Monument

[I wrote this on LJ back in 2008. Some of the links may have expired. I do have OED access now.]

I commend Cecil Adams's Straight Dope to you. For thirty-odd years they have been fielding difficult questions from the public with snarky answers. Reading the archives will probably teach you as much as a year in some schools.

There are, however, some questions they refuse to answer. In a spirit of homage, I'll take my lunchbreak to answer them here.

Why do we need a hot water heater? If it's hot it doesn't need to be heated.

Your grasp on the concept of apposition is shaky. Apposition is the placing of two nouns or noun phrases together, so that the one tells you more about the other. In some cases they are simply two ways to describe the same entity, like "my sister Lucy". You seem to be thinking that a "hot water heater" must be a heater to heat hot water, and that's one option, but consider other examples like "sausage machine", a machine to make sausages. A hot water heater is a heater which produces hot water.

How can we have jumbo shrimp?

This is a rather amusing question, because although the person asking it is presumably aware that "shrimp" is both the name of a creature and a description of size, they are possibly not aware that the same is true for "jumbo". Jumbo was a famous elephant in London Zoo in the 1880s; if he had been a particularly small elephant we could have said he was a shrimp Jumbo. Use of his name to mean "very large" followed within ten years. Shrimp are in fact so called because of their smallness (the word is related to "shrink") and we have records from the 1300s of using the term to describe people. So the fact that the adjectives in both cases are derived from comparing whatever it is to very large or very small animals is irrelevant; everyone knows you can have small elephants and big shrimp.

Why isn't phonetic spelled the way it sounds?

1) It is. The word is not irregularly spelt at all. (There are other ways of spelling the sound which "ph" makes, but that is irrelevant; the point is that "ph" can make no other regular sounds.)

2) Even if it wasn't, it is not necessary that a word should describe itself. This would lead us into shaving barber territory.

Why do our noses run and our feet smell?

This is a confusion about the two meanings of the verbs "run" and "smell". "Run" is a word which, in various forms, has meant "flow" since Proto-Indo-European; its use in describing the flow of your feet in bipedal motion and the flow of mucus from your nostrils are two applications of the same idea. "Smell" is one of those interesting words which can mean both sides of an action (compare dialectal "itch" for scratch and "learn" for teach); it's meant either to produce or notice an odour for almost a thousand years (probably longer, but we don't have attestation). There is an untrue story that Samuel Johnson, on being told, "Sir, you smell!", replied, "No, Sir, I stink, you smell."

Why does quicksand work slowly?

"Quick" here has the original meaning of "alive", as in "to judge the quick and the dead", and not the newer sense of "fast" (which has only been around since the fourteenth century).

Why are boxing rings square?

A lot of people seem to want to know this, for some reason. I think if you imagine a real fight between exactly two people, without all the formalised rules and layouts of boxing, the other people in the bar or marketplace or wherever tend to fall back into an approximate circle; people were using squares to fight in at least by 1743, when Jack Broughton's seminal rulebook on the conduct of bareknuckle fighting was published. I suspect it's simply easier to draw up a square on the floor, and it's easier to say that you start from opposite sides after a fall than saying you have to start from 180° from your opponent, but that's just a guess.

Why, when lights are out, they are invisible, but when the stars are out, they are visible?

"Out" is a word with a number of meanings, few of which can be descriptions of the same objects. You might as well ask whether Jodie Foster coming out meant she became more or less visible based on stellar or light analogies. If I still had access to the OED, I would tell you when the word came to mean "extinguished" when applied to flames (and hence electric light), but I don't.

[Update: Jonathan Jarrett, who does have OED access, shows me that the earliest record of the word being so used was by John Trevisa in his 1398 translation of De Proprietatibus Rerum: "For þat þe wynde schulde nouȝt blowe out þe light". You rock. Thanks.]

Why do we call them apartments when they are all together?

This question makes no sense because it is backwards. If you take a house and put all the parts together, it is precisely then when it is not apartments. If you split it apart into separate pieces, you have apartments.

If cows laughed, would milk come out of their noses?

