H/T to Jason Ciastko and John McCluskey for the link.
November 13, 2010
November 12, 2010
New book for kids about to fly for the first time
Mark Frauenfelder has the book to give to your child before going to the airport:
Got to start ’em early . . . by the time they’re full-grown, they’ll accept any intrusion from government officials as a matter of course.
The original version (in French) is here.
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November 10, 2010
Sign of the times
Sue Barrett took a photo of this sign in Brisbane, Australia:
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November 9, 2010
The five stages of grading
By way of Ilkka’s blog, a new look at the plight of the grad student:
Everyone is familiar with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and her stage model of coping with grief popularly known as the five stages of grief. What you may not know is that Kübler-Ross actually developed her theory as a graduate student, basing her conception of the process of loss on the experiences one goes through over a grading weekend.
In coping with grading, it’s important for graduate students and young professors to know that they are not alone and that this process takes time. Not everyone goes through every stage or processes the reality of grading in this order, but everyone experiences some version of at least two of these steps.
Read the whole thing.
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November 8, 2010
QotD: “Melticulturalism”
So, the majority of Canadians are in favour of a system that seeks to respect and preserve cultural differences, just as long as people from other cultures don’t actually preserve those differences but assimilate into Canadian society. Call it melticulturalism1: You can be as different as you want, just as long as you act like everyone else.
How Canadian can you get?
1 h/t to Tasha Kheiriddin for “melticulturalism”
Kelly McParland, “Canadians overwhelmingly favour melticulturalism”, National Post, 2010-11-08
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November 5, 2010
Banned from visiting Afghanistan due to weight
John Turner sent me this link, which could be said to point out fitness requirements for lawmakers:
Britain’s defence ministry says two lawmakers from Northern Ireland have been barred from visiting troops in Afghanistan until they can find flak jackets big enough to fit their bellies.
The ministry says Ken Maginnis and David Simpson were scheduled to fly to Kabul this week, but army-issued body armour doesn’t exceed 49 inches (124.5 centimetres), too snug for both.
A ministry spokesman said Thursday the British army offers “a wide range of sizes but, regrettably, none was suitable on this occasion.”
Alternatively, you could just roll ’em up in kevlar carpets, or something . . .
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November 4, 2010
Something I’m adding to my Christmas list
H.L. Mencken was a literary giant in the 1920s and into the 1930s, but fell from the pinnacle of popularity as the Great Depression hit. His consistent opposition to FDR and the New Deal moved him further and further away from the limelight, and his outspoken opposition to the war rendered him all but unpublishable from 1941 until his death. A large collection of his shorter works from 1914 through 1927 were published in Prejudices, running to six volumes.
The books are back in print, in two large volumes, through Library of America. An excerpt from the New York Review of Books just starts to get interesting before the cut-off for non-subscribers:
The material that H.L. Mencken published in a series of six volumes under the title Prejudices was a collection of his journalism written between 1914 and the late 1920s. Most of it, he told a good friend on publication of the first volume in 1919, was “light stuff” with an occasional “blast from the lower woodwind” that would “outrage the umbilicari, if that is the way to spell it.” Such books, he added, were “mere stinkpots, heaved occasionally to keep the animals perturbed.”
Most of the pieces in the first volume — or “series,” as it was called — had originally appeared in The Smart Set, the magazine he had edited since 1914, but they also included articles published in newspapers, as well as material written especially for the book. A painstaking editor of his own work, Mencken also did a good bit of rewriting; stinkpot or not, this was not to be a quick harum-scarum hustling of secondhand goods but a high-quality piece of prose from a master.
Its commercial success surprised him as well as his friend and publisher, Alfred Knopf, who seemed to realize for the first time that Mencken had a promising future, or, as he expressed it to his author, “that H.L. Mencken has become a good property.” The book was quickly followed by Prejudices: Series Two, Series Three, and so on to a final Series Six in 1927, by which time Mencken had developed from a good property into the most exciting literary figure in the country.
H/T to Mark at Unambiguously Ambidexterous for the link.
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October 27, 2010
October 23, 2010
Happy Creation Day, Earth!
Chris Myrick linked to the relevant Wikipedia entry to mark the 6013th “birthday” of the Earth.
[James] Ussher [Anglican Archbishop of Armagh] deduced that the first day of creation began at nightfall preceding Sunday, October 23, 4004 BC, in the proleptic Julian calendar, near the autumnal equinox. [. . .] Ussher’s proposed date of 4004 BC differed somewhat from other Biblically based estimates, such as those of Bede (3952 BC), Ussher’s near-contemporary Scaliger (3949 BC), Johannes Kepler (3992 BC) or Sir Isaac Newton (c. 4000 BC). Ussher’s specific choice of starting year may have been influenced by the then-widely-held belief that the Earth’s potential duration was 6,000 years (4,000 before the birth of Christ and 2,000 after), corresponding to the six days of Creation, on the grounds that “one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day” (2 Peter 3:8).
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October 22, 2010
Allen Patterson tells the real Caramel Pie story
In a possibly vain attempt to get ahead of the urban legend generation/amplification/distortion cycle, Allen Patterson tells the original Caramel Pie story:
This is the definitive version of The Caramel Pie Story, a tale that has been spreading throughout north Mississippi (and beyond) for at least 35 years. It is time to get it online before the variant versions take hold and are accepted as truth.
People have told this story so many times that some Mississippians now claim to have been there when they weren’t. Combine those folks with the number of people who claim that they saw the aftermath and, well, there’s not room for that many people on an ocean liner.
The story involves a caramel pie, my family, the LaMastus family (neighbors), a remodeled kitchen, and some ducks.
Don’t forget about the ducks.
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October 21, 2010
October 20, 2010
Some combination tools work well … and then there’s this one
Christopher Schwarz gives in to the urge to try out a new tool that combines the rasp and the chisel in one not-so-easy-to-handle package:
Now usually when I see a tool like this I just ignore it. Boneheaded ideas like this usually end up in a mass grave with the bones of dodo birds, passenger pigeons and AMC Pacer automobiles. But a couple weeks ago I stumbled on a set of these tools for sale — new — on Amazon.
These tools must be stopped. So I bought a set of three to take a look. They are as bad as I feared.
The tools are incredibly heavy. The rasp teeth are coarse and not very aggressive. They manage to make more of a farting sound than any scratches in the wood. Of course, it doesn’t help things that you have to use the rasp one-handed — grabbing the chisel tip is ill-advised.
Or is it? The chisel edge is as sharp as Lennie from “Of Mice and Men.” And when you do pound the chisel into a piece of wood (thank you Mongo the Mallet) the tool stops dead after 1″ because the rasp teeth dig into your work.
And the worst thing of all? They are branded as Nicholson — the once-great rasp maker.
But if this tool can succeed in the marketplace for 10 years, what other opportunities are toolmakers missing out on?
October 19, 2010
Got a transmedia “strategy”?
They’re all the rage these days. If you don’t have one, you can get a custom-crafted, up-to-the-microsecond strategy outlined for you at whatthefuckismytransmediastrategy.com, like this one:
As you can see, it makes at least as much sense as “real” strategies sometimes do.
H/T to Warren Ellis for the link.
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