mike's web log

More on spite-y things

Sat, 27 Jan 2018 09:25:44 GMT

After yesterday's word post that discussed spite mounds, I got a couple of notes from some folks that I thought I should share.

First, Friend Rick shared the photo that had moved him to talk about bygone spite mounds:

He added the comment "I had felt there was some mound (if that makes any sense), though certainly not the likes of which there was in the regrading days!" It's true, it does have that feel.

Second, Friend Leon pointed out another, similar term: nail house, which is a Chinese term for the same thing[1]. There's an article about nail houses with some quite amazing photos. Here's one:

Leon also noted the term spite house, which has a different sense of spite. A spite house is deliberately built or modified in order to spite someone—for example, to block someone's view. There's a related term spite fence, a construction that has the same purpose but is generally cheaper to build.

I will note that Leon is from a land down under, so it's possible that in his ozzy dialect, spite house has a different meaning. I'm sure he'll let us know if so. :-)

[1] A calque, I guess.

Me versus the squirrels

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 01:08:06 GMT

For Friday Fun this time, I'll tell you the story of how I've been waging war on some squirrels. And how that's going, or not.

We have birdfeeders on our deck:

Some of our birdfeeders

They’re nice. We see all manner of wildfowl — not just the variety of songbirds that we have here in the NW, but occasional surprise visitors like flickers and jays. Now and then we’ll see a hummingbird, who seems to visit the feeder when the pickings are slim elsewhere.

And then there are other visitors. Those would of course be squirrels:

Squirrel [#]

As it turns out, many of the things that birds like, like sunflower seeds and suet, are things that squirrels really, really like also.

Now, I don’t have anything against squirrels as such. They’re, you know, cute and stuff. I don’t even particularly mind squirrels having a snack at the feeders.

[more]

15 years and a book

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 19:05:00 GMT

More Friday Fun. This week I celebrated 15 years as a full-timer at Microsoft. My colleagues at work took me out to lunch and presented me not just with the giganto crystal that you get from the company as your 15-year marker, but with a very cool present: a book. Not just any book, tho — it is, to quote the title page in full:

The

Scientific and Literary

Treasury:

A New and Popular

Encyclopedia

The Belles Lettres:

Condensed in form, familiar in style, & copious in information;

Embracing an extensive range of subjects in

Literature, Science, and Art.

The whole surrounded with

Marginal Notes, containing concise Facts

with appropriate observations.

By Samuel Maunder

This was published in 1858 in London. (Actually, it’s the revised edition — the original was published in 1840.) It’s a beautiful little (literally little) book, bound in leather with an embossed title on the spine. Here’s a picture:

(The glasses are in fact required; the book is set in 6-point type.)

[more]

People who work at "_" call themselves "_"

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 22:53:53 GMT

For Friday Fun this week, I asked around about what corporate employees use as their nickname. For example, I work at Microsoft; we call each other Microsofties. I have it on excellent authority that people who work at Amazon call each other Amazonians, and so on.

For help, I asked my Facebook Friends, who are mostly folks in high-tech. I also enlisted the aid of naming expert and well-connected word person Nancy Friedman, who took the question with success to various lists of which she is a member.

Here are the names I've collected so far. Most of these are self-reported names, so I can't vouch for their accuracy in every case.

Aiven: At this Finnish company, employees are crabs and the employees are collectively the Cast of Crabs. (Thanks to baby capu on Twitter) I do note that their careers page says that they want people who are "sideways thinkers" (i.e., move like crabs), so this name might not have originated organically.
Aldus: Aldusians
Amazon: Amazonians
Ammex: Ammexians
Arthur Andersen: Androids ("but not very loudly"). This is disputed (see comments).
CIA: Spooks
Citrix Systems: Citrites (Thanks to Jenny in the comments)
[more]

The Troublesome Door to the Man-Cave

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 23:04:11 GMT

For some Friday Fun today, I'll tell you the story of how I solved (I think) a problem in my home office. My office is in the bottom level of the house ("daylight basement"), in what's normally known as the "rec room" but around here is just the man-cave. It's a nice setup, except that it gets cold — sometimes 10 degrees cooler than the rest of the house.

When it's cold, I have a baseboard heater that I will sometimes use to prevent my hands from going numb. I can get the man-cave toasty, but in order to do that, I have to close the door to prevent all this nice heat from escaping.

And therewith is the problem: the damn door to the man-cave. First, you have to picture how the rec room/man-cave is configured:

Note the lengthy distance between my desk and the door.

I can close the door, but this introduces the following problems:

People come in and out to go to the laundry room, and they leave the man-cave door open.
The dog whimpers outside the door to come in.
The dog whimpers inside the door to go out.
The cat scratches on the door to come in.
The cat scratches on the door to go out.

So I find myself constantly getting up and opening the door or getting up and closing the door. (Did I mention the lengthy distance between the desk and the door?) You can see that this is going to cut deeply into the highly productive time I spend constantly sitting at my desk.

Not long ago I had a thought, so I scrounged around and got two cup hooks and some stretchy hair ties (rubber bands, basically) and rigged a little closing device on the outside of the door:

[more]

Decoding programming book titles

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 07:54:04 GMT

Time again for some Friday Fun. Ok, you know how they say that you can't judge a book by its cover? Well, I have a theory that you can make a pretty good judgment about a programming book by its title. See what you think.

The [Language] Programming Language
The Ruby Programming Language, The SQL Programming Language
The authors are really hoping you'll think that they've written their language's version of The C Programming Language, aka K&R. Not much chance that their books are a slim 250 pages like the original, eh?

[Language] in a Nutshell
Python in a Nutshell, VB & VBA in a Nutshell
Reference docs.

