Archive for: August, 2007

Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia

Aug 31 2007 Published by Sarah, etc. under Lexpionage

At 36 characters long, hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia is the fear of long words. And is it any wonder. I tried to set about looking up very long words, to see what sort were out there, but most of them that are very long don’t mean much of anything and are mostly just agglomerations of prefixes and suffixes. We all know antidisestablishmentarianism, which has an actual meaning (opposition to the withdrawal of state support from an established church), but nobody knows it anymore. It’s also not the longest word in English at only 28 characters. Most of the longest of the longest are diseases and chemicals, which are no fun.

So let’s play together, what really long words do you like that meet the following criteria:

  1. More than 20 characters
  2. Not entirely composed of prefixes and suffixes
  3. Not the name of a chemical or a disease

I’ll start with:

Antitranssubstantiationalist: If you doubt the bread and wine really turns to flesh and blood when the priest blesses it.

Your turn.

6 responses so far

The Worst Sort of Poverty

Aug 30 2007 Published by Sarah, etc. under Speechifying

When’s the last time you claimed you wanted to “make a difference.” Did you actually go out and make it, or did you just sit around, talking about it? If you think about the phrase, do you find it’s lost its meaning? Most of the time, making a difference isn’t so much about actually taking action as it is about having people think you care.

For example, the Real World Studio project in Hale County, Alabama, where graphic design students go to “make a difference” as part of the Hale Empowerment and Revitalization Organization (HERO). The article never says whether or not any individual or family was actually, physically helped—that is, experienced a measurable change in circumstances. But it does say a lot about how seriously a group of super-educated, effete snobs take their moral grandstanding.

And grandstand they do, over and over again, discussing the gravity of their vocation as designers with toxic levels of narcissism:

Convened here nonetheless is an unlikely group—eight students and recent graduates from across the country with a month to accomplish something meaningful; something that they hope will make a difference for the people of Greensboro and the surrounding Hale County. By day 18 of their stay, however, that “something” is yet to be determined. In a county where 34 percent of children live below the poverty line, a quarter of the residents don’t have access to clean drinking water, and the biggest employer is a catfish-processing plant that is rumored to be closing, the team has lots of issues to choose from.

Other projects include green spaces in urban Baltimore and get this—design supplies for displaced Katrina victims. I wonder if anyone will use the design supplies to create a work of art that says, “We would have liked some plywood, jackasses!”

After spending time trying to think up a manifesto (though there is one notable quote from a guy who doesn’t want to write. He wants to help!), they quit that and begin collecting ideas. They choose to confront Hale County’s poor drinking water standard—in the drought this year, many people have little to no water and those that do must deal with terrible contamination. They fixate on water meters and determine that they way their going to help is to create a publication drawing attention to the idea that “clean water is not a right.” Thusly:

“We were all united by our shock over the hard truth that in America [clean] water is not a right,” says Ellen Sitkin. “That people here living in run-down trailers have large-screen TVs with access to satellite cable, but they don’t have clean water.” At the office of the city water board, right across the street from Project M’s temporary home, the designers discover the missing link: a $23 water meter. With labor and installation, the total cost to bring water to a home in Hale County is $425.

Where do they live that they don’t understand this? Have they never paid a water bill? Do they not know that every time you turn on the faucet or flush the toilet, you pay money? Wherever that is, they also don’t have newspapers, because they printed their document on newsprint:

Newsprint, which had intrigued them as a medium since they started, carries the message. “By the time you’ve read the piece, your hands are dirty,” says Smith. “It’s not polished, it’s not slick, it will get wet and ruined and fall apart. It’s raw. If we wanted to create a message about [Hale County], then it had to look like [Hale County].”

And that about sums it up. Clean, beautiful people from the city trekking out to the middle of nowhere Alabama to make a newspaper about water, where the simile of the printing medium is just as important as the water. See the whole publication at 425.

That’s the cost. $425 to hook a family up to municipal water—and only then if it can be determined that the family will be able to afford the bill. The manifesto voice of reason, the guy that wanted to really do something, raised $2000 to take the trip to Hale County. That’s four water meters and a good start toward a fifth.

But if your goal is to make a difference, you can’t just put your money where your mouth is. And that’s an even worse sort of poverty.

3 responses so far

I Got Your Ctrl+D Right Here

Aug 30 2007 Published by Sarah, etc. under Geekery

A couple weeks ago, Firefox nerfed all my bookmarks. I’m not even sure how it happened or if anything else happened at the same time. One minute I was reading along a very weepy post-Deathly Hallows fic and then next, Firefox just shut down. When it came back up, everything that had been on my bookmarks toolbar, when I keep several RSS feeds, was gone, as was the entirety of my bookmarks folder—years of URLS. I lost fic links, and recipes, and everything in my “shopping” folder. You can recover that folder, I found out later, if you act immediately. I didn’t. I was so concerned at getting back to McGonagall’s penseive memories that I didn’t notice. And by the time I did, Firefox had made many daily backups of nothing.

