Entries for February 2005
While wandering around the Natural History Museum in London, I came up with a little game** that I’d like to try out on you all. The challenge is to come up with a statement that’s difficult to tell whether it’s true or false, but is definitely one or the other. So, we’re looking for really plausible lies or truths that seem false. Here’s an example (from the Museum):
Due to the Coriolis Effect, the spirals in sea shells from the northern hemisphere grow counter-clockwise while shells that grew in the southern hemisphere spiral clockwise.
Sounds plausible enough, but is it true? Do you have any facts that seem false or lies that seem true?
** This can’t be a novel idea…anyone seen this kind of thing somewhere before?
Advice for game magazine publishers. Gamers are getting older and more mainstream, but the gamer magazines aren’t keeping up.
Coldplay’s new album may be delayed, but they’re pretty enthusiastic about it. “We’ve got some fucking good songs. That’s one thing we are sure of. I don’t think we’ll top this.”
George Clooney to redo another Rat Pack movie. He, Brad Pitt, and Matt Damon are set to remake Robin and the 7 Hoods.
NY Times buys about.com for $410 million. I’ll let kottke.org go for a *lot* less than that.
Which celebrities make the best wine?. Francis Ford Coppola, Ernie Els, Gerard Depardieu, or Elvis?
Blank keyboards. It would be cool to get your own type printed on these.
Through a series of miracles yesterday, I stumbled across something I’ve been searching for forever: an OS X driver (plus a fix for OS X 10.3) for my old USB QuickCam. (I also found an add-on that lets me use said USB cam with iChat AV. Whee!) I then downloaded a program called EvoCam, and just like that, the webcam is back up (view in popup). (No guarantees as to how long it will stay up.)
How’s that for a bit of nostalgia? Back in the early days of weblogs, a lot of folks had webcams…it was part of the package. Posts, a list of links to your friends’ sites, a webcam, link to your Amazon wishlist, maybe a link to your Epinions page, an about page, a guestbook or little chat widget in the sidebar, etc. It was a social space to move around in. Now that everyone is reading everything in RSS readers, a lot of that sort of thing has been lost. RSS readers are not that social, even with so-called “next gen” newsreaders that recommend sites based on what you already read. It’s mostly just information in, information out…little time or opportunity for play. Thank God for sites like Flickr, LiveJournal, and Fark, where people can still go to hang out and play around with the web and their friends a bit.
NASA has found “strong evidence” that life currently exists on Mars. Fluctuating methane levels and the presence of sulfate jarosite may indicate that life is present.
Entire NHL hockey season cancelled. Can the sport recover from this?
Stay Free! pans Gladwell’s Blink. “His writing follows a simple formula: put forth a counterintuitive argument, then cleverly select points that advance this claim while ignoring and obscuring those that don’t.”
Good article on what’s wrong with the NBA. “Isiah Thomas has ordered players to wear suits and ties to the arenas. But during games, a team functionary goes around knotting the ties so that when a player gets dressed afterward, all he has to do is slip the tie over his head and tighten it rather than actually having to make the knot himself.”
The making of a child molestor. “‘It’s far more difficult to be candid about sexual urges,’” she said, and so it’s far more difficult for those on the edge of offending — those for whom cultural taboos, legal prohibitions and empathy for the child aren’t powerful enough to keep desire deeply submerged or to choke it off if it rises to the surface — to find a way to stop themselves.”
Daria is “an autonomous software system making a living as an artist”. You may commission Daria to make a piece of art for you by donating via PayPal.
Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, two Internet pioneers, are receiving the Turing Prize this year. “The 2004 A. M. Turing Award [is] widely considered to be the computing field’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize.”
Even those that like their jobs spend Sundays dreading Monday morning. One woman recommends eating melted cheese (??) to take your mind off of Monday.
Have scientists invented a machine that can predict the future?. It seems to have “predicted” the tsunami and 9/11, but most remain skeptical.
(It’s going to be hard to write this one without resorting to all sorts of unclever puns, but I’m going to do my best.)
When I was in London a couple of weeks ago, a group of us was sitting around in a pub on Saturday afternoon (what a cliché!) and someone mentioned that the reason that the English “loo” is so named because the toilet was commonly located in room 100 of buildings and the two (“loo” and “100”) look very much the same. (You can see that I jotted that tidbit down on my analog Palm Pilot (upper right quadrant) for later reference.) Turns out that pub chat aside, the jury is somewhat out on the etymology of “loo” (unless the OED, which I don’t have access to, says otherwise tons of people wrote in with the OED entry for loo, summarized below).
One popular theory comes from this timeline of toilets:
When people flung their potty waste out of the window, they would shout “Gardez l’eau” [gar-day low]. That’s French for “watch out for the water”. We probably get the word “loo” from this expression, although some people think it comes from “Room 100” which is what European people used to call the bathroom.
Wikipedia backs this version as well (don’t miss the list of euphemisms for toilet there, including poop-house (wtf?), dunny, and necessary).
Michael Quinion offers a few more theories. The word appears to originate no earlier than James Joyce’s usage in Ulysses in 1922 — “O yes, mon loup. How much cost? Waterloo. water closet.” — perhaps Joyce came up with it. Or it could be “a British mispronunciation of the French le lieu, “the place”, a euphemism.” Maybe loo is short for bordalou, “a portable commode carried by eighteenth century ladies in their muffs” (!!). Quinion also notes that “a rather more plausible [theory] has it that it comes from the French lieux d’aisances, literally ‘places of ease’ (the French term is usually plural), once also an English euphemism, which could have been picked up by British servicemen in World War One” but that there’s no real conclusive evidence to support any of these theories over the others.
Cecil Adams of Straight Dope offers many of the same theories as well as this additional one:
It’s short for “Lady Louisa,” Louisa being the unpopular wife of a 19th-century earl of Lichfield. In 1867 while the couple was visiting friends, two young wiseacres took the namecard off her bedroom door and stuck it on the door of the bathroom. The other guests thereafter began jocularly speaking of “going to Lady Louisa.” In shortened form this eventually spread to the masses.
But Adams has no definitive answer either and so the question of the etymology of loo will continue to be debated on the Internet and in pubs around the world.
Update: the OED notes Joyce’s usage as the earliest, but is also at a loss to explain things:
A. S. C. Ross’s examination of possible sources in Blackw. Mag. (1974) Oct. 309-16 is inconclusive: he favours derivation, in some manner that cannot be demonstrated, from Waterloo.
Five fast email productivity tips. I’ve been using these tips for years and highly recommend them.
Boeing unveils new version of 777. It has a range of 11,000 miles and a flying time of almost 19 hours without refueling.
After years of saying that IE was dead as a standalone browser, betas of IE7 will be released this summer. This is probably a move to stop the bleeding, but might have the opposite effect. As long as folks are looking at an upgrade, why not evaluate the alternatives?
Didn’t take long for some vandalism to show up on The Gates. Or is that just valid and appropriately situated criticism?
Bowled a personal best of 137 last night. Not bad for someone who bowls every year or so whether he wants to or not.
Rivalry is making a comeback in our culture. “I’m not entirely sure that competition is good for art. There is the danger that it can create a uniformity of thought and aim.”
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