This Didn't Use To Be A Problem
People are silly. I notice that Google gets
more hits for "didn't used to be" than for "didn't use to be", and
more hits for "didn't used to have" than for "didn't use to have."
It reminds me of the time "I didn't ran to see what was the matter" and "he didn't wanted to buy anything."
More: I guess that apart from the phonic similarity of "used to" and "use to", another contributing factor to this error is that we never use "use to", in this intransitive sense, in the affirmative present or future tense. I do "run to see what is the matter," or "want to buy something," but I never say that I "use to cook spaghetti." So people don't have that example in their heads to extend to the negative past tense.
Recommended Restaurants
Added Soda Jerks and Mr. Cecil's California Ribs to
the restaurant list.
Twenty Gallons of Gas In A Fifteen Gallon Tank
I was annoyed to learn today that my 1995 Jeep Wrangler does not have a fifteen-gallon gas tank as I had always supposed. It has a twenty-gallon gas tank. And an extended fill vent hose to stop you from putting more than fifteen gallons of gas in it.
If the original owner (not me) had bought the Jeep with the more expensive "20 gallon tank" option, then they would have received a shorter fill vent hose so they could fill the tank up.
Deliberately hobbling your own product just strikes me as sleazy and wrong. It actually cost Chrysler
more (a few pennies more) to make a worse product, so that they could charge more for an uncrippled version. Scumbags!
Region coding for DVDs and various anti-compatibility measures in the computer industry are vaguely similar and those practices annoy me too. But this Jeep thing is worse, if anything.
If I get ambitious enough I might try to
chop off the offending fill vent hose. But I have some other repairs I have to do first, like fixing the passenger door (again).
Letter To An English Teacher
Thanks for your paper on
Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth. You didn't ask me a specific question, but here are some random thoughts.
I do think that the Shakespearean English probably comes as a relief to the audience after the less-comprehensible Dogg part.
An important difference between Dogg words and confusing Shakespearean words is that, by investigating the etymology or just by thinking about it, one can see how the Shakespearean meaning of the word "silly" evolved into the modern meaning. But unless Tom Stoppard had some secret logic in mind, there is no interesting reason why "satisfied egg" should mean "my way."
It would be interesting to quiz an audience of students and see how many words of Dogg they had learned just from watching the play. I would be pleasantly surprised if they had learned very many (more than five).
As you know, one scene of
Dogg's Hamlet involves rearranging the letters of "Dogg's Hamlet" into phrases like "Maths Old Egg" which have little meaning in English but mean something in Dogg. One thing we did in the Caltech production (I don't believe this was in the script) was rearrange the same lettered blocks to spell out "Ghost" during the Hamlet play. Two more phrases that could be spelled using those blocks are "Let's Go Mad" (for Hamlet) or "Hags Told Me" (for Macbeth).
Regards,
Richard Mason
Thanks, Fake Terrorists
Yesterday I was delayed about fifteen minutes-- first my bus took a detour, then I walked the long way around, partly because I didn't know what the problem was. Turns out the Santa Monica mall, and surrounding blocks, had been cordoned off by police due to a
bomb scare.
No explosion, but rush hour traffic was adversely affected.
The Half-Blood Prince
I've read all of the Harry Potter books, if only to stay au courant, but I've always been lukewarm on them. They're okay, but I can't see why they're more deserving of world-wide mania than the next book.
But, I did think that
the latest installment was well-done and perhaps the best in the series. It surprised me a couple of times. I did figure out who the Half-Blood Prince was, slightly before it became completely obvious.
I notice that previous generations of students at Hogwarts seem to have left the school littered with magical artifacts such as books and maps that they made. No one in Harry's year seems to have been so inventive yet... As far as we know,
The Compleat and Accurate Researches of Hermione Granger isn't ready to be padlocked and put on the Restricted Shelf next to the Necronomicon, and Ron shows no sign of inventing any Everlasting Gobstoppers such as Fred and George might have done. Well, there's still final year.
