Combine Pharmacokinetics and Bowling

Shape the Zeitgeist

I like to jump head first into subjects that I have no understanding of at all.
Here's a site that meets the criteria. A site that discusses the book:

"Agronomic Representation of Muddles in Linguistic Theory"
by Peter Cannings

The august journal Speculative Grammarian has a long, rich, and varied history, weaving an intricate and subtle tapestry from disparate strands of linguistics, philology, history, politics, science, technology, botany, pharmacokinetics, computer science, the mathematics of humor, basket weaving, archery, glass blowing, roller coaster design, and bowling, among numerous other, less obvious fields.

SpecGram, as it is known to devotees and sworn enemies alike, has for centuries sought to bring together the greatest yet least understood minds of the time, embedding itself firmly in the cultural and psychological matrix of the global society while simultaneously illuminating, reflecting, and shaping the universal Zeitgeist.

The Speculative Grammarian


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More Pi, please

Pick a piece

Is your Social Security number just part of Pi? How about your phone number?

"In 1996, Arthur Bebak of Netsurfer Digest jokingly suggested the idea. I put the site online, linked from the now-defunct Useless Web Pages Pages. The original suggestion was to find your birthday in Pi, but things got out of hand. The original pi searcher featured 1.25 million digits. It was upgraded in 1998 to 50 million, in 2001 to 100 million, and in 2005, to 200 million digits to keep up with the times. The Pi Searcher has proven both exceptionally useless (see the comments) and occasionally useful to math & early science classes.

The Pi Searcher lets you search for any string of digits (up to 120 of them) in the first 200 million digits of Pi. You can also show any substring of Pi"

Today's date:

The string 09062010 occurs at position 100,612,215 counting from the first digit after the decimal point.

The string and surrounding digits:

69799506351530413700 09062010 38508990326697425579

Dave Anderson at:
Angio.net:
PiQuery


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In Search of Stupidity

By Merrill R. Chapman

In Search of Stupidity: Over Twenty Years of High Tech Marketing Disasters


About the Author
Rick Chapman has worked for them all; from Ashton-Tate to Ziff-Davis.

Also see:
InSearchofStupidity.com

Book Description

"... how did Microsoft get that monopoly?

According to Rick Chapman, the answer is simpler: Microsoft was the only company on the list that never made a fatal, stupid mistake. Whether this was by dint of superior brainpower or just dumb luck, the biggest mistake Microsoft made was the dancing paperclip. And how bad was that, really? We ridiculed them, shut it off, and went back to using Word, Excel, Outlook, and Internet Explorer every minute of every day. But for every other software company that once had market leadership and saw it go down the drain, you can point to one or two giant blunders that steered the boat into an iceberg.

Micropro fiddled around rewriting the printer architecture instead of upgrading their flagship product, WordStar. Lotus wasted a year and a half shoehorning 123 to run on 640kb machines; by the time they were done Excel was shipping and 640kb machines were a dim memory. Digital Research wildly overcharged for CP/M-86 and lost a chance to be the de-facto standard for PC operating systems. VisiCorp sued themselves out of existence. Ashton-Tate never missed an opportunity to piss off dBase developers, poisoning the fragile ecology that is so vital to a platform vendor's success."

Quote: the following quote was added just for the neat statistic.

"In 1993, Microsoft Excel 5.0 took up about $36.00 worth of hard drive space. In 2000, Microsoft Excel 2000 takes up about $1.03 in hard drive space. All adjusted for inflation."

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Military Clipart

Thousands of items

If you find the need for Armed Forces photos and art, here is the place to look.
Regardless of your opinion about their present mission, the military does present a spectacular visage.

"06/17/06 - An F/A-18E Super Hornet aircraft sits at the ready as storm clouds pass overhead aboard the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan (CVN 76) in the Philippine Sea June 17, 2006.
(U.S. Navy photo by Photographer's Mate 2nd Class Aaron Burden)

All of these files are in the public domain unless otherwise indicated. However, we request you credit the photographer/videographer as indicated or simply "Department of Defense."

Hood.Army.mil- Clipart


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Triangle with Three Right Angles

They said - "Impossible!"

Forget high school geometry. A triangle can have more than on ninety degree angle.




Here's how it was done:

IllusionsEtc.Blogspot.com

"Caution!!!! Some of the optical illusions on this blog may cause dizziness or possibly epileptic seizures. The latter happens when the brain can't handle the conflicting information from your two eyes. If you start feeling unwell when using this website, immediately cover one eye with your hand and then leave the page. Do not close your eyes because that can make the attack worse."

