My tweets

Jun. 2nd, 2015 12:05 pm
kirisutogomen: (Default)

WoUtNW

May. 8th, 2015 11:30 am
kirisutogomen: (lifeboat)
The WoUtNW is amanuensis. For those of us who went to MIT instead of Harvard, the Wikipedia article: amanuensis.

I was just cc'ed on an e-mail in which someone used amanuensis quite naturally, in the sense referred to by
It is also used in a specific sense in some academic contexts, for instance when an injured or disabled person is helped by an amanuensis at a written examination.
kirisutogomen: (lifeboat)
A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom.

Thomas Paine

WoUtNW

Apr. 17th, 2015 01:02 pm
kirisutogomen: (checkers)
The WoUtNW is lunch.

Lunch is derived from lump, indicating that your lunch is a formless mass of some sort of (hopefully edible) substance. Or possibly it is derived from the Spanish word lonja meaning "slice" (but literally meaning "loin"). It seems that that form lunching predates lunch, and that this in turn may have been a corruption of luncheon (which obviously also survived). Luncheon may have been influenced by nuncheon, from Middle English nonechenche.

Nonechenche seems to be a combination of none, "noon", and schench, "drink", from Old English scenc derived from the verb scencan, "pour out", cognate with Old Frisian skenka, "to give to drink", and with the modern German/Dutch schenken, "to give."

My tweets

Apr. 16th, 2015 12:03 pm
kirisutogomen: (Default)
kirisutogomen: (crab)
"We want Iran not to have nuclear weapons precisely because we can't bank on the nature of the regime changing. That's exactly why we don't want to have nuclear weapons. If suddenly Iran transformed itself to Germany or Sweden or France then there would be a different set of conversations about their nuclear infrastructure."


I'm pretty sure that if Iran suddenly turned into Sweden, the different set of conversations that would ensue would no longer be about nuclear infrastructure at all, and would be much more ontological or at least would include some profound social constructivist questions.
kirisutogomen: (lifeboat)
Cruz was joined by 18 Republican senators in his effort to prevent stripping out a clause that would have defunded the Affordable Care by voting against the motion, leaving the effort 21 votes short of the required number to deny cloture.

Not a sextuple negative, but sufficiently contorted that I had to read it three times to parse it correctly.
kirisutogomen: (lifeboat)
My parents got a new roof in 2013, and they got it with ice barriers, so I thought ice dams weren't a problem. But then I hear that [livejournal.com profile] dcltdw and [livejournal.com profile] nuclearpolymer also have a new roof, also with ice barriers, and they've got water infiltrating their living quarters. I start to doubt.

Well, I doubt no longer. Water is infiltrating my parents' house in several locations, and new stains are appearing on the ceilings daily. I am afraid to go up into the attic to see what it looks like up there. The folks who installed the roof are going to come over and clean snow off, at $300/hour.

But hey, it could be worse. I'm reasonably healthy, vastly wealthier than the majority of humanity, and I know how to solve differential equations.
kirisutogomen: (lifeboat)
Remember that shoe bomber? Well, I'm taking a class and one of my fellow students was a prominent member of Richard Reid's legal team. (I don't know if he was the lead or what, but he did seem to be the one the newspapers quoted.) We had a short interesting chat about how that experience gave him a lot of understanding of Reid's motivations, but that understanding Reid's motivations was no help in understanding the motivations of people who might superficially appear similar (e.g., the three girls who seem to be attempting to join the Islamic State).

tanstaafl

Feb. 12th, 2015 05:09 pm
kirisutogomen: (lifeboat)
What do you pay for that you could get for free? (Including premium versions of something you can have a basic version of for free, like Dropbox or Spotify or or LiveJournal or sex.) Why do you pay for it?

WoUtNW

Dec. 16th, 2014 11:03 am
kirisutogomen: (lifeboat)
The WoUtNW is osmolality. Proceed accordingly.

WoUtNW

Sep. 12th, 2014 09:21 pm
kirisutogomen: (lifeboat)
The WoUtNW is brabble.

WoUtNW

Jun. 17th, 2014 03:04 pm
kirisutogomen: (chow yun-fat)
The WoUtNW is quintessential.
cut for quintessence )

WoUtNW

Dec. 17th, 2013 05:43 pm
kirisutogomen: (lifeboat)
The WoUtNW is quintessential.

OK, so a quintessential foo means something like "ultimate or perfect example or embodiment of a foo". But what's that quint- doing there? Is that a five? Five whats?

Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends )

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