Tea, Tannin & Canker sores:

If you’re afflicted by lip and mouth sores, you may be aware of products on the market intended to ameliorate your suffering. The active ingredient of some of these is tannin, which is much more readily (and gently) available in regular tea. Just brew up some tea and make sure each mouthful comes into contract with your sores before you swallow. You may be pleasantly surprised.

Why I carry a lot of keys:

Like many people, I carry a key ring full of keys. Now I know why. Not for the first time, a pair of pants developed a hole in the key ring pocket. I lost a nickel, three pennies and a quarter before I figured this out, but my key ring was much too large to fit through the hole! Is it a Murphy's law thing that of all my pockets, it's the one with the keys that gets the hole? I don't think so, it's more like cause and effect - those sharp keys poking away at the fabric.

Limericists, Roll up your Sleeves!

There’s a cooperative project on the Internet to write original limericks that define each and every word defined in the OED. If you fancy your limericking ability, or you know someone who does, this is no time to withhold your skills. A lot of work lies ahead, they are only up to words beginning with (roughly) Ac. See The OEDILF Website for details.

Irresponsible programming.

I’m glad I’m not the programmer whose software failed to warn operators at Ten Mile Island how serious their emergency was. There were greatly mitigating circumstances for this software failure, but I’d generally rather work on projects where the implications of failure are far less serious. I can remember an embarrassing case where my irresponsible programming cost my company an expensive repair. Fortunately they did not take it out of my pay.

I needed to communicate some data trends by drawing very large, detailed diagrams. My boss showed me a little-used piece of equipment we had, a “plotter” (a kind of printer) with a thirty inch wide printing bed. A monstrous roll of paper fed the plotter, which could thus draw pictures 30” by ANY LENGTH in size, just what I needed.

Programming the plotter was simple. You issued commands to raise and lower its pen some distance. You issued commands to move the pen in any direction. If you lowered the pen far enough to touch the paper and then commanded it - or the paper - to move, you drew a line.
In my first debugging session, I told the plotter to move the pen about a quarter of an inch below the surface of the paper and then to draw a graph. The plotter dutifully lowered the pen into the inch-thick sheet metal bed below the paper and engraved my graph in the metal. (My engraving did look pretty, I must say.) We had to buy a new metal bed, the most expensive part of this expensive plotter.
In the many years since then, as you can imagine, I’ve often wondered whether the manufacturer might just, perhaps, pretty please, have made it impossible to lower the pen into the metal. Or, to look on the bright side, I could claim I was one of the first people to do three-dimensional printing!

The Extinct Species of Computer Operator:

Until some time in the early 1970’s, almost all computer systems were mainframes that required a special profession: “Computer Operator.” To this day there are specialized large systems that require special operators, but the operators from the late 1950’s to about 1975 were a unique breed: Requiring no more than a high school diploma (if that), a little smarts and the ability to do many rote activities reliably, this profession allowed many young people, post office mail carriers and other drudge workers to move quickly into a world of prestige and undreamed-of modest wealth.
The typical mainframe computer room was full of equipment that was easy to operate until it (rarely!) failed, but could easily be destroyed through mishandling. Consequently it was essential to keep the users of computers out of the computer room, and let the trained operators run them. In great demand, operators were paid somewhat less than programmers.
There were always elaborate procedures to enable users to submit their software “jobs” and, hours later, get their output. (Interacting directly with a computer program was almost unheard of.)
I remember one mail carrier who quit the post office because he had some initiative, eventually managing a whole staff of computer operators and doing quite well. I remember Tony, who suddenly found he and his wife could afford to build a custom home. When the builder balked at finishing agreed-upon changes, he told Tony, “I’m not going to do it and there’s nothing you can do about it.” Tony replied, “I’m only seventeen years old so my signature on the contract’s not binding, I’m not going to pay you another cent.” The builder finished the house Tony’s way.
When the Cape Canaveral Space Center opened, its computer room, in a fine government gesture, included mainframes from all the current major manufacturers. Each manufacturer contributed one of their finest operators to run this operation. IBM, generally paying high wages to avoid any impetus for its staff to unionize, was concerned about what would happen when these operators from the different manufacturers compared notes. I’m told that the IBM operator went into that room with the highest salary, because IBM had raised its computer operator payscale world-wide the month before.

