Today Community College Bathrooms, Tomorrow the World!

The sign stood at the entrance to a men's room at our place of employment (not this specific sign, but one with the exact same message). Now, we're all for wet-floor safety. And we appreciate the multi-lingual approach. As our place of employment is a community college in the San Francisco Bay Area, we serve a cosmopolitan melange of bathroom users. And students. These students, though, while they hail from various international locales, are not what you might call German. Neither are the faculty. In fact, the closest the college came to having a German on campus was when Arnold Schwarzenegger passed by on a campaign swing.

Maybe that's why we have those signs. Maybe the college is trying to attract German exchange students!

"Look, Rolf! Zey vant us to kom study here! Zey vant to make sure zat ve do not fall ven making der poo-poos! Forget Heidelberg! Let us to go to zis college instead!"

Today

(Image from Webshots)

This Rescue Brought to You by. . .

The last sentence from an article in yesterday Times about the recently rescued Chilean miners:

All the miners came out of the capsules in expensive dark glasses — donated by Oakley — to protect them from the sun, but the main health effect they all shared was very pale skin from being in the dark so long.

So those Ray-Ban bastards would just as soon let miners go blind!


We take notice--and, we suppose, issue--with how the reporter, Donald G. McNeil, Jr., went out of his way to mention the sunglass manufacturer. One the one hand, we assume McNeil has his facts right, and that Oakley did donate the sunglasses; the Times' motto is "All the news that's fit to print," and there's nothing "unfit" about this factoid. On the other hand, the factoid itself lacks a certain relevance.


McNeil (or his editor) might disagree. He might claim the fact deserves mention, if only because of the plethora of images showing dark-spectacled miners celebrating their rescue:

McNeil may have wanted to address questions he anticipated his readers asking: "What's with the shades? Those miners think they're soooo cool!" Fair enough. But why mention Oakley?

Was McNeil trying to give props to a company for its charitable gesture? Hoping to cadge a free pair of Oakleys for himself? Just being thorough?

To Mr. McNeil and/or his editors: Oakley will seize opportunities aplenty to publicize its humanitarianism. Leave the PR to the marketers.

A Brief Post and a Recommendation

Just posted a comment on Questions, Comments, Complaints, and the verification "word" was "sworkabl."

Wasn't that one of Cole Porter's rejected lyrics? "'Sworkabullllll. . . . 'Smarvelooooouusss. . ."?

On another note, we finally found someone who "gets" the fact that "[Crazy] Cat People Are People, Too." Enjoy.

Tuesday Paper Recap

Congratulations to the Chilean miners, rescued after two months trapped 2,000 feet underground:

The second miner to reach the surface, Mario Sepúlveda, left the rescue capsule in a kind of victory dance, hugging family members and officials. He embraced President Piñera three times and presented people with gifts: rocks from the mine.

Rocks? OK, it's not like they had a duty-free shop down there, but. . . rocks? We suppose it's better than a "My Daddy spent two months in a collapsed mine and all I got was this lousy t-shirt" shirt.

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A new entrant in the least-interesting-job ever competition:

The reason these grains [of ancient wheat] make good pasta, said Andrea Brondolini, an ancient-wheat specialist at the Italian Agricultural Research Council in Sant’Angelo Lodigiano, can be traced to the early history of agriculture. As ancient types of wheat were hybridized into modern varieties, they were bred for a higher yield.

"Ancient wheat specialist"? That must have been an interesting dinner-table conversation:

"Ay, Papa, I'v-ah decided what I want to do with my life!"

"Whaddaya mean, 'what you're gonna do wit' your life'? You follow inna da family footsteps! You tak-ah over da harmonica shop!"

"Nah! I'ma not-ah gonna take-ah over da harmonica shop! I'ma gonna be an ancient-ah wheat especialist at the university!"

"Ancient-ah wheat?!?"

"Yeah, ancient-ah wheat!"

"Fuggedaboutit! Whatta you gonna learn about ancient-ah wheat?"

"Dere's lots ta learn about ancient-ah wheat! Farro! Spelt! Einkorn!"

"Whadda ya talkin' about 'einhorn'? Who's-a gonna give-ah you money to tell 'em about einhorn?"

"Ah, fuggedaboutit!"

