Way cool, Wikipedia

You know how the pronunciation guide used on Wikipedia, among other sites, is not the one you grew up with (if you're of a certain age)? It features many more characters and some different conventions. It's hard for me to make the effort to learn this new language, as it were, and so I am, from time to time, frustrated when I want to know how to pronounce something.

However, help is here!

I don't know how long this feature has been around on Wikipedia, but I just noticed it today: you can hover over an individual character in the phonetic spelling of a given word or name, and a tooltip will pop up, showing you what that particular character means!

Here's an example screenshot:

My life just got measurably better. Shoutout and many thanks to the Wikipedians who made this happen.

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Evidently, the money is being put to good use! ;)

I love little details like this

Here's a simple and clever authentication mechanism that's new to me:

Authorities watched as the truck arrived at about 1:55pm on October 23 to 3055 Dulles Drive in Mira Loma, California, a location near the airport in Ontario, California.

"This location is less than a mile away from where KARAC had received duffle bags containing cocaine form CHS1 a few months earlier," Monroe wrote.

She watched as Ignjatov and Hristovski got out of the truck to meet an "unknown man." Hristovski handed the man "an item, which looked like neither paper or money."

"I know, based on my training, experience, and knowledge of this investigation, that drug traffickers often use serial numbers on dollar bills as a method of identification when conducting drug transactions," Monroe added. "Accordingly, I believe that the item HRISTOVSKI handed to the unknown man may have been a dollar bill so that the unknown man could confirm the identity of IGNJATOV and HRISTOVSKI by the serial number on the bill."

(source)

Oh, the things you'll learn from Wikipedia!

(link)

(h/t: Roy Edroso)

"She was called a fussy, stubborn, unreasonable bureaucrat."

By Big Pharma, of course.

I did not know until just now that it wasn't so much the FDA who saved the US from the horrors of thalidomide. It turns out it was just one woman.

Belated thanks, Frances Oldham Kelsey. You took your job when I was about a month from appearing on this planet, and my sisters were not far behind.

Sure, you know perigee and perihelion. But what about peribothron?

If I were a cynical man, I might worry that this would become the new biz buzzword for opportunistically gaining proximity to the Big Boss.

Fortunately, I am only about the science.

(h/t: Phil Plait, vaguely. Weird to see a site give access to the news and charge for the blogs. Smells like TimesSelect to me, but what do I know?)

Gmail search tip -- use the from: and filename: keywords

Just noticed this string that appeared in the Gmail search window after I clicked on one of the thumbnails in the "Recent photos" sidebar while looking at a new message from ... let's say somebody@example.com. It looks like a handy way to find that picture that person sent you that one time.

from:somebody@example.com filename:(jpg OR jpeg OR png)

Works whether the pictures are attached or embedded in the body of the message, despite what it says here.

You might want to add gif and other extensions, of course.

Note the parentheses, the colons and the absence of a space after them, and the capital ORs. Not positive, but I think those might all be requirements.

Can you imagine? Never mind fluoridation, this would make chem trails fall right off the radar.

The Uncola

In which it is argued that we should consider adding lithium to drinking water, because, among other things, it might decrease suicide, homicide, and rape (at least among Texans, so who can say?), a fun fact that I had never heard:

Lithium drinks were in huge demand for their reputed health-giving properties, so much so that the element was added to commercial drinks. 7-Up was originally called Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda and contained lithium citrate right up until 1950. In fact, it’s been suggested that the 7 in 7-Up refers to the atomic mass of the lithium. (Maybe the “Up” referred to mood?)

Not as sexy as marching powder in Coca Cola, but still, better living through chemistry, amirite?

(pic. source: Bipolar Planet, you are doubtless shocked, shocked to learn. Many other great pix at the link.)

Help stomp out robocalls [updated]

(Update at bottom of post.)

TC sent along an article about a free service called Nomorobo that claims to block robocalls. He wondered how it worked: "If you're not bundled with everything together, how is your computer going to answer your phone when it rings? There's no connection between the two as far as I can see."

So I looked into it a bit, and I figured I'd post (a mildly edited version of) my reply to him, since it seems like potentially useful information.

MORE »

Image credit, long overdue

Once upon a time, MK mailed me a cartoon, on paper. I used it as a bookmark (the paper kind, in a paper book), as I often do with such things, because they're fun to come across when I re-read the book years later. I liked this particular cartoon so much that when blogging came along, I decided to use it as my About Me image. Since then, I've been using it, or pieces of it, for my online avatar pretty much everywhere, including as the favicon for this site.

Thanks to Sean Taggart, I now know the artist: the late and apparently great John Callahan.

More here. This profile, from 1992, is especially recommended.

Not so much

I came across that phrase in a NYT article and it surprised me a bit. It strikes me as a colloquialism that the style guide masters would have, if ever, only very recently allowed.

But look at this graph from Google Ngrams.

