Discussing conlangs (invented languages)

There's a lively Q&A  on the NYT’s website with Paul Frommer, the inventor of the Na'vi language for the movie “Avatar,” and Anita Okrent, author of In the Land of Invented Languages, about “conlangs,” or “constructed languages” (like Na'vi, Esperanto, Elvish, Klingon, Volapük, and the like). 


Fun stuff. :-) I once tried to translate the Lord’s Prayer into Klingon, but came to a roadblock with the concept of forgive. :-0

Glasspool gets a majority! (Or, +Gene will have company in the HOB come May)

Both ENS and the Diocese of Los Angeles have reported that the Rev. Canon Mary Glasspool has received the required number of consents by bishops and standing committees of the Episcopal Church in order to be consecrated bishop suffragan of the diocese of Los Angeles. (The Rev. Canon Diane Jardine Bruce, currently rector of St. Clement's, San Clemente, who was elected to the other bishop suffragan post at Diocesan Convention last December, received the required number of consents on February 17.)


[EDITED March 12th: I should have said that this is not completely official yet; we will have to wait for when the P.B. confirms that she has the required number of consents from bishops having jurisdiction and from the standing committees of all of the dioceses. So, informally, it's almost as if the points have been won, except that the puck hasn't hit the net yet, so to speak. Or it's a slam dunk, except the ball hasn't gone through the hoop, yet. Choose your own sports metaphor. :-) ] 


Congratulations, Diane and Mary! Their consecrations are set for Saturday, May 15th, at the Long Beach Arena. Chief consecrator at that occasion will be the Presiding Bishop and Primate, the Most Rev. Katherine Jefferts Schori.


So, come May 15th, we'll have two openly... hmm, this is where English gets tricky with respect to listing both +Gene Robinson and Mary Glasspool+ and their sexual orientation in one sentence. You can't say “gay or lesbian” bishops, because one is gay, the other is lesbian, so “or” in that context just sounds weird. You can't really use “gay” because many lesbians reject being lumped in with the men with “gay,” and prefer “lesbian” (though I don't know where Mary+ stands on that). Maybe “gay and lesbian” would work, since we know +Gene's a man and Mary's+ a woman.


Oh, heck; how about “openly same-sex partnered bishops,” then?


No matter how you phrase it, it's a wonderful time to be in a church that values openness and honesty in all things—openness to how all of us are created, in our many and varied ways, and honesty in being true to whom we are, and not trying to hide, lie, or subvert whom we were meant to be.


Alas, there will be Anglicans in other parts of the world that will disagree. But we do not seek to impose our will on them—nobody's telling them they have to ordain women, let’s say, let alone gay or lesbian people—so why should they seek to impose their will on us?

What's the difference between a cop car and a regular car?

The Globe and Mail's Peter Cheney explores the anatomy of a police cruiser (video link). It's not your father's Crown Victoria!

Snowmageddon wreaks havoc on Orthodox Jews

Fascinating piece in the NYT recently [A Jewish Ritual Collides with Mother Nature] about the trials and tribulations the recent spate of snowstorms has had on observant Orthodox Jews in the Northeast. Some of the storms have blown down the eruv, the enclosure, or boundary, around a home or a community. 

Almost literally invisible even to observant Jews, the wire or string of an eruv, connected from pole to pole, allows the outdoors to be considered an extension of the home. Which means, under Judaic law, that one can carry things on the Sabbath, an act that is otherwise forbidden outside the house.

Prayer shawls, prayer books, bottles of wine, platters of food and, perhaps most important, strollers with children in them — Orthodox Jews can haul or tote such items within the eruv. When a section of an eruv is knocked down by, let’s say, a big snowstorm, then the alerts go out by Internet and robocall, and human behavior changes dramatically.

So if the eruv blows down, then little kids can't carry tissues with them on the walk to the shul [synagogue], for instance, on Shabbat—the problem, you see, is not the tissues (or any other object), but rather the act of carrying or transporting an object from one place to another on the Sabbath. If, however, you put a boundary—an eruv—around a home or a community, then you can move something from place to place within that boundary.

The damage to eruvim this winter evokes another kind of convergence, as well. It draws attention to the concept of the eruv itself, a combination of religious obligation, historical phenomenon and what academics call a social construction. In more than one way, an eruv is a through line.

The walls of European Jewish ghettos in olden times once served as eruvim, but when Jews were finally permitted to live elsewhere, then other boundaries were selected (a river, for instance), and then also erected (making eruvin, which Wikipedia says is the correct plural of eruv—the NYT writer used eruvim, but as I am not qualified to know the reasons why it should be eruvin instead of eruvim, I will assume the Wikipedia version is correct).

Sure—now they get snow! Lower Mainland of B.C. hit by the weather the Olympics should have brought

CBC website headline: Snow hits metro Vancouver / North Shore ski hills get spring break dump


Little bit of a timing problem there, eh? It would have been great last month.

Technical merits in ice skating competitions: Infographic

I know, the glorious Winter Olympics are now history (VANOC can be proud; aside from the terrible tragedy that marred the opening day, and the weather conditions that threatened to make it the “Spring Olympics,” instead, they really did turn out to be fabulous—British press accounts be damned). 


