Odd Lots
- Lee “ArtRaccoon” Madison has posted a new page on Cafe Press with all kinds of Sad Puppies 4 swag, featuring Isaac, Ray, Frank, and robot puppy Robert. Shown above is the 15 oz. coffee mug. Mugs also come in 12 and 20 oz. sizes.
- If you’re not familiar with Sad Puppies 4, here’s the main site.
- And if you missed my summary of the Sad Puppies phenomenon last year, take a look. It’s part of an ongoing series that began here.
- Rick Hellewell informed me that the $15 Pine64 single-board computer is shipping and getting some attention. It sports a 1.2 Ghz quad-core ARM A53 as part of the Allwinner A64 SoC, plus a 500 MHz Mali-400 GPU that can do 4K video. The $15 version has 512MB of RAM; the $19 version has 1 GB, and the $29 version has 2 GB RAM. The $15 version is shipping (though, as I expected, it’s out of stock) and the two more powerful boards should be shipping by May.
- Indie authors take note: Amazon has begun pulling Kindle ebooks that have the TOC at the end of the book, and demanding that it be placed up front. Authors have been putting the TOC in the back recently so that there is more “real” content in the 10% preview, but, alas, scammers are also putting TOCs in the back to game KU by encouraging readers to immediately click to the end of the book to see what’s in it. Walter Jon Williams got stung, as I assume were many others.
- Some T-shirt firm on Amazon has begun selling T-shirts with my most famous quote on it: “A good tool improves the way you work. A great tool improves the way you think.” Alas, they didn’t cite me by name, and the underscore between the two sentences suggests it’s some sort of data-driven product bot.
- I’ve always been in the “rare Earth” camp, and intuit that Earthlike planets are rare. (There’s a book about this.) I’m not sure I ever imagined them as quite this rare, though.
- Not all cheap ham radio transceivers come from Baofeng. (See my entry for February 14, 2015.) I stumbled on a dual-band $69 mobile rig from Leixen that has promise, and can be programmed with CHIRP. What I’d really like (but don’t seriously expect to find) is a small, cheap rig that includes 50-54 MHz.
- How far back could you travel in time and still understand English? I would do better on Middle English than most, but on Old English I would be almost completely hopeless.
- You can have the ugliest house in America (practice your un-seeing exercises, folks!) for the trifling price of $850,000. Carol and I would set it up as a sort of culturally or decoratively haunted B&B, and make a fortune from people daring one another to spend a night in it.
- This is by no means news, but I’m amazed how many people are unaware of my favorite broadband speed tester. Make sure you test it using a browser with only one tab open, and ideally shut down any other machines on the same broadband line.
- A portion of the cheese you put in your omelette may be wood pulp, which is used as an anticaking agent in packaged shredded cheese. I started reading labels closely, and discovered a house brand of shredded Parmesan at the local Kroger chain, Fry’s, that doesn’t contain wood pulp. It does, however, contain calcium sulfate. Is that a win? I’m sure I don’t know. After all, sodium ferrocyanide is used as an anticaking agent, as is a lot of other scary sounding stuff.
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: hardware · sad puppies · software
re the ugliest house.
I couldn’t sleep in the bedroom with the hideous purple carpet even with the light off!
I’d still know that hideous carpet was there.
Oscar Wilde on his deathbed “Either that wallpaper goes or I do.”
(he actually said “This wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. Either it goes or I do” but the above is funnier)
swag:
I suggested that to Kate the day after she put the SP4 site up. Now if they only had colored T-shirts without the giant white box…
swag(2):
T-shirts are temporary, but coffee cups can last a long time. I once saw a comment that someone’s co-worker used a cup that said “IBM: THE SYSTEM OF THE SIXTIES.”
quotes:
I’ve seen several of mine float back through the ‘net. Though to be honest, whole they were 100% my original thoughts, they probably occurred to someone else too…
English:
I have trouble understanding regional dialects of English *now*. I have just enough hearing loss that I actually have to *listen* to what people are saying… and what’s coming out of their mouth is usually some stream of consciousness babble with random inflection, no real sentence structure, and missing words.
As corroboration, I present “The White House Transcripts”, which are the transcripts of some of the recordings of the Oval Office in the Nixon Administration. Almost all of the parties involved were lawyers and politicians, for whome words are precision tools. (there are transcripts from the Johnson and Kennedy administrations, and they’re no better)
cheese:
I don’t use the stuff myself, but some years back my wife’s shopping list included “American Cheese”, so I was standing there at a 40-foot display (literally) of packaged cheeses when I noticed that most of them said “cheese product” or “cheese food.” Some research revealed that almost any mass-market cheesy substance in the USA couldn’t lawfully be called “cheese” in any reasonably civilized country.
