Posts by GrimJack

Yay - I get to open the OED again -- Goddess-ship hyphenated, goddesshood is not. Sigh - I really want the full sized OED, even with one of those handsfree magnifying lenses with light it hard to read the 9 pages per page condensed version, getting old does have a couple of disadvantages.

@GFD: Not really , i would like to die with people arround whom i born and live life. That reminds me of the old joke "I want to die peacefully, in my sleep like my Grandfather - not screaming and crying like the passengers in his car

@AM: Libraries have already given up - they used to keep all the various journals available - now they can't even keep up with the journals that abstract the journals. The cost has skyrocketed because most of the journals depended on library subscriptions to keep them afloat and libraries can't afford them.

PhDs and their associated dissertations used to be the ultimate definition of a lifetime of science; now you can't get started in science w/o one. Hell, now they use post-docs as wage-slaves - seldom even offering them a path to tenure because they can't afford to hire all the damned PhDs they crank out.

The interesting thing about spoken English and American dialects is that the you can track the changes in how Brittish English was spoken from New England to Georgia. New England was settled first and century by century the colonization moved south. The dialects of the mountain folk match how the Scotts spoke English and the flatlanders spoke more like the English.

And the methods used to learn change over time; AE Van Voght covered this in his Weapons Master books. At some point you just can't keep up - you won't even be able to operate in the normal world - the paradigms would be so radically different that just leaving your apartment and walking down the street could get you killed.
But I would still like to try.

@firstperson: back from Montana and Wyoming - here is a link for my flickr sets. I just uploaded the pics for my last workbench; my new bench in my new apt has been built and I will install the sheet metal cover shortly then set it up. I hadn't used flickr since my trip to Paris, time to catch up.

2014: The usual evening, an inconvenient day off, and now I have to remember to write 2014 instead of 2013.

What he said! I bought some cheap Italian sparkling wine and watched TV; called mom early in the evening (phone calls are hard for me - I used to love to chat on the phone with friend, now I think I have called 11 people in the last 15 years, sigh.) and did not even finish the bottle. Watched all my shows (darned things were all reruns). I start back to work (presidential order - all seasonals to report on Jan. 6) next Monday. Just another day. It is just an arbitrary moment whose only purpose is to keep order in your life.

banning people who're critical of him from the white house press room takes care of that.

You know that is just plain BS

My Jewish leathersmith friend put up a sign in his shop each year saying "Keep the X in Xmas" but then he is still awaiting the savior (or he would be if he wasn't an atheist). A lot of people are outraged at the commercialization of the day (Christ should be in your heart, X should be in your wallet). I by force of habit and reciprocity, buy chocolate for each of my family members just so I have something to exchange. This year is the first year that I am single for Xmas (last year she had not moved out yet but we were breaking up). My poor kitty has a serious ear infection - it appears to be fungal and may permanently damage her balance but she is such a love. Her name is Freya but I call her Golden Goddess because she is black with gold tourtousshell markings.

Happy New Year to all

GrimJack/Grumpy old Man

Seattle was warm and rainy, Bozeman is cold and snowing. Just in case you did not notice US, China, and Australia are large enough countries that the question is moot - you can get any answer depending on where the respondent is. We will be driving down to Wyoming to see my sister; that will be even colder and snowier. Seattle is sea level, Bozeman is about 4,471 feet above sea level, and Worland is a little lower but in WY so the wind will be killer.

I am packing for my trip to Montana (leaving tomorrow), worrying about my cat (fungal ear infection), worrying about myself (ADD, depression, unemployed), and cleaning my apt. (well, I plan on cleaning my apt but...). I got my hot glass workbench set up, I have ordered some sheet metal to cover it and I am going over all the supplies I will need. Since I had to disassemble my bench when I moved, I have to make sure I have everything I need. The basics are: O2, propane, torlch, mandrels, and glass rods - these I have. I need something to pre-heat the glass rods (so they don't shattered from temperture shock) and I need something slow down the heat loss (tempering) after the bead/piece has been produced. Mostly these items can be purchased at a place like Value Village - a hot plate.

