I went through the play-by-play of the final match of the 2000 National Scrabble Championship.  That’s a humbling experience.  48 distinct words were played, and I did not know 20 of them (42%).  Also, three words I knew (‘futz’, ‘garcon’, ‘garcons’) but would have guessed not to be officially playable.  What this means is that even if I had found locations for the words, I still would not have known to play nearly half of them.

I have a pretty good vocabulary, but awee?  didie?  helot, oidia, and uta [1]?

I’m inspired.  I have to get Jenn to play with me later.

[1]  OK, if you are curious:

• awee: a little while (chiefly Scottish)
• didie: diaper [Thanks to the anonymous QuickTopic poster who found the definition for me]
• helot: a slave in ancient Sparta; a Spartan serf; hence, a slave or serf
• oidia: asexual spores
• uta: a mild form of skin infection

I have just brewed my last cup of my cherished Autumn Green tea.  The leaves are all gone now.  They have been stale for a while, and this last cup consisted almost exclusively of small leaf fragments.  I’m tasting it now, and it is no longer the same.  The magic is gone from it, there is almost no sweetness, it is a bit harsh and bitter.  Teas are like wine, they are constantly evolving; but unlike wines, most teas just get progressively worse from the time they are first produced.

This tea is one of my all-time favorites (though I’m a sucker for the notoriously unstable matcha [1].)  Autumn Green is from the delicate Autumnal Flush, and while it is an oolong it is only lightly oxidized, leaving a lot of green character.  It is delicious.

However, the company from which I purchased it, the great In Pursuit of Tea, recently sent in their One Minute Tea Tip newsletter a head-to-head tasting of Autumn Green, which is in the Pouchong style, against the true Pouchong Ming Yue.  The Autumn Green leaves were older, and so perhaps did not fare as well as they could have.  Even allowing for this, though, the taste test overwhelming favored the Ming Yue in all categories, including color, aroma, palate, and suitability for multiple infusions.  If I were more cynical I’d see this as merely a marketing ploy to get people to buy the Ming Yue, which is a steep $180 per pound versus $80 per pound for the Autumn Green.  But I trust the guys who run the company, and I’ve spoken to them at length, so I trust their recommendations.  My overall sense was that “if you liked the Autumn Green, you will love the Ming Yue.”

I’m considering whether to re-order the Autumn Green, of which they still have some sealed stock left over from last year, or to just order the Ming Yue.  Considering their high recommendation, and my sentimental attachment to the Autumn Green, I might just do both.

[1]  Matcha, sometimes transliterated ‘maccha’, is the powdered, highly perishable green tea used in the Japanese cha no yu, or tea ceremony.  For more information on Japanese tea varieties (including matcha but not including Autumn Green and Pouchong, which are from Taiwan), look here, and here, and here.

The final setlist for Pearl Jam’s 12 November release “Riot Act”, courtesy of The [Official] Pearl Jam Rumor Pit.

1. Can’t Keep
2. Save You
3. Love Boat Captain
4. Cropduster
5. Ghost
6. I Am Mine
7. Thumbing My  Way
8. You Are
9. Get Right
10. Green Disease
11. helphelp
12. Bushleaguer
13. 1/2 Full
14. Arc
15. All or None

With less than two months to go, I am as always getting into my pre-release hyperventilation stage.  15 songs!  I hope that some are longer format and not of their recent sub-three minute pattern.

Apparently the single “I Am Mine” is allowed to be played officially tomorrow, 18 September.  The only problem with their traditional pre-release singles is that I listen to them so much that they never quite seem to fit into the album once released, as they have built an identy all their own.  It happened with “Who You Are”, it happened to “Given to Fly”, it happened, to a certain degree, to “Nothing As It Seems”.  Regarding “Given To Fly”, I am surprised when the song comes on every time I listen to Yield, which I admit is bizarre.

This is great.  Some wiseass was actually able to extract $3 from a Nigerian 419 scammer.  He needed this money to prove they were acting in good faith.  Go figure.

More on manipulating 419 scammers here.

On Monday The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer aired an interview with U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney.  He was describing al-Qaida as a global menace and explained that the U.S. and its allies had just broken up a cell in Singapore.  “Singapore,” he said.  “Singapore.  That’s around the other side of the world from the Middle East.”

Yo, Dick?

(Map from National Geographic MapMachine)

Many words have several different senses.  When a language loses certain senses of the word, the language can be left with mis-interpreted phrases.  Case in point: I was watching a television program the other day, in which the following exchange occurred:

“Fancy meeting you here.”