"YOU fuggedaboutit!"

"NO! YOU FUGGEDABOUTIT!"

And so on into the night.

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Hmmm. . . . WOS says we have a message from the Italian-American Anti-Defamation League. . . . We'll get back to them.

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Finally, this tidbit from the world of infant and child development:

"Babble is increasingly being understood as an essential precursor to speech, and as a key predictor of both cognitive and emotional development."

Looks like there's hope for Sarah Palin after all!

GOOD NIGHT, EVERYBODY! WE'RE HERE ALL WEEK! DON'T FORGET TO TIP YOUR WAITRESS!

All Those Opposed?

We are constantly approached by people who ask, "Solipsist, how do I start an essay."

"Well," we reply, "there are SEVERAL ways to begin an essay, but can I please just have a Number 1 with a Diet Coke?"

Starting with a joke works.

People often have trouble writing introductions. The biggest problem, we find, arises from the mistaken belief that, since the intro is the first part of the essay, it must be the first thing written. This is not the case. Indeed, the good writer will usually write the introduction in the late stages of the composition process, most likely after composing an entire draft. We explain to our students that writing an introduction before writing a draft is like introducing a person you've never met--or, more precisely, introducing a person that hasn't yet been born. When you read introductions to novels, you can assume that the intro's writer has read the work under discussion.

If, however, you find yourself under time pressure--if you have to produce an essay under test situations--we highly recommend the opposing point of view, or "Many People Think," introduction. If, for example, you have to write about whether or not brussels sprouts are disgusting, and you adopt the rational view (they're like poison), you would begin your essay like so:

"Many people think that brussels sprouts are delicious. Whether these people are certfiably insane or were simply born without taste buds, they feel that brussels sprouts are veritable ambrosia."

Then, you "turn" the conversation:

"These people, however, have a mistaken idea about the meaning of the word 'edible.'"

And wrap up with the thesis:

"Brussels sprouts are the Hitler of vegetables."

The "MPT" intro offers several advantages:

(1) It's easy. After all, if you know what YOU think, it's easy enough to figure out what those who disagree with you think.

(2) It makes you look like a rational person who is able to recognize and articulate the point of view of those who disagree with them, rather than some narrow-minded solipsistic proselytizer.

Happy writing.

Sports Update

We just finished watching the Jets, and it's late. So we'll simply say congratulations to Brett Favre on becoming the first quarterback to pass for more than 70,000 yards and 500 touchdowns. Oh, and a special congratulations for setting the record for most fumbles!

J-E-T-S!!!!

01000 00001 10000 10000 11001 00010 01001 01110 00001 10010 11001 00100 00001 11001

For those of you who don't read binary, today's title translates as "Happy Binary Day." October 10, 2010--10/10/10--is a day on which to celebrate the ingenuity of those who recognized the power of ones and zeroes. Some benighted folks (including, sadly, someone who once worked for us as a math tutor) think we will not see another such day for a thousand years; we hasten to point out that the next binary day will be in a mere one hundred years--or, for that matter, tomorrow (10/11/10).

The concept behind binary language is that limitless amounts of information can be conveyed through the simplest of codes. If you think about it, this makes sense. Pretty much anything that we do boils down to a series of yes/no decisions: Get up? YES/No. Go to the bathroom? YES/No. Lift toilet seat? Yes/NO. Whoops! Coding error.

Of course, binary also makes for a simple (if lengthy) alphabetic encryption. As each letter can be labeled with a number (A=1, B=2, and so on), you can use binary instead of numerals to add a layer of complexity. It works like this:

A binary sequence may be thought of in terms of exponential growth, thus:

1 2 4 8 16 32

and so on.

Switch the numbers around, thus:

32 16 8 4 2 1

Now, you can encode any number between 1 and 63. WOS suggested 44, which would be

101100

The first '1' is the number of 32's, followed by the number of 16's (0), then the number of 8's (1), the number of 4's (1) and the number of 2's and 1's (none). (Since the English alphabet has only 26 letters, there's no need for a 32's column, but you can see that the possibilities are limitless.)

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CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post spelled the first word of the title, '01000 00010 10000 10000 11001,' which is just stupid. We feel shame and will now go sit in the box.

(Image from xkcd.com)