Bong. Bong Bong. Bong Bong Bong Bong. BongBongBongBongBong….

Very early in computer history we had to deal with data that was too extensive to fit all at once inside a computer. The only solution for many years was to keep tapes full of data. A tape reel was about a foot in diameter and an inch wide. When a program needed to use a tape, it would print a request, in front of the computer operator, to load the tape. (The people who wrote programs were not permitted inside the computer room.) The operator would find and load the tape so the program could continue. Computer time was precious; it was frustrating to all when the operator failed to notice a tape request and idled the mainframe for an hour or two.
Princeton University solved this problem by adding a programmable LOUD GONG to the computer room. They told us how to add a simple routine to our programs to ring the gong after printing a tape request. Fine. Although it must be said, operators occasionally failed to hear the gong.
About two weeks later one professor wrote a program that rang the gong; then ten seconds later it rang the gong twice; then four times; then a hail of gong-shots until the desired tape was mounted. We loved this idea and everybody borrowed his program.
A few days later, faced with a united protest from all the operators, the university removed the gong.

I’ve dealt with many amazing and wonderful computer devices in my life, but I miss the gong.

Painter or Paintee?

Next Monday I will be helping to interview a fine pianist on our local radio station. She has been concertizing vigorously for about fifteen years and was recently mentioned in the New York Times.
Naturally I prepared by Googling the pianist’s name and checking out the first hundred or so references. Soon I clicked on a link and up came a large painting of a nude woman. Below the painting was the pianist’s name, the only text on the whole webpage. Non-plussed, I goggled. Finally I said to my self, “Self, before you ask the pianist about this picture, you’ve got to know whether she painted it, or whether she’s the subject.” Frantic web searches ensued. For some reason it was difficult to resolve the issue.
About five minutes later, light dawned. There is a painter whose last name is spelled almost exactly like the pianist’s, and they share the same first name. Google searches for either will yield info on both, partly due to misspellings on the web. In fact the painting had the correct name of the painter below it, but since I had found it by searching for the pianist’s name, I had not noticed the unexpected extra letter.

I shall not ask the pianist about the painting.

Beware the attack of the Zombie Auto-Blogs!

The next time you hear someone quote statistics about the millions of blogs, please tell them that their stats include hundreds, thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands of bogus, computer-generated zombie auto-blogs spouting gibberish, like this one: Vasectomy Reversal.
Click that link and you'll see all the worst characteristics of these zombies: meaningless (or rote-copied) text, a mindless author profile, multiple entries with closely-spaced date/times, and - obviously - no human being trying to communicate anything to you.

Clearly, Something Strange is going on, and whatever it is, it's polluting the blogosphere.

I've found many examples not quite as wasted at that first link, but just as zombie-like, for example, Car Accident, which seems to use text copied at random from elsewhere in a series of disjointed entries, such as "Mouse Over to learn more Bankcard model displayed on this site is by far your best option. If you have only one qualified rate". (That quote may have been lifted from this page at www.leoquinn.com.)
Now this next zombie, sugar-eyes, has a clear purpose. The title of every one of its stream-of-copied-consciousness entries links to an ad page at a web-site, mm-information.co.uk.
Radial-eskimo-fish-x, with its stupefying entries about Discount Inkjet Printer Ink Cartridge, China Eastern Airline, Adult Erotic Book, Used Police Car For Sale (etc.), similarly has entry titles that link to mmj-electronics. If you think for a moment that this blog has an author who’s trying to talk to you, try to read text like this: "...ely Free Sample Stuff Completely Free Sample Stuff links and resources. Freebieholics - UK Free Stuff ... here. Channels Home Free Stuff Competitions Ecards Shopping Games Forums Members Sub-Menu Tell-a- Friend Bookmark Us Contact Us T&C's / Privacy What we do.... Freebieholics shows you ... Free Magazines Have free sample issues of top quality magazines sent right to your door! Many of these offers also give you a subscription at a discount below news stand prices, or gifts for subscribing. ... Free stuff sample for baby Free stuff sample for baby herbal nutrition. Home ....." (And this text junk could have been cribbed from many web pages.)

