Torgo χ

Look, LOOK into the spirals!! Hear and obey me! Buy my boooooks! Only theeeeey can make you haaaaappy! Buuuuy them!! I snuck dirty words into them, for yoooooouuuu! COLLECT THEM ALL!!

Tags: books, perl, rtf

Current Mood: controlling you
Current Music: theremins

17 denials | Deny!

For your consideration...

Perl & LWP

The Unicode Slide Rule

Many RSSs

goto LabelHELL;

The Nightmare

The Industrial Art Gallery

Your soundtrack for living

My soundtrack for living

Punch Card

My Amazon page and Wishies: 1·2·3

My stuff in CPAN

My LJ Style

LJ auto-cut

Feeds I provide to Livejournal

The Permalink Icon

Home

Pics

And stop using Internet Explorer!  Really, it's dangerous for your machine and your private data. Use Firefox instead.  It's a breeze to install and easier to use.

Μέκκα λέκκα ἅϊ; Μέκκα ἅϊνι ὧ !

Deny!

Dear Log,

I asked the pharmacy to refill a prescription, and they said okay now here it is.

Wrong pills.  I caught it last night, just as I was setting out the pills for the coming week.  This afternoon, I got the right pills and returned the wrong ones.  No harm no foul?

I pay attention, and I know what shapes the current right pills are, so catching it was no problem.  For me.  This time.  And with this particular pill.

Other people, other pills...

Tags: failure, medicine

location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: druct
Current Music: David Bowie- Panic in Detroit

1 denial | Deny!

Dear Log,

Well, there's a compare and contrast in cover design for ya.

Tags: design, media

location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: dual
Current Music: white noise

2 denials | Deny!

Dear Log,

The Alabama state quarter that came out in 2003 has a portrait of Helen Keller on it, and tiny tiny tiny Braille lettering of her name.

It says: ⠠⠠⠓⠑⠇⠢ ⠠⠠⠅⠑⠇⠇⠻

That's: ^ ^ h e l EN   ^ ^ k e l l ER

(^^ = allcaps)

Or, if your menagerie of fonts doesn't show up the braille characters above, here it is with images (from here):

Tags: design, language, linguistics, money, writing

location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: pointy
Current Music: Smash Mouth- Disconnect the Dots

Deny!

Dear Log,

Whoops, I forgot to update The April Fools RFC Page this year.  Until now.

Additions:

• RFC5242 A Generalized Unified Character Code: Western European and CJK Sections. J. Klensin, H. Alvestrand. April 1 2008. (Format: TXT=31314 bytes) (Status: INFORMATIONAL)
• RFC5241 Naming Rights in IETF Protocols. A. Falk, S. Bradner. April 1 2008. (Format: TXT=25304 bytes) (Status: INFORMATIONAL)

Tags: net, writing

location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: haaaaah
Current Music: Powerman 5000- Nobody's Real

Deny!

Dear Log,

Remember Netscape 0.9b post?

The "Guided Tour", etc buttons didn't work– until now, because jwz went and got mcom.com back, and back up and running, with the original content!

Tags: success, technology, web

location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: zilly
Current Music: David Bowie- Oh You Pretty Things

Deny!

Dear Log,

So, Chinese has two main ways to write numbers, the normal way (which happens to be trivial to forge), and the complicated unforgeable (financial/commercial) way:

(By "forging", I don't mean imitating into a complete blank, I mean things like tweaking a 6 to look like an 8.)

I wonder if there has ever been an attempt at any such thing in Latin scripts.  I do recall how some (especially old-stylee) fonts have digits where some have ascenders, some have descenders (like the first font below), whereas now-common fonts (like the second font, below) simply make all the digits like capital letters— going from baseline to cap hight.

I took a guess that that font thing might be an imitation of some old handwriting style that used ascenders and descenders in some way that would, as with Chinese, make forging difficult.  But of all the sites that I google on that have illustrations of normal pre-1900 handwriting styles, none show digits.  Dang.  If I were back at Northwestern, I'd look in their library's section on paleography, which was surprisingly large (i.e., maybe two shelves), and which just might have mentioned numerals.