AgileMind = jwenting often makes statements that refer his particular sources so may not be seen in mainstream media. I, personally, think he might hang out on places similar to prisonplanet, AceofSpades, and FreeRepublic.

Yeah, but 'love doctor' with no context just sounds like Doctor Love - warning this link will take you so far back in time you will squee

Stages:
* up to 21 - I am immortal
* 22 to 31 - I might die
* 32 to 41 - I will die someday
* 42 to 51 - damn it, I don't want to think about it
* 52 to 61 - Okay, okay I will die soon enough
* 62 and up - okay, I will get around to making out a will and EOL plans and DNR
* (everybody sort of still believes that they are different and just might, maybe can still live forever)

Married people might have different time frams.

So I have been looking for the examples of Mandela's terrorism and ran into this guy - I am still looking but I ran across this quote `Calling Mandela a Communist or a terrorist shortly after his death is mean-spirited, but it is a bigger condemnation of the moral blindness of much of U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War than it is a criticism of Mandela.
There are American heroes who fought against a despodic ruler. I know that the US and the UK branded him as a terrorist and kept him there until 2008, you gotta look at the friends the US and the UK kept while call Mandela a terrorist (do I need to bring up Reagan, Iran, and the Contras?). This is not a comparison who is most or least evil. The story is about a white minority that deprived all non-whites of normal human priveleges like participation in government, education, the freedom to move about their own country. The conditions that the Africans faced were much worse that those faced by American colonists.

I actually even went to warren88's links that only say that he was imprisoned for treason - it was considered treason to want his people to have a good education, et cetera. sigh!

We all are mandelasWe all are mandelas Fortuneatly, very few of us are jwenting

Stultusk: You have 4900 posts; I assume you have read some of jwenting's posts before. Jwnting is a right wing trolll; he can be counted on to appear whenever something comes up that appears to him to be left-ish attracting his very predictable trolling. Free speech means that we can speechify against trolls. Jwenting does not care, he seldom responds to responses to his trolling - if it is your task to defend trolls, good for you but do not expect sympathy.

Reverend Jim - I got fired once for using the phrase "bilabial fricative" - all the asshole heard was 'labia' and fired me for using a female body part in a description.

Is that along the lines of: it gives you that warming you get after wetting youself that ultimately turns into a wet smelly mess?

Maybe not quite where I was heading but sure. Either way you are losing precious body heat.

Up here in Seattle, SCUBA divers drink lots of tea/coffee so that just before they jump into the Pacific they pee so that when it is less of a shock when they hit the cold,cold ocean.

There is a quote by a French author that states that the average person does not know what to do with their life yet wants another one which will last forever

No there isn't. If you don't know what you are talking about, why do you open your mouth? Mexican proverb If you don't open your mouth, the flies won't get in

Aww u the Mandela post Ha if you only knew half the story but if you wish me to stay my tongue i will

I am the person who started the Mandela thread - say what you have to say or shut the eff up.

Hah, I just remembered the fish species that never dies of old age - the sturgeon. They are bottom feeders that have no known age limit or size limit. A dead sturgeon floated to the surface in Lake Washington (near Seattle), it weighed 300+ pounds and was though to be 200+ years old.

WRT blue animals - the blue crab is blue using a cyanine of the anthocyanidins which is similar to what plants use. It is a complex carotenoprotein. I thought that the blue was from copper but that is a different crab - the horseshoe crab which has copper-based blood (possibly the only such species on earth).

It is bright and sunny here in Seattle but it is about 32 F - which is what we consider cold (it does get colder than that but seldom for long). I grew up in Montana where it was so cold, your ears could freeze in a coupld minutes and when the wind blows, it is like being cut with a knife.

If I could live as long as Mandela and affect 1/10,000th of world as he, I would consider myself successful.