Trampoline seems to be a coherent sample of the genre. Every item title links to an ad page at www.trampolined.co.uk; the item titles cover everything you might want to know about trampolines, and the text always matches the entry title. But with dozens of short textbook entries per day, computer generation is clearly at work.
Homeimprovementhowto is similar, except that in this blog each entry has NO TEXT. Again, the entry titles point to ad pages at another web site. Cardonations works the same way.

Contentmanagement is more primitive - entries without text, and entry titles that are broken links (or at least, were broken when I checked them). Perhaps some child failed to finish debugging his or her PERL Script this time.

These blogs all have a very primitive look, as if a basic blogger template is being used with no individualization. Perhaps they are intended to show up in web searches and boost the ranking of the sites they point to.

Anyway, Beware the attack of the Zombie Auto-Blogs! They're Here! They're Everywhere! Why are they permitted to exist, anyway?

Hey, I just made up some new Viola jokes:

Q: Why did Arnold Schönberg use violas in his Verklärte Nacht?
A: It was the best he could do, because he hadn’t invented atonal music yet.
Q: Why did Mozart score his Sinfonia Concertante for violin and viola?
A: Because the Theremin hadn’t been invented yet,
Q: A violist and a soprano fall off a cliff; who hits the ground first?
A: The violist should have hit the ground first, but he missed it.
Q: What did paleontologists conclude when they found the fossil remains of a Tyrannosaurus Rex clutching a viola?
A: That the T. R. stunned its prey before killing it.
Q: What did paleontologists conclude when they found the 150 million-year-old shattered fossil remains of a sixty foot long viola?
A: That it knew how to fly, but not how to land.
Q: Why do many violinists think they can play viola?
A: They all know violists who think they can play the viola.
Q: Why aren’t there any viola solos in the last movement of Berlioz’ Symphonie Fantastique?
A: Because witches really aren’t that bad.
Q: Why didn’t Mozart write any awful notes for the viola to play in his Musical Joke?
A: It wasn’t necessary to write out the awful notes..
Q: Why do violas exist?
A: To prove there's more to creation than Intelligent Design.
Q: What do you call a violist who also airbrushes photographs, and paints?
A: Archie, we miss you.
Q: What do you call a violist who also writes TV scripts for Lassie?
A: David, we really, really, really miss you.

The Internet is like a highway (hmmm):

There’s a joke(?) floating around on the Internet, in which the writer imagines what real highways would be like if they were like the Internet. I wasn’t impressed with his imagination, so I’m going to take shot at it. Please supply more suggestions!
If highways were like the Internet:

• If there was no room to park at your destination, they wouldn’t even let you go there in the first place.
  
• Just before you reached your destination, you might discover (error 404!) it doesn’t exist.
  
• If you got lost, you could quickly go home and start over. But sometimes home would inexplicably change to another place.
  
• You could usually drive quickly back to your previous destination, just as it was in the past.
  
• Most toll boths would require a name and a password (but no money).
  
• It’d be hard to drive fast because you’d have to steer around the thousands of billboards that are right on the roadway. If you accidentally hit any of these signs, you’d suddenly find you’re somewhere else.
  
• The speed limit would routinely be faster in the city than the country.
  
• Some places you visit would try to puts lots of extra drivers in your vehicle, to make it go elsewhere.
  
• Traffic would often go one way at a time.
  
• The more you drove around, the more your vehicle would fill up with food (cookies, anyway).
  
• Over time the highways would get faster and faster, and require less maintenance.
  
• There would be only three kinds of cars, but they would offer frequent upgrades.
  
• Some places would look weird if were driving the less common kind of car.
  
• You’d never see red lights or stop signs. There would be intersections, but you’d never see them either.
  
• Roads would remember the people who’ve driven on them, rather than the other way around.
  
• Drivers who couldn’t spell well would wind up in Eastern Europe.
  
• You could go to several places at once. You could go to the same place at once.
  
• You could go to a place to get its map, rather than get a map to go to a place.
  
• ”Road rage” would be a desire to destroy your own vehicle, not the other guy’s.
  
• (Pig added:) If you accidentally mistook a similar sounding exit for the one you really wanted, everyone might be naked when you got there.
  

Not feeling enough rage?

If you're having too many of those manic weeks when things just seem to be fine, and your anger muscle is way under-exercised, have I got a website for you. Overlawyered describes incredibly wrong-headed lawsuits, rulings and related stupidities. There's a lot of detail there, and as you read, if you agree, you just get angrier and angrier. Or if you disagree - well, you'll get really furious. The perfect antidote for a beautiful Spring day.

