It's nice to hear someone making sense. Still, I've got this cold pit in my stomach about this (undeclared) war. My whole life as a Gen Xer, and I have never felt this powerless and disenfranchised. I want to *do* something.

 



 i like computers ivystudent

Hooray! Hi, Dave!

Discovered Talking Points Memo, have we? Sehr gut. As for worries about popular redistribution of video, I don't know that "broadcast quality" is anything too grand to brag about. Back when I gave a damn about Buffy, the actual "broadcast" signal out of Boston and New York stations (actually satellite feeds, but whatever) were significantly less viewable than irc-distributed digital copies that Dave Asher found. These were not multi-gig copies either, but hrmm, maybe 400 megs? Email is a poor distribution scheme, but there are other ways, like irc, kazaa and the various web subspecies.

Hey, Dave. Still alive in there?

Mitch

/m25
Thank you. Hang in there.

Psst, hey, you. Prove you're not dead.

Miss you, hope you're well.
Love,
Sharon

/m22:

It's hard to write a definition [of "Planet"] that includes Pluto but excludes asteroids and Quaoar.

That's like writing a definition of "continent" that includes Australia but not Greenland.

"An object orbiting the sun that is at least the size of Pluto (1430 miles in diameter)."

However, this possibly includes the Moon (2160 miles in diameter). I've read a few articles suggesting that the Earth and Moon have a double planet relationship rather than planet/satellite. If you compare the way the Moon moves around the sun, its pattern is more similar to a planet's than a satellite's.

But yeah, Jovian/Terran/Sub-Terran seems like a more useful taxonomy.

Any definition of heavenly bodies that groups Mercury and Jupiter together definitely has some issues. Idly speaking, jovian, terran, and subterran bodies seem to be a better classification scheme.

My former manager is the brother-in-law of Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York (http://research.amnh.org/users/tyson/home.html). Neil came and gave a talk at one of Rich's parties (out in the middle of Nowhere, Texas). Neil posits that Pluto is not a planet at all, but a captured comet. It's orbit is so eccentric, and when it gets near the sun, it forms a tail. The Hayden Planetarium left Pluto out of its model of the solar system, inspiring a flood of hate-mail from third-graders. ("Don't kill Pluto, Mr. Tyson," and so on.) He makes a good argument.

The only flaw in the argument that I see, actually, is that we do not have a good definition of planet. The word means wanderer, and the Greeks named the moving things in the sky "planets." That is, the Sun, the moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. (And then they named the days of the week after them.) When we got better optics, we started finding other things that were like those last five, and Galileo put _us_ on one of those things and changed the status of the other two.

Problems arose when we started seeing lots and lots of those other things. We had a planet explosion. Some bright person demoted them to "asteroid," and we were back to a reasonable number of planets.

Where does this leave Pluto and Quaoar? The last time we had a solid definition of the word "planet," it included the Sun and left out Neptune. Clearly, that's not the working definition used now. Does the working definition include rocky things spinning around the Sun that could maybe support life, if we tweaked them a little? Do the things have to be in the plane of the ecliptic? (Pluto isn't.) Do they have to follow orbits predicted by Kepler's equations? (Pluto doesn't.) It's hard to write a definition that includes Pluto but excludes asteroids and Quaoar. The current approach is reminiscent of the government's take on porn: I'll know it when I see it.

Edited by author 09-20-2002 02:27 PM
I'm probably the worst possible person to be discussing linguistics. I am still, sadly, monolingual, and will no doubt stay that way. Anyways...

They're still discovering languages? Are these the microlanguages in New Guinea and such? My impression is that the pressure on regional languages and dialects is less extreme than at the height of nationalism in the fifty years or so around the turn of the last century. There's less ideological pressure for homogenized language now, so the environment for the regionals is less hostile. Not friendly or anything, but better. Didn't Cornish die out briefly in the early 20th century?

So long as there's records of a language, it isn't entirely extinct. One hopes that there are linguistics postgrads climbing through the backhollers of New Guinea building those records right now.

Anyways, my contempt for Esperanto is mostly rooted in the jingoistic belief that an auxiliary language already exists, and it's called Basic English. ^_^

Speaking of strong emotions and linguistics, I recently heard Danish for the first time, and was greatly annoyed to discover that it is basically German with a heavy English/Swedish accent. Enough so that I was able to follow some of it with my decade-old college German.

Re /m19:

It's unfortunate (for Esperanto) that its more-reasonable-but-still-silly goal of being an "auxiliary" language got drawn up in all the fear of cultural homogeization.

Meanwhile, the majority of languages are spoken by ever-smaller populations. Each language that disappears without being recorded is a potential insight into the structure of human language lost. For example, inguists recently learned of a language that uses no pronouns, which they had previously assumed to be universal. On the other hand, there's plenty of evidence that understanding the dominant language in a region is advantageous (for individuals, if not their culture). I wouldn't want to argue that isolated tribes remain isolated so they can give us insights into the human mind.

I read that reactions to Esperanto article. Wow. Talk about reacting to condescension with condescension. It also seems to miss the most obvious (to my mind, at least) reason for reacting violently and negatively to Esperanto, namely, ideological reasons.

Klingon and Elvish are both hermetic artificial languages - created for fictional, hobbyist reasons and adapted for somewhat silly subcultural reasons. They are adapted and used for the establishment of subcultural values. They aren't expansive, they're internally-directed.

Esperanto, on the other hand, is an intentionally *expansive* meme-collection. Traditionally, it's part of the agenda of international-socialist one-world intellectuals. To the average person, Esperanto reeks of fellow-travellerism, intellectual arrogance, contempt for existing bodies of literature and tradition, and just the slightest whiff of future coercion.

It doesn't help that Esperanto was born in the period where national languages were busily exterminating regional dialects and languages like Breton, Welsh, Gaelic and Scots. Esperanto could be seen in that context as the final step in this process of lingual homogenization: as the national languages smothered the regional tongues, Esperanto seemed a tool for the coming world-state to finish the process.

And yes, that was an excellent pink-slipping. More than I usually expect of the CDT.

Dave, it was Ann Coulter. She wrote: "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war."

The entire column can be found here -- http://www.anncoulter.org/columns/2001/091301.htm

I am *so* glad the Centre Daily Times dropped her column.

The boss recently found an open source bit of code that quickly translated between "common" units in a browser context, a units calculator. When we took a look at it, it was clear that it was written for a British website of some sort, because it had things like Imperial Gallons, Stones, and Short and Long Tons. Even worse, the Short and Long Tons referred to metric tons, although that wasn't clear until actually converting between kilograms and tons using the code.

Our customers have a somewhat odd set of needs for units conversions, based partially on local peculiarities - Texans and Louisianans use barrels to measure rice yields, the rest of the delta and the world uses bushels and everybody insists on using volume measures when we try to use weight measures - and partially on what measures the chemical companies use for various pesticides and assorted chemicals. Potato growers insist on hundredweights (cwt), Sugarcane growers on tons (non-metric), Cotton on poundage or "bales" (about 400 lbs). Internally, we store everything as pounds, and convert based on user preferences.

Thanks very much. I'd also like to hear about old friends you got to see and people you got to meet, but I know your site doesn't delve much into the Man Behind the Curtain.