Site map


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Paper Power

What do steam and paper have in common?

I find origami and paper sculpture intriguing.

Ed Bertschy provides a template that can be downloaded and printed on good paper to be used in the construction of a paper steam engine.

This paper steam engine is based on a Riches and Watts nominal 2 1/2 horsepower vertical A-frame double acting simple slide-valve steam engine circa 1870-75. The original engine was used to drive a water pump to irrigate the fields of Norfolk. If this model had a scale, it would be roughly 1:19. I had to double the size of the eccentric and strap in order to make it buildable. Everything else is close to scale, but changed in design and appearance because, well, paper isn't iron.

Everything will work on this engine, the flywheel turns, there really is a slide valve in the valve chest, the piston works, the cranks and the connecting rods, eccentric and strap all work if built carefully. The final model stands about 12 inches high. I hope you have as much fun building it as I had designing it.

Paper Steam Engine


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Your Grand-cestors Swore

Your Grandmothers told them to stop

What is there about a well placed curse that spices a novel or a conversation?
Perhaps it's genetic or evolutionary.

"The Jacobean dramatist Ben Jonson peppered his plays with fackings and "peremptorie Asses," and Shakespeare could hardly quill a stanza without inserting profanities of the day like "zounds" or "sblood" - offensive contractions of "God's wounds" and "God's blood" - or some wondrous sexual pun.

Even the quintessential Good Book abounds in naughty passages like the men in II Kings 18:27 who, as the comparatively tame King James translation puts it, "eat their own dung, and drink their own piss."

Almost before we spoke

Refered to by:
LanguageHat.com
The Antiquity Of Cursing


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Plain Numbers

I'd Like to Make It Clear

Plain Figures is a method of transforming statistical and financial data into figures, tables and graphs that people readily understand.

Have you ever:

• squinted your eyes trying to see the numbers in a PowerPoint presentation?
  
  
• scratched your head at a charity leaflet with an indecipherable pie chart titled 'Where your donation goes' ... and set it aside?
  
  
• missed discussion at a meeting because you were busy trying to figure out the figures?
  
  
• put aside a graph or table, thinking "I'm not good with numbers."?

Then you know how important the clear display of numerical information can be. Common problems People have trouble using numerical information for many reasons. Most commonly, authors don't know:

• what to include: when unsure what numbers are important, people frequently display them all, overpowering the reader with irrelevance.
  
  
• which format to use: the choice between text and table, table and chart, bar and pie.
  
  
• how to use the technology effectively: computer software generates graphs easily, but the results hide your point behind incomprehensible chartjunk.
  
  
• how to explain the information: selecting the right words for titles, columns and captions.

Plain Figures is a partnership between Sally Bigwood, located in Wakefield, Yorkshire, UK, and Melissa Spore, who divides her time between Toronto and Saskatoon, Canada. Sally and Melissa are sisters and both have dual citizenship in the United States.
 PlainFigures.com


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What if the Truth Teller Fibs

Who ya gonna believe?

Snopes.com is a great source for answers about urban myths, legends and computer hoaxes.

These articles appear on the Snopes site:

TRUE: The Mississippi state legislature removed fractions and decimal points from the mathematics curriculum of public secondary schools.

FALSE: The restaurant chain formerly known as "Kentucky Fried Chicken" changed its name to KFC to eliminate the word "fried" from its title.

TRUE: At the moment the Titanic hit an iceberg in the north Atlantic, the silent version of the film The Poseidon Adventure was being screened aboard ship.

After you stop shaking your head, look at the bottom left corner of the page and click on "More information about this page."
False Authority Syndrome


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Watermellon Pickles

Actually quite good

1. Cut a watermelon into slices (for best results, use a melon that's not overly ripe).
   
   
2. Cut the rind off the pink portion and cube the flesh.
   
   
3. Soak the watermelon cubes overnight in brine made by dissolving 2 Tbsp. of pickling salt in 1 qt. water.
   
   
4. In the morning, drain the brine off the melon cubes.
   
   
5. Put a dill head and stem (or a couple of teaspoons of dill seed) in each quart jar. If you desire, also add a hot pepper (chili) and whole allspice and/or mixed pickling spice to each quart.
   
   
6. Bring to a boil 1 cup white vinegar, 2 cups water, and 1/2 to 1 cup granulated sugar (try the smaller amount first and increase the amount if you decide you like your watermelon pickles sweeter).
   