One thing that struck me, when watching the ice skating, is figuring out what the judges are grading on, and why the skater is being docked points for this or that. Actually, for me, announcers forever talk about doing a triple Lutz, or a double Axel, but as someone who last was on skates at the age of 7—and to hear my mother tell it, wasn’t all that good at it—and who certainly never aspired to any pretensions of being the next Johnny W—er, Brian Boitano or Orser :-) —these moves are a mystery to me. (Thank heavens for Wikipedia.)


To help clear it up, both for me and for millions of others, the NYT has a great infographic on the things judges grade on: Underrotation on takeoff, underrotation on landing, and wrong edge on takeoff. Very helpful. 


(Sorry, iPhone viewers, that's in Flash. Can't help you, there, until Steve Jobs has a come-to-Adobe moment. )

Flight times grow as airlines pad schedules, or why a six-hour flight now takes seven

The WSJ, on why “Your airline seat may not have much padding, but the airline's schedule sure does.”


In short, airlines are padding the schedule to account for unexpected delays, figuring that arriving early is better than arriving late. (Also, planes are flying about 2% slower, in order to save on fuel.) I wondered why, last year, on a Vancouver to SNA flight, how it was we arrived 10 minutes early! Now I know.

Where batteries go to be tortured: If something can go wrong with lithium-ion cells, better in the 'abuse lab' than in your car

The Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico houses a research lab that tests the hell out of lithium-ion batteries so that manufacturers can go back to the drawing board and reëngineer their batteries to prevent overcharging, runaway thermal events, and the like—all the better to prevent a future electric or hybrid car from exploding or catching on fire in an accident, for instance.


But it's not just lithium-ion batteries that they test:

In one memorable test a few years back that didn't involve lithium-ion technology, he overcharged a battery made of 48 cells lashed together, then exposed it to sparks. The cells immediately began venting a tremendous cloud of gas and then exploded like fireworks, ricocheting off walls and disintegrating so completely, nothing was left but a thick layer of grit so toxic that cleanup crews had to wear hazmat suits.

His report to the manufacturer was simple, Mr. Roth says: "Back to the drawing board."

As for his test bay? "We put in a steel ceiling after that," he says.

Yikes!

Woman, fearing apocalypse, tries to halt Europe's Large Hadron Collider

The Large Hadron Collider is a grand physics experiment, situated on the border of France and Switzerland. Its existence has spooked a lot of the tinfoil-hat people, who fear that by turning it on, a black hole will be created, swallowing up the Earth, and presumably half of our galaxy, too.

A woman in Germany, however, fears the end really is very nigh indeed. So, according to the Telegraph, she went to her country's most exalted court to get its judges to understand just how nigh our final breaths are.

Memo to this lady: They've already turned the LHC on (briefly), and last time I checked, we're all still here. And we'll still be here even after they turn the power on full-bore.

Toyota, industry need more rigorous testing, says software-testing firm

The latest cases of uncontrolled acceleration in the Toyota Prius point to software glitches that the car industry needs to address with more rigorous testing, according to a company that specializes in software integrity.

No doubt; as cars become more complex, year after year, putting all this mass of code together and expecting it to work right “out of the box” is a daunting challenge. And we’re talking a lot of code. To put this in perspective: 

"The amount of code in cars today is getting truly enormous," said Andy Chou, chief scientist and co-founder of Coverity. Luxury cars can have as much as 100 million lines of code, according to Chou. (Windows Vista, by comparison, is estimated to have about 50 million lines of code.)

No kidding. When you car contains more code than your computer, that's saying something! 

‘Your PC is infected!’ Guess again. They're just trying to scare you.

Have you ever seen those messages that pop up at you when you're using your computer? The ones that say, "Your computer may be infected with spyware!" or some such thing?

Social engineering being what it is, too many people have been fooled by this sort of thing. They think, "OMG, I have a virus!" and click on the message, thinking it's from their own antivirus program. They are then cajoled into downloading software that will clean their computer of malware, spyware, viruses, or whatever. The wide-eyed user runs the downloaded app, which then triumphantly pronounces that they have 593 cases of spyware and viruses. But, listen, pal, the software suggests: I can get rid of all of that, if you'll pay $29.95 for Anti-Virus Professional Cleaner 2010, or some such. Yessss... you're buying really good protection if you buy that. In the same way that Guido in the pinstriped suit once offered "protection"!

The problem is that the program that's downloaded to their computer isn't a real antivirus program at all. It's a fake, cleverly disguised as an antivirus/antispyware program. In some cases, these programs can unleash real malware on your PC—things like keyloggers and Trojan horses, that try to sniff out the passwords that you type, or monitor your Internet activity.

McAfee, one of the well-known security software companies, announced that “worldwide a million people are victimized by scareware daily. There are 69,000 daily cases in the United States, according to the company.”

Here’s a tip—if you ever see a screen that purports to say that your computer is infected, or has spyware, or malware, or whatever, take a good look at the notice. Does it say that it's from the company whose antivirus program you have installed on your computer? Or is it just generic? That's probably the first tip-off; if it's not from McAfee, Symantec/Norton, AVG, Avast, Trend Micro, Kaspersky, Panda, or NOD 32, please run fast in the other direction. :-) In some cases, it's really hard to get rid of the scareware (I've had to remove a few of those from people's computers.)

