True Facts about Spaghetti

Posted on August 21, 2014 by Allen

During the years I lived in Seelisberg on Lake Lucerne (aka Lac des Quatre Cantons / Fierwaldstattersee) we often joined in the feast after a long afternoon watching the Swiss farmers (usually a mom and pop) harvesting. Curiously, the Swiss eschew tomato sauce (“gravy” as it is called in New Jersey) in favor of a thin glaze of sour cream. On the mountain-sides around Lucerne, and concentrating mostly near sunny Zug, the spaghetti trees produce a much broader fruit, which is rolled to remove the pith. The pith is sun dried and packaged as vermicelli, loved the world over for its delicate al dente texture; the left-over hollow portion of the fruit is then wound around long wooden dowels and sliced down the length of the dowel, producing the curved macaroni we all know so well. In Basel, of course, during Fussnacht when the fern blows up from the deserts of North Africa, those wacky Baselers are known to do much less gentille things with the long fruit of the spaghetti tree, where the fatter, firmer Lucerne variety knows a special popularity. Occasionally, Italian workers from Torino will join in the fun, shouting out their plaintive lament, “E pericoloso sporgersi!“

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Enhanced Text — Helpful or Annoying?

Posted on May 25, 2014 by Allen

What I’m referring to by “enhanced text” is the practice of highlighting text in some way for the purpose of clarifying its meaning. It’s something I tend to do in blogs and emails, but I try not to do it in books because it’s traditionally regarded as ugly, out of place, or even insulting to the reader.

I suppose it could be taken to imply that the reader isn’t clever enough to interpret your sentence correctly. It also might imply that you can’t write well enough to be clear without the help of italics or bold. Even if these are valid reasons for the taboo, perhaps being clear even with effective syntax is worth the oddity of some visually emphasized words and phrases.

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Sound Quality of Audio Systems

Posted on April 29, 2014 by Allen

Are vinyl LP’s better in certain ways than music digitized and recorded on CD or into a computer file? This is an interesting area of inquiry that I’ve thought about a lot over the years since digital recordings became a practical reality. There are legitimate arguments for both sides of the question, but both types of recording come with their own special issues. I was recently intrigued by an article that mentioned “a youthful LP convert” saying, “There’s less compression, more, much more information. More air. More depth.”

This statement is interesting because CDs, despite their arguably inadequate sample rate (or bit depth), require much less compression than vinyl, because the full dynamic range of vinyl is much lower than for CDs (65 dB vs 96 dB). Technically, the dynamic range of vinyl is limited by the physical velocity capability of the cutting head and the subsequent playback stylus, so at high frequencies, where stylus excursion is minimal, vinyl dynamic range can approach that of the CD (about 90 dB). But at low frequencies, the dynamic range may be little better than 25-30 dB. (Some dispute this on mathematical grounds, but I strongly support it on empirical grounds.)

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eBooks and Just Plain Books

Posted on April 20, 2014 by Allen

FIRST: I love the kindle3 and the “paper-white,” and find myself reading much more now — partly due to the amazing ease of staring at the e-ink screen, and partly due to the convenience of obtaining material from Amazon. I now read The New Yorker and Science News exclusively on my Kindle, along with miscellaneous books.

HOWEVER: We are now entering into the book publishing industry’s dinosaur phase, wherein they emulate the music industry’s reactionary and unimaginative response to digital media. The duration and impact of this period of dim-witted “marketing” remain to be seen, but I seriously doubt if digital books will go away in the face of artificially jacked-up prices.

The publishers (most of them) are doing exactly the same thing as the record industry — trying to force their customers off the new technology and lend false strength to their increasingly obsolete physical packaging businesses.

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Free Will — Another Reducto

Posted on April 3, 2014 by Allen

Some friends of mine were recently embroiled in another attempt to answer the perennial question of free will or determinism. Is everything pre-ordained? Or do we have control over the events in our lives? At least some of them, anyway…

This question comes up now and then for most people, although most people promptly shove it back under the bed, where it belongs. It is an intriguing question for some, however, and serves as an excellent opening for hours of logical entanglements and soul-crushing cosmologies. Since I also have fallen prey to the lure of free will philosophizing (read: gossip), my friends’ recent rantings prompted me to deliver a brief rant of my own.

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Brain Frieze – New book, available now.

Posted on March 28, 2014 by Allen

I’m very pleased to announce the release of my latest book, Brain Frieze: ‘Barnaby Goes Home’ and 20 more stories of humor, mystery, sci-fi, and the mind, four days ahead of its April 1 publication date. (No, this is not an April Fool’s joke.)

