of aerodynamics can account for bumblebees quite nicely.
Actually, if that is the fence I'm thinking of, it's still there. It's along the Point Reyes Interpretive Trail, and has been kept up for almost 100 years-- but not mended, not in the strict sense of closing the gap. Slip has since widened the gap to thirty or more feet. The 1989 quake, which was one the Hayward fault, not the San Andreas, moved the fence another six inches from sympathetic slippage.
It's kind of a creepy trail when you think about it, since it pretty well follows the fault line. Rumors of it swalloing a cow, however, are exaggerated, though dealt with in the explanatory signs.
I didn't have a copy on hand to check, but I suspected as much when I heard the words "infinite complacency." I mean, how often do you hear such words in a Hollywood movie, let alone a trailer?
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Have you ever *been* in Britain? There's places where the roads are narrow because the centuries-old buildings were put in when the road had to be wide enough to accomodate cows. If they say the roads are too narrow for sidewalks, I'd assume there's literally no escape on the sides.
Giving up your right to vote for a full scholarship?
Huh. I managed to work my way to full tuition (still paying off the pesky amounts I had to borrow for living expenses.) I did that by working my butt off in high school.
It also means I'm smart enough to not sell my vote.
----
As a side note, did you know that the secret ballot wasn't introduced in the US until the middle of the nineteenth century? We take it for granted, yet it took them decades to realize it might be a good idea...
I'm going on a train trip tonight, as a matter of fact. The Coast Starlight leaves at 11:59PM, which means everybody gets on, stretches their seats back, gets out blankets*, and goes to sleep. You wake up and you're in the Cascades. Lovely.
*And pillows and padding and slippers-- you can take two large carryons AND a purse AND a laptop bag, so smart travellers pack for comfort...
"I will take exception to the idea that there were no allergies and less sickness among rural populations 2 generations ago. There were. The difference is that those kids were just labeled "sickly" and often died back then. Is it a bad thing that those kids have a chance now?"
I concur. My father-in-law, a farming Depression baby, suffered from asthma his whole life, and the last twenty years of his life were a state of constant illness, mostly from the damage he'd suffered pre-treatment. (Though in the later years, there was certainly an element of drugs to treat the side effects of the drugs to treat the primary problem. Certain things stack up over time.)
The irony is that he outlived his "healthy" siblings, every one.
My K-8 days were a decade later, and it's an interesting saga. To begin with, my mother was against skipping grades because of her own experience of always being the youngest in class, and how isolated that made her feel. So when she talked to the Catholic elementary that my siblings were going to, and they said that they could not do anything for me except skip grades, she promptly talked to the public school, which could.
In kindergarten and first grade, I'd being doing other things during the reading sections (learned to read a two and a half and haven't stopped since-- it's not speed-reading, just the natural result of almost three decades of practice.) Then, at a later time, I'd be in the special reading group for those whose comprehension was outside of class norms. (I still remember that the teacher's name was Ms. Redding. We loved her and that little yellow chair that was the universal prop.) Sometime in first grade I was tested but I can't tell you how I scored because as the test kept going I got squirmy and they broke it off. I was apparently reading at a seventh grade level, and even then I thought that said something sad about seventh graders.
As a result I got put into the district Rapid Learner program, a class made up entirely of gifted students at the standard size of thirty (give or take a few.) One teacher per class; the class moved as a unit. I have no "normal" education to compare mine to but I know that we got to do all sorts of things that the regular classes didn't. We got an hour-long dance lesson every Friday. We did a play every year (my elementary had at least five plays a year as a result, with the sixth grade class doing a musical.) In the later years we got to go to places like Yosemite and Marin Headlands. And this was back when the arts were still in schools so we had choir and band (I was in both) along with bi-weekly music lessons and Spanish lessons.
There's some schools these days that are cutting recess. I look on that and shudder.
My junior high had a sort of gifted track but I ended up taking geometry from a local high school. And when I got to high school... well, by my senior year, I had nothing left to take in several subjects, so I got an interesting talk with the administration and the end result that my "guided studies" ended up netting me more credits than a normal year would have.
My point is that I have never lacked for opportunity in educational terms in the public or the private venues. Because of this, I know what education can be like... and the triggers for if I will have to homeschool my children. I'm considering it more seriously as time goes on because my current job works closely with high schools and I don't like what I see. But if they still have RL (which is called GATE-- Gifted And TalEnted-- these days), I may not have to. We'll see.
