Cop Car's Beat

An apology

Dear blog friends,

I've experienced so little (as in, none that I recall) spam on this blog that I had forgotten its existence - except in commiserating with some of you who have lamented your own spam problems. I'm getting my come-uppance! The TypePad spam filter had been working so efficiently that I was oblivious. Until recently!

Recently, I've had a problem trying to comment on my own blog. And...I've heard from Stu that his comment had disappeared. The TypePad people had to remind me that there was a spam filter. Having checked the filter a few minutes ago, I find that many of you have been subjected to the bad manners of my spam filter.

Please forgive me!

TypePad and I are working on the problem. Hopefully, we'll soon be back to normal. In the meantime, this blog will operate as if I had activated comment verification rules. I will have to publish each comment that gets caught in the filter. It is interesting that Bogie & Buffy are seemingly golden. Their comments don't get caught up in the filter!

Cop Car

P.S. As the time span that comments are retained in the spam filter is only a few weeks long, I note that the recoveries that I've made this morning go only as far back as Technical postings from Slashdot.org!

P.P.S. If you wish to compare notes: From 3/21/2013 until the current time, there have been 108 truly spammy comments that were caught by the spam filter - nearly 2.25/day.

Douglas Adams Google Doodle

Yesterday, some of my friends missed the most amazing Google Doodle that I've ever seen. Here, through the magic of YouTube are two videos of the doodle. I don't know if the sound track has been added; but, there was no sound to the doodle that I was watching, yesterday. Note, too, that, in the upper video, the whole doodle is not displayed in the video - only the PDA and its surrounds. Enjoy!

 

Other blogs

Finally, on Day 12, I am feeling well. My voice is strange; but, I went out to fill bird/critter feeders, this morning, and Hunky Husband (much against his better judgement) took me out to lunch. (We ended up at Freddy's Frozen Custard & Steakburgers place, up the street a couple of miles. Wow! I must be well if I can eat junk food, again!) Herein, below, are snippets from some of the blogs/websites that I've visited today.

IGLOO

From Colossal | A blog about art and visual ingenuity, an article How to Build a Rainbow Igloo:

Isn't the igloo marvelous?! To see how it was constructed, follow the link.

BOOKS FOR KIDS

From a recently discovered (by me, at least) website, Cocktail Party Physics, comes an article with recommendations on books for kids - which recommendations I intend to follow as soon as Next Generation 1 reaches age 3 (the minimum suggested age on any of the books). The article is dinosaurs, mars, and kareem abdul jabbar: science books for the kids on your shopping list. For instance, this excerpt (below) is from one of the blogger's reviews.

Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs by Mo Willems. Balzer + Bray (September 4, 2012). Ages 4 and up. Kids love Mo Willems as much as they love dinosaurs, so this book is like the chocolate and peanut butter of children’s books. This is his deliciously ridiculous riff on the traditional Goldilocks story, with three dinosaurs setting out bowls of pudding to lure a tasty little girl into their home for dinner.

 

 

TALKING CRITTERS

lbwoodgate's posting of yesterday, Saturday Humor: "If Only They Could Talk" is especially for animal lovers (aren't we all?) Below is a "teaser".

 

Cop Car learns a new word: portmanteau

Without violating copyright laws, it is difficult for me to define "portmanteau"; but, I'll give it a go. A portmanteau is similar to a contraction in that it represents a combination of two or more words/word sounds into a single word whose meaning combines the meanings of the original words.

Example of a contraction: "shall" plus "not" contracts to "shan't".

Example of a portmanteau: "Spanish" plus "English" combines into "Spanglish". 

No one cares, but I ran into "portmanteau" in relation to "sparticle" which is a shorter word for "supersymmetry" plus "particle". Another portmanteau is formed by combining "supersymmetry" with "parner" to form "superpartner".

Aren't (are not) you glad that you asked?

I'll not bore you by going into morphemes; but, for those who are familiar with them, I'll agree that the sounds combined in a portmanteau need not be whole words, but may be morphemes.

The media oversimplify - again!