“It is, isn’t it?

The phrase fancy meeting you here uses fancy as a synonym for imagine — that is

Imagine meeting you here!

The nuance of this is

I am surprised to see you here!  I would not have imagined that happening!

But somehow the screenwriter lost sense of this definition, and somehow thought the common sentence was referring to the occasion being highly decorated or intricate; that is, the adjectival usage, new enough that it does not even appear in the 1889 Century Dictionary.  You cannot very well imagine someone saying It’s intricate to meet you here! or How highly decorated to meet you here!, but this apparently did not give pause to the screenwriter.

But I confess to perpetrating one of these myself, one which Geoff Nunberg calls attention to in his excellent book The Way We Talk Now.  The phrase in question is polite society, which apparently employs an obsolete definition of polite meaning well-bred.  And yet it my mind I have always pictured a society of people for which the entrance requirement is minding one’s manners.  Certainly this is a democratic and American read on the phrase, but one cannot easily alter one’s progenitors; therefore polite society is one that the mass of us have no chance of entering.  Fancy that.

Rob is cool.  Be sure to check out the other pages on the site, too.  They’re all cool.

It’s … Lego Chef!

I have been reading the September/October 2002 issue of the great Skeptical Inquirer magazine and have learned a very cool word.  The word is syncretism, defined as “Reconciliation or fusion of differing systems of belief, as in philosophy or religion, especially when success is partial or the result is heterogeneous.”  Very cool.

Less cool is yet another SI demonstration of how stupid people are.  This is one of those bang-your-head-into-concrete ones.  I mean, we all know people are stupid, but fuck, people are stupid.  I would give up my car and house and job and live in a fucking cardboard box if that could suddenly stop people from being this stupid.

Try out Clifford Pickover’s ESP Experiment and see if you come up with the same “explanations” the other visitors did after trying to fool the computer.  Many visitors are convinced the computer is psychic (one was impressed that emotional excitation “does not even seem to interfere, as would be expected if one looks at Sufi literature.”)  One is convinced the computer scans eye movement and tracks pupil dilation resulting from concentration.  Another is impressed that the English-language site can read his mind even though he thought of the card in Finnish.

The duty of friends is not just to agree with everything, but to say, `We disagree on this point.’  That is what I believe to be the duty of friends in relations between individuals, just as it is in relations between nations, if one happens to disagree.  And on this point” — Iraq — “we disagree, or I disagree.”

Read a short but informative NYTimes article on German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s position regarding the U.S. and Iraq.  (By the way, can you imagine a U.S. political leader giving a high-profile interview while smoking a cigar?  How’s that for a more laid-back culture?)

The Safeway was completely empty save for us and a few other Microsoft people just like us — hair-trigger geeks in pursuit of just the right snack.  Because of all the rich nerds living around here, Redmond and Bellevue are very “on-demand” neighborhoods.  Nerds get what they want when they want it, and they go psycho if it’s not immediately available.  Nerds overfocus.  I guess that’s the problem.  But it’s precisely this ability to narrow-focus that makes them so good at code writing: one line at a time, one line in a strand of millions.

                Douglas Coupland, Microserfs

I should have picked a point, preferably a simple one, and hammered it over and over like White did.  Instead, I was self-censoring, getting bogged down in the complexities, uncertain what distortion to correct.  Most people watching the show probably read me the way the producers wanted — as a pointy-bearded civil libertarian and a paid corporate apologist trying to talk down to a concerned mom.

It can be very difficult to explore complex issues in a Phil Donahue world.  If I ever go on a talk show I want a lapel pin that reads “Slow down, think, and listen for a minute.”  This story by MIT professor Henry Jenkins on what passes for debate in this nation follows a frustratingly familiar pattern but makes for interesting reading nonetheless.

The site Women in Refrigerators discusses the phenomenon of the superheroine tortured/raped/murdered/depowered in comic books.  A fascinating read, even if (like me) you are not really a reader of comics.

Thanks for MeFi for the link.

On the morning of September 11th decisions began tumbling like dominoes.  After the second tower is hit, Bruce Barrett, deputy manager of the New York’s largest FAA’s air traffic facility, declares a state of emergency called “ATC [Air Traffic Control] Zero”, a failsafe in the case of FAA radar failure that empties the skies overhead.  The order stretches from Maryland north to southern New England, from Long Island to central Pennsylvania.  His boss approves the order, and the order goes through without first obtaining FAA permission.

