Ron's Log

Calle 8

I found this spelling error really interesting since I know nothing about Spanish misspellings in the U.S. Was "Cayle" an attempt to write it in Spanish with a hint to English speakers how to pronounce it? This photo was shot on Friday, April 6.

9th Circuit Has Some Good Writers

Prop 8 Trial Tracker picks out the Top 10 Quotes from the yesterday's decision on Prop 8. I'll give you just Number 10:

We need consider only the many ways in which we encounter the word "marriage" in our daily lives and understand it, consciously or not, to convey a sense of significant. We are regularly given forms to complete that ask us whether we are "single" or "married." Newspapers run announcements of births, deaths, and marriages. We are excited to see someone ask, "Will you marry me?", whether on bended knee in a restaurant or in text splashed across a stadium Jumbotron. Certainly it would not have the same effect to see "Will you enter into a registered domestic partnership with me?". Groucho Marx's one-liner, "Marriage is a wonderful institution … but who wants to live in an institution?" would lack its punch if the word "marriage" were replaced with the alternative phrase. So too with Shakespeare's "A young man married is a man that's marr'd," Lincoln's "Marriage is neither heaven nor hell, it is simply purgatory," and Sinatra's "A man doesn't know what happiness is until he's married. By then it's too late." We see tropes like "marrying for love" versus "marrying for money" played out again and again in our films and literature because of the recognized important and permanence of the marriage relationship. Had Marilyn Moneroe's film been called How to Register a Domestic Partnership with a Millionaire, it would not have conveyed the same meaning as did her famous movie, even though the underlying drama for same-sex couples is no different. The name "marriage" signifies the unique recognition that society gives to harmonious, loyal, enduring, and intimate relationships.

KESQ Reports Palm Springs TSA Screenings To Be Extradited

No word on where it will be extradited to, nor whether travelers will have to go there and back, or is it just the screeners and their equipment that will be going away.

Airport Executive Director Tom Nolan recommended checking the Transportation Security Administration website -- www.tsa.gov -- about what can be packed and taken through security.

"It's the busiest time at airports nationwide," he said. "It would help extradite screening."

Here's a copy of the article, in case KESQ extradites the original.

At The IHub

Last night was the Tri-Chamber Mixer (or something like that). The Chambers of Commerce of Desert Hot Springs, Palm Springs and Cathedral City all together at the IHub in Palm Springs.

The historical plaques on the building. 1959 is readable. 2011 is like a standard Powerpoint presentation where in the pursuit of preserving "white space" the text is rendered unreadable, unless you look at a larger version.

Mayor Parks was there along with Mayors DeRosa and Pougnet.

Let's put a stop to this nonsense before it gets widespread. First, it's spelled Blu-ray. There is no "e" in "Blu-ray." Second, it's a "Blu-ray player." Yes, it also plays DVDs and CDs and provides a warm shelf where your cat can rest. But it's not a Blu-ray DVD-CD-Player Cat-Warming-Tray. Just say "Blu-ray player."

George Orwell

Again I point out this touchstone of clear English writing: George Orwell's essay, Politics and the English Language. Re-read it. You may want to update some of the mid-twentieth century examples he gives to the balderdash that's being shoveled now, but the essence remains the same.

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a ‘party line’. Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases — bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder — one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved, as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity.

Scientific English compared to General Public English

AGO Blogosphere highlights this list of terms that, when used by scientists, may be misunderstood by the general public. The table appeared in Physics Today.

Examples: "theory" may be understood by the public to mean "hunch, speculation" while what scientists actually mean is "scientific understanding." "Error" might be understood to mean "mistake, wrong, incorrect" when scientists actually mean "difference from exact true number."

(Via Bad Astrtonomy).

The History Of English In Ten Easy Parts

Ten YouTube snippets, each a little more than one minute long, scan the history of the English language. There should be eleven snippets, but they totally skip Middle English, the language as it existed after the Norman Conquest, but before the Tudors - you are familiar with it in The Canterbury Tales. So here are the ten fun parts of the history of English:

• One, the Romans leave England and the Angles and Saxons take their place.
  
• Two, the Norman Conquest which brought us justice, beef and pork.
• Three, Shakespeare, AKA "Early Modern English."
• The King James Bible, still considered the only true revealed word of God by some people.
• Science, especially Newton and acid, gravity, pendulum, penis and vagina.
• Six, empire: barbecue, canoe, yoga, bungalow, voodoo, zombie, and nugget.
• Seven, dictionaries. Samuel Johnson and Oxford.
• Eight, American English with raccoon, squash and moose from the Indians, plus more from the Dutch, Germans, and Italians, plus the words of capitalism, economic growth, and movies.
• Nine, the internet with download and IMHO, WTF?
• Ten, global English, meaning the English of China, Singapore, India, etc.

Ligidation

Thank goodness photographer ItsSoSunny pulled over to get the shot of this eternally irritating sign along Palm Drive (thereby saving me the trouble). It's on the east side of Palm, so in the county not the city. Is it safe to assume that some day when the city annexes Dos Palmas, the city's spelling requirements will be enforced?! If not, then I will sign up to be the third code enforcement volunteer, so long as I can focus on spelling, punctuation and grammar. Let our city's fame be proclaimed for hot water and good English!

Unicode

Unicode is the computer standard which, ideally, allows all the characters of all the world's languages (plus mathematics and all the sciences) to be represented. Here's a YouTube video of the first 65,536 characters (using 16 bits each). The video is over 33 minutes long. Be careful, I'm sure there are words from alien religions in there.

The latest version of Unicode has 109,000 characters. Those will be in the sequel, or maybe a mini-series, which would allow for greater story development.

E-Bbooks, E-Readers

First, here's an article about a study at Princeton University that indicated recall of information that is read is enhanced if it is presented in some less-legible typeface than the ubiquitous Times New-Roman, Arial, presumably Helvetica too, and Caecilia (which is used on Kindles). They don't tell us which typefaces are more memorable, except to say "Disfluent fonts, the ones people tend to laugh off, fonts that are comically ugly, they tend to be the best for learning and for memory." Like this maybe?

The research was published in the journal Cognition and you can buy a copy of the article here for only $40. The journalists (I don't know if the original researchers, Connor Diemand-Yauman, Daniel M. Oppenheimer, Erikka B. Vaughan, did this because I haven't shelled out the 40 bucks) have taken a leap further and asserted that e-readers encourage the brain to be lazy. While it's true (I think) that all e-readers right now are limited to a selection of these well-known, easily read fonts, all the manufacturers have got to do is update the software to include some irritating font (Comic-Sans?) and see what happens.

Second, here's an interesting, long article about the history of e-books and e-readers and John Siracusa's hopes and suggestions for them. He spends a lot of time going back - way, way back before the Kindle - to the 1990s, a period when most e-readers still burned whale oil for illumination. He talks about the resistance from publishers.

As you read that article you've got to be very aware that it was written more than a year ago. That means that while the Kindle was on the market, they were still months away from releasing the $139 model that sent sales through the roof. Also, the iPad had not been introduced yet. The author had long thought that Apple was the logical company to bring e-books and e-readers to the masses, although he doesn't seem to resent that a massive book retailer did it instead. He does think the e-reader should be more than a one-task tool, like the Kindle. The iPad is closer to his ideal.