   
7. Pour the pickling solution boiling hot over the melon in the jars, filling them to 1/2 inch of the top of the jars.
   
   
8. Wipe the rims and seal the jars with sterilized lids and rings.
   
   
9. Process in a boiling water bath for 15 minutes, just long enough so the contents won't ferment. (If you process the pickles too long, they will be too soft.)

Here's the Volga Deutsch site:

 Getting in a pickle


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Paper Skyscrapers

Fold your own steamship

This beats paper airplanes. If you order you get hard paper cards with all the pieces.

What exactly is a Micromodel? Micromodels are card or paper models that were originally sold from the 1940's through the 1960's. Most were designed by Geoffrey Heighway.
Each model was made up of several small cards illustrated with the pieces of the model, all wrapped up in a label. You could cut the pieces out and carefully assemble an intricate little three-dimensional model.
Micromodels were known for the amazing details that people would add to customize their models. There were more than 100 original Micromodels of all types.

MicroModelsUSA


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Julian Dates

Gregorian to/from Julian

Julian dates refer to the number of days from the first of the year and the number of days until the end of the year.

The year -45 has been called the "year of confusion," because in that year Julius Caesar inserted 90 days to bring the months of the Roman calendar back to their traditional place with respect to the seasons. This was Caesar's first step in replacing a calendar that had gone badly awry. Caesar created a solar calendar with twelve months of fixed lengths and a provision for an intercalary day to be added every fourth year. As a result, the average length of the Julian calendar year was 365.25 days.

The Gregorian (Pope Gregory XIII) calendar is based on a cycle of 400 years, which comprises 146,097 days. Since 146,097 is evenly divisible by 7. Dividing 146,097 by 400 yields an average length of 365.2425 days per calendar year, which is a close approximation to the length of the tropical year. The Gregorian calendar accumulates an error of one day in about 2500 years.

Calendars by L. E. Doggett


From Chip Pearson's site CPearson.com:

"Many applications (especially mainframe systems) store dates in the Julian format, which is a 5-digit number, consisting of a 2-digit year and a 3-digit day-of-year number. For example, 24-August-1999 is stored as 99236, since 24-August is the 236th day of the year. Excel does not support Julian dates directly, but you can use them with only a few fairly simple formulas.

Converting A Standard Date To A Julian Date

The formula below will convert a standard Excel date in A1 to a Julian Date.

=RIGHT(YEAR(A1),2)&TEXT(A1-DATE(YEAR(A1),1,0),"000")

This formula takes the 2 right-most characters of the YEAR of the date in A1, and then appends the number of days between the date in A1 and the 0th day of that year. The TEXT function formats the day-of-year number as three digits, with leading zeros if necessary.

Converting A Julian Date To A Standard Date

The formula below will convert a Julian date to a standard Excel date.

=DATE(IF(0+(LEFT(A1,2))<30 data-blogger-escaped-strong="strong">

If the year digits of the Julian date are less than 30 (i.e., 00 to 29), the date is assumed to be a 2000 century year. If the year digits of the Julian date are greater than or equal to 30 (i.e., 30 to 99), the date is assumed to be a 1900 century year. This formula works by taking advantage of the fact that the DATE function can handle days beyond the "normal" days in a month. For example, DATE correctly computes 100-Jan-1999 to be 10-April-1999.

These Julian dates must have the leading zero or zeros for years between 2000 and 2009. For example the 123rd day of 2000 must be entered as 00123. Format the cell as TEXT before entering the data, or enter an apostrophe before the Julian date -- e.g., '00123. This will prevent Excel from treating the Julian date as a number and suppressing the leading zeros."

US Naval Observatory has this definition (and a calculator):

Julian dates (abbreviated JD) are simply a continuous count of days and fractions since noon Universal Time on January 1, 4713 BCE (on the Julian calendar). Almost 2.5 million days have transpired since this date.

CE 2016 March 17 03:00:00.0 is JD 2457464.625000


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Map Yourself

Make your own

You know you've wanted to play with Google maps on your own. It's not super easy, but here's a description about how to do it.

"One of the great things about Google maps is it has its roots in XML. To translate for the non-web developers out there, it basically means Google maps are user hackable.

This how-to will show you how to make your own annotated Google map from your own GPS data. Plus, you'll be able to tie in images and video to create an interactive multimedia map.

We'll walk you through the steps we took to generate an annotated map of a walk we took recently through our hometown, now that it's actually starting to get warm enough to want to walk about!"