American Airlines knows it has lost one flight.  They cannot lose another.  At American headquarters the order goes out to ground all their planes that have not taken off in the Northeast.

At the same time, Ben Sliney is on his first day on the job as national air traffic operations manager, the central “chess master”.  First he halts takeoffs of all flights bound for the Northeast.  Moments later the order extends to Los Angeles.  Then to San Francisco.  The career air traffic specialists on staff aren’t satisfied.  They shout for Sliney to “Just stop everything!  Just stop it!”  For the first time in history, the unprecedented order goes out: full groundstop.  Nothing takes off.

But where is American flight 77?  There is no response.  American V.P. Gerard Arpey, acting without consultation with the CEO, orders all American flights out of the sky.  But still no word from flight 77.

Then it hits.  35 minutes after the second tower collision, American flight 77 slams into the Pentagon.  Sliney shouts to land all 4,500 planes in the air.  The order is broadcast and sent up to FAA Administrator Garvey and her deputy Monte Belger.  They approve.  But now comes a phone call from a bunker under the White House where Transporation Secretary Norman Mineta has joined Dick Cheney, needing to know what the hell is going on.  They explain the landing order.  He concurs, then asks for the precise details.  Belger explains that every plane is to land at the nearest airport unless, at the pilot’s discretion, there is a major emergency prohibiting this action.

“Fuck pilot discretion!” says Mineta.  “Monte, bring all the planes down.”

The news cannot come fast enough for the flights in the air.  On United flight 890 over the Pacific, Capt. Hosking and pilot Doug Price wait for more news.  But they have already decided to behave as if there are hijackers aboard their plane.  Price wedges the pilots’ suitcases against the cockpit door.  It won’t be easy to get in with those in the way.  “Get out the crash axe,” orders Hosking.  “If someone tries to come in that door, I don’t want you to hurt him.  Kill him.”

September 11 described very excitingly.  The second half comes tomorrow.

Stamp collectors might be amused by this heartwarming story that showed up on Usenet.

Andrew Smith invents languages as a hobby.  His language Brithenig asks the question what would have happened if there had been sufficient Latin speakers to displace Old Celtic in Great Britain.  The result is a Romance language that underwent Welsh-style sound changes and borrowed more from Celtic languages than any other Romance language.  In Brithenig, the story of the Tower of Babel begins

Agur ill mun inteir afew yn llinghedig e yn cant comyn. Sig ill pobl sumodefant di’ll llewent, ys ligarent yn lluin in Senar e llâ si ysteblirent.
Ys ddisirent a sew alltr, “Gwath, gwan a ffager yn fric e gogher llo hinteirfent.” Ys hýsafant llo fric in ill llog di’ll pedr, e yn aerell per ill kelchin. Affos ys ddisirent, “Gwath, gwan a eddiffigar yn giwdad per nu, cun yn tyr ke dang a llo chel, ke nu ffagen yn n�n per nu e sun ysparied rhen syrs feig lla der inteir.”

Another of his languages, yet unnamed, is created out of the “special cases” of dozens of language books; irregular parts of speech, irregular patterns, special rules, and so forth.

Not content with creating languages, he has also created an ‘alternate-present’ church called the “Church of Christ in Aotearoa New Zealand” that envisions what might have happened in the church if certain decisions had gone another way.

Startlingly, “No, it never propagates if I set a gap or prevention” is a palindrome.  I could even see using that in conversation.

Meg Hourihan (of Pyra and Megnut fame) has written an insightful article on blogging.  It has been reposted on DaveNet.

“The original VisiCalc program that ran on the IBM PC in 1981 still runs on today’s PCs.”

You can download VisiCalc, forerunner of today’s spreadsheet programs, from the website of its original co-author.  Do not worry about hard disk space; the program is only 27,520 bytes, smaller than many image files on the web today.

For the twelfth bug of Christmas, my manager said to me,

   Tell them it’s a feature

   Say it’s not supported

   Change the documentation

   Blame it on the hardware

   Find a way around it

   Say they need an upgrade

   Reinstall the software

   Ask for a dump

   Run with the debugger

   Try to reproduce it

   Ask them how they did it and

   See if they can do it again.

Or maybe you would prefer the “ABCs of Unix”.  It’s actually a pretty good introduction to Unix for a neophyte:

…S is for Spell, which attempts to belittle, while

T is for True, which does very little.

