Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Philip Newton's LiveJournal:

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Monday, May 28th, 2012
12:20 pm	The things you learn: skink In Klingon, there’s an animal toqvIr lung translated as “Tokvirian skink”. I thought that was a made-up word, but apparently, there really are animals called “skinks”. Huh! (And they’re lizards, which makes sense, given that lung “loong” is described as a lizard-like animal. I presume the name was influenced by the Chinese word 龍 lóng for a dragon.) (Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 23rd, 2012
10:51 am	The things you learn: Stroke order of 生 So apparently Chinese and Japanese use different stroke orders for writing 生. Interesting! (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 15th, 2012
11:23 am	The things you learn: Edmonton and Hamburg Turns out that Edmonton and Hamburg are at nearly exactly the same latitude (around 53° 32' N), as I found out just now when I received a Postcrossing postcard from there. (Postcrossing plots the start and end on a map and draws a line between them, and I wanted to see whether the line just looked horizontal or whether it was actually completely horizontal.) So the postcard travelled effectively due east all the way! (Well, if it had followed a rhumb line, at least….) Always fun to see such coincidences. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, May 14th, 2012
4:08 pm	The things you learn: “ĝis la revido” Today, I found out that in Esperanto, “ĝis la revido” means “up to the dream-child” („bis zum Traumkind“). A curiously idiomatical phrase for a farewell :) Fun stuff! Current Mood: amused (Comment on this)
Thursday, May 3rd, 2012
8:15 pm	Typos as class markers From spam today: Upscale dating is what you deserve, and its free!. I don’t know about others, but for me, “upscale” includes “educated” which, in turn, includes a reasonable command of standard English spelling and punctuation. Especially in advertisement copy where you’re trying to show your best side. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, April 26th, 2012
5:44 pm	You know you’re old when… …someone asks what A: and B: are for on Windows. Ah, kids these days. (And they probably have no idea what the icon on the “Save” button represents, either.) Current Mood: nostalgic (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 25th, 2012
8:54 am	Non-self-segregating morphology The other day, while practising my Esperanto flashcards on Anki, I got a new word: bankalsono. I didn’t recognise it, so I tried to parse it: bank'al'sono? Something about making a call to a bank? bankal'sono? A “Bankal sound”, whatever that might be? Then I asked it to show me the answer: “Badehose” (swimming trunks). Oh! It’s ban'kalsono! Perhaps one should start using the apostrophes more often to separate the morphemes :) Famous mis-segregations in German include Wach'stube vs. Wachs'tube; Blumento'pferde vs. Blumen'topf'erde; and be'in'halt'en vs. bein'halt'en. (Though in most cases, the alternate parse is merely humorous, or the entire pair might be a bit constructed.) (Comment on this)
Friday, April 20th, 2012
12:29 pm	The rane in Spane falls manely on the plane The other day, I finally got around to taking all the words I had jotted into the margin of my notebook during the week-long Esperanto course in March and look them up the dictionary and make Anki flashcards out of them. Two of the words I got that way were ebeno and ebenaĵo. They were defined in my eo–de dictionary as something like “(Geometrie, Physik) Ebene” and “Ebene (konkret; besonders in der Geografie)”, respectively. And yesterday morning, I had the insight that while, in English, both of those words are 𐑐𐑤𐑱𐑯 in the Shaw alphabet, 𐐹𐑊𐐩𐑌 in the Deseret alphabet, /plɛɪn/* in IPA, and presumably in Gregg shorthand, the first sense is spelled plane while the second is spelled plain. Funny how both of those English words correspond to the same German one; I don’t think I’ve ever connected them. Presumably they both come from Latin but one of them took the scenic route through France. * (or however you choose to notate English phonemes; perhaps you would prefer /pleɪn/.) Current Mood: geeky (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, April 8th, 2012
12:10 pm	Easter cards from Amy, with her name in shorthand :) Amy made me two Easter cards (link goes to the Flickr photo set)… and signed her name in Gregg shorthand! (See the two “back” images.) I told her a while ago how to write it (since I’m trying to teach myself Gregg shorthand, so it’s been on my mind quite a bit recently), but I’m still a bit surprised she remembered. The proportions are rather off (it looks more like “Anner” than “Amy”), but still! She even remembered the “capital” dashes on one of the two cards. To see what it should have looked like “by the book”, see this image (it’s also linked to from the set, but you can’t see anything in the thumbnail; it’s the white space just after the last image). Current Mood: impressed (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, April 2nd, 2012
