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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
MJSS' LiveJournal:
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| Tuesday, July 14th, 2009 | | 9:21 pm |
an alphabet of irregular plurals
Some of these are kind of weak; can anyone do better? A: Alumni B: Bacteria C: Children D: Dice E: Elves F: Fish G: Geese H: Hippopotami I: Indices J: Jacks-in-the-box K: Kine L: Lice M: Mice N: Nuclei O: Oxen P: Phenomena Q: Quail R: Radii S: Seraphim T: Teeth U: Uvulae V: Vortices W: Women X: Xu Y: Yeti Z: Zebra [[Also, the existences of Xu Beihong and the Guangxu Emperor make it rather more difficult for me to see how much xu are going for on eBay.]] | | Sunday, June 28th, 2009 | | 7:36 pm |
| | Monday, June 22nd, 2009 | | 2:18 pm |
| | Saturday, June 13th, 2009 | | 12:46 pm |
seriously?
"Also there was a cloth that had been kept in a large metal box. The corners of the box had been sealed with a waxy substance, no doubt to prevent mildew. The cloth was of midnight blue velvet and heavily embroidered with gold thread and jewels in signs that resembled the zodiac. In the center of the cloth were two swirled, snakelike figures twined together to form the number 8." Now, this cloth has supposedly been in the box for slightly over a millennium. I don't care how awesome your "waxy substance" is; if you're describing a thousand-year-old piece of cloth, it is totally unacceptable to not say something about how it's aged. I know little enough about how cloth ages that a simple "it seemed miraculously well-preserved" would suffice to preserve my suspension of disbelief, but leaving even that out just seems like a failure of imagination. Also, mixing up the Julian and Gregorian calendars is poor form. [[ETA: "But how very interesting--did you know that your birthday, April 4, is an Islamic holy day?" GAHHHH! NOT EVEN WRONG!]] Current Mood: disgruntled | | Wednesday, June 10th, 2009 | | 5:55 pm |
Holy shit.Yeah, it's a blog post based on a presumably-not-yet-peer-reviewed preprint, so some skepticism is probably in order. Still. | | Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 | | 11:24 pm |
random bridge stat of the month
If you have a 5-card major and your partner is no-trump-distributed, they have a 36% chance of only having two of your suit. (Most of this is driven by 4432 hands; if you know your partner is 4432, they're short in your suit almost half the time.) Of course, this assumes that you have no information about the rest of your hand, which is kind of silly. But on average... [ETA: Oh, wait. This is actually even sillier than I thought it was. The correct way of phrasing the assumption is "you've looked at five of your cards and they all belonged to the same major" (that is, you don't know that your other cards don't also belong to that major). If you have a major with exactly 5 cards, presumably the odds are better.] | | Friday, June 5th, 2009 | | 2:56 am |
| | Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 | | 4:20 pm |
| | Sunday, May 24th, 2009 | | 3:58 am |
on scientific accuracy in visual-media space opera
I have this sense that the "No, really, space actually is silent" meme has propagated over the last few years--the earliest example of this progapagtion that I can think of is in Firefly[1]. Is this actually true, or is it an example of the Recency Illusion? [1] I certainly don't mean to imply that Firefly is anything like the first thing to have silent space, just that it might be at/near the beginning of the current wave. | | Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 | | 11:22 am |
be ðe change you want to see
After muchvery little careful þought, I have decided ðat, among ðe many ways ðe spelling of ðe English language is irrational, ðere is at least one--ðe confusion between the voiced and unvoiced versions of the sound whose standard orþographical representation is "th"--which is easily eliminated, wiþout much danger of dialectical discrepancies or ðe appearance of illiteracy, boþ of which cause substantial difficulty wiþ many attempts at spelling simplification. As such, I would like to announce ðat ðis journal will be moving to a 28-letter alphabet until I get bored wiþ ðe idea. | | Wednesday, May 13th, 2009 | | 7:46 pm |
| | Saturday, May 2nd, 2009 | | 5:00 pm |
something we were wondering about Pride and Prejudice
How is it possible that Mr. Bennet's male-heir-entailed estate can be inherited by someone not named "Bennet"? Is it inherited non-salically? If so, why doesn't anyone consider the possibility that Jane's or Elizabeth's sons will end up re-disinheriting the Collinses? | | Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009 | | 1:39 am |
on word usage
In my idiolect: -cognoscente="one who, as the result of their elite powers of taste and specialized knowledge, serves as an arbiter of quality in some field" -connoisseur="one who, as the result of their elite powers of taste and specialized knowledge, is able to deeply appreciate high-quality examples of some field" Of course, this is kind of silly; etymologically speaking they're exactly the same word. Is it uniquely silly to me, or do other people see these connotations as well? (Unrelatedly, I learned tonight that I apparently had a nemesis in high school. Who knew?) | | Monday, April 20th, 2009 | | 3:11 pm |
a thought, inspired by the debit card that I just got mailed
What is the advantage of using a voice-recognition system for card-activation hotlines? I can maybe understand using such a system when the desired input is a question or something, at least if it's smart enough. I could also understand it if anyone still used rotary phones. But it seems to me that, at this point, inputing digits of strings over a phone line is a solved problem, and all the voice-activation does is increase the risk of error and create a potential security risk. | | Friday, April 10th, 2009 | | 1:42 am |
a few scattered thoughts on disc 1 of "An Age of Kings" (Richard II and half of Henry IV, part 1)
1. The Richard II bits really seemed to push the idea that York and Richard are very similar people, or at least spun the same number on the Wheel of Tragic Flaws. 2. I've had the game of "try to match characters from Shakespeare's histories to their equivalents in Buffy" in the back of my head for a while. I realized tonight that Richard II is Andrew. 3. Sean Connery plays Hotspur in exactly the way you'd expect him to. It's fun. 4. It framed "I do, I will" as an apology, which I thought was really neat. | | Wednesday, April 8th, 2009 | | 2:56 am |
| | Friday, April 3rd, 2009 | | 12:19 pm |
dear lazyweb,
I want to make the OS X spellchecker forget that "basically" is a word. The standard interface doesn't let you make it forget words that show up by default--only words that you added. Is the default dictionary kicking around as a text file somewhere (if it is, I'm pretty sure it's not named anything containing the strings "words" or "dict" [ETA: unless it is]), or do I just have to suck it? | | Wednesday, April 1st, 2009 | | 6:07 pm |
| | Monday, March 30th, 2009 | | 11:05 pm |
I am obviously a horrible person
...because I find this to be absolutely hilarious. (In the comments to Scalzi's blog post, someone brings up the idea of an omnibus edition, reminding me of that time in college when we calculated the mass and volume of a mole of textbooks.) | | Thursday, March 19th, 2009 | | 7:02 pm |
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confused