I do rather find it hard to understand what kind of mental confusion would produce this question even as a joke. Firstly, when humans produce milk (or coffee, or whatever) from their nose when they laugh, it is because they were drinking it. Cows drink milk only in calfhood; the rest of their lives they drink water (around six gallons a day, although it varies by temperature). So only a baby cow would even be drinking the milk to start with. Secondly, why a cow? All mammals from mice to giraffes produce milk. Furthermore there is no connection between the mammary and the respiratory system. Finally, as far as I am aware, cows cannot laugh in the first place. Some zoologists have recently reported laughter in non-human primates, but not in other mammals.

Why does Denny's have locks on the door if it's open 24 hours?

A moment's thought should show you that the problems which would result from not being able to close the restaurant in an emergency, or in leaving it empty but unlocked, would far outweigh the few tens of dollars it costs to add locks to the door. Imagine, for example, closing the restaurant while refitting after a fire, or not being able to scrape enough staff together to run the place at 4am during a flu epidemic. (In addition, some jurisdictions may require that restaurants close on certain days or nights of the year.)

[Updates: rethought points out that a building may not have been open twenty-four hours a day in the past; shaunm points out that even buildings which are generally permanently open often close for a few hours a few times a year to have a cleaning crew do a thorough pass rather than the incremental cleaning that happens day-to-day.]

Why do ships carry cargoes and cars carry shipments?

"Car" (a Norman word which they took from the Celts) and "cargo" (a Spanish word that comes from Latin) are unrelated. Incidentally, it is interesting that people assume that the Welsh word for car, "car", is a loan-word from English, but its irregular plural belies this.

When will a building actually become a built?

The -ing on the end of "building" is not the "-ing" on the end of "singing"; it is another ending which was once "-ung" but merged. (The word in Scots is "biggin".)

For the last couple of years, I've been working on and off on a Mastodon-like microblogging server called kepi.

I have reached an impasse: I've done all the interesting stuff (Mastodon API and ActivityPub support) and what's left is dull (the HTML/JS interface, which TBH wouldn't need to be much different from Mastodon's own anyway).

Unfortunately, a microblogging system you can't use from a browser isn't all that useful for most people, and a lot of work would be needed before you could. It could work if someone wrote the bits I'm not enthused about, but I've asked around a few times and nobody seems interested on collaborating.

However, a lot of kepi would work well as standalone libraries. In particular, trilby (the Mastodon API support) would be useful for other people in other places, and indeed I've been playing with adding it into GROGGS. And bowler (the ActivityPub support) is something a lot of people might need. There are also some functions in busby (support for some .well-known services) which might be useful to others.

I'm not confident enough about writing general-use standalone Python libraries to do this at present. In particular, I don't have a reasonable grasp on all the possible use cases for something like bowler. I will read up on it, but help would be appreciated.

Some people were asking about the Anchoress font. All the ASCII letters and some basic punctuation now exist. Some of the letters still need to be tidied. The leading widths are still wrong. Anyway, this is what it looks like right now.

Today I learned the word "eristic", meaning arguments for the sake of it rather than to find truth. Twitter, really.

For example, here's a passage from Plato's "Euthydemus", c. 384 BCE.

If you will answer my questions, said Dionysodorus, I will soon extract the same admissions from you, Ctesippus. You say that you have a dog.

Yes, a villain of a one, said Ctesippus.

And he has puppies?

Yes, and they are very like himself.

And the dog is the father of them?

Yes, he said, I certainly saw him and the mother of the puppies come together.

And is he not yours?

To be sure he is.

Then he is a father, and he is yours; ergo, he is your father, and the puppies are your brothers.

Let me ask you one little question more, said Dionysodorus, quickly interposing, in order that Ctesippus might not get in his word: You beat this dog?

Ctesippus said, laughing, Indeed I do; and I only wish that I could beat you instead of him.

Then you beat your father, he said.

[I want to hear more about the dog]

It’s Friday morning and I’m the only person in church— just like every other morning for the past five years. I’m the only person in town. I have a lot to pray about.

This town, my town, is under a curse of sorts. When I was a child here, and my father would come home blackened with coal dust from the mine, he’d say, “Centralia is beautiful, son.” I believed him-- it was the only town I’d ever known, after all. As he washed the coal dust away, he’d say it again. “Your town, she’s dirty beneath. Above, she’s beautiful.”

When I was twenty-five, someone threw half a ton of garbage down a hill off the side of a side road just out of town. And nobody wanted to bring it back up. So the town council made a decision. My father always called them “those fools on the council”. They decided to burn it.

Of course the burning garbage fell through a crack and into a mine. Of course the coal seam caught fire. My father was nearly killed down there. That was twenty-five years ago.

And it’s still burning. The ground is warm to the touch. Everywhere there are small cracks with smoke curling out of them, and the small cracks become big cracks. At night you can see the glow. Every so often, a house falls in.

So everyone else has left town. The government gave everyone money to buy houses somewhere else. I won’t take their cash: this is my town.

And now… well, I guess it’s just mine.

Last time, you received an ActivityPub message claiming to be from your goddaughter, Marigold. But it's possible that someone is tricking you, pretending to be Marigold. How can you be sure the message is really from her?

We're going to do a bit of crypto here, but don't be afraid. All you need to know is:

• Everyone on ActivityPub has two related keys: a public key (which is public), and a private key (which is, er, private). We'll represent Marigold's public key as PPPPP.
• Any message can be represented by a unique signature, which we'll represent by SSSSS.
• Signatures are created using private keys.
• Signatures are verified (checked) using public keys.

Let's look at the HTTP headers of Marigold's message to you.

So I promised someone the story of the cop who came into my primary school class. CW for sexual assault and violence.


( Read more... )

some things to know about me:

* I may be wrong and often am. If I am, I would like to know, and learn better. But...
* I hate conflict. If you are rude, aggressive, hostile, ridiculing, I'll probably not talk to you.
* I am aware that I am privileged in many ways; if I show unchecked privilege, I appreciate hearing about it and I promise to take it seriously. I expect the same from you.
* Autonomy is important. I would like to hear your stories rather than tell my own. But if your behaviour involves nonconsensual damage to others, especially children, I am unlikely to be sympathetic (to put it mildly). Anti-vaccination people are specifically included here as people who damage children.
* I love hugs and cuddles, but please don't touch me without asking.
* If I have a panic attack, please hang around. Afterwards I will probably go and hide somewhere for a bit, and then I probably won't cope too well with people talking to me.
* If I'm occupied with nothing but my phone in public, that's probably a way of hiding.
* I hate phone calls. I hate making them, and I hate receiving them. Text or email instead, unless it's urgent, or you've arranged it otherwise. (To my parents: yes, you count as having arranged otherwise. But I still prefer email.)
* My pronouns are they/them, though zie/zir is fine too, and other pronouns are all right where I'm not out as genderqueer. If you get it wrong, that's fine. But don't get it wrong on purpose.
* Do not shout at me. Ever.
* I like reconciliation. If we were friends in the past, I probably want to be friends again. There are a very few exceptions, but you know who you are.
* I like vegetarian food, but I'll eat some kinds of meat if that's all that's available. I'm allergic to uncooked egg (and this includes scrambled eggs, for some reason). Eggs in things like cake are fine. Actually, cake is lovely in general.
* I have a bad habit of avoiding dealing with things I don't know how to handle, especially emails I don't know how to answer. In particular, I love getting fanmail, but I'm rather bad at answering it. I'm really sorry: I'm working on it. I do read it all, and it does make me happy, and I love you all.
* Please don't assume I can pick up on hints, or flirting, or that I know any particular social conventions about conversations; please be explicit. If there's something you can't or don't want to talk about, I will pick it up and worry about it if you lie about the things round the edges in inconsistent ways. I really like it when people talk to me about how they want to talk to me and how I want to talk to them.
* I'll try to add trigger warnings to posts and pictures. Again, if I get it wrong, let me know.
* I have triggers of my own. I may have to leave a conversation because of them. It's a PTSD thing.
* Reciting poetry and singing and scripting/echolalia are coping habits.
* I apologise too much. I'm working on it.

Did I miss anything? Questions and comments and suggestions are welcome.

A man longs to become a jade carver. So he apprentices himself to a master jade craftsman.

Every day he comes to the workshop, and the master asks him to sit and hold a jade carving, a different one each day, while the master talks to him.

And every day the master tells him stories, about the great jade carvers of the past, and about the principles of jade carving, and about the particular piece of jade the apprentice is holding. Then he sends the apprentice home again.

This goes on for months.

The stories fascinate the apprentice, and the jade carvings he has to hold are beautiful, but he's getting impatient by this time. He wanted to learn how to carve jade, not to sit and get lectured!

Then, one ordinary morning, the master hands him a carving. As soon as the apprentice touches it, he blurts out, "That's not jade!"

The master says, "Good. Now we can begin."