Of course, on checks, the thing that non-East-Asians do to keep people from messing with the digits, is that we write out the sum, in words. "Two hundred and thirty four" and then a big "~" to fill out the blank.  But I'm taking a wild guess (and merely that) that Chinese people use the financial numeral-hanzi in wider applications than on checks.

Tags: china, language, linguistics, money, writing

location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: financial
Current Music: Grieg- Waltz (38.7)

3 denials | Deny!

Dear Log,

«[In China] The means of access are different too. The fastest growth last year was in rural areas. A third of users go online at net cafes, known as wangba (web bars).

The scene this week at a suburban wangba in Beijing was typical: scores of young people hunched in front of screens in a dimly lit room; the men in hoodies and parkas jabbing at their keyboards, blasting aliens and soldiers, while the women are transfixed by weepy Korean soaps and Taiwanese gameshows.

"My life would be very boring without the net," admits Yang Jing, a 19-year-old art student from Anhui, tearing herself away from a glitzy movie. "It's just occupied with school and this - I watch films, play games and chat to friends. If we didn't have the net, I wouldn't know what to do."

[...]

Most popular "what is" questions [to search engines] in the world:
1 what is love
2 what is autism
3 what is rss
4 what is lupus
5 what is sap »

—"Behind the Great Firewall:: 210 million Chinese have web access and any day now China will have more users than the US.  But instead of spreading freedom, the net has been tamed by Beijing's iron grip"

Tags: china, net

location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: firey
Current Music: Grieg- Arietta (12-1)

1 denial | Deny!

Dear Log,

[Edit: Yup, it's a Clove Slip Hitch]

So, when I get take-out at the local sushi place, they tie the bag up like so:

You hold it by the big loop.  What's the point of the whole complexity, as opposed to just this simpler slipknot?  It's that once you want to get at your food, you pull on that little tab and the whole knot instantly comes undone.  (Pull on that other little loop, and it won't budge and nothing happens.)

I've been trying to figure out the knot— so that I see how it's arranged; and then so I can tie that knot, and then can tie it quickly, without having to have any necktie-like steps of "and then do it so that it looks like this, and if it doesn't look right, then start aaaall over". 

I've gotten past the step of how it's arranged internally. Instead of it being a blur of crumpled plastic as above, here is the topohoovically same knot, done with shoelace on a chopstick, and then loosened, for ease of viewing:

Again, tying it is not too hard, if you get to do it slowly.  But now I'm optimizing for ease and speed! Oof.

Also, I wonder what the knot is called.

* * *

Today I started fiddling with this knot problem, and when I looked up, four and a half hours had passed.  I have a strange brain.

Tags: design

location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: nodal
Current Music: David Bowie- Scary Monsters (& Super Creeps)

9 denials | Deny!

Dear Log,

I was just grepping thru old mail and stumbled on this fact: I've been generating RSSes for five years now!  With extremely generous hosting from Ignatz, of course.

Granted, maybe a fifth of the feeds are broken at any one time, but I try to make sure the really popular or really important ones get quick attention when they break.

Tags: rss

location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: calm
Current Music: Grieg- Valse-Impromptu (47-1)

Deny!

Dear Log,

Two or three people that I used to see around a lot have emailed me in the past few weeks saying hi, haven't seen you around, what are you up to these days, how are you.  Now, if you took an EEG of my meaty meaty brain, it might turn out to be the percussion track from Talking Heads "The Great Curve" played backwards— so I've been finding "how are you?" and "how have you been?" to actually be real bafflers. 

Ignatz, years ago, recommended E.B. White Writings from The New Yorker 1927-1976 just as fine fun reading.  Stumbling around in it the other day looking around for something else, I came upon a phrase that feels like me: that I am in a "state of repair".