Quote of the Day
An addition to the
quote collection:
"The success of the environmental movement is driven by two powerful forces-- romanticism and science-- that are often in opposition. The romantics identify with natural systems; the scientists study natural systems. The romantics are moralistic, rebellious against the perceived dominant power, and combative against any who appear to stray from the true path. They hate to admit mistakes or change direction. The scientists are ethicalistic, rebellious against any perceived dominant paradigm, and combative against each other. For them, admitting mistakes is what science is."
--- Stewart Brand,
Technology Review, May 5, 2005.
It's really the last six words that I like.
Bank of America Sees Light
Great progress on
the ATM situation:
Bank of America ATMs in California have adopted another reasonable solution. Now when you enter your card, you are asked in English to enter your PIN and press button A when complete... Below you are asked in Spanish to enter your PIN and press button B when complete.
So, you implicitly select your language, but are not explicitly asked for it. The extraneous button push is gone, subsumed into the PIN-enter button push. And if you tune out language text that you don't read, you would likely not even be aware that you were making a language selection.
I find this very satisfactory.
Boggle
I got 172 points in a
Weboggle game today. That might be my personal best. The second best score was 110, and there were several very strong players. Hooray for me.
Left Versus Right
I have been purgatoriously forced to use Maribeth's Windows laptop recently, causing her to use the iBook more. She
noticed that the Mac and the PC have different conventions as to whether the affirmative or negative response button goes on the left or right.
However I have just witnessed something more disturbing. First the Windows laptop came up with a pop-up window saying, "Since this is a Windows machine, it is necessary to perpetually carry out something called Registry First Aid. Would you like to update First Aid now? Yes / No." The window went away but soon returned with, "You are probably not familiar with this being a Mac user, but cleaning the registry is absolutely essential. Frankly, your data is probably already corrupt. Are you sure you wish to cancel this important activity? Yes / No." Yes, I'm sure! Then a few seconds later there was a third window, "Okay, then in the face of your intransigence we will proceed to clean the registry using normal, non-updated Registry First Aid. Do you agree? Yes / No."
You see what happened there? Because of the use of phrases like "are you sure you wish to cancel", the proper button to express the natural response of "get your damn Registry First Aid away from me and my family"
changed from left to right! Twice over the course of about ten seconds!
Matlab
Today I pondered whether to buy
Matlab. I got used to using Matlab in grad school. However, it is a wee bit pricey: $1900 for the basic no-frills package. Then there are dozens and dozens of add-ons or "toolboxes" that they will gladly sell you for, say, $800 a pop.
This morning I downloaded
Scilab which is a
free alternative to Matlab. I got it to work on my Macintosh. However, although Scilab is
free, there are a couple of drawbacks. It is said to run a few times more slowly than Matlab. I have not used it before so, to the extent that it is different from Matlab at all, I am less familiar with it. And most importantly, the scientists who created Scilab, who distribute it, and who wrote the manuals are French scientists. My French is not worth a damn, and their English, while not bad, is not flawless. I think this could get to be a little bit of a drag.
I also tried to download Octave, another
free open source alternative to Matlab, but (only being willing to devote a small amount of time and effort) I could not even get it to run on my Mac. And
the Octave FAQ has not been updated since 1998, which I take to be a bad sign.
So, I am leaning towards blowing $1900 of the taxpayers' money on Matlab. If you are a U.S. taxpayer, thank you, and I hope you understand.
A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love
It has been almost eleven months since I first started reading it, but I finally got through
A Devil's Chaplain. Richard Dawkins took a lot of shorter things he had written over the years (magazine articles, book reviews, grocery lists, etc.) and collected them in this book. This is a package of ground beef, so to speak, offered for sale alongside the steak of his other books.
Now, I am a big Dawkins fan. I've read most of his books. I think the reason it took me so long to finish this one is that it's not breaking much new ground. I felt even within this collection, some of the pieces were repeating the same points.
So, not especially highly recommended. I guess if you want to read everything Dawkins ever wrote, then you have to cover this eventually. But if you're not near Dawkins-completion, you're probably better off with one of his book-length books.