While we were being kept awake by firecrackers and fireworks set off by people in our neighborhoods, the scientists at CERN were celebrating, themselves. However, they were not (repeat: NOT) celebrating the finding of the Higgs boson as has been reported through many of the media. They were celebrating the detection of a particle that is consistent with (and may, in fact, turn out to be) the Higgs. Below are a couple of articles from CERN's own website. Please note the careful wording that is used.

4 July 2012:

 

Proton-proton collision in the CMS experiment producing four high-energy muons (red lines). The event shows characteristics expected from the decay of a Higgs boson but it is also consistent with background Standard Model physics processes (Image: CMS)

At a seminar on 4 July, the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN presented their latest results in the search for the long-sought Higgs boson. Both experiments see strong indications for the presence of a new particle, which could be the Higgs boson, in the mass region around 126 gigaelectronvolts (GeV).        

Both ATLAS and CMS gave the level of significance of the result as 5 sigma on the scale that particle physicists use to describe the certainty of a discovery. One sigma means the results could be random fluctuations in the data, 3 sigma counts as an observation and a 5-sigma result is a discovery. The results presented today are preliminary, as the data from 2012 is still under analysis. The complete analysis is expected to be published around the end of July.

13 July 2012:

The ATLAS detector at the LHC (Image: CERN)

An important piece of news that almost got lost in the excitement of the Higgs update seminar on 4 July is that the 2012 Large Hadron Collider (LHC) proton run is to be extended.

....

The current LHC schedule foresees proton running reaching a conclusion on 16 October, with a proton-ion run scheduled for November. In the preliminary new schedule, proton running is planned to continue until 16 December, with the proton-ion run starting after the Christmas stop on 18 January and continuing until 10 February. With a final Higgs update for 2012 scheduled to be given to Council during the week of 10 December, an early Christmas present in the form of new insights into the discovery announced last week could be on the cards.

Reason enough to run the above posting is the beauty of the photos that CERN released!

DEFINITIONS:

ATLAS -  A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS

CERN - Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (French for European Council for Nuclear Research)

CMS - Compact Muon Solenoid

LHC - Large Hadron Collider

Impact-based warnings

During a meeting that I attended a couple of weeks ago, we were told of plans to implement a pilot program providing expected impact-based wording of severe weather warnings. Historically, weather forecasts have concentrated on telling people about the expected weather. The pilot program will also tell people about the expected results of the expected weather.

Here is the beginning of an article (link sent to me by Hunky Husband - thanks!) from U.S. News concerning the program.

'UNSURVIVABLE!' New tornado warnings aim to scare

BILL DRAPER

From Associated Press

March 31, 2012 5:48 PM EDT

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — Even expert storm chases [sic] would have struggled to decipher the difference between the tornado warnings sent last May before severe weather hit Joplin and, a few days later, headed again toward downtown Kansas City.

The first tornado was a massive EF-5 twister that killed 161 people as it wiped out a huge chunk of the southwest Missouri community. The second storm caused only minor damage when two weak tornadoes struck in the Kansas City suburbs.

In both cases, the warnings were harbingers of touchdowns. But three out of every four times the National Weather Service issues a formal tornado warning, there isn't one. The result is a "cry wolf" phenomenon that's dulled the effectiveness of tornado warnings, and one the weather service hopes to solve with what amounts to a scare tactic.

This May 7, 2011, file photo shows the path of a deadly tornado that struck Tuscaloosa, Ala. The National Weather Service is kicking off an experiment starting April 2, 2012 with a new kind of tornado warning that's aimed to scare people into seeking shelter. (AP Photo - Dave Martin)

I don't believe that anyone of my readers lives in Missouri or Kansas (which states are in the pilot program); but, if this program goes nation-wide, you can be foretold by using the above link to read the whole article or going to this article on the The Washington Post/National website.

BTW: I was in Kansas City MO when the tornado warning mentioned in the article was issued. We hunkered down in the basement of the parking garage to the Hyatt Hotel in which the annual meeting of the National Volunteer Organizations Active in Disasters was being held. Obviously, all attendees were somewhat conversant with disasters; but, I was astonished at the number who said that this was their first exposure to an actual tornado warning. I should not fail to mention the professionalism of the hotel employees who managed the crowd. They were awesome!