I have done a few topical searches lately on different things and many of the hits are for Del.icio.us. And they’ve been surprisingly helpful, not mention that once I get what I’m looking for, I can use the tags to find more of what I also might want. I’ve seen it for years, but have never used, or considered using the service because of irrational feelings toward its orthography. Do you just “delicious”? Or do you say del ici o us? It’s ludicrous!

But so is losing years worth of saved stuff because a browser got snippy with me. So I’m looking for an online bookmarking system to use so make sure that that doesn’t happen again. Ideally, I’d like something that could be integrated with my Google account, since everything is already there, but I haven’t seen anything like it outside of Google Notebook. Great application, and I do a bit of bookmarking that way, but nothing I’d consider long term.

Do you all use any services? Del.icio.us? Or something else? If you use more than one, what works best for you?

p.s. First person to tell me to get on Twitter is gonna get me, at your house, late at night, giving dramatic readings of weepy Harry Potter fanfic.

6 responses so far

Everywhere Like Such As, Pop. 2

Aug 28 2007 Published by Sarah, etc. under Speechifying

You’ve seen Miss South Carolina right? She’s the pageant contestant who suffered a case of blond-nerves-bright lights-hard question at just the wrong time. If you haven’t see her, watch the video. And sympathize. Lady is obviously trying very hard to win some scholarship money.

And if you don’t quite understand what she’s saying, here’s a Tube Map for Miss South Carolina. Everywhere Like Such As is my new favorite place!

8 responses so far

Ask Math Girl 2: A Huge Atom Smashing Machine

Aug 28 2007 Published by Sarah, etc. under Math Girl

Just in case you woke up this morning asking yourself, “I wonder where I could get a short podcast about space weather and modern symphonic music?” I’ve created a second episode of Ask Math Girl for your listening pleasure. Ask Math Girl 2: A Huge Atom Smashing Machine is just over 17 minutes long and guaranteed to teach you something you didn’t know. Not anything good, just something.

I’ve also added an integrated player for those who don’t have quicktime or wish to download the whole thing. Enjoy!

4 responses so far

I Brake for Spaceships and Wizards

Aug 27 2007 Published by Sarah, etc. under Geekery

Marcie has a post up about bumper stickers and bumper sticker generators and what sort of bumper stickers you have on your car. I am bumper sticker free for the first time since I got a car. That first car ended up covered in stickers—mostly Union Jacks and Oasis stickers, but also some hot Real Men Love Jesus action. It looked like the back side of most college cars in the mid to late 90s. Though once, leaving an IHOP, I did watch, in the rearview mirror, a guy read (lips moving an everything) some of the stickers and then start hollering and shaking his fist. I’m still not sure what it was that pissed him off, but I like to think it was all the British flags. I imagine him standing there, full of some Rooty Tooty Fresh ‘n’ Fruity, screaming, “Cornwallis may have surrendered but I sure as hell didn’t!”

After that, I got fancy and did a bit of custom sticker making, printing out 300 dpi images of Serenity and Wash playing with his dinosaurs with captions, then laminating them and covering the back with magnetic tape. The Serenity said, “And every breath we drew…” which about 10 people in the whole world will really get and maybe only five of them will claim. And the Wash sticker said, “Who’s driving this thing? Oh, right. That would be me.” I never liked that caption, but I wanted to have a Wash sticker on my car, so I left it there.

Later, I used the same print, thick laminate and magnetic tape method to make a ribbon-style sticker, green with green and white stripes, that said, “I trust Severus Snape.” I never could bring myself to actually stick it to my car, afraid that someone would steal or deface it and I wouldn’t have one. So I stuck it to my fridge and there it will remain, what with the time for choosing sides being over.

My latest car has a back bumper entirely made of plastic. There will be no stickers for me, since I prefer the magnets. Unless somebody gives me a “Republicans for Voldemort” sticker. That I’d… tape up in the rear window.

3 responses so far

An Octothorp, a Pilcrow, and a Dele Walk into a Bar

Aug 24 2007 Published by Sarah, etc. under Lexpionage

Today is typography day! Yesterday was punctuation day, but I forgot to let anybody else know, except Doc, and he and I actually had a 45-minute long chat last night about ampersands and interrobangs and where on the internet we could find the prettiest interrobang image.*

So this morning when I was thinking of something to blog about, I kept coming back and back to that symbol and thinking how I’d already talked about interrobangs and there’s only so surprised and incredulous one person can be in any given day before you need a nap. So I went hunting for symbols.