1:46 pm	Twilight Stella borrowed the Twilight DVDs and she asked me whether I wanted to watch them with her, so we watched the first one together. Maybe I’ll watch the others with her at some point, too. Current Mood: calm (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, April 1st, 2012
8:01 pm	The things you learn: pronouncing “thorough” In Gregg shorthand (simplified), “thorough” is written th-e-r-o. I would have used different vowels there, so I tried to see where those came from. The first was easiest; I was expecting a STRUT vowel there, since I have STRUT in case such as “hurry”, but I have heard NURSE in such words from Americans. Essentially, I have “hu-ry” while they have “hur-y”. (I do have NURSE in words where I segment things with the r in the same syllable as the u; for example, in “furry”.) OK, so this presumably represents a pronunciation with NURSE; that sound is regularly spelled e-r, so that made sense. But I have commA at the end of the word; the vowel in both syllables is nearly the same for me. So seeing an o there seemed odd. (So I would have spelled the word th-oo-r-a, since oo is used for STRUT.) I checked dictionary.com and while that gave both STRUT and NURSE for the first syllable, it gave only GOAT for the final vowel. Then I had a look at Forvo; that had seven pronunciations recorded. Clicking through them one by one, it seems that there is a Commonwealth/US split for this word, with commA for the former (the UK samples and the Australian one) and a fairly clear, unreduced GOAT for the latter. Huh! Learn something new every day. (And now, thorough sounds extremely odd to me. Typical result of listening to a word over and over!) Current Mood: accomplished (10 Comments |Comment on this)
10:14 am	Google Maps “Quest” view Google Maps has an awesome Easter Egg for today—check out the “Quest” view! Current Mood: happy (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, March 18th, 2012
8:02 pm	Reicht das Erzählte, oder zählt das Erreichte? At the moment, there are election posters in Hamburg with the slogan, “Reicht das Erzählte, oder zählt das Erreichte?” I thought that a rather clever turn of words. (And I’m sure it wasn’t the candidate pictured who came up with it, though I had never heard it before.) For those who don’t speak German, the meaning is, “Is what has been told enough, or does what has been achieved count?”, or perhaps a bit more fluently, “Are you going to be satisfied with what other people have told you they wanted to do, or are you going to measure people by what they have actually achieved?”. The punchy bit is in the parallelism of the nouns and verbs: reichen “to be enough, be sufficient” vs. erreichen “to achieve” on the one hand and zählen “to count” vs. erzählen “to tell [e.g. a story]” on the other hand. Current Mood: geeky (Comment on this)
Friday, March 16th, 2012
8:18 pm	Note to self: splitting up a multi-page TIFF file From the ImageMagick manual, of all places: Multi-Page TIFF If you want to split a multi-page tiff into separate pages, IM may have problems as it will still use up a lot of memory to hold previous pages even if you use a command like... convert "a.tif[i]" b%03d.tif This might be regarded as a bug, or perhaps a future improvement. The better solution may be the non-IM "tiffsplit" program. (Comment on this)
8:37 am	Ah, those Swedes! I just got some spam from Sweden with a sender of “test testsson”. Made me chuckle :) Current Mood: amused (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 14th, 2012
1:59 pm	Pi Day! It’s Pi Day! 3/14 1:59:26.5 p.m. In the strange middle-endian, 12-hour dialect spoken by some people :) Current Mood: geeky (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, February 29th, 2012
8:25 pm	Twitter poll Some people use Twitter a lot, some use it rarely… I’m not sure whether it’s my generation or what, but using it multiple times in a hour, perhaps even for nearly-real-time conversations, seems strange to me; it’s not something I’m used to. What’s your Twitter usage? Poll #1822904 Twitter Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 31 Do you have a Twitter account? View Answers Nope. 6 (20.7%) Yep! 17 (58.6%) Yep! Several, in fact. 5 (17.2%) What’s a Twitter? 