The Nigerian Letter Scammers ought to be more organized:

The Nigerian Letter Scammers ought to be more organized:
I have some advice for the people who write those scam letters from Nigeria. They ought to get together and set up a significant pool of money, say, a half million dollars. Then they should operate a “scam” in which someone in the USA actually GETS the half million by following the usual instructions. After word of this gets out, they’ll have ten times as many suckers falling for their scam. This is MY idea, and I’m willing to be the sucker who gets the actual half million.

Another Problem with “Privatizing” Social Security:

Al Hedstrom, the Kitsap Pundit, has pointed out that any Soc Sec plan like our president’s will require immense new development in government IT. He explains that much more information will be needed about the current status of each person with an account, and that money will have to be correctly credited to each account within days (he says that currently Soc Sec $$ can find their way into the system 18 months late).

A new large computer system must be written to handle your account transactions, and to know, at any moment, how much money of each type YOUR account would have for you, or the account managers, to play with. The bottom line: We couldn’t start a new Soc Sec plan until all this new software was written and well-tested. Its development has to be paid for, and here’s a real likely scenario:

• Year 2008: The program is defined so well that the system can be developed in ten years at a cost of $60,000,000...
  
• Year 2015: But we've changed our minds about what we want, the software has to be redesigned. Start over…
  

Like calendar reform, some aspects of society can no longer be changed because of the inertia of computer change required to support them. Changing Soc Sec might first require a brilliant intermediate step that gradually adds capabilities to allow many future changes to be made in a timely fashion. Here’s how that will work:

• Year 2007: The infra-structure is defined so well that the system can be subtly upgraded in ten years at a cost of $30,000,000..
  
• Year 2011: Now that we know what we want, it turns out that the intermediate upgrades – Murphy’s Law strikes! – do not support the new plan. Start over…
  

It’s … un … wearable …… ohno

When I’m getting ready to go to a fancy event, it gives me pleasure to think of the suit, just recently pressed at the cleaners and waiting for me to wear. Then I try to put it on and … ohno … the cleaners have squashed the fly zipper, which is now stuck at half mast.
I’ve taken a vow to check the zippers immediately and not wait until I want to wear the garment. This is a problem for which there might be no last minute fix.

When you see a movie on TV, are the ads the "dirty parts"?

Orrin Hatch's Spring gift to the movie corporations, bill S. 167, called the "Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005", includes some draconian penalties for illegal movie copying. But it also makes it legal to sell DVD players that know how to skip over the naked bodies and sexual intercourse parts of movies. (Or possibly, as Ed Felton has pointed out, to skip over all the other parts instead.)
In fact the wording that allows limited excerpting of movies is very general. Please don't confuse me with a lawyer, but I think congress just made it legal for TiVo and other PVRs to automatically skip over the advertisements while playing back a movie shown on television. If you're curious, take a look at section 202 of the bill, which says in part that it allows: "the making imperceptible ... of limited portions of audio or video content of a motion picture, during a performance in or transmitted to that household for private home viewing, ... or the creation or provision of a computer program or other technology that enables such making imperceptible ..."

Already You!

Voila! Another lovely misspelling that's common on the web: Deja vous. Here are a few examples:

• This one also includes jamais vous.
  
• Zeitgeist Deja Vous. Anyone care to translate that?
  
• Deja-vous is evidence of time travel. Or at least, Vowel travel.
  
• It's Like Deja Vous All Over Again. Of course.
  
• Deja Vous Ringtones. Hint: a "deja vus" ring-tone would tell you that you've already answered the phone, no need to pick it up again.
  

OKAY, now let's try to use it in a paragraph (suggestions please):

I had never seen you before, but I seemed to know exactly what you had done, and what you were thinking. It was a case of Deja Vous.

Precision Blogger's law of remarkably unforeseen consequences:

Ed Felton argues persuasvively that the new Family Movie Act (FMA), despite its draconian penalties, has some really excellent anti-censorship qualities. You can read his discussion here.

Unfortunately, I am sure this law is going to conform to a general rule that I shall formulate here:

Precision Blogger's law of remarkably unforeseen consequences:
Any new law involving free speech, censorship, copyright, or computer usage is going to have such remarkable unforeseen consequences that it would be better right now to pass NO SUCH laws.