Make your own annotated multimedia Google map



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The Girl Who Fell to Earth

By Sophia Al-Maria

“When Sophia Al-Maria's mother sends her away from rainy Washington State to stay with her husband's desert-dwelling Bedouin family in Qatar, she intends it to be a sort of teenage cultural boot camp. What her mother doesn't know is that there are some things about growing up that are universal. In Qatar, Sophia is faced with a new world she'd only imagined as a child. She sets out to find her freedom, even in the most unlikely of places.

Both family saga and coming-of-age story, The Girl Who Fell to Earth takes readers from the green valleys of the Pacific Northwest to the dunes of the Arabian Gulf and on to the sprawling chaos of Cairo. Struggling to adapt to her nomadic lifestyle, Sophia is haunted by the feeling that she is perpetually in exile: hovering somewhere between two families, two cultures, and two worlds. She must make a place for herself—a complex journey that includes finding young love in the Arabian Gulf, rebellion in Cairo, and, finally, self-discovery in the mountains of Sinai.”

 “… Matar (Sophia's father) agreed to a trade-off with Gale (Sophia's mother): in exchange for a simple nondenominational ceremony, Gale would quietly convert to Islam and raise their children as Muslims. In the end, the marriage consisted of a civil ceremony performed by a notary public in the kitchen of the farmhouse, and later that evening when the newlyweds were alone, a private circumnavigation of a lilac bush in the backyard.”

  The Girl Who Fell to Earth: A Memoir


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May I have a Word

Vocabulary game

Sometimes what we know is wrong. Try this puzzle to see if you really know what words mean.

"In this etymology game you'll be presented with 10 randomly selected etymology (word origin) or word definition puzzles to solve; in each case the word or phrase is highlighted in bold, and a number of possible answers will be presented. You need to choose the correct answer to score a point for that question. Beware! The false answers will often also seem quite plausible, and some of the true answers are hard to believe, but we have documentation!

What is arachibutyrophobia?

1. A fear of spiders.
   
   
2. A fear of ingesting too much margarine.
   
   
3. A fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of the mouth.
   
   
4. A fear of butane lighters.

Etymologic.com


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Moxie Cola

What this country needs is plenty of Moxie

"Moxie outsells Coke"

The West coast was not a huge Moxie fan back in the day. Easterners had the advantage of a drink that has been described as a combination Dr. Pepper and cough syrup. It preceded and out sold Coke and Pepsi in the beginning, but lost market position.

How could it fail with a spiel like this:

"Contains not a drop of Medicine, Poison, Stimulant or Alcohol. But is a simple sugarcane-like plant grown near the Equator and farther south, was lately accidentally discovered by Lieut. Moxie and has proved itself to be the only harmless nerve food known that can recover brain and nervous exhaustion, loss of manhood, imbecility and helplessness. It has recovered paralysis, softening of the brain, locomotor ataxia, and insanity when caused by nervous exhaustion. It gives a durable solid strength, makes you eat voraciously, takes away the tired, sleepy, listless feeling like magic, removes fatigue from mental and physical over work at once, will not interfere with action of vegetable medicines.

BDragon.com

You can still buy Moxie and a bunch of other odd soft drinks. Here is some information on micro bottlers around the country.


Other soda sites:


The Soda Pop Stop:

PLANTATION STYLE MINT JULEP

Bubbles of fresh tasting mint in a soft drink. This one is so great! It's delicious alone, use it as a mixer or make ice cubes.

The Soda Shop:

BOYLAN'S ORIGINAL BIRCH BEER

"Although we may be the smallest soda company around, our flagship brand is the most locally loved soft drink of its time. Rich with history, Boylan's Birch Beer started in a apothecary in the early 1890's and developed into the most popular flavor of The Boylan Sodaworks. Boylan was a bottling and keg filling operation located in the heart of Paterson, NJ, the first industrialized city in the country.

Competition increased however, and in the 1930's Boylan was forced to close its bottling lines, leaving Boylan's Draught Birch Beer as its only product. Shortly thereafter, the rights to the name, the formula, and the sole route was purchased by the driver. He, by himself, was responsible for pulling Boylan's Draught Birch Beer from near extinction to a beverage that is enjoyed by thousands at Fourth of July parades, town picnics, hot dog stands and many good times.

His reward for this accomplishment was a 7 day - 80 hour work week, but he would have it no other way.

In appreciation of our grandfather's effort, we honor him with this bottling project."