Mike2k - thank you, I think I will remove most referenced to A/S from my vocabulary since it apparently has no real meaning. I think I assumed A/S was prior to 1066 and that is why I was confulsed with references to ME. So Old English is really Middle German? That is the impression I get from how people talk about Cantebury Tales.

As a native French speaker, I find it very hard to believe that "debt" comes from an Anglo-Saxon root.

(I am going to have to start a crowdfunder to get me the Big Dic OED all I have now is the 12 pages to the page compressed version of the OED and even with one of those magnifying lense with light - it is tough for an old fart like myself to read - I want the full 22 volume set)
But I digress

Middle English det, dette, deytt; Old French dete, dette
around the 13-16th centuries it was artificially spelt debte after which it entered English as debt. The OED does not go into how or why the change was made but that progression seems to match the story I told. I am amazed at how Middle English seems so close (in this case) to Old French. I don't know the timeframes for OF and ME but the Battle of Hastings in 1066 could be were to words overlapped. The question becomes is ME ths same as Anglo-Saxon? it 2:30 in the morning, and kitty is purring on my wrists so I am not inclined to search any deeper.

Today is a sad day for South Africa, Africa, and the world; with the passing of Mandela there is an emptiness in the world that will be hard to fill.

Diafol - when I was first responding, I missed pun and started with the smiley thingy then realized where it was going, deleted my rant but did not delete back far enough. I thought your malapropism/pun was pretty spot on (I had a bit part in our college adaptation of "The Rivals" where Mrs. Malaprop first appears (1775))

The arrogance of the 'literate' class was that Latin was the ultimate language thus gave us the 'split infinitive' rule and they even took a fine Anglo-Saxon word 'det' and latinized it as 'debt' (a silent 'B' even for craps sake).

Ah, but there are fewer numbers in 1 to ∞ than there are between 0 and 1.

nitin1:The book "30 days to a better vocabulary" is about 50+ years old but it is exceptional.

diafol: I didn't see a smiley but I have to ask "are those aleph null or aleph 1 infinities being split"

In both Trollope and Dickens, the characters who use the word 'ain't' are upper-class and/or professional; as recently as 1907 it was used by both ends of society and was defended in a book on social commentary (as upper class calloquialism). It is usable in place almost all the contractions - it is pretty useful but the grammarians started in on it sometine around 1914.

Language changes; usage changes; words are added to the lixicon but are seldom removed, they just get down-graded. Often the changes can be seen in thier opposites like the words 'disengenuous' 'ruthless' 'reckles' - if you ever get a chance to wander through the Oxford English Dictionary, you will discover the first time the word was recorded and trace the change in usage over time. Words are created, borrowed from other languages, sometimes dragged out of past for a new use.

When I trained to be a radio announcer/DJ the word 'long-lived' was pronounced with a long i (as the word 'jive' not as the word 'give'). There are theories around that suggest that the reason modern English has not changed as much over time as usual so that Shakespeare's plays will stay in our language. Once of my favorites is because it is series of puns across 2 languages:
Hoist by his own petard - which effectively translates as blown up by his own bomb, but means caught in his own trap. The pun comes from those crazy French, when they heard a bomb it sounded to them like a fart; petard is French for fart.

Suggesting that once an organism is no longer able to reproduce it no longer affects the evolutionary process is ignoring the importance of family. Colony species like ants, hive species like bees immediately come to mind - reproduction is limited to a single entity and yet they survive. In the same manner uncles, aunts, grandparents all contribute to the survival of the species by helping keep the offspring alive. The longer a grandparent lives productively, the more likely the offspring will survive. Unmated, relatives contribute to keeping offspring alive.

Actually, they are chipping people who are quadroplegics - I remember back in the 90s an electrode was placed in a quadroplegic's brain and he was albe to move the cursor. It is taking off in the assistive tech world; brain controled wheel chairs. Essentially there is a whole spectrum of people who have disabilities that can be assisted by 'chipping'.

Hmmm, I find the structoral blue of bird feathers interesting; the pattern of keratin proteins is such that red and yellow wavelengths are cancel each other out leaving blue reinforced and amplified. The shades of blue is made by air pockets in the keratin structures.