What would you call this symbol: # ? Number sign? Numeral symbol, pound, hash, hex, crosshatch, mesh, comment sign? Sharp? I think it has more synonyms than any other piece of punctuation. But its real name is octothorpe. How cool a word is that? Octothorp. The wikipedia entry on the topic has a lot to say about it and all the different ways its used and its various contextual meanings. Notably, that many speakers of American English (after all, the British would call £ the pound sign) call it a pound symbol, because it’s an evolution of the piece of typography used to set “lb” (the measure of mass) apart from anything that might have been just a lower case L or a numeral 1. It was “lb” with a line through the top of both letters and evidently just let the curve of the b evolve into a line of it’s own until it looked like #.

Cooler than that, though, is Neatorama’s explanation of its history. The root of the word is “thorp,” derived from “thorpe,” the Norse word for village, also where we get the “thorpe” suffix for town names. Early mapmakers used the symbol to indicate a village surrounded by eight fields. Octothorp. Exclamation point! #!!!

And for humor’s sake, Christopher has been flirting with teaching himself C#, the programming language, for several years now. He’s got a giant red book and everything. But he didn’t want to say C-plus-plus, because that wasn’t it, and was having a hard time communicating it. Was he trying to learn C-hash? C-number? So he sent me out to look for what it was actually called, because why does a man take a wife, if not to have a researcher who’l also cook dinner. And when I came back with “C-sharp” we had a flurry of forehead smacking. We’ve both been reading music since we were little kids and it didn’t occur to either of us that # is just the easiest possible way to write the musical sharp symbol.

And then that led to finding out that the paragraph symbol (or backward-p, as I am now ashamed to have been calling it), ¶, is called the pilcrow. The wiki for pilcrow has an interesting picture of the evolution of the symbol, from a basic “c” standing for capitalum, or begin a new thing here, through what looks like a cent symbol, into a fancy cent symbol, into an extremely stylized cent symbol somebody started doodling with. It notes specifically that the final version, closest to the pilcrow we know and love, was “left as a note from the scribe to the rubricator.” And then you’re like, what’s a rubrictor? The guy on the manuscript making team who goes back and make the important parts red. How awesome is that guy?

Which sent me to the entry on the dele symbol, which has so far cleverly avoided an HTML designation, so I can reprint it for you here. It’s the proofing symbol used for delete, and it does look a bit like a little letter “d” that decided to get up and run away. Did anybody out there ever learn to use many formal proofing symbols? I know I only did in college and then used very few (including the pilcrow! But not by it’s good name) and the one I used most often, and saw most often, was “delete.” Except it just looked like a vertical cursive “e” or a long line wiht a loop on the end. What I was seeing was the top of a real dele.

Oh, the unforgivable puns. If anybody can work these into regular conversation (typesetters and copy editors are out) today, without getting a massive eyeroll or a smack to the back of the head, I will totally give you a dollar. I know I couldn’t. Which I why I have to blog about it. Even though I’m not going to be able to resist and start talking about it first thing and owe everybody a bunch of dollars. I’ll go get a bunch of crisp ones from the bank and hope they ask me why so I can say, “stripping for typography.”

* The MySpace Interrobang, I think. Which is pretty weird.

9 responses so far

The Future of Piracy

Aug 23 2007 Published by Sarah, etc. under Geekery

Yesterday, The Pirate Bay reopened Suprnova, new, improved, bigger and better than ever after it shut down several years ago when its own was threatened with legal action. As of this morning, there are approximately one zillion torrents. One that caught me particularly is Bioshock– a first person shooter I’ve been really looking forward to playing. There are currently 121 leechers working off 1 seeder. It’d be easier to wait two more hours and just go buy it.

Torrents aren’t anything new, and Suprnova isn’t new either. For years, it was the best possible torrent site. I used it extensively to download episodes of Six Feet Under so that I could write reviews of the show for a now defunct media site. I also paid for an HBO subscription, watching the episode first the traditional way, then downloading it over night.

What is new is what the new Suprnova management’s philosophy:

Finally, some words for non-internet loving companies: This is how it works. Whatever you sink, we build back up. Whomever you sue, ten new pirates are recruited. Wherever you go, we are already ahead of you. You are the past and the forgotten, we are the internet and the future.

It gives me goose bumps. And I’m not sure if they’re goosebumps of amazement and or of guilt. Paying for goods and services is important. I believe in that. Using products you don’t pay for (be they games, movies, music, whatever) is nothing more or less than stealing. But I find I really want the Powers that Be out there, the ignorant suits controling DRM policy, to listen to this. To realize that it’s going beyong piracy, beyond watershed, beyond paradigm shift into revolution.