U is for Uniq, which is used after Sort, and

V is for Vi, which is hard to abort…

Or perhaps your taste runs to a computer programming song called “Write in C,” sung to the lyrics of the Beatles’ “Let It Be”:

A thousand people sware that T.P.

Seven is the one for me.

I hate the word PROCEDURE,

Write in C.

Be afraid.  There are many, many more.

Rudie Berkhout is a holographic artist.  He has photographs of his exciting works on his website.  To provide a 3D experience, he includes a page of stereo photographs of holograms in two formats: parallel-eyes and cross-eyed.  By adjusting the parallax and focus of your eyes, two images can be fused into one in the brain.  I find the cross-eyed images easier to view.  As a note, this exercise causes eye fatigue, at least at first.

I have started watching televised billiards.  I find this to be a fascinating game.  There is a great deal of logical and geometric reasoning involved coupled with precise training of bodily movements, sort of chess meets figure skating.

I followed the women’s world semifinals and finals, with players from the U.S., U.K., and Ireland reaching the top ranks.  The two finalists both have “a snooker background”, say the announcers, and explain that snooker is played on a longer table (so they are very good with use of the bridge) and with smaller balls (so they have good ball control.)  And watching Jeanette Lee, known as The Black Widow, lean over the cloth, chest touching the table and long black hair brushing the felt, I noted that billiards is the only women’s sport in which the sportcaster can get away with proclaiming “Nice rack!”

Ever type a sentence fragment into a search engine to see what sort of sentences people are formulating?  No, me neither, but looking for something specific I typed the phrase “than other religions” into Google.  Of the first ten matches…

• Two pages mention an ABC News poll reporting that 38% of Americans say Islam has more extremists than other religions.
• A Pew Forum poll reported that “a plurality” of Americans believe that Islam is more likely to encourage violence than other religions.
• An article from the Jan-Feb 2002 issue of “Military Review”, a U.S. Army journal, discusses “the possibilities of U.S. forces being deployed as peacekeepers and nationbuilders in Muslim nations,” and states that “Unlike many other religions familiar to American non-Muslims, Islam inserts itself into the body politic far more aggressively than other religions.”  The nationbuilders are also reminded that to “some Muslims … westernization and globalization are threats.”  (The Army have since removed the page, but is still cached at Google.)

• ReligiousTolerance.org explains that it covers “Christianity in greater detail than other religions” because in the U.S. and Canada it “outnumber[s] the next largest organized religions by about 40 to 1.”

• Two quote Nietzche as saying that “Buddhism is hundred times more realistic than other religions.”

• Cartoonist Tim Kreider explains that he mocks Christianity more often than other religions because he was brought up Christian and has personal resentments.

• A Canadian page on Hereditary Witchcraft states that most of their rituals are “spontaneous and less structured than [those of] other religions.”
• And as a final touch, ChristianAnswers.net, on its sure-to-be-objective “ANSWERS about RELIGIONS” page, asks if Christianity seems “to be supported by historical evidence more than other religions.”  I’ll spoil the end for you: It does because “Christianity and history have always been allies,” explaining that “twentieth-century archaeology generally reinforces Biblical history, including the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch … and the historical background surrounding the virgin birth, sinless life, vicarious death, and physical resurrection of Jesus Christ.”  (Note the weasel phrase “historical background surrounding.”  I suppose what this means is that Caesar Augustus ruled around that time, that a place called Judea existed, and so forth.  As for the idea Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, this is rejected by most Biblical scholars.)

Project Censored‘s number one story for 2001 regards the privatization of the world’s water supply.  The story states that “less than one half of one per cent of the world’s total water stock” is freshwater.  Much less, I would think.  As a botec, if the ocean covers two-thirds of the earth’s surface and the ocean is an average of two miles deep, that is enough freshwater to cover all of the continents to a depth of 50 feet.  I might believe five feet.  Anyone have better figures on this?

Product Warning, Epistemological Denotation:

The consumer must understand that due to the a-priori impossibility
of assuring a shared denotation amongst independent agents, none of
the advertising material, product literature, instructions, or safety
warnings (including this one), associated with this product may
contain what the consumer perceives to be factual information.

See this and more philosophy humour.

The steroid question will always be your last question

[When Journalist Rick Reilly challenges Sammy Sosa to take a test for steroids,] Sosa chuckles ruefully, pats Reilly on the back, and replies, “No, sir, that would weaken the player’s union, and besides, your question is quite inappropriate.”

