Twitterholic: Who are these people?
Brilliant.
June 25, 2008
The Good Enough Guide to Health
ABC News: The Good Enough Guide to Health By CAMILLE NOE PAGAN, Prevention Magazine
e.g. Exercise
Gold Standard: 30 minutes of cardio, five or more days a week
Good Enough: 17 minutes a day
A new study from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston found that women who exercised just two hours a week (or 17 minutes daily) reduced their risk of heart disease and stroke by 27 percent.
“You don’t even have to do it all at once. No fewer than 10 studies since 1995 show that breaking up physical activity into small segments of about 10 minutes is just as effective,” says Barry Franklin, director of cardiac rehabilitation and exercise laboratories at Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Mich., and spokesperson for the American Heart Association’s national “Start!” program.
Get ready. Get set. … GO!
June 24, 2008
PopCo, Stuff and Uncrate
Finished PopCo while I was away.
Like The End of Mr. Y, this Scarlett Thomas book had a to-me sympathetic main female character who roamed around in her head and jumped from subject to subject and landing pad to leaping-off-point in a manner I’m quite familiar with. Thomas’ heroines remind me strongly of Cayce Pollard, the heroine in Gibson’s Pattern Recognition.
The books are filled with consumer culture, philosophy, and weird, quirky bits of trivia. PopCo specifically has enough code breaking arcana to keep you going for a while. Alice Butler, the main character, creates sleuth kits for kids for a megacorp called PopCo (#3 in the world after Mattel and Hasbro) and finds herself stashed away in a corporate getaway with other PopCo creatives, tasked with finding a brilliant product for the teengirl market, which is notoriously hard for toy companies to crack.
I took pages and pages of notes of clever phraseology and references I had no clue to (the Riemann Hypothesis, the Voynich Manuscript), book titles I need to check our bookstash for (and buy if we don’t have a copy) (Secret and Urgent: The Story of Codes and Ciphers by Fletcher Pratt) and more.
Thomas even gave a brief explanation to another character of how public key encryption works, an explanation my aunt Ethel would be able to understand!
Is this really the way toy companies are run? Is marketing really as cynical about tapping into the pocketbooks of teens and pre-teens as the book suggests? Could be.
I try not to buy stuff I don’t =need=. This book made me even more aware of how you, me, and Mr. McGee are sold to.
Witness: Uncrate | The Buyer's Guide For Men Talk about cool stuff you don’t really need!
We won’t even begin to explore Archie McPhee and Things You Never Knew Existed.
I received an offer in the mail the other day. Because I’m a special person (because of my W subscription? because of my ZIPcode? because of the stylish, fashionable things I buy at the Goodwill?), ELLE offered me a year’s subscription (normally $48! or something close thereto) for only $8!
Well, hey, yes! Of course, they’d love to have me on their subscription rolls.
But we talked about our dear mailman and all