Languages and physicists

Some of us have been "discussing" the use and misuse of the English language (including spellings, pronunciations, and punctuations); so, the following posting from Slashdot.org particularly caught my attention.

Physicists Discover Evolutionary Laws of Language195

Posted by samzenpuson Monday March 19, @08:09AM
from the species-first-word dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "Christopher Shea writes in the WSJ that physicists studying Google's massive collection of scanned books claim to have identified universal laws governing the birth, life course and death of words, marking an advance in a new field dubbed 'Culturomics': the application of data-crunching to subjects typically considered part of the humanities. Published in Science, their paper gives the best-yet estimate of the true number of words in English — a million, far more than any dictionary has recorded (the 2002 Webster's Third New International Dictionary has 348,000), with more than half of the language considered 'dark matter' that has evaded standard dictionaries(PDF). The paper tracked word usage through time (each year, for instance, 1% of the world's English-speaking population switches from 'sneaked' to 'snuck') and found that English continues to grow at a rate of 8,500 new words a year. However the growth rate is slowing, partly because the language is already so rich, the 'marginal utility' of new words is declining. Another discovery is that the death rates for words is rising, largely as a matter of homogenization as regional words disappear and spell-checking programs and vigilant copy editors choke off the chaotic variety of words much more quickly, in effect speeding up the natural selection of words. The authors also identified a universal 'tipping point' in the life cycle of new words: Roughly 30 to 50 years after their birth, words either enter the long-term lexicon or tumble off a cliff into disuse and go '23 skidoo'as children either accept or reject their parents' coinages."

 

The most upsetting part of the posting, itself, is the statement that "each year...1% of the world's English-speaking population switches from 'sneaked' to 'snuck'". How can they do that to me? Why-oh-why would anyone abandon a perfectly regular verb form for an irregular? Arrrgh!!!!!

Note that physicists will trespass into any field of knowledge! For The Big Bang Theory fans, as noted at Yahoo! Voices, in an article, How to Become a Physicist and What to Expect when You Become One, by Timothy Sexton, on Jan 14, 2011"...Sheldon Cooper once noted, the job of physicist essentially covers every piece of knowledge known to man as well as the greatest mysteries as yet unknown."

Apocryphal* apostrophes

*I just used this word to show that I really can spell it, having misspelled it in a comment on a friend's blog, the other day!

Right out of the chute, I wish to avow that Mary (of Xtreme English) and I are members of a mutual admiration society. I appreciate her postings, and she is nice enough to say that she appreciates mine. We have, however, come to an impasse on one subject: the English language. If you've not already read it, I suggest you see Mary's posting, Cheers for the Apostrophe Protection Society!! before continuing the reading of this posting.

At the time of Mary's above posting, CAPCHA was being a complete jerk; thus, I ended up sending a comment via email, the copying of which I hope Mary will forgive me. My comment was, in part, "I get annoyed and hate it that the English language (spoken and written) is so illogical and inconsistent. The fact that the formation of the possessive of "it" is not consistent with the formation of other plurals defies understanding. No wonder we can't get things "right"!"

This morning, having a bit more time available, I followed the link that Mary had provided to the Apostrophe Protection Society's web site. It turns out that they offer a combination tutorial and test on Using the Apostrophe. It may surprise you, in light of my above comment, to learn that my score on all of the testing in the 39-page tutorial was 100% - even though I answered the questions/did the exercises without bothering to read the preceding tutorial material.  I tell you this, not only to show off; but, to demonstrate that my above comment had come from a person who is not ignorant of "the rules".

Mary responded to my email. I shall not share her well-reasoned, well-written response (too lazy to gain her permission!); but, I will share the further comment that she elicited from me. I wrote, as follows.

"Well…to me, the issue with [sic] improving the English language is very similar to the issue of making computers user friendly. If we all had to communicate with our PCs by using FORTRAN, COBOL, BASIC, etc, how widespread would PC use be? I just see no reason for us to stick with such perversity as abounds in the English language! (So…sue me?)