The lack of blue in mammals (actually, in most vertibrates) with the exception of mandrils and velvet monkeys (and some marsupials) has driven some scientists to delve a little more deeply into looking at the sturctoral reasons. I really like this quote for both what it says and how it says it
Prum’s observations provided the first phylogenetically documented instance of macroevolution between classes of coherently scattering nanostructures. For such periodic arrays, the 2D Fourier power spectrum could distinguish between laminar, crystal-like, and quasi-ordered nanostructures since laminar and crystal-like typically produce iridescence while quasi-ordered arrays do not.

Some blues and greens of glass are produced by oxides of copper so when working with these colors it is possible to use a reduction flame to rip the Oxigen out of the color leaving you with ribbons of copper metal in the object you are working.

Anyway, I brought up blue not for its own sake but to try to point out that some of the attributes produce by genetics are a side affect of some other attribute. Red hair in caucasians is linked to the balance of melanins produced by a particular gene whereas red hair in Africans is a form of albinism - a particular …

AD - thank you for that video - always eat a durian out in the open, near a bucket and never,never inhale anywhere near one.

Everyone kind of views the human body as balanced on a peak of health and anything that disrupts that the body falls to illness - the truth is that it is more like the body is down in a valley and it takes something pretty extreme to overcome its normal homeostasis. (sorry, that might be a confusing analogy sigh).

There are RNA (transcriptase?) molecules whose job it is to go over the DNA and correct transcription errors. We contain all the DNA from our origins with all the DNA that makes us different from pond scum or primates. It is just that certain genes are 'turned on' (crap I miss my ex - she was a plant phys. whis and could get me closer) or 'expressed'.

People sometimes wonder why no one has blue hair and why no mammals have blue fur - the reason might be that the combination of genes that would express blue hair cause other issues that are deadly to mammals. Attributes that we consider beneficial (surviving malaria) in a different environment proves to be detrimental (cycle cell).

But I digress

There have been interesting speculative fiction on living long: AE VAn Voght's Weaponsmaster, Heinlein's Methusela's children, and so on. The current research seems to aimed more at why do we age rather than how do we extend our lives. IIRC, DNA replication snips the ends off of certain chromosomes (???); pieces that are snipped start out being junk DNA but once the junk is all snipped off, actual important information is snipped and this is what they consider the aging process. Sorry, I don't have all the research to hand (and it is too late for me to start googling right now).

Durian - this is my love/hate fruit. It is not explainable what it is like; eating it from the shell is like eating pudding as long as you do not breath through your nose. Seriously, when eating durian plug your nose. It is banned in most cities and towns in Asia so you will see crowds of people (mostly men) at the city limits waiting for the durian truck. The durian fruit comes from a tree very much like palm trees but even taller; in order for the seeds to be spread it needs an animal that can carry a 4-10 pound seed so it evolved to attract tigers (the only animal big and strong enough to carry it) but how does it attract the tiger - it smells like rotting flesh! This is why you can't breath through your nose when you eat it and why most cities and towns ban it. It stinks - we wrapped one in 5 plastic bags (one inside the then next) and it sill stank. We buried it and it still stank so we took it about 20 miles north and dumped it in the woods. We were on the porch eating it (very carefully) when my boss showed up for the party, he tried a bite got a whiff and I swear he spit that about 40 yards across the road and onto a neighbor's yard. The party was themed with one of the themes was the strangest fruit - guess what …

Well, scientists recently found a clam that was over 500 years old (too bad they had to kill it to find out how old it was). There are some species of lizard that do not die of old age and a fish; not a coeleocanth but another of the cartilegenous fish that live over 300 years. Koi fish live over 200 years.

I bring these up because for such species to live a long time, they have to compete for food during the entire time; I just wanted to make sure that having a long life span does not necessarily means spending most of your life in senecense. In order for someone to live for hundreds of years, it would probably have to be by reversing the normal entropy at the cellular level.