Aside from that, I'm trying to take things easy, and I'm doing a modicum of weird language-games JavaScript/database/dictionary work, most of which ends up on CDROMs.

I haven't been on chat much, because sometimes it spreads my attention way too thin.  Dunno, maybe a reaction to the sheer suddenness of the change in daylight-per-day here.  Like: put on the mp3 player, have a late lunch, and walk around town until it's dusk, come home– and see that now dusk equals 10pm.  Whoops, there went a day, and there's still work to do, email to catch up on, etc., and then plonk asleep.  But from here on until the solstice, it's just slow change, so daily schedules can sync back to normality.  Since I do most of my work at "night", this time of year throws me for a loop.

Tags: brain

location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: meaty
Current Music: Grieg- Popular Melody (12-5)

Deny!

Dear Log,

I, pathetically, have just ordered one of these.

Ah well.  I can, pathetically, return it if turns out to be a dud.

Tags: brain, design

location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: wavy
Current Music: David Bowie with Queen- Under Pressure

3 denials | Deny!

Dear Log,

Ouch:
«

Study: Alaska worst in U.S. at producing college graduates
By Alan Suderman | Juneau Empire
Thursday, May 08, 2008

Juneau's fifth-graders got a peek of college life earlier this week when they took a tour and some classes at the University of Alaska Southeast.

But for many of them, it could be the last time they set foot on a college campus as a student, according to a study released Wednesday by the Alaska Commission on Postsecondary Education.

The study, written by former Juneau resident Ron Phipps, said Alaska's "'student pipeline' is the leakiest in the U.S." For every 50 ninth-grade students in Alaska, only three will graduate from college in the next 10 years, according to the study.

And 19 of those 50 students will drop out of high school, according to the report. The statistics used in the report come from the federal Department of Education, according to Lora Jorgensen, an outreach officer with the Alaska Commission on Postsecondary Education.

Phipps, who is a senior associate with the Institute for Higher Learning Policy in Washington, D.C., said education does not have a strong place in Alaska's culture.

"There simply is not this sense that education is important relative to other states," he said in a phone interview.

Phipps said there are a number of reasons why Alaskans don't value education as much as other states, including the fact that there are ample opportunities in the state to make a good living without a college degree.

But Phipps said physical jobs and higher education don't have to be mutually exclusive, and having a degree gives older workers more opportunities as their bodies stop holding up to demanding work.

The report suggests that the state should work toward making college more affordable and accessible for Alaskans, and that its K-12 schooling should be geared more toward making students ready for postsecondary education.

The study focused on Alaska as a whole, and information specific to Juneau was not in Phipps' report.

But he said Juneau is an "anomaly" in Alaska, thanks in part to the high number of state jobs in town that require some level of higher education. Parents who have postsecondary degrees are likely to produce students who get degrees, Phipps said.

The Juneau School District's curriculum and assessment coordinator, Phil Loseby, said the district doesn't keep statistics on how many of its students go on to graduate from a university or technical college on time. But he said that students who take standardized tests for college admissions tend to do better, on average, than students both statewide and nationwide.

Emphasizing the benefits of pursuing schooling or training after high school is a priority for teachers and students at Juneau-Douglas High School, according to Kelly Hopson, a counselor at the school.

"We're doing everything we can to promote postsecondary education," Hopson said.

She said all students are encouraged to go beyond the district's minimum to graduate so they'll be eligible for postsecondary education, Hopson said. Even students who say they want to dive right into the work force after high school are encouraged to take more advanced classes that will get them into college in case they change their minds, Hopson said.

"We don't want to close any doors," she said.

Other information from the study:

• All 49 other states and the countries of Turkey and Mexico have a higher "degree completion rate" than Alaska.

• Alaskans with college degrees are more likely to vote and less likely to smoke than those with only high school degrees.

• Alaska has the second highest unemployment rate in the nation for high school dropouts at 17.3 percent.
»

Tags: alaska, edudoom

location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: doompt
Current Music: David Bowie- All The Young Dudes

Deny!