The more I see of high school, the more I want to homeschool.
And I don't really want to homeschool, but if stupid stuff like this goes on...
Not a bad rationale, but the Air Force didn't exist at the time, just the Army Air Corps.
I think this is what you call "not ready for prime time." I much prefer my county's system, which has a Scantron-like form that you fill in with pen and which gets scanned on-site, giving you an instant total-- and an immediate notification if there's an overvote or undervote. Plus there's that handy little paper trail...
Of course, the part that gets me angriest, as a former poll worker, is the fact that there are people who will mess with someone else's vote. You don't do that.
Bing grew up in Spokane, not Tacoma. His childhood home is now the Alumni center for Gonzaga University.
Despite the rumors to the contrary, he was not expelled from Gonzaga for pushing a piano out of the fourth floor of DeSmet. But it makes a great tale for gullible froshlings.
The ant so affected seems to be Megaloponera Foetens , the "Stink Ant" of the Cameroon. From the article I linked, it is "one of the very few to produce a cry audible to the human ear."
An ant that cries audibly and is enslaved by fungus. And some people say science fiction is implausible.
Actually, I figured out quite early on that the Pictsies were the bizarre mental crossing of Scotsmen, pixies, and Smurfs.
Think about it: you have little tiny blue men, of whom only the old wise one has a white beard, and there's a single female for the lot of them...
One can imagine the mental cross-connections which came up with that one...
I am surprised that nobody's mentioned the obvious: the format that will win out is the one the porn industry picks.
As porn drives the Internet, so it drives the rental industry.
(And in terms of backwards compatibility, you'd be surprised what matters. Our VCR died, so we can't watch DVDs... because our TV is old enough to lack the proper ports. So to watch DVDs we either have to get a new TV or a new VCR. Or we can just not worry about it for a while and watch DVDs on our computers.)
It sounds good, except that in a lot of industries, your work schedule is dependent upon other people in other jobs being there so you can contact them.
As an example, my husband works in retail distribution. He has to be there at a certain hour because the warehouse supervisors are there at a certain hour because the shipping companies start at a certain hour. No doubt the shipping companies start at a certain hour because the planes and trucks arrive at a certain hour and the mail centers open at certain hours, and furthermore they all have to deal with the banks being open at certain hours.
It's the law of unintended consequences. No matter what change you make, things will happen that you didn't even think of.
The short story is available in The Complete Short Stories, Volume I, which is still in print. (It's supposed to be 1 of 3 but I don't think they ever got to the third one.)
This collection also has Asimov's other two favorites (Nightfall is #2, I believe): The Ugly Little Boy and The Last Question. It's well worth picking up if you don't own all of Asimov's science fiction already.
If you own all of Asimov, including all of his non-fiction (he has books in every major category of the Dewey Decimal System), you're getting a little obsessed...
One of the primary reasons that spelling is so important in the English language (and why 'fonetik speling' keeps getting shot down) is the prevalence of homonyms, words that sound the same. A misspelling can drastically change the meaning of a sentence, and a constuction such as "They're playing with their dog over there" needs the distinct spellings to be intelligible.
More to the point, when a person uses the incorrect spelling of a common phrase, they indicate to the readers that they have no idea where the phrase came from, and that means that they may be using it incorrectly as well as misspelling it. That leads to a decrease in the amount of confidence a reader is willing to give the author of a text.
As an example, take "rein (or reining) in", often misspelled as "reign in." The first, evolving from people riding horses, means to pull back on the reins so as to slow the horse down. The second, having to do with ruling, means, what exactly? Reuling in person?
Another common misspelling is "loose" (as in untie) for "lose" (to misplace) and vice versa. Imagine what "lose the Dogs of War" would be like.
And, of course, there is the constant misuse of "literally", as in "happened exactly like", for "figuratively." If you've "literally had my heart torn out" I'm very disturbed that you're still around to write about it.
The poster's main point is that language is supposed to be an aid to communication, and as technical types, we should be exact in its usage. While the language is evolving, misuse acts as a damper on communication, and misspellings and bad grammar lead to lost time for interpretation.