The best car I ever owned was Toyota Corolla al-trac; bought it in 88 (in fact the manual called it 1988 and a half) I had it until 2006 when it was essentially totaled. I now drive a 96 Buic MOM-car; I hate it but I refuse to buy a new car until I am debt-free. I plan on buying something like a Leaf. I no longer drive to Montana ( I used to go home 3 times a year; there are 4 mountain passes between here and there which made Christmas travel pretty 'exciting') and if I really want road trip, I can rent a car or take the train. Since I broke up with my ex, train travel is back on the table.

I played high school football and college soccer/karate.

I did google it and the answers.microsoft.com advice did not work- I shut the thing down, unplugged it, waited for a bit, and I still get the USB devices failed. I will keep looking but - sigh!

I did google it and the answers.microsoft.com advice did not work- I shut the thing down, unplugged it, waited for a bit, and I still get the USB devices failed. I will keep looking but - sigh!

When I go to device manager it says 'unknown device' then it is updated and says USB composit device, then I get the error and it becomes unknown device.

For some reason Windoze thinks that my USB port(s) is/are unknow devices when I try to update the drivers it tells me the drivers are current. I get a message "sfotware for this device has been installed; unknown device is ready to use. Most things 9except for my mouse and cooling fans, don't seem to connect - hell they don't even recharge when plugged in.

Any suggestions?

    ddanb- I have a pretty complete collection of JS Bach; most of Beethoven, I have The complete recordings of Glenn Could; much of Ennio Moricone, much Frank Zapa, Profuse 77, Much Yoyo Ma, Tom Waits,Jean Michel Jarre, and so on.I also have some Punjabi, Israeli, Palestinian, Indian, and so on.

@AA=

Why do people need WIC anyway? GET A JOB
WIC is for children/babies - we have laws against child labor. "Get a Job" Is a pointless remark as there have to be jobs to get. I first thought you were making a joke, then I read your other rants.

m2k17 - I used to polka - it was joyous to fly around the floor twirling but then I learned to waltz and I lost that 'extra' beat and could never recover it. But then the waltz is another wonderful dance - I saw an old French gangster movie with guys in the striped shirts waltzing (and guys with those tiney French accordians); what they did was drop the left arm/hand and they would lean out on the right hand/arm and spin - if you waltz, try it, you can't help but spin!

dd - don't you just love the casual anarchy of the streets!? It was the automobile clubs that agitated for 'jaywalking' laws - they even stipulated that a 'ticket' be issued rather than jail time.
The music is - I don't have words - I am going to subscribe to their channel - hell, I might even pay good money for their music!

OMG you guys are the tops - not only the suggestions but the links to other stuff.

ddanbe - How could I have forgotten King Crimson! They (along with Moody Blues, Pink Floyd and Frank Zappa) got me through some rough trips back in the 70s. I could get drunk at keggers and sing all of "Help I am a Rock" - but I don't think the drunks appreciated my virtuosity!. At one of the keggers I invented the "double inverted" moon (I used to be a performance gymnist) - back to back, drop trou, lock arms, and one person bends at the waist lifting the other onto his back and he lifts his legs - double inverted.

<M/> I need to have complete control of what I hear - I suppose I could listen for new and interesting stuff but when I put on my cans and step out - I gotta have my mood. Have you checked out "GlobalVortexRadio"? They do a lot of ambient AND they accept submission; if you want to get a half hour or hour on the air, check them out. But keep in mind thay prefer ambient to house. sample - what I like about the vid is that you can actually see what a DJ does and how it affects what you hear. The records you see him working are actually blank and are linked to files on his laptop

RJ - I really like "Here and Never Found" - …

Well, I am starting to get bored with my current rotation and want to update my collection. I like weird music and I am especiall fond of German Industrial like Rammstein, Kraftwerk, and Einstürzende Neubauten - at least for industrial I also like California Guitar Trio (can you tell the 3rd guy is shy? - note that each guy is playing every 3rd note) and lady sovereign. Can you say 'eclectic'?