Just kidding. Actually, Sosa yells and screams. His answer includes the word “motherfucker.” “You’re not my father,” he tells Reilly.

Via MetaFilter.

Stupid things shouldn’t be this much fun.

I have my Review of www.[number].com Sites.  I have my Survey of Four-Letter Domains.  I have nothing near as cool as THE SECRET LIVES OF NUMBERS.

The weird thing is, I don’t think he’s kidding.

Texas has geared up for another year of Fahrenheit 451 homages.  In the most recent case, Texas has refused adoption of a history textbook because it described rampant prostitution in the newly-settled American West.  The chairperson of the Texas State Board of Education rhetorically whether “that something that should be emphasized?  Is that an important historical fact?”

It turns out that Republican ideology is formally engrained in the Texas Education Code.  § 28.002(h), “Required Curriculum”, contains the following:

The State Board of Education and each school district shall foster the continuation of the tradition of teaching United States and Texas history and the free enterprise system in regular subject matter and in reading courses and in the adoption of textbooks.  A primary purpose of the public school curriculum is to prepare thoughtful, active citizens who understand the importance of patriotism and can function productively in a free enterprise society with appreciation for the basic democratic values of our state and national heritage.  (Emphasis added)

This statute has been used to challenge numerous textbooks.  In one particularly horrific example, an environmental science text was banned as being “anti-American”.  Although I do not know the specifics, the only way I can conceive of an environmental science textbook being “anti-American” would be for it to note that the U.S. emits more greenhouse gases, both total and per capita, than any nation on earth, that the U.S. has refused to sign on to environmental protection treaties, and so forth.  In other words, the truth.  An alternative environmental sciences book was accepted, however.  This one was partially funded by a consortium of mining companies.  Conflicts of interests abound, not the least of which is the fact that the chairperson of the Board of Education is a co-owner of a petroleum company.  “The oil and gas industry should be consulted,” she explains.  “We always get a raw deal.”

Citizens for a Sound Economy, a right-wing special interest group involved in the censoring of Texas textbooks, flaunts their influence.  With Texas buying one tenth of the nation’s textbooks, the field director is able to proclaim that “what we adopt in Texas is what the rest of the country gets.”  The director bluntly and snidely describes their economic coercion: she explains that the publisher withdrew the textbook because they “wisely didn’t want to jeopardize their larger sales in the state by having that book as its poster child.”

Some examples of deleted and edited sentences in Texas textbooks:

• “Destruction of the tropical rain forest could affect weather over the entire planet” is changed to “Tropical rain forest ecosystems impact weather over the entire planet.”
• Astonishingly, the sentence “In the past, the earth has been much warmer than it is now, and fossils of sea creatures show us that the sea level was much higher than it is today. So does it really matter if the world gets warmer?” was added.  (I’m all for instilling critical reasoning skills by having students challenge claims, but this line seems solely to suggest that global warming does not matter.)
• The sentence “Most experts on global warming feel that immediate action should be taken to curb global warming” was deleted.
• A textbook was rejected, with partial justification that it proclaims the “oft-heard falsehood” that over 100 million Americans are breathing unhealthy air.  This is a said to be a lie because air is only toxic on some days.

Despite this blatant inculcation of ideology and censorship of true statements, the director insists that they do not want to edit or rewrite textbooks, only to assure that they are “stripped of ideology and offer a straightforward, objective statement of facts.” (Quote is from a New York Times article, and may be a paraphrase of the director’s statements.)  In the end, the censors fall back on one excuse.  “[Historical realities should not be swept] under the rug.  But the children should see the hope and the good things about America.”

Texas’s senators are Phil Gramm and Kay Bailey Hutchison.   I have written both regarding this issue.  If you desire, you may use my letter as a model for your own letter:

Dear Senator [Gramm/Hutchison],

I am writing as a concerned U.S. citizen regarding the censorship of textbooks by the Texas State Board of Education.  In recent decisions, environmental textbooks have been banned for their frank discussions of global warming, and history books have been banned for their discussion of prostitution in the Old West.  I believe U.S. students should be armed with relevant facts, historical and modern, so that they may grow to be conscientious and knowledgeable leaders upon reaching adulthood.  Texas purchases 10% of the nations textbooks, and as such is in a unique position to set the standard for the United States.  Accordingly, I ask that you advocate for the revision of textbook adoption policies in the Great State of Texas.

I appreciate your time and consideration.

Best regards,

[Name]