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Grand Complication, The

By Allen Kurzweil

ISBN 0-7868-6603-9
Hyperion August 2001

About the Author
The Library of Congress has a reading by Kurzweil


Book Description
"Narrated by Alexander Short, a stylish young reference librarian of arcane interests, The Grand Complication propels the reader through a card catalog of desperation and delight, of intrigue and theft. It's a novel of suspense that comes full circle, with a clock-maker's precision and a storyteller's surprise, on page 360."

Quote

"THE SEARCH BEGAN with a library call slip and the gracious query of an elegant man.
"I beg your pardon," said the man, bowing ever so slightly. "Might I steal a moment of your time?"

He deposited his slip on the reference desk and turned it so that the lettering would face me. And if this unusual courtesy wasn't enough to attract attention, there was also the matter of his handwriting — a gorgeous old-fashioned script executed with confident ascenders and tapering exit strokes — as well as the title of the book he requested. Secret Compartments in Eighteenth-Century Furniture played right to my fascination with objects of enclosure.

"Let's see what we can do for you, Mr. — " I double-checked the bottom of the slip before uttering his improbably literary name. "Henry James Jesson III."

After I had directed him to the tube clerk, curiosity got the best of me, so I rang the stack supervisor and asked that she expedite retrieval. In a further breach of protocol, I pushed through the swing gate and planted myself near the dumbwaiter in Delivery, where I waited for the book to surface.

"This is terribly kind of you," Jesson said as I slid Secret Compartments under the brass grille.

"Glad to be of service."

I was professional enough not to mention the uncanny overlap of our interests — I don't meet many readers keen on lettering technique and enclosures. But that same restraint left me mildly disappointed. The call slip was so enticing, our exchange so stilted and brief.

Jesson settled himself at a table near the municipal tax codes. He quickly supplied further proof of a charmingly outmoded manner by digging deep into his capacious trouser pockets to extract a roll of paper, a tiny ink pot, and a calligraphy pen. Though he seemed to ignore the stares of nearby readers, he occasionally glanced in my direction, as if to confirm that I'd stuck around. Which, of course, I had. In fact, while he took notes on Secret Compartments, I took notes on him, convinced that the consonance of our uncommon pursuits demanded annotation.

He wore billowy trousers of moss-green corduroy that had wale as thick as pencils. These he partnered with a button-down shirt of subtle stripe and a dainty chamois vest tied at the back with a fat purple ribbon. He had an indulgent-looking face and blue-gray eyes that recalled the color of the buckram on my compact OED. Despite a bump at the bridge of his nose and teeth that predated fluoridation, he was undeniably handsome, a scholar who appeared unencumbered by the tattered frugality of most academics I assist. Those, in toto, were my preliminary observations of the elderly man wishing to steal a moment of my time."

A watch that shows the phases of the moon, for instance, is said to have one complication. A watch with five of these extra actions is said to be a grand complication.


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Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®

A morning's home companion

The Writer's Almanac®, a daily program of poetry and history hosted by Garrison Keillor, can be heard each day on public radio stations throughout the country. Each day's program is about five minutes long.

Minnesota Public Radio will email the newsletter and link to you every morning.

It's a pleasant way to start the day with Garrison talking about some piece of literary history and then reading a short poem.

Try it, you'll like it.The Writers Almanac.org

Also, in keeping,
Prairie Home Companion Features


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Byte, Nibble, Crumb, Bit

Umpty ump definitions and references — maybe even a googol.

We all know/knew that a nibble is four binary digits or half of a (eight-bit) byte and that a crumb is jargon for two bits (two binary digits). However, there must be some other definitions that don't pop into mind right away.

That's where Whatis, an IT-specific encyclopedia comes in.


"Every File Format in the World"

This is a list of file name extension or suffixes that indicate the format or usage of a file and a brief description of that format.

KAR

MIDI file (text+MIDI) (Karaoke)

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Free TIVO

(Almost, if you've got the parts laying around)

From the "Not quite too hard to do" file. Construct your own DVR from a leftover PC.

"I started with an old PC (a Dell Dimension 4500) that had unfortunately been destroyed by lightning. After some experimentation, I figured out that the only bad portions of the PC were the motherboard and the modem (which I didn't need anyway). I decided to replace the motherboard and keep the same case and other hardware because I really liked Dell's clamshell case design. I did some research at my local Fry's electronics store and got a motherboard that would allow me to use the same memory, processor, and case. After getting . . . . .

Seguetech.com:
Build a Better DVR out of an Old PC


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