Dear Log,

The Canadian spelling predicament, well depicted as between two columns in a long table.

Tags: language, linguistics

location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: soakered
Current Music: Snow Patrol- Counting Cars

1 denial | Deny!

Dear Log,

«What has to be done is to have Russian taught at first in a Western phonetic type.  Then it becomes a language not very much more difficult to acquire than, say, German by a Frenchman.  When the learner can talk with some freedom, has a fairly full vocabulary, a phraseology, knows his verb and so on, then and then only should he take up the unfamiliar and confusing set of visual images of Russian lettering— I speak from the point of view of those who read the Latin alphabet.  How confusing it may be only those who have tried it can tell.  [Ahem, ahem, AHEM] Its familiarity to the eye increases the difficulty; totally unfamiliar forms would be easier to learn.  The Frenchman or Englishman is confronted with

COP ;

the sound of that is

SAR !

For those who learn languages, as so many people do nowadays, by visual images, there will always be an undercurrent toward saying "COP." The mind plunges hopelessly through that tangle to the elements of a speech which is as yet unknown.

[...] But to almost anyone it is possible to learn Russian if at first it is presented in a lettering that gives no trouble.

If I found myself obliged to learn Russian urgently, I would get some accepted system of transliteration, carefully transcribe every word of Russian in my text-book into the Latin characters, and learn the elements of the language from my manuscript.  A year or so ago I made a brief visit to Russia with a "Russian Self-Taught" in my pocket.  Nothing sticks, nothing ever did stick of that self-taught Russian except the words that I learnt in Latin type.  Those I remember as I remember all words, as groups of Latin letters.  I learnt to count, for example, up to a hundred.  The other day I failed to recognise the Russian word for eleven in Russian characters until I had spelt it out. Then I said, "Oh, of course!" But I knew it when I heard it.

I write of these things from the point of view of the keen learner. Some Russian teachers will be found to agree with me; others will not.»

—H. G. Wells: What is Coming?, A Forecast of Things after the War [1916], chapter 10, "The United States, France, Britain, and Russia"

There's no winning.  If you have a similar script, you get stuff like CAMOBAP and PECTOPAH.  If you have a totally dissimilar script... well, I occasionally try to bang my head up against the wall of learning Yiddish.  A Germanic language, no problem, right?  Well, no problem when it's written in Latin script with something even vaguely in the direction of the standard Romanization.  But try to learn Yiddish in Hebrew script, and my GOD.

I think I'll just go back to learning Haitian.  Creoles are fun; and it's like if French were the Sopranos season 1 DVDs, and then you jump right to Haitian, which is like the season 5 DVDs.  You have to guess what you've missed in the intervening centuries/episodes— but you also get to find out what finally happens with the verb system, or whatever.  Without having to learn a new alphabet.

* * *

By the way, Haitian's language code is "ht", as in http://ht.wikipedia.org. It was the last two-letter language code that ISO has approved, and it was five years ago.  Previous versions of the two-letter code set shockingly lacked this national language of millions of people.

Guess who, back in the day, went and petitioned ISO to allocate the code. Hint: name sounds like it starts with a "sh", ends with a "urk".

[Spoiler Alert!!]

Tags: design, failure, language, success, writing

location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: scrupt
Current Music: Cameo- Word Up

2 denials | Deny!

Dear Log,

Man, when James Burke is on, he is on:

Youtube link: Last ten minutes of Connections "Eat, Drink and Be Merry" (s1e8).  Watch it.

Tags: doom, media, success

location: The moon, or Moscow
Current Mood: boom

1 denial | Deny!

Dear Log,

Sammidge.

From pixelcomic.

Tags: food, media, success

location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: pixt
Current Music: Adrian Belew- Oh Daddy

3 denials | Deny!

Dear Log,

I take a normal daily multivitamin.  It contains a solid 400IU of vitamin D, which is a good solid dose, right from the USDA.  For normal Earthican people.  Who have light skin.  And who are getting normal exposure to sun at normal wavelengths and intensities, for normally long periods of the year.