(The above only really applies to Windows users; Mac users may get the pop-up ads, but as far as I know, none of the scareware folks have developed Mac versions of their apps.)

CBC.ca parody site

The wonderful men and women who ought to work at my favourite network, the CBC, have been locked out of their jobs since the middle of August. As a result, programming has suffered, and not just on radio and TV. (Programming on Radio-Canada in Quebec is not affected, and their website remains unaltered.) The CBC's website has been reduced to running a lot of wire-service copy and hastily written stories by management pulled into running the website.

A bunch of locked-out CBC staffers (we don't know who) have put together a parody of CBC.ca. If you know what that page should look like, you'll find this one to be quite funny. :-)

Thanks to Tod Maffin's cbcunplugged.com blog for sharing this. :-)

Devil wipeout? In Tasmania, that's the fear

Tasmanian devils are dying of a mysterious facial-tumor disease, and scientists are mightily perplexed. "In Tasmania, the Devil Now Faces Its Own Hell" is a New York Times article that examines this strange phenomenon, and what Australian scientists are doing. They're setting up a quarantine program for young devils that show no signs of the disease, to see if they can rescue the population--provided that the quarantined youngsters are disease-free. This disease looks similar to one in dogs, except that dogs just develop antibodies to the virus and don't develop symptoms. In Tasmanian devils, however, it's 100% fatal.

A little genetic diversity would help the devil population, however. As correspondent Sandra Blakeslee writes,

In this hypothesis, tumor cells alone are the infectious agent. In nature, this is not supposed to happen, Dr. Pyecroft conceded. Healthy animals exposed to pathogens, including tumor cells, will normally mount an immune response to fight off the infection.

But genetically speaking, devils are virtual clones. With scant variation in their DNA -- perhaps from a population bottleneck in the recent past -- they may have nearly identical immune systems. Hence they cannot fight off the tumor cells.

Every tumor cell examined so far is the same in every animal, male and female, regardless of area of origin. The chromosomal rearrangements, presumably from the one random mutation, are identical.

Wow.

Ismail Merchant, 1936–2005

The film producer Ismail Merchant, partner of director James Ivory, has died at the age of 68 in a London hospital. He and Ivory were in London to shoot a film adaptation of "The White Countess," by Kazuo Ishiguro. Warren Hogue of the NYT has an obituary of Mr. Merchant, which includes the immortal line uttered by Mr. Merchant describing their recruitment of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala as screenwriter for their first film:

"When we first began, Ruth told us she had never written a screenplay," Mr. Merchant told The Associated Press. "That was not a problem, since I had never produced a feature film and Jim had never directed one."

If only that sort of bravado worked for all of our ventures and projects in life, eh?

Merchant-Ivory movies were wonderful period-piece creations—think "A Room with a View," or "Howard's End" — and it's sad that Ismail Merchant won't be around any more to head up another production. He and Ivory treated their production company as if it were their family—the same people would be employed behind the scenes from film to film—and, according to Hogue's obituary,

Once on the scene, Mr. Merchant was just as likely to be fetching tea for a company member or making one of his celebrated curries for the cast as pitching a fit about cost overruns or schedule snafus.

10 things I didn't know about Google, either

PC World's editor-in-chief, Harry McCracken, attending something called the "Google Factory Tour," which is a bit of a misnomer, since it wasn't at a factory and it wasn't a tour. But never mind—it was a glimpse inside Google. McCracken outlines ten things about Google that he found out from this meeting. (There's even a webcast available, too.)

Google Maps is such a cool thing, especially their satellite imagery. You can have hours of fun with it! In fact, other companies have produced ways of tapping into Google Maps and overlaying their own data with it. Looking to find out where recent earthquakes have occurred in North America? Look no further.

(Here's a quick explanation of the earthquake map site.)

Nifty, eh?

The camera's always on, buddy

Memo to people in public life, including on-camera TV reporters: The camera (or microphone) is always on—even when you think you've handed the shot back to the studio.

Although . . . the guy worked in New York City. Doesn't everyone in New York already talk like that anyway? ;-) So why'd he get canned?

I know, I know—to teach him a lesson. Or maybe because broadcasters are so afraid of the FCC these days.

Give me my ‘su doku’ or I’ll sue

There's a new craze across the Pond: People in the U.K. are going mad over su doku, a Japanese puzzle that has taken the country by storm. Think of it as a crossword puzzle, but with numbers instead of letters.

I think I'll stick to the one with letters—although, truth be told, I've never seen a su doku puzzle, so perhaps I don't know what I'm missing.

Best pun o’ the week

In a glossary for the non-Star Wars geeks out there (I'm more a Trekker than a Star Wars fanatic, though I enjoy Star Wars), Wired editor Adam Rogers writes in Slate concerning the Sith, the villains in the current Episode III movie:

They can often throw lightning from their fingertips, which makes any one of them a Darth and stormy knight.

{groan} — but good. ;-)