But then I tell myself to calm down and remind myself that I’m a believer in business and that trade is the foundation of civilization, reinforcing our Creator-given right to private property. And then I let myself have a daydream wherein the guy who makes me sit through all those stupid anti-piracy commercials on the DVDs I have purchased has to sit through me and everybody else like me, who understands that in a pirated version of the product that warning is the first thing to go, smacking him repeatedly.

3 responses so far

Science is Hott! So is American Studies.

Aug 22 2007 Published by Sarah, etc. under Geekery

The Ars Technica blog wrote a great post about science in movies– and how they so frequently get it totally wrong. They gave several good examples, starting with how a speeding bus could jump a fifty foot freeway gap. Movies dumbing down science makes a lot of great points about drama and physics and how they don’t always intersect.

They also didn’t talk about the movies that did science really well. Titanic, for all its other faults, was a great disaster movie because the final shots of the ship were some foam and a little bloop when it finally went under. And then they immediately screwed it up by having their protagonists get “sucked under,” which wouldn’t have happened. But they made up for it ahead of time with the complete awesomeness of watching the back end rise up and eventually become so heavy that it cracked the deck clear down to the keel. Say what you want about the love story– it’s a great disaster movie.

And though it’s not a movie, Firefly did have one completely awesometacular scene that seemed (cos I don’t know, so correct me if I need correcting) completely correct. In the episode “Out of Gas,” the engine has a blowout and catches fire. The crew quickly seal off the upperdecks* and open the cargo bay to vent the flames. The fire whooshes out of the engine room, down the closest passage and out the bay doors, spiraling, pulling everything with it. The camera cuts to an external shot and you see, in total silence, the fire dissipate into nothing in the vacuum of space. And later, when they confront other forms of space-related death resulting from not having a working engine, they make it a point to say that none of them will actually suffocate; they’ll freeze to death long before that happens.

And I can’t think of any other movies that get science really right or really wrong off the top of my head. My favorite movie pet peeve is from Clue– near the end of the film, Mrs. Peacock slams the front door on someone she thinks is a Jehovah’s Witness or similar and says, “Our lives are in danger, you beatnik!” Except it’s 1951 and the first use of the word “beatnik” didn’t happen until 1958, after everybody freaked out about Sputnik and Jack Kerouac published On the Road. And both of those events occurred in October of 1957.

I’m a big suspender of disbelief. I can justify most things. Another of Ars Technica’s examples is how many calories Magneto would have expended moving the Golden Gate Bridge in X3. That didn’t even occur to me. What did occur to me, because I am a Beat Generation scholar and spent a chunk of my honeymoon in San Francisco visiting the places I’d read about was why he didn’t just move the Bay Bridge? It’s practically on top of Alcatraz.

12 responses so far

Did They Label You Gifted?

Aug 21 2007 Published by Sarah, etc. under Speechifying

I can’t think of the word I want. The one for ‘rule by the smart’. So meritocracy is going to have to do for now, because I think we should talk about super-smart kids. Time Magazine’s article Are We Failing Our Geniuses has ticked me off, and I’m not even sure why.

Beginning with several anecdotes about frighteningly smart children, the article goes on to probe whether or not there are sufficient education options for remarkably intelligent children. And if there aren’t, what is the government going to do about it? They list figures, including the massive gaps in spending instituted by the No Child Left Behind debacle. And they go on to make analogies. For instance, a child with an IQ of 140 in the same class as a child of 100 will have as hard a time learning as the child with 100 IQ would, if she were forced to be in class with low IQ children (say, 60). There are three more pages of hand-wringing and anecdotes before this gem:

Often the kids are wasting away in average classes, something that drives Bob Davidson crazy: “I mean, that’s criminal to send a kid [who already reads well] to kindergarten … Somebody should go to jail for that! That is emotional torture!”

Raise your hand if you could read by kindergarten. Me too. And that taught me a lot. Specifically, when I got the first grade and we had reading lessons, I read ahead and was scolded. I corrected the other children and was scolded. I asked a lot of questions about commas and was rewarded with knowledge about them. And those were crucial lessons, I think. What none of the people in the article seem to acknowledge is that kids are kids. And yes, they’re little sponges, but they need to soak up more than pre-Calculus and medieval literature. They need to learn to share and make friends. They need to learn to stand in line and to ask questions and cut and paste and color inside the lines, right before they learn to color outside the lines. They also need to learn to sit down and shut up– skills which will serve them particularly well later in life.

They probably don’t need to be taught that because they are special, the rules don’t apply to them. They certainly don’t need to be caught that because they are special, or gifted, or geniuses, that not only deserve, but require special circumstances and consideration, extra spending, more time and energy. Doing those things, setting them apart, growing them like little natural resources to be harvested when the time is right– that’s failing our geniuses. Supporting them would be convincing them that they’re kids; very smart kids, but kids nonetheless, who will be happier people in the long run for being themselves.

22 responses so far

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