Ferrocyanide sounds scarier than it is – cyanides are toxic because they bind strongly to iron and don’t easily come off; ferrocyanides contain cyanide already bound to iron so they’re safe (unless you add strong acid – I don’t know how much ferrocyanide you get in kitchen salt but if you pour battery acid onto it and smell almonds, run away). The toxicity comes from iron enzymes which need the iron to bind to a molecule weakly, catalyse a reaction, and let it go after a while – if cyanide has come along and permanently taken up the binding slot, the enzyme can’t do its job any more.
Thanks for clarifying that; I was mostly going for grins and do understand that sodium ferrocyanide is not itself harmful. Did not know you could release the cyanide with acid, which is a little scary, considering that I had sodium ferrocyanide in my Porter chemistry set in 1966 and a bottle of weak sulfuric acid that my father bought at Central Scientific to clean metals.
As I grew up when the King James Bible was still the default (Protestant) translation, I don’t have much trouble back through Elizabethan English. I have a little trouble with Spenser and Chaucer, but not that much. Old English is a foreign language. I can kind of follow the Lord’s Prayer, but only because I know that it’s the Lord’s Prayer. Beowulf, for example, could be in Hungarian for all I can recognize.
I read some chunks of Chaucer in Middle English back in college, and while it was slow going at first, after awhile I got a sense for it and it was much easier. More recently I read sections of Lady Julian of Norwich’s book Revelations of Divine Love in Middle English, and again, once I got into her rhythms and a developed a sense for her grammar, it became a reasonable thing to do. (My earlier struggles with Chaucer helped a great deal.) One trick that helped (I learned this from reading Chaucer) is to try to read it aloud, phonetically. Some of the difficulty is just a matter of archaic spelling.
One of my profs in college went through a few paragraphs of the original text of Beowulf with us, and it was indeed like a foreign language, reminding me more of German than anything else. Afterwards, with (great) relief, we read the rest in a modern translation.
My problems with the video I linked to mostly cook down to the question, How do we know how people pronounced anything 600 years ago? This has bothered me for a long time. I guessed that poetry can provide clues. I’m not sure what else we might have to guide us.
“How do we know how people pronounced anything 600 years ago?”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s
The answer begins around 3:45.
Well, if you’re gonna be picky, Shakespeare was only circa 400 years ago, but Crystal’s explanations would hold true for Chaucer as well. 🙂
Of course, we cannot know how anyone pronounced anything much before the turn of the 20th Century. It’s all educated guesses. And less educated and more guess the further back we go.
We talk as if we could discover how ‘people’ talked in Shakespeare’s time, but of course there were class and regional accents in those days just as there are now. Does any particular rhyme reflect the majority, learned pronunciation or the dialect that the poet thought appropriate to the poem at hand?
For example, Kipling wrote “Gunga Din” as from a British Infantryman. He rhymes “Din” with “green”, “spleen”, and “been”. We can infer that he exacted that last to be a homophone for “bean”. Was this Kipling’s usual pronunciation? (Rhetorical question; although, Kipling lived recently enough that we may know the answer to this one.) Or merely what he would expect from a 19th C Brit grunt?
Just read a KU series that had roughly 10 pages of reviews at the end of the book and just before the next book in the series teaser pages. Was wondering if Amazon was paying for those pages?
Because they did not contribute to the story, at least for me.
As far as I know, KU counts it all and pays for it all, including previews etc. after the end of the book proper. I put a few reviews at the very beginning of The Cunning Blood to sort of “seal the deal” when people looked at the preview on Kindle. The book got a rave in Analog, which might well persuade someone that the book was worth a shot at $2.99. As far as stuff at the end of the book is concerned, it doesn’t have to be read, and doesn’t increase the cost (or the weight, heh) of the book. I’ve gotten emails telling me explicitly that people bought The Cunning Blood because of a preview in Cold Hands and Other Stories, so previews do work. I haven’t put previews at the ends of my two novels because they’re so utterly different (serious hard SF vs. whimsical fantasy) but maybe that’s a mistake. It would cost me nothing to add them and see.
A correction, “at the end of the book” should read “at the end of each book”.