Gris's Journal

Arrr!

I've been sorting through my bookmarks, and, well... ::holds her feathed tricorn in her hands hopefully:: Will you help me be a pirate? O_O

What kind of pirate am I? You decide!
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Things Invisible

Today I learned (by dint of cutting into a really ripe one today) where a pineapple hides its seeds (just under its thorny exterior, in the little pockets in the flesh that correspond to the center of the "berries"). Did you know that pineapple's prime pollinator is the hummingbird? Or that it has mathematical properties?

I also wandered into a really neat category in Wikipedia on nonexistent people (such as the Alan Smithee credit for directors, which, I learned, requires the approval of a panel of the Director's Guild of America to use). A few favorites I'll share before releasing you to peruse the section on your own:

George P. Burdell, fictitious student at Georgia Tech.
Ern Malley, fictitious (yet well-loved) modern Australian poet.
Sidd Finch, April Fool's joke of a Mets rookie pitcher. (Okay, I admit, this one's primarily here for Mattchew's benefit.)
And finally, Fernando Pessoa, who was a real person, but who wrote as quite a few fictional poets, each with their own style and personality, some of whom hated the others. (He called them heteronyms... gee, I wonder if they're anything like certain remarkably autonomous Hall characters...?)

Wednesday night again

Well, it's Wednesday night again.

The computer catalog is still down. (It *was* up this morning, mostly, so we're making progress, but that will not help my enjoyment of this particular evening.)

And so, we turn to another fun-filled evening of catching up on all the two-new-things I haven't posted about the REST of the week!!!

So, let's work backwards, shall we?

Today, I learned that August 24th was a very bad day for the Roman Empire. Julius Caesar's general, Gaius Scribonius Curio, was defeated and killed in a battle against the Numidians in 49 BC. Then, in AD 79, they got hit with the most famous eruption of Mount Vesuvius-- you know, the one the buried Pompeii? And do you know *why* we know so much about that eruption? Pliny the Elder happened to be in the area with his fleet, and took his nephew Pliny the Younger to go check it out and see what help they could offer the locals. The elder Pliny died in the effort. And if this weren't enough disaster for one day, beginning on the same date in 410, Alaric led his Visigoths to sack Rome... the beginning of the end for the once-proud mother of nations, forseen by Tacitus in his Germania over 300 years earlier.

And, continuing in the Roman theme, I also learned that the capital of Slovenia, Ljubljana (easier to pronounce than spell), was once known as Emona in Latin (even *easier* to pronounce and spell!) (And if this sounds like a familiar placename to you, I know you've also started reading Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian.)

Tuesday, I learned about the existence of a lovely little natural paradise off the coast of Cornwall called the Isles of Scilly, home to Bishop Rock, the smallest island in the world and the eastern endpoint of the North Atlantic shipping route. (It's been added to my list of places to visit before I die. At this rate, I had best not die young.)

I also learned that cashews aren't really nuts-- they're seeds. (I could get into a whole botanical discussion here about what nuts and seeds really ARE, and the distinctions between them, but I won't, I'll just give you links. You're welcome.) The large fruit-looking thing it's attached to isn't even a fruit at all-- it's just a fleshy growth that holds the true fruit at the end of it. And what I find particularly interesting is that before it's processed the cashew fruit is toxic-- it's got the same nasty oil in its shell that makes poison ivy itchy. So, if you've ever wondered why you've never seen an unshelled cashew in your holiday nut mix-- that's why.

On Monday-- or was it over the weekend, I forget? Well, I take weekends off from blogging anyway, so it doesn't really matter. ;) Mondayish, I learned about the Uncanny Valley of robotics-- the sudden extreme dip in emotional response to uncannily almost-human robots as opposed to less-anthropomorphic robots (and the reason some people were really weirded out by the computer-animated movie version of The Polar Express).

I also learned-- coolest of all cool things! --that Alexandre Dumas' famous swashbuckling Musketeer, D'Artagnan , was based on a *real* D'Artagnan!

And as a bonus, I learned that the famous cathedral in Tours is dedicated to St. Gatien, its founding bishop.

Tracking boredom

BORED. Bored bored bored, and starting to get testy about it, darnit. We're in the middle of migrating to a new catalog system (as I believe I've mentioned before), and at this point, I've done all the paperwork I can do without a catalog. We've had very little business, and there's only so far I can help patrons if they want to know if a *specific* title is checked in or not. (I can tell them where it *would* be, but not if it's there or not. Sigh. No, I can't look on the computer. No, you can't check from home. No, no other library in our system would know, either. Your tax dollars at work.)

I've run out of work to do. I have no one to talk to. I'm BORED. I'm so bored I'm almost tempted to read my spam mail. (DANGEROUS. Do not try this at home. And certainly don't try it in your local library when you're the in-house techie and would have to clean up your own messes.)

And so, without further ado....
The amazing, ever-changing, stupendous, tremendous, sometimes-horrendous Wikipedia RANDOM ARTICLE link!!!!!

Global warming (Actually, this was in answer to a reference question on the Kyoto Accords, to grab a quick date. But this was my starting point.)

Liang Quichao, Chinese scholar, journalist, philosopher and reformist of the late the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) .

IATA- ever wonder who makes up those airport codes? These would be the blokes.