Just wait a few months to see the unforeseen consequences of the FMA, and be amazed.
- precision blogger

This…

Don't you just hate it when someone invites you to click on a link without giving you the slightest inkling what you're going to see? I would never do that. For example, take a look at this!

Certificate of Authenticity:

While flying, we browse the Sky-Mall magazine. I’ve noticed that one can buy a gold ring, the “One ring to rule them all” with the appropriate Tolkien inscription. What fascinates me is that the thousands (or perhaps, dozens?) of people who buy this ring get a “certificate of authenticity.” I imagine the certificate says something like this:

Congratulations! You have purchased the one and only authentic ring to rule them all. Everyone else (including the manufacturer) has a fake.

Two stories that make no sense.

Today’s entry is rather long, but having remembered these two stories I just have to tell them. I promise you that, taken together, they make no sense in an entirely different way.

Please imagine that we are back in the 1950’s in some provincial Italian city. The city fathers have decided on an immense rebuilding program to spruce up the government center, and they receive several bids. One bid - the highest - fascinates them. More than a million bricks will be needed for the entire project. This oldtime contractor undertakes to estimate exactly how many bricks will be needed. If he is wrong: the city need pay him nothing.
Well, they accept his bid. An enormous pile of bricks is delivered to the site. As work progresses, people gather to watch the pile diminish. On the last day of construction there is great excitement. The old contractor, his head covered by a broad hat, stands apart observing. A mason climbs up to cement a final brick in place.

One brick remains of the pile. One excess brick. The contractor walks slowly forward, picks up the brick, examines it, and sadly tosses it over his left shoulder.





A train departs. It’s a hot day and things are not going well in the stuffy third class seating. A woman holds a crying babe. A man directly across from her smokes a cigar, blowing the smoke into the child’s and the mother’s face.
After awhile someone opens a window but this has little effect. The smoke swirls at the child. The mother begs the man to put out his cigar. He refuses.

Suddenly the woman snatches the cigar and tosses it out the window. For a moment, all is immobile; but then the man grabs the baby and throws IT out the window.
Pandemonium ensues. The emergency brake is pulled, but the train comes only slowly to a halt. A search party is organized to see what’s become of the baby. They walk back down the track, peering into the distance, confused by the heat-distorted air rising off the tracks.

In the distance, they see a very large dog.
The dog is coming towards them.
It has something in its mouth.
In terror, they strain to see what’s in the dog’s mouth. They surge forward. The dog continues toward them. And then: they can see what’s in the dog’s mouth:


It’s the brick.

A small dose of Blind Faith

You can read at Annanova that Gerrard Gosens, a blind person living in Brisbane, recently began his ascent of Mount Everest. When asked why he wanted to climb it, I wonder if he said, "Because it's probably there."

$9,999.95:

I had an experience today that says something about the mindset of retailers. Or maybe it says something about the mindset of the people who program cash registers. And in any case I’m not sure what it says…

I visited a local supermarket to pick up few ingredients for a meal. Deciding I must have a tomatillo, I grabbed a nice one, noting that there was no price posted for them.

The cashier looked dubiously at and said, “This is a tomatillo, right? Did you notice what it costs?”

I explained that no price was posted, as far as I could see. She sighed, set it aside, and checked out my other items.

I was in a hurry, so I said, “Why don’t you charge me $2.00 a pound for the tomatillo? I’m sure it actually costs less than that.”

“I’ll trust you,” she said, and charged me – now get this - $1.99/pound for the tomatillo.

$1.99? To what purpose???

Locking my Car:

I always get a sense of how I feel about the immediate world when I decide whether and how to lock my car. I live in a place where locking is not mandatory, but I also live near places where locking is probably required.
I've noticed that I even make different decisions in the same place, feeling safer - or more anonymous - at some times. For example, if I park in a big, full parking lot, I tend to assume that a thief is unlikely to select my particular car.

On a hot day I may leave a window part way open and lock up. When I do this, I feel the locks reduce temptation in all but the most hardened, rarer thief.
On a very hot day I may leave a window all the way open and lock the car. In this case I hope the lock will give me a nice, false sense of security.