The teeming masses of my readership can find it on the Mulberry Knoll publisher’s site here, where there’s an up-to-date link for purchasing it on Amazon.

These stories are quite varied in style and content, but I think they’re all pretty entertaining. I’m hoping readers will find them satisfying and suitably off the mainstream. I write in many voices, and as a matter of fact, I apparently write about voices as well, so a goodly chunk of the spectrum of human personas may be found in the collection, from a zombie to God (or someone who thinks he is, or used to think so, or used to think he isn’t).

There’s a more marketing-like description of the book on Mulberry Knoll’s book page (click on the cover), but for readers curious about what’s in it, here’s the table of contents (below the fold):

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Mary Malaprop #1

Posted on March 21, 2014 by Allen

I trust there will be more in this series, but here’s the first one.

Re: Brits

Here’s an amusing anecdote that only someone with Brit experience can appreciate:

When the aerospace company I worked in some years ago was acquired by a huge Brit conglomerate, they sent in a very dour Scot as CFO to hack the personnel down to size. My wife Mary, being in charge of business practice reorganization, often had to get his approval on things. He hated the idea of a woman in such a high position, and he hated that she was always better informed than he was. But what he especially hated was that she was completely honest and straightforward, and didn’t have a single political cell in her body. She was always cheerful and laughing, and one’s first impression of her was that she was 20 years younger than she actually was. She was also a fountainhead of malaprops, some of which could have inspired a doctoral thesis. One of her long-term malaprops, which I didn’t realize she was using until long after it had done its work, was a substitution for the famous signatory of the Declaration of Independence. Mary would walk smiling into Duff’s stuffy, repressed office and slap some paperwork onto his desk, saying, in cheerful innocence, “Hi! I just need you to put your John Thomas on this.”

I think Duff never quite decided if she knew what she was actually saying.

And later, when she told me what she had been saying to Duff, and after I had explained how wonderfully inappropriate that was—she continued to do it. But always with a smile.

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Clarification #409 – slash and backslash

Posted on February 3, 2014 by Allen

There is an old punctuation mark (some prefer to call it a symbol) popularly known as the slash. Its most frequent uses are to separate alternatives (this/that) or to signify a simple fraction (1/2). Sometimes it’s used to represent a line break, as when poetry is quoted in block paragraphs (“There was an old man from Japan / Whose limericks never would scan / etc.”), in which case the cognoscenti call it a virgule.

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Windows 8.0/8.1 Start Screen — You’ve got to be kidding.

Posted on January 29, 2014 by Allen

Alright, obviously Microsoft will be unaware of this post, and would ignore it even if they read it, but still, I can dream, can’t I?

Here’s the thing. Windows 8.1 isn’t all that bad, except if you consider the shell to be the OS, which is how most people now understand “Operating System.” That’s too bad, because “under the hood” is where the OS really lives, and the colorful GUI that we all have to interact with isn’t the operating system any more than a dashboard is a car.

The tragedy with these new absurd revisions of Windows (8.0 and 8.1) is that the most visible aspect of the shell—the desktop—is also the worst UI design to emerge in a long time. This is, of course, a matter of taste and opinion, but it’s also a matter of the four Most Important Values of a user interface:

  1. functionality
  2. usability
  3. discoverability
  4. configurability

And these are just the places where Windows 8.0 and/or 8.1 makes such a frustrating and unnecessary giant leap backwards. Let’s look at all four at once and marvel at how misguided this software behemoth can become, and how far from obvious utility their creative efforts can stray.

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The Descent of English

Posted on December 23, 2013 by Allen

Once in a while, against my better judgement, I get upset by the mis-use of English—not just in conversation, where perfection is rarely expected or appropriate, but in carefully scripted presentations, news copy, narrations and voice-overs, articles, books, etc.

I know it’s a lost cause, and I’m well aware that concern over the deterioration of the mother tongue is an eternal worry of pedantic folks and has probably existed since the first hominid grunt was uttered with the “wrong” intonation. Nevertheless, there are a few mistakes that consistently bug me:

Singular nouns taking plural verbs  (If ever there were a lost cause.)

In the last decade, it appears that a new rule of grammar has emerged concerning subject-object agreement. We used to think that the subject of a sentence had to match, in number, the verb form of that sentence. We’d say, “Twelve apples are too many,” or “One apple is quite enough.” Simple.

Admittedly, some confusion arises when we use singular nouns that denote multiplicity, such as “dozen.” Which is correct:

A dozen apples are too many.
A dozen apples is too many.

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