There are two pieces in
A Devil's Chaplain about the untimely death of Douglas Adams, and in one of them Dawkins mentions that he met his current wife at Adams's fortieth birthday party, and that Adams and his wife "had worked together on Doctor Who." Elsewhere in the book he refers to "my wife Lalla." Still, I did not realize until doing some semi-related googling that his wife is
Lalla Ward, better known as Romana #2!
The Partly Cloudy Patriot
I gave
this book by Sarah Vowell to Maribeth, and then I read it myself(*), and it was very good. I recommend it, although the tightwad in me is slightly troubled by the thought that most or all of the content of this book could probably be downloaded for free on the Internet (in the form of American Life episodes, for example, or on Salon). I have a similar problem with Paul Krugman essay collections.
Sarah Vowell does need a better copy-editor, since I was struck by a couple of long sentences that changed direction in the middle and ended up not actually being sentences. I don't remember the examples now. Maybe they were in the essays which are almost-transcriptions of radio broadcasts. But even if so, you should make the sentences coherent when moving from spoken to written word. Don't you think?
(*-- This is a dangerous way to proceed, of course. I hate giving people books that they didn't ask for, but I think will be good for some reason, and then later reading the book and finding out that I don't like it myself.)
Bounded In A Nutshell
Today I read in
Ansible that some book called
Kings of Infinite Space was a finalist for some horror award, and I said to myself, "Crap! I was going to use that title."
I did not have a book or any other work clearly in mind to go underneath this title. I just thought it was a good title and I wanted to use it for something.
But now
I see that there are at least four books in print already using this title. This title is about as original as a TV show about forensic medical examiners! Oh well. I guess I was very foolish to think that any Hamlet quote would not have been used to death.
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun
For example, the outer temperature of the Sun is around 6000K, whereas
Maribeth radiates at an apparent temperature of 310K.
Here is a false-color image of Maribeth sitting on the sofa, as she appears in the longwave infrared.
A Pet Peeve
I don't like it when people insert pause-words like "well" or "err" into their written sentences to imitate spoken English. I
especially don't like it when it's done with the old "repeated word" gambit, like this:
Inserting natural pauses into your sentence will make the sentence sound, well, more natural.Now I do agree with the school of thought that your sentences should sound natural when read aloud. But I don't like the inserted-pause-word because:
(a) I see it all the goddamn time and I'm tired of it. As a literary device it has no freshness.
(b) It is fake. In written English you do not have to write superfluous words like "well" to kill time while you think what to write next. And written sentences don't go astray and have to end clumsily, the way spoken sentences sometimes do.
(c) If someone actually does read the sentence aloud, it will probably sound fake. A lot of speakers will half-cleverly write these things into their speeches, trying to create a natural effect. But you
know they're reading their speeches from a text and they
sound like it, so when they say, "The appeal of murder mysteries is, well, mysterious," it sounds fake as all hell.
It's okay in written dialogue, of course, and it's okay if you know it will be said aloud naturally. I guess I've just heard way too many public speakers who can't pull it off.
Nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.
I'm puzzled by the claim made in the
Kelo dissents, and elsewhere, that the Fifth Amendment prohibits the government from taking private property except for public use. The Kelo dissents cite
Brown v. Legal Foundation of Wash., which states, "While it confirms the state's authority to confiscate private property, the text of the Fifth Amendment imposes two conditions on the exercise of such authority: the taking must be for a “public use” and “just compensation” must be paid to the owner." There seems to be no more explanation or elaboration on the issue in
Brown v. Legal Foundation of Wash.
Now in my opinion the statement just quoted from
Brown is false. While the requirement of public use might be well rooted in something else (common law? common sense?), it is not imposed by the text of the Fifth Amendment.
I'm not a lawyer, but I speak English. If I say, "Nor shall a party be thrown for someone's birthday without a cake and candles," that would never be read as a
prohibition of Hallowe'en parties, even if Hallowe'en parties are not for someone's birthday.
(We can leave aside the separate question of whether a cake with candles is or should be required at a Hallowe'en party, and also, whether a party occurring on October 31 or any other day could always be justified as being for
someone's birthday.)