"BTW: Most blogs are not high enough in my esteem for me to bother even trying to use CAPCHA. (You are, indeed, blessed!) *giggling*

"BTW2: [That] English has such widespread roots is part of the reason that it is so inconsistent. It is I or it is me? English or German?

A modern form of protest

I could almost go for the modern form of electronic protest being lodged, as reported by Slashdot.org.

Canadians #TellVicEverything In Response To Bill C-3066

Posted by timothyon Friday February 17, @07:01PM
from the like-a-sausage-but-with-cracks-on-the-surface dept.

First time accepted submitter beerdragoon writes "In order to protest the government's new Internet snooping legislation, some Canadians have started a somewhat unorthodox protest. Vic Toews, the minister responsible for tabling the legislation, has had his twitter account bombarded with tweets regarding the boring, banal aspects of regular Canadians' lives. The idea is that since Toews wants to know everything about your personal life, we should oblige him and #TellVicEverything."

 

I really cannot endorse the reported form of protest, however, as I am opposed to spam. How different is this, though, from write-in campaigns to our legislators? I know that I am constantly bombarded with requests to sign online petitions or send "scripted" messages to my senators and representatives. Only once have I signed an online petition; and, if I send a message to my legislators, you can bet that each message is individually composed in my own words. (Just because one can do something does not mean that they should.)

Math speak

I think that there are ways in which people use English that are terribly annoying. You probably have your own instances of annoying constructs. In visiting the Math is Sexy blog, just now, one of the postings brought an annoying construct to mind. Sexy did not use the construct; but, reminded me of it. The problem:

(Source: dayy-after-dayyy)

reblogged from dayy-after-dayyy

12:10pm 13/11/2011

Truly, I do not care whether you know how to do the problem (I shall assume that you do know how). I wish to discuss how words are used to offer a mathematical problem to the reader and how some people describe the status of one person/place/thing as having a larger number/greater amount of a given attribute. (Did you love word problems in third grade?!) For instance, I could say (on the basis of the above problem) that this year, Archimedes has 1.54 times as many Pokemon cards as he had last year.

For years - nay, decades - I noticed that advertisers would advertise "Tidal has three times more power than Cheers." or "Pepsal in a liter bottle costs five times less per ounce than Pepsal in 12-ounce cans." That bothered me; but, as it was advertising, I cut the idiots who wrote it some slack. They probably were not mathematicians I reasoned.

It seems that, within the past five or ten years, this sort of verbal construct has taken over - even in the non-advertising world. It is sloppy. To an elder like me, it is confusing. I believe that the writer/speaker is not conveying the "fact" that s/he means to convey. Let us consider the first statement - the one about Tidal and Cheers.

If Tidal's power is measured as being X, and Cheers's power is measured as being Y, the statement tells me that X = Y + 3Y = 4Y. That is not what many people, nowadays mean by the statement. What they intend to convey by the statement is that X = 3Y. Wow! Big difference. If the latter equation is what they meant to convey, they should have advertised "Tidal has three times as much power as Cheers" or "Tidal is three times as powerful as Cheers."

Similarly, let us consider the second statement - the one concerning Pepsal.

If Pepsal in a liter bottle costs X cents per ounce, and Pepsal in 12-ounce cans costs Y cents per ounce, the statement tells me that X = Y - 5Y = -4Y. The statement implies to me that, if Pepsal in a liter bottle costs 1 cent per ounce, the merchant will pay me 4 cents per ounce to take the Pepsal in the 12-ounce cans off of their hands. What people really wish to convey is that X = (1/5)Y. They might easily express the thought by saying that, the cost per ounce of Pepsal in a liter bottle is 1/5 the cost per ounce of Pepsal in a 12-ounce can." 

The message is this: "less" or "more" implies subtraction or addition, respectively; while "times" implies just what it says: multiplication. Whew! Having gotten that off of my chest, I feel a bit better. Now back to whining about "choose" vs "chose"!

P.S. Please don't ever tell me that Archimedes now has approximately 1.54 times more cards than he had last year - unless you really mean that he now has 173 cards, which is not one of the choices. *smiling*