Maybe it's just that I'm wiped out from work, but I can't think of a way it would be used other than in this sense from the article:

The natural question is how long this situation can last. Fifty years ago a “woman doctor” was a gender-bending phenomenon. Now not so much.

And that sounds distinctly recent to me. The top Google hits support this sense.

There is, however, this, from a 1914 book.

Other examples?

Did you know Carl Zimmer now has a NYT column?

I just discovered this. No author page yet, but you can start here.

"How to Easily Print a Large Image to Multiple Pages in Windows"

The answer turned out to be surprisingly hard to find using the Google, so I thought I'd add a little link juice and, of course, a note of thanks to Scott Ogrin of ScottiesTech.info.

It makes the mind reel that there is something fundamental that MS PAINT can do that none of my other image processing programs can.

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Coupla things to watch

First is an ad that ran in preroll for some thoroughly unrelated video that I had gone looking for. Yes, an ad. It's about three minutes long.

It's a little sappy, but kind of cool, and yes, obviously constructed, but ... what can I say ... it ultimately left me affected.

(alt. video link)

Next is the bonus video from TBogg's latest Random Ten, about which he says:

This performance gives me goosebumps:

(alt. video link)

There is a Dead Can Dance box set that contains the entire concert that the above was taken from, and it is worth it for the DVD alone.

I have always felt that TBogg's taste in music and mine are offset by about one notch, but I really liked that.

Also.

Wouldn't you know I'd happen across this just as it's getting warm out

Not that I'm complaining about the beautiful day, but I sure do wish I read about pykrete a few months earlier.

Forget about ice-9:

Pykrete is a super-ice, strengthened tremendously by mixing in wood pulp as it freezes. By freezing a slurry of 14 percent wood pulp, the mechanical strength of ice rockets up to a fairly consistent seventy kilograms per square centimeter. A 7.69 mm rifle bullet, when fired into pure ice, will penetrate to a depth of about thirty-six centimeters. Fired into pykrete, it will penetrate less than half as far—about the same distance as a bullet fired into brickwork. Yet you can mold pykrete into blocks from the simplest materials and then plane it, just like wood. And it has tremendous crush resistance: a one-inch column of the stuff will support an automobile. Moreover, it takes much longer to melt than pure ice. But as strong and eco-friendly as it is, pykrete remains forgotten today save among glaciologists, who express bafflement over why no one has made use of it.

Though the name suggests it, pykrete has nothing to do with Guido van Rossum. Rather, it was named for its inventor, Geoffrey Pyke, "who the Times of London once declared 'one of the most original if unrecognized figures of the present century.'"

For a brief time during World War II, it looked like the next big thing. Churchill, Mountbatten, and FDR all loved it. A fascinating story.

Inuitively, it still sounds like a great idea.

;)

Hat tip to Wired's Tim Maly: "How to Make an Indestructible Snow Fort."

Nice gamuts

I did not know until one minute ago that gamut is (also) the word used to describe the "number of colors a printer can render."

I like the appropriation of the term[, he said as entered the bar just after last call]. I guess I am not alone here: this meaning is the principle entry on Wikipedia for the word.

"The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food"

A longish but fast-paced article that's worth a look, if for no other reason than to satisfy your cravings for sick fascination. Probably you already have a sense of much of what's touched on, but some of the specifics, not to mention the corporate attitudes on display, deserve to be front and center in your thoughts for a while.

The article, by Michael Moss, is adapted from his book Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, which is featured on his website.

On a tangential note, visiting his site introduced me to a new button:

IndieBound may interest some of you. There's a handy independent book sellers finder page, for example.

(top pic. source)

Nice to see the old man having such a good time

I did not know until a few minutes ago that, some years back, Jimmy Page did a two-night stand with the Black Crowes.

Here is "Custard Pie" from one of those nights. Pretty much a straight-up version of the original recording -- the song remains the same, one might say, were one prone to cheap and obvious jokes -- but it's fun to see Page smile and bounce around, even, and to hear a backing band who obviously grew up on his stuff tear it up so well.

(alt. video link)

Weasels ripped from context

William Horman, the headmaster of Winchester and Eton, included the Latin form 'Mater artium necessitas' in Vulgaria, a book of aphorisms for the boys of the schools to learn by heart, which he published in 1519.

Which leads, just one screen later, to Frank Zappa, in a connection for which I have just begun to kick myself for never having made.

"Pyongyang ... deals with fewer electricity shortages than other parts of the country."

So says the caption.

My first reaction: the other parts of North Korea have electricity?

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[Added] Probably you remember seeing a picture like this:

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(pic. source)

Now that's baseball trivia!

In a good way, I mean.

Ken Singleton just pointed out Hiroki Kuroda's uniform number and said that since the 1990s, it has been a tradition in Japanese baseball for the team's best pitcher to wear #18.

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(pic. source: Pinstriped Bible)