Whelps long story short, nearly all of the 600K people living in Alaska are moderately to seriously deficient in Vitamin D; and what they need is not 400IU daily (which they're not getting unless they're taking a multivitamin), but something three or four times that. 

My psych-MD (therefore MD) said ohyeah, it's practically a given that general blood tests at the doctors' office come back saying "Vitamin D: very yes too little", which you'd think MDs might mention to all their new patients even as they walk in the door for the first time even before there's a need for blood test for any reason, but, uh, not so much. She remembers one extreme case— a patient whose general blood report incidentally said: "vitamin D: undetectable".  I.e., there was presumably some in there, but that it was below the presumably tiny threshold that the blood-mo-stat could detect.  That means they could get RICKETS.  Haven't heard that word in a while, have you? Well...

* * *

So I'm off to go get to buy some 1000IU pills, and take them daily, on top of my normal multivitamin, daily.

* * *

By the way, anyone living at or north of Boston (or, on the other coast, Portand and north of)— the above applies to you too for at least November, December, January, and February. 

Of course, doses change significantly for infants, pregnant women, and nursing mothers.

Look in the Google tubes for details.

Tags: alaska, failure, medicine

location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: rickety
Current Music: The Church- Under the Milky Way

Deny!

Dear Log,

The "Mistakes Were Made...By Others!" episode of CBC Ideas over here is fascinating.  It's about the psychology of cognitive dissonance, underlying groupthink and justification.  It's 54 minutes, and very worth the bother.  I listened this morning, as I was doing dishes, in my first hour of being awake, during which I can't be trusted near a computer or I'll make even less sense than usual.

Tags: brain, failure

location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: dissident
Current Music: OneRepublic f/Timbaland- Apologize

Deny!

Dear Log,

May is (Inter?)National Masturbation Month.

Way ahead of ya, folks.

Tags: dongs

location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: avant-garde
Current Music: Devo- S.I.B.

Deny!

Dear Log,

Wow, lots of things are starting to show up in Google Books.

And I think we just learned something about their process.

Tags: books, success, web

location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: scanner/darkly
Current Music: David Bowie- Young Americans

Deny!

Dear All Windows People,

Thoughts?

It's my first stab into the Cenobite-haunted world of the Registry (a/k/a The Special People's File System), and the modifying thereof.

Tags: program, programming, windows

location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: regulated
Current Music: Bloodhound Gang- Pennsylvania

1 denial | Deny!

Dear Log,

Hot Linguist Boyfriend left today for three weeks of traveling, putting this whole bell rope protocol on hold.

* * *

I am reverse engineering a wily Oriental knot.

Specifically, it is the knot that the Koreans at the local Orientalese restaurant tie, on bags of take-out.  Obviously, it holds the top of the bag shut; but unlike this slipknot thing, it's instantly undoable— there's an inch or so the knot sticking out, a ripcord, and you pull on that, and the knot comes undone. So there's obviously no need for crazy untying.

I bought something at their shop and I didn't untie the top of the bag, but instead I cut it off with scissors, so I could stare at its knot endlessly.  Once I figured out which bits belonged to which side of the bag, it could see every turn in the knot, and now I can even reproduce it– but it's laborious. I'm currently clueless on how you would sort of cats'-cradle your fingers so that you could tie this knot without it being as awkward as an eighth grader trying to tie Windsor knot.

Knot, I will conquer you!!

I could just ask the Koreans, but that would be cheating.  Or I could say "Can you tie it and I'll video it?" and I'd hit Video on my camera (and slo-mo thru it later)— but Hot Linguist Boyfriend took the camera.

Tags: design, failure, success

location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: nodal
Current Music: Cake- Open Book

1 denial | Deny!

Dear Log,

WHAT'S ALL THIS I HEAR ABOUT THE WANGZ?
[~2min ha-ha video]

Tags: dongs, media, success

location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: wung
Current Music: Windom Earle- unknown track!

Deny!