H/T to Cory Doctorow for the link.
June 2, 2011
It actually does explain why the “prequels” sucked
Comments Off on It actually does explain why the “prequels” sucked
Man succeeds in suicide attempt over an hour, as police and fire rescue watch
A hard-to-believe story from Alameda, California:
Fire crews and police could only watch after a man waded into San Francisco Bay, stood up to his neck and waited. They wanted to do something, but a policy tied to earlier budget cuts strictly forbade them from trying to save the 50-year-old, officials said.
A witness finally pulled the apparently suicidal man’s lifeless body from the 54-degree water.
The San Jose Mercury News reported that the man, later identified as Raymond Zack, spent nearly an hour in the water before he drowned.
Perhaps they assumed that the suicidal man would get too cold and come back to shore, but it’s hard to understand how they could stand around for an hour and not do anything.
When menu translators go feral: “Timid and rapidly grown prostitutes”
Victor Mair finds the menu items lost something, but gained humour, in the translation:
The basic Bèn School Method seems to be to look each content word up in a bilingual dictionary, and to pick the most amusing and least grammatical option among the alternatives on offer. The word order of the translation seems to be a semi-random compromise among the various languages involved.
H/T to Tom Vinson for the link.
Comments Off on When menu translators go feral: “Timid and rapidly grown prostitutes”
When shipyards produce pork instead of effective ships for the Navy
Shipbuilding for the navy has traditionally been a good source of pork for politicians to dole out as their political fortunes require. The US Navy is having monumental problems with the quality of ships, but the problem isn’t easy to fix:
The U.S. Navy continues to have serious problems with shoddy shipbuilders. The latest incident involved a support ship, the 12,000 ton, 172 meter (534 foot) long radar ship, the Howard O. Lorenzen. The ship recently failed its acceptance tests. The Lorenzen was built to carry a special, billion dollar, radar used to track ICBM tests. This tracking activity also supports verification of missile and nuclear weapons treaty compliance. The Lorenzen replaces a similar ship that is over 30 years old. The acceptance tests found serious problems with the steering, electrical system, damage control, anchor control, and aviation (helicopter) facilities. The yard that built the Lorenzen, VT Halter Marine, builds military and civilian ships, and has had problems with some of the other military ships it has built recently. Like the Lorenzen, the other ships were late, over budget and suffered quality control problems.
[. . .]
While the admirals are correct in blaming the shipyards for many of the problems, the navy shares a lot of the blame as well. It is, after all, the navy that draws up the contracts, and supplies inspectors during construction. However, inspectors are regularly deceived and lied to (about the quality of work and supervision and known defects being fixed). While Congressional interference can be blamed as well, in the end, it’s the navy that has the most to say, and do, about how the ships are built. The problem is, admirals who stand up and take on the contractors and politicians put their careers on the line. The ship builder deploys a large number of lobbyists and has many key politicians as allies.
[. . .]
The problems with nuclear subs and carriers were minor compared to the LPD 17 travails. Still, the sheer extent of the problems, across so many ships, is very disturbing. This may be why a growing number of admirals are willing to take career risks, and try for some fundamental reform, and finally fix the “system” that turns out more problems than warships. Victory is not assured. The shipyards and their suppliers have powerful allies in Congress. All that money translates into votes that gets incumbent politicians reelected. Congress is not inclined to attack this kind of patronage and pork, since nearly all members of Congress depend on it. The admirals can openly complain, but offended legislators can quietly cripple the careers of those critics. The smart money is betting against the good guys here. So far, the smart money is right. But the bad builder mess is so vast, expensive and messy that even many politicians are calling for some fundamental changes.
The poster children for defective ships is the San Antonio LPD 17 class of amphibious ships.
Comments Off on When shipyards produce pork instead of effective ships for the Navy
Pity the poor, over-used em-dash
Noreen Malone — who admits to being an em-dash abuser herself — makes an appeal for everyone to just leave the em-dash alone!
According to the Associated Press Stylebook — Slate‘s bible for all things punctuation- and grammar-related — there are two main prose uses— the abrupt change and the series within a phrase — for the em dash. The guide does not explicitly say that writers can use the dash in lieu of properly crafting sentences, or instead of a comma or a parenthetical or a colon — and yet in practical usage, we do. A lot — or so I have observed lately. America’s finest prose — in blogs, magazines, newspapers, or novels — is littered with so many dashes among the dots it’s as if the language is signaling distress in Morse code.
What’s the matter with an em dash or two, you ask? — or so I like to imagine. What’s not to like about a sentence that explores in full all the punctuational options — sometimes a dash, sometimes an ellipsis, sometimes a nice semicolon at just the right moment — in order to seem more complex and syntactically interesting, to reach its full potential? Doesn’t a dash — if done right — let the writer maintain an elegant, sinewy flow to her sentences?
Nope — or that’s my take, anyway. Now, I’m the first to admit — before you Google and shame me with a thousand examples in the comments — that I’m no saint when it comes to the em dash. I never met a sentence I didn’t want to make just a bit longer — and so the dash is my embarrassing best friend. When the New York Times‘ associate managing editor for standards — Philip B. Corbett, for the record — wrote a blog post scolding Times writers for overusing the dash (as many as five dashes snuck their way into a single 3.5-paragraph story on A1, to his horror), an old friend from my college newspaper emailed it to me. “Reminded me of our battles over long dashes,” he wrote — and, to tell the truth, I wasn’t on the anti-dash side back then. But as I’ve read and written more in the ensuing years, my reliance on the dash has come to feel like a pack-a-day cigarette habit — I know it makes me look and sound and feel terrible — and so I’m trying to quit.
Bloggers (some of us, anyway) tend to use the em-dash a bit too frequently, and that’s one of the downsides to being one-person shows — there’s no kindly editor to strike through the excess punctuation with a red pen.