Bezau, Austria. Population under 2,000. No, I don't know why it has a Wikipedia entry, either. But they even have their own web site!

roots (the plant kind). See what *really* lies beneath!

Raffelsia - a digression from true randomness, off the roots page above. This genus of plants has haustorial, or parasitic roots. This also happens to be the famous giant "corpse flower" that smells like rotting meat. It's only coincidence that the discoverer of this parasitic flower shares a name with a famous fictional gentleman thief. (And no, that wasn't a random link, either. Bad me! I'm actually managing to entertain myself, here!)

Edward Short, Baron Glenamara, former Labour MP for Newcastle upon Tyne in the mid-20th century. Right, moving on.

Hoberman sphere - cool! I have one of these. ^_^ Can *you* say "icosidodecahedron" five times fast?

Labor unions in Japan- Pretty self-explanatory. Um. Okay. Not viscerally excited by foreign economics, I must admit. Moving on.

Balance (metaphysics)- Oh, bah, a stub. I know, I know, put up or shut up, as I'm not a contributing editor to Wikipedia... still, it's an intriguing concept, and I should have enjoyed reading an entire article on it. Ah, vell.

1959 Governor General's Awards- Canadian awards for literary merit. Hm. This article's a pretty good example of why Wikipedia *isn't* the best of all encyclopedias... a whole entry on one year's worth of awards, with no explanation of what the award, in general, is or who awards it? (A little digging found an explanation here, but that's a little sloppy, IMHO).

Penetanguishene, Ontario, an "historic community" (I'm guessing rather like Williamsburg). It's pretty. These location entries in Wikipedia interest me... mostly, though, I'm wishing I knew how to pronounce this one. (PEN-et-AN-gwi-SHEEN?)

Fairy chess piece , a chess piece not used in conventional chess, but in certain chess problems or variants. This is sort of a cool idea, and would likely play holy hell with standard chess tactics.

Hippocoon, a character from Greek mythology. (Now be honest-- weren't you hoping, as I was, that this was some sort of mythical cross between a hippopotamus and a raccoon?)

There. And now it is time for me to go home. I can only *imagine* how bugnuts I would have gone without web access this evening.

Geekiest geeks ever

The character used to represent infinity is known as the lemniscate (from the Latin for ribbon-- think "Moebius strip").

Transfinite numbers are what one (completely insane, to my mind) mathematician came up with in order to do math with infinite numbers. (What, infinity isn't mind-boggling enough for you, you have to learn to juggle with it, too?)

And Matt and I are couple of the geekiest geeks ever to walk the earth. A small snippet of an IM conversation:

Me: Oh yes I am.
Matt: Are not.
Me: R2.
Matt: !R
Me: R2^2!
Matt: !R^(Gris's number +1)

...I'll let you figure out why I wound up looking up stuff on infinity. And no, for future reference, the Unicode ∞ *won't* render in IM. I guess it's just funny that way.

Even more silliness

From Publisher's Weekly, 7/11/05, p. 18, the little author factoid-snippets they put on their bestseller lists, regarding bestselling author Jodi Picoult: "Which five people, living or dead, would Picoult invote to a dinner party? 'Ernest Hemingway, Alice Hoffman, William Shakespeare, Mel Gibson and Emeril Lagasse, because someone's got to cook.'"

HEE.

And on p.21, regarding the audio version of historian David McCullough's 1776, read by the author: "McCullough came to his recording in a beautiful, starched, crisp button-down shirt. Of course, the microphone was picking up sounds every time he moved hi[s] arm or even took a deep breath. To remedy this, at lunchtime he headed over to Brooks Brothers on Fifth Avenue and bought a soft cotton T-shirt to wear for the duration of the recording."

My thought-- Brooks Brothers sells *T-shirts*???

Much silliness

I now know what a theremin is, thanks to the list of 250 things Mr. Welch can no longer do during an RPG (WARNING: have oxygen handy before clicking, not recommended for surfers with weak hearts, do not read while drinking anything, especially Tang)-- thanks, KT!

I know that people will write books on just about anything....

And I know that saxophones alternate between being E-flat and B-flat instruments, depending on size ("Sopranino, alto and baritone saxophones are in the key of E-flat, and soprano, tenor and bass saxophones are in the key of B-flat.")...

I was deeply amused to learn that Wikipedia has an article on itself....

Oh, and under "redundant," see redundant.

Cool math tricks

I learned how to find the distance to the true horizon today. (Which is amazingly apropos, as the other major thing I've been involved with this month is learning the new catalog software our library is migrating to, called... wait for it! ... Horizon!

Oh, and just to give you something to do when you're out in the middle of nowhere without a calculator and need to know the approximate square root of a number to figure out just how far it *is* to the true horizon from your altitude... try Pell's equation. Neat trick, hunh?

I'll buy that for a guinea

A rare look inside the workings of the librarian mind...

So, the term "guinea pig" came up from conversation today, and that got me wondering... are they really from Guinea? (No.)

And how about guinea hens? (Sort of. But that may not be how they got called that.)

And... what sort of "guinea" might these things have been named after, anyway?
(Pick one. Although most likely it refers to the African region and/or country of Guinea, or (more remotely possible) in price (or diminutive size?) to the retired British coin (which, incidentally, takes its name from the region).

And by the way, did you know that some kangaroos live in trees? (Bonus points if you can figure out how my mind leapt to THAT.)