As you probably suspect, nothing has ever been stolen from my car (although an entire rental car was once stolen). If I experience a robbery, I'll probably return to this post and revise everything I've said.
Comments? How do you feel about unlocked cars?

Drip … drip …

Walking home on a cloudy, windless day, I felt the chilling sensation, every few minutes, of sparse cold raindrops on the nape of my neck. Soon I realized what this meant: my posture was lousy! Had I been standing straight, my longish hair would have protected my neck.

I was once somewhat insulted:

I started a new consulting job to complete a program that was “almost finished”, because the original programmer had quit. I was soon able to show that the program was far from finished (I completed it in three months). On my third day of work I found that two parts of the program had been designed in conflict, so that a third part would be impossible to complete. I thought it best to ask the original programmer how to resolve this issue. I got his phone number, called and described the issue to him.
“That’s amazing,” he said, “I would have expected you to work on my program for a month before you understood that problem.”
You might argue that he actually paid me a compliment. Didn’t feel like it though.

Not not:

As you don’t not know, if you use double negatives in English, you’re not unlikely as not to be clear.
It’s tricky to count negs on the fly when an even number of negatives means a positive. But in many other languages (such as Spanish and French), multiple negatives simply accentuate the “not.” In English, using multiple nots for emphasis rather than negation seems to be ‘against the rule”, but Mencken writes here about such usage, longstanding, in English. The WikiPedia entry on double negatives includes a good joke about double positives.

About three inches by five inches:

Out walking yesterday, I saw a young woman staring intently at a whitish object held in her palm. It looked too thin to be a cell phone, and I'm not aware of any white-colored PDAs so I was curious what gadget it was.
As I approached, she took the top index card off the short stack in her hand, slid it to the bottom of the pile, and stared intently at the next card.

The Origin of Dragons:

Maybe you've already thought about this, but it only struck me today. There was something weird on our dining room rug, a monster cricket I thought. I approached it with extreme caution, and picked up what turned out to be a crumpled leaf. Then I asked myself: How much do the legends of dragons, mermaids, griffins and other fanciful creatures owe to the vision of near-sighted people before the invention of glasses?

“The camera is the film”, says Dvorak; but what of modularization?

John Dvorak has a thoughtful column titled "The camera is the film." He explains that with analog cameras, you choose the film you want to get a certain look. Digital cameras, each with their unique combination of lens, light-capturing mechanism and firmware, have a certain look. Dvorak has used many digital cameras and discusses a few that he returns to for their characteristic style.

Since we are in a world of hybrid hardware/software products here, I’d like to take the obvious next step and ask about modularization. Will the day come when I assemble my own digital camera by buying a lens here, a CCD there, download and customize some open-source camera firmware, and make a camera that has a unique look?
Why not?

Willie Randolph, Mgr:

I promise not to blog much about baseball.
The Mets decided that Willie Randolph will be a great manager. So great in fact that he needs no seasoning in the minor leagues, but will learn best beneath the cruel magnifying glass of NYC sports. I hope they are right, for his debut was not impressive.
On opening day he appeared to manage like the American Leaguer he mostly was. Considering that the Mets got most of their runs via the long ball, he may even have been correct. I'm more concerned by a failure if imagination late in the game.
The Mets pitched Dae-Sung Koo in the eighth, one of their many “question mark” relievers. He was sensational, striking out the last two batters on called third strike pitches that looked like balls and moved so much that catcher Piazza dropped them both. Koo may have been having a career moment! I really expected him to start the ninth. With a two-run lead, there was room to bring in the Mets' genuine closer if Koo got into trouble. But no, the unimaginative move – bring in the closer to start the ninth.
It's not that important to me that the Mets' closer lost the game. I'm concerned about the lost opportunity to nurture a new player who might grow into something special.

Where’s Africa?

I was happily browsing a small second-hand book shop. It was a delicious musty warren of nooks with tall stuffed bookshelves sorted by subject.
A young man hurried in, turned to the clerk and asked excitedly, “Where’s Africa?”
We customers, perhaps six of us, turned to look. The clerk laughed nervously, then pointed across the store to a shelf near me. “Over there,” he said, “below the books on Asia.”
“No, “said the young man. “I mean the continent!”
“Uh, I think it’s south of the Mediterranean,” offered the clerk.
“Thanks!” said the young man, and he hurried away.