The user interfaces are supposed to be one of the things getting upgraded this time around to make them more intuitive to those who have never worked in a darkroom. The toolbars were geared toward professional photographers-- the Burn tool, for example, portrays a hand position actually used to "burn" areas of a photo during development. Now that their audience has expanded considerably, they want to move toward icons that explain the tools to people who have never even used real film, let alone developed it.
My friendly neighborhood Adobe employee (source of the above info) also told me to never use their manuals. Personally, I recommend Scott Kelby's books, which actually have honest-to-goodness useful information, Visual Quickstart guides, or task-specific books such as Restoration and Retouching (Photoshop or PS Elements.)
Actually, it's not true that nobody figured on the eruption. Author Tim Cahill went to Mt. St. Helens shortly before the major eruption and asked geologists what could possibly happen; their worst-case scenario was so accurate that his article (republished in Jaguars Ripped My Flesh) was widely hailed as a perfect prediction-- right down to the body found of someone wearing a t-shirt that read "I survived Mt. St. Helens." This, of course, caused great embarrassment to Mr. Cahill, who didn't want to take credit for someone else's expertise.
The geologists knew what could happen, but either nobody listened or the scientists were dismissed as alarmists. People take them more seriously now.
I've been using a Kensington optical mouse for years, and it's symmetrical. A quick search shows that many of their mice are non-ergo, which I prefer since "ergonomic" mice are often countured to fit a generic average-- and my hand is not an average shape. If you use the left button as the left button, you should be able to use one right out of the box, but if not, I'm sure you could re-map the buttons with little problem.
Hmm. That would be an interesting app, the 'lefty mouse button switcher.'
I used to have a lot of wrist and shoulder strain from using a mouse. That strain was completely eliminated by doing two things:
1. Replacing the flat, single-level table with a computer desk, and
2. Buying a good chair with back support that actually cost more than the desk.
Seriously, folks, if you are hurting, figure out what you need to do to fix the problem. This product might well help you, but please look into getting better furniture. Sure, good furniture is expensive-- but it's almost certainly cheaper than your health.
And if you are having the problem at your company, and they refuse to improve the ergonomics, look into such simple things as support cushions.
I *know* there are online services to get that stuff, because my husband buys them all the time. Try CD Baby for some domestic stuff, and Ghostland or Progressiveworld to get more info.
Trust me, we've gotten plenty of CDs from online groups; you just have to hunt them down and wrestle them to the ground.
The lyrics go, I kid you not, something like "Beo- Beo- Beo- Beo- Beowulf!"
Found via Beowulfiana
It's got tattoos, it's got a pierced hood,a l
It's got Generation X
It's got lesbians and vitriol
and sadomasochistic latex sex
It's got Mighty Morphin' Power Brokers
and Tonya Harding nude
Macrobiotic
lacto-vegan
non-confrontation
Free Range Food!
It's got the handshake, peace talk,
Non-Aggression Pact
A multicultural interracial non-segregated historical fact
Say Amen. Hallelujah! Say Amen
Certifiable number one smash
Hallelujah! Amen.
Certifiable undeniable solid platinum number one smash.
-Shaming of the True, Kevin Gilbert, 1999
There's a link to a practice of the song here, but keep in mind that it's done by somebody else entirely (KG died before the album was released) and the original is MUCH cooler.
Once again, the apocryphal tale of bumblebees flying "despite the laws of aerodynamics saying they can't" makes the rounds.
In truth, the only reason such a "proof" exists is that the laws were applied incorrectly; the scientists involved used the explanations for single-foil flight (i.e. birds' wings.)
Whether they did so accidentally or as a joke remains the domain of speculation, but the truth is that the laws of aerodynamics can account for bumblebees quite nicely.
Actually, if that is the fence I'm thinking of, it's still there. It's along the Point Reyes Interpretive Trail, and has been kept up for almost 100 years-- but not mended, not in the strict sense of closing the gap. Slip has since widened the gap to thirty or more feet. The 1989 quake, which was one the Hayward fault, not the San Andreas, moved the fence another six inches from sympathetic slippage.
It's kind of a creepy trail when you think about it, since it pretty well follows the fault line. Rumors of it swalloing a cow, however, are exaggerated, though dealt with in the explanatory signs.
I didn't have a copy on hand to check, but I suspected as much when I heard the words "infinite complacency." I mean, how often do you hear such words in a Hollywood movie, let alone a trailer?