0 (0.0%) Twitter killed my father, you insensitive clod! 1 (3.4%) How often do you post on Twitter, on average? View Answers About every 2 minutes (all the time) 0 (0.0%) About every 3 minutes (about 20 times an hour) 0 (0.0%) About every 5 minutes (about 12 times an hour) 0 (0.0%) About every 8 minutes (about 8 times an hour) 0 (0.0%) About every 13 minutes (about 4 times an hour) 0 (0.0%) About every 21 minutes (about 3 times an hour) 0 (0.0%) About every 34 minutes (about twice an hour) 0 (0.0%) About every 55 minutes (about once an hour, or about 25 times a day) 2 (6.7%) About every 89 minutes (about 15 times a day) 0 (0.0%) About every 144 minutes (about 10 times a day) 0 (0.0%) About every 233 minutes (about 6 times a day) 2 (6.7%) About every 377 minutes (about 4 times a day) 1 (3.3%) About every 610 minutes (twice a day or so) 2 (6.7%) About every 987 minutes (once or twice a day, or about 10 times a week) 1 (3.3%) About every 1597 minutes (once a day or so, or about 6 times a week) 0 (0.0%) About every 2584 minutes (about 4 times a week) 2 (6.7%) About every 4181 minutes (2 or 3 times a week) 3 (10.0%) About every 6765 minutes (once or twice a week, or about 6 times a month) 0 (0.0%) About every 10946 minutes (about once a week, or about 4 times a month) 1 (3.3%) About every 17711 minutes (2 or 3 times a month) 4 (13.3%) About every 28657 minutes (once or twice a month, or about 18 times a year) 0 (0.0%) About every 46368 minutes (about once a month, or about 11 times a year) 2 (6.7%) About every 75025 minutes (about 7 times a year) 0 (0.0%) About every 121393 minutes (about 4 times a year, or about once a season) 1 (3.3%) About every 196418 minutes (2 or 3 times a year) 1 (3.3%) About every 317811 minutes (once or twice a year) 0 (0.0%) About every 514229 minutes (about once a year) 0 (0.0%) About every 832040 minutes (about twice in 3 years) 1 (3.3%) About every 1346269 minutes (about twice in 5 years) 0 (0.0%) About every 2178309 minutes (every 4 years or so) 0 (0.0%) About every 3524578 minutes (every 7 years or so) 0 (0.0%) About every 5702887 minutes (every 10 years or so) 0 (0.0%) About every 9227465 minutes (every 20 years or so) 0 (0.0%) About every 14930352 minutes (every 30 years or so) 0 (0.0%) About every 24157817 minutes (every 50 years or so) 0 (0.0%) About every 39088169 minutes (maybe once in my life) 0 (0.0%) Never have, never will. 0 (0.0%) I said I haven’t got a Twitter account! 7 (23.3%) Also, if you want to follow me, I’m “mizinamo” on Twitter. I very rarely post, though, and don’t read very often. But I do tend to add people I like, as a kind of marker of friendship; just be aware that it’s not a very efficient way of communicating with me :) So, if you want, let me know what your Twitter account is, if I’m not following you already! Comments are screened. (Let me know if you want a comment unscreened.) Current Mood: curious (3 Comments |Comment on this)
6:12 am	29th of February It’s the 29th of February! Yay :) Current Mood: happy (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, February 20th, 2012
10:20 pm	Wireless is working again, yay! So at some point during my trip to Saarbrücken for the qepHom last November, I managed to disabled the WiFi on my laptop. It has a hardware switch with an LED, and it somehow got into a state where it was permanently off, and clicking the switch didn't switch it back on. I couldn't enable WiFi from Network Manager because it said it was disabled by hardware switch ... but I had no idea how to get it working again. I was even considering reinstalling on the off-chance that that might fix it. But this evening I googled for "compaq nc6220 hardware wifi switch" and found this entry which linked to this one, which had the magic incantation! tl;dr: after installing "rfkill" and running rfkill unblock wifi, the LED started flashing, I got asked for my keychain password, and I was connected to my home WiFi network! Yay! Current Mood: ecstatic (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, February 10th, 2012
8:56 pm	Help me get old issues of _The Gregg Writer_? Someone pointed me to this page on Google Books which has an old issue (Volume XV) of The Gregg Writer (a magazine for shorthand writers, typists, and secretaries). Unfortunately, when I visit that URL, I get redirected from US Google Books to German Google Books. Apparently, the US version has a red field at the top left that reads “EBOOK - FREE” which you can hover over for a list of options, including downloading the book as PDF. For me, though, the red field reads “GET PRINT BOOK”, and underneath, it says, “No eBook available”. I eventually got a copy of the PDF from the Internet Archive, where somebody had uploaded the book. However, I’d be interested in other volumes of that magazine, too, and the Internet Archive only seems to have the one. Right at the bottom of the page, just above the bibliographic information, I see “Other issues”. (Or try using the search string “editions:HARVARDHXKNLV”.) I can’t download any of them, either, but I wonder whether people in the US can? If so, could you let me have a copy of the PDFs, please? (They’re all of books published before 1923, so out of copyright and in the public domain.) Thank you! (5 Comments |Comment on this)