Content-Type: text/shitpost

… to be late!

Today I spotted someone using the word “frankenblog” to mean an unfortunate mashup of the Tumblr and Wordpress software.

It's awesome that the prefix “Franken-” has become a productive morpheme.

One of my all-time favorite questions from the audience during a conference talk: I was discussing Y2K problems in date formats, I think in email message headers, and this attendee asked if my proposed practice, of using a 4-digit year, wasn't subject to Y10K problems instead.

There are two answers to that. One is that, in the context of a message header, there is nothing to stop you from going on to 5-digit years when the times comes. The problems intrude only if in the year 10000 you stupidly decide to roll over, odometer-style, to 0000.

But the larger answer is that it does not make sense to plan network protocols on an 8,000-year timescale. 8,000 years ago, we had invented fire and agriculture, but not writing. Metallurgy and metal tools were still works in progress.

Trying to predict the information technology needs of the year 10,000 is at least as silly as asking someone from the neolithic era whether message headers should use a 2- or 4-digit date format, and less likely to produce a useful answer.

Katara and I were on the sofa, and I mused aloud “It's funny how there's no adjective like “three-itude” that expresses how much threeness you have, or how much you are like the number three. You can't say ‘I wish I had as much threeitude as that other person.’”

Unsuspecting, she walked right into my trap:

“There isn't anything like that for any number, is there?”

“Forti-tude.”

If your band's cover of “Eleanor Rigby” is more than three minutes, you're doing something wrong.

Tags: itsTrue

The surname “Parker” was originally an occupational name. It dates back to the valet parking services instituted in 1534 at Hampton Court by Henry VIII.

Construed as relations, the logical ∧ operator is transitive, but the logical ∨ is not.

Hittites did not live in Mesopotamia. They lived in Anatolia, what is now Turkey.

Who else is credited with inventing one or more letters of the alphabet? Russian ‘ё” was apparently proposed by Ekaterina Romanova-Dashkova. I think I remember a story about Peter the Great inventing a different letter. (Looked it up, it is “Я”, and we still have the notes he made while he was deciding what it should look like.) And of course Sejong the Great is credited with the invention of the entire Korean alphabet and scholarly consensus is that he not only planned and oversaw the project but also made technical contributions.

Are there any others? Anything like that in the Latin alphabet? Do we know who first distinguished between “u” and “v” or “i” and “j”? The Scandinavian letter “Å” occurred in the 20th century but Wikipedia doesn't attribute it to any particular person.

Oh, I know, Sequoyah invented the entire Cherokee writing system. OK, let's restrict the question to people who contributed a few letters to existing scripts. (Sorry, Sejong!)

Today I learned about Princess Yekaterina Vorontsova-Dashkova, the Russian Imperial Academy of Arts and Sciences and the proposer of the Russian letter ‘ё”.

What's the right way to spell the name of Andre Scedrov? I suppose at some time in the past it was spelled “Andrej Ščedrov” but I've never seen anything actually written by Scedrov that spelled it that way. For example, here's his professional web page and here's a recent preprint paper of his which contains 21 instances of his name all spelled the same way.

A little more searching does find much older materials with the expected spelling. For example, his book on Forcing and Classifying Topoi from 1984, the dark ages of mathematical typesetting, before Donald Knuth came to lead us into the land of milk and honey. The book is typewritten, with accents and math symbols written in by hand.

When I was at Penn, Scedrov’s name was invariably pronounced “shedrov”. I was puzzled by this at the time because “Andre” looked French and then “Sced-” looked like it is going to be Italian, and maybe I thought that “Andre” was just Italian “Andrea” with the ‘a’ left off to prevent annoying confusions, but then I got to the “-ov” and went down for the count. It wasn't until many years later that I understood what was had hit me.

(That “Šč” is the Latin-script version of Cyrillic “Щ” that you meet in names like Khrushchev (Хрущёв).)

I don't know what I would do in a similar situation. Stubbornly insist on the original pronunciation of my name or change the spelling so that other people wouldn't stumble over it? My great-grandfather chose on my behalf around a hundred years ago when he dropped the ‘z’ from “Dominusz”.

Back when Katara was still in utero, I got tired of people asking me what we planned to name her, so I started saying “Bethesda!” And then, as the look of dismay spread over their face, I would add helpfully “After the hospital where her uncle died.”

But there are plenty of other medical-themed names that would be much worse. Scrofula, for example. Melanoma (and her little sister, Carcinoma). Fluoxetina.

Okay, but those are just jokes. What about names that people actually use? “Dolores” comes to mind, but that's just my own taste. The people who choose it are well aware that it is Spanish for “sorrows” and they choose it because of that, not in spite of it. “Alexia” means a cerebral disorder causing a loss of the ability to read.

(Perhaps I should mention that Katara is not actually named Katara and is only called that on this blog.)

The episode is described in Luke 2:41–52. Jesus at the age of twelve accompanies Mary, Joseph and a large group of their relatives and friends to Jerusalem on pilgrimage, “according to the custom” – that is, Passover. On the day of their return, Jesus "lingered" in the Temple, but Mary and Joseph thought that he was among their group. Mary and Joseph headed back home and after a day of travel realised Jesus was missing, so they returned to Jerusalem. Meanwhile Young Jesus was forced to contend with two inept burglars, leading them into the booby traps he had placed about the temple.

The worst letter of the English alphabet is clearly “V”. (In second place, unfortunately, is my own initial, “D”.)

“Hob” used to be a common nickname for “Robert”, but unlike “Rob” and “Bob” it is no longer common. But it lives on in patronymics like “Hobson” and “Hobbs”. Similarly “Watt”, “Watts”, and “Watson” attest to the widespread use of “Wat” as a nickname for “Walter”.

I want to infer from the surnames “Daw”, “Daws”, “Dawes”, “Dawson”, etc., that “Daw” used to be a common name in northern or western europe. But I've never heard of any such person and Wikipedia doesn't list anyone relevant.

From Wikipedia's summary of the plot of Don't Change Your Husband (1919, starred Gloria Swanson):

Leila Porter has grown tired of her husband James Denby Porter the glue king, as she is romantic but he is prosaic. Moreover, he is careless of his personal appearance, gets cigar ash in the carpet, and eats green onions before he tries to kiss her.

All of them.

Yes, I have heard of your favorite, and I am including it.

Hard to say, there are so many to choose from. My first thought is for Judges 19, the story of the Levite's concubine.

(Content warning: extreme violence, rape, mass murder.)

But Genesis 34, the story of Dinah, is definitely in the running.

(Content warning: extreme violence, rape, mass murder.)

Not so easy, this one. Obama? Arafat? F.W. de Klerk?

Without actually looking at the list, I'd guess it was Kissinger. But there is certainly room for argument. And I suspect that if I did look at the list I would have some chance of finding someone worse.

Bookbinder's was on my mind today because, going up the stairs, I asked myself “what is the worst bean?” And then instantly the answer appeared: the lima.

Thinking on it now, I have to admit, I do like the big beige kind. But on the stairs I was thinking about the smaller green starchy kind, and I stand by my choice.

One day I wondered: what is the worst restaurant in Philadelphia? Not all such questions admit a definitive answer, and you might scoff and say it is a matter of opinion. But sometimes there is one pre-eminent candidate that recives overwhelming support. As in this case. A quick web search revealed the inarguable answer: Bookbinder's. “Oh, of course it is,” I said.

I could go on at length, but the 1999 review by Craig LaBan, the food critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, sums it up nicely: “a tourist trap with lackluster food and outrageous prices”. I won't quote from the rest. It's not funny, just sad.

The restaurant closed in March 2009, denied bankruptcy protection. What Philadelphia's currently worst restaurant is, I could not say.

Suppose you are sitting in a room and there is a flock of ducks outside. You hear the ducks quacking and you can count the rate of quacking !!r_q!! in quacks per minute.

Maybe you also know how much a typical duck will quack. Let's called that !!v_q!!, measured in quacks per duck.

Then you can find the quotient $$\frac{r_q}{v_q}$$ which is in ducks per minute.

More things should be measured in ducks per minute.

Almanzo Wilder had a third sister. His oldest sibling, Laura, was born in 1844. At the time of the events of Farmer Boy, Almanzo was nine and Laura was 22. She is not mentioned in the book, perhaps to prevent young readerrs from confusing her with Laura Ingalls.

This masterpiece of sarcasm was written in 1917 by J.P. Long and Maurice Scott.

1918 audio recording by “Courtland and Jeffries”. I have not been able to find much information about Jeffries or Courtland. Courtland may have been one of the many pseudonyms of Mr. Herbert Pike. About Jeffries I can learn nothing.

Up to your waist in water,
Up to your eyes in slush,
Using the kind of language
That makes the sergeants blush;
Who wouldn't join the army,
That's what we all enquire,
Don't we pity the poor civilians
Sitting beside the fire?

Chorus
Oh! Oh! Oh! It's a lovely war,
Who wouldn't be a soldier, eh?
Oh, it's a shame to take the pay.

As soon as reveille has gone
We feel just as heavy as lead,
But we never get up till the sergeant
Brings our breakfast up to bed.
What do you want with eggs and ham
When you've got plum and apple jam?
Form fours! Right turn!
How shall we spend the money we earn?

When does a soldier grumble?
When does a soldier make a fuss?
No one is more contented
In all the world than us.
Oh, it's a cushy life, boys,
Really, we love it so;
Once a fellow was sent on leave
And simply refused to go.

Come to the cook-house door, boys,
Sniff at the lovely stew,
Who is it says the colonel
Gets better grub than you?
Any complaints this morning?
Do we complain? Not we.
What's the matter with lumps of onion
Floating around the tea?

In 1669, the Jewels went on public display for the first time in the Jewel House at the Tower of London. The Deputy Keeper of the Jewel House took the regalia out of a cupboard and showed it to visitors for a small fee. This informal arrangement was ended two years later when

(Wikipedia, Crown Jewels of the United Kingdom.)