Programming [Language] or Pro [Language]
Programming Visual Basic 2008, Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework
[more]

From functional to decorative

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 18:16:31 GMT

For Friday Fun, a word that's new to me (tho not a new word per se — in fact, it's from the 1800s). First: I really like the word retronym, which refers to a term that has to be amended due to a technological change. Thus before the invention of the electric guitar, there was no notion of an "acoustic" guitar; all guitars were acoustic. Likewise dial phones, analog clocks, Classic Coke, and so on. (List of retronyms)

The new word I just learned is semantically kinda-sorta in that camp. (Maybe it's kind of opposite-y.) The term is skeuomorph (Greek: "vessel-shape"), and it refers to a vestigial design feature that represents something that was once functional. A popular example is the buckles on shoes — originally used to, you know, buckle the shoe, now used just for looks. Other examples are faux wood or fabric patterns in plastic; light bulbs shaped like candle flames; fake shutters that people mount next to the windows of their house; fake spokes in a hubcap; the "wax" on a bottle of Maker's Mark bourbon; and (a famous example) the tiny and useless "handle" that's on virtually all bottles of maple syrup.

[more]

The KJV in everyday speech

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 15:17:47 GMT

The King James Bible (alternately, the Authorized Version or King James Version or KJV) is 400 years old; it was originally printed in 1611. Many people have noted that the book -- specifically, the language of the translation -- has had a widespread impact on everyday English.

For some Friday Fun (tho it's Wednesday, it's a virtual Friday for many in the US), here's a pleasing observation from an article in the latest National Geographic about the creation of the King James Bible. This is by Adam Nicolson, whose book about the KJV is listed below.

If a child is ever the apple of her parents' eye or an idea seems as old as the hills, if we are at death's door or at our wits' end, if we have gone through a baptism of fire or are about to bite the dust, if it seems at times that the blind are leading the blind or we are casting pearls before swine, if you are either buttering someone up or casting the first stone, the King James Bible, whether we know it or not, is speaking through us. The haves and have-nots, heads on plates, thieves in the night, scum of the earth, best until last, sackcloth and ashes, streets paved in gold, and the skin of one's teeth: All of them have been transmitted to us by the translators who did their magnificent work 400 years ago.

Personal anecdote. In my grad school days, I was exposed to a variety of extinct Germanic languages, including Anglo-Saxon and Gothic [more]

And now, some other text generators

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 07:55:44 GMT

A little while back, I played around with various ways to create placeholder text. Those were specifically for generating nonsense text, but there are various sites/tools/utilities for generating text that have a more serious purpose. For a little Friday Fun[1], therefore, let's have a look.

Data Generator
"... a free, open source script that lets you quickly generate large volumes of custom data in a variety of formats for use in testing software, populating databases, and scoring with girls."

Ok, so that actually sounds pretty useful. (Yeah, except the girls part.) The next few are implementations of the general desire for automatic summarization.

FigSum
Supposed to generate text summaries automatically from figures (e.g. in a paper). "... aggregates scattered information to improve figure comprehension. For each figure in an article, FigSum generates a structured text summary comprising one sentence from each of the four rhetorical categories – Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion (IMRaD)."

Generating Questions Automatically from Informational Text (pdf)
[more]

Childhood trauma

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 00:12:39 GMT

For some Friday Fun, a cartoon out of a recent edition of The New Yorker:

Words (not) to live by

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 13:01:31 GMT

John McIntyre has a post today about using evidence to support assertions about language, and I've been thinking anyway recently about the need for empirical support for things like planning your documentation. (More on that another time.) Thus I was primed today while I was editing to think about edits I make that I really can't justify.

The writer David Owen said once that early in his career he interned for someone who "maintains an idiosyncractic but absolute ban on the word however."[1] Every editor has terms — words, phrases — that they just don't like. A word seems ungainly to them, or it violates some bogus rule that the editor once learned, or ... well, whatever. It's subjective, but in each case it's specific to that editor and can't be justified in the usual ways. (Logic, precedence, or appeal to authority.)

So for a little Friday Fun, here's a list of edits I make that have no more justification than "because I don't like it." :-)

upon
Custom Formatting Based Upon Data [#]

The number of times in which I think upon is better than on is so small that I can't remember the last time I let upon stand.

within
ASP.NET MVC 3 and the @helper syntax within Razor [#]

My ban on within isn't quite as absolute as it is on upon; there are times when it does clarify. (Something like [more]

Theory And Practice Of Editing New Yorker Articles [Selections]

Fri, 10 Jun 2011 13:22:04 GMT
A little Friday fun. Years ago I read the book The Years With Ross by James Thurber, which is a memoir about working in the early days of the New Yorker magazine under its original editor, Harold Ross. In the book, Thurber reproduces a list created by Wolcott Gibbs that attempted to set down some guidelines for editing the various authors who contributed to the magazine. Although the list was intended for a specific time and about a specific set of authors, a lot of it seems to apply to many editorial contexts.

Herewith a few of the more memorable pieces of advice.
The average contributor to this magazine is semi-literate; that is, he is ornate to no purpose, full of senseless and elegant variations, and can be relied on to use three sentences where a word would do. It is impossible to lay down any exact and complete formula for bringing order out of this underbrush, but there are a few general rules.

1. Writers always use too damn many adverbs. On one page recently I found eleven modifying the verb "said." "He said morosely, violently, eloquently, so on." Editorial theory should probably be that a writer who can't make his context indicate the way his character is talking ought to be in another line of work.

[...]

6. See our Mr. Weekes on the use of such words as "little," "vague," "confused," "faintly," "all mixed up," etc. etc. The point is that the average New Yorker writer, unfortunately influenced by Mr. Thurber, has come to believe that the ideal New Yorker piece is about a vague, little man helplessly confused by a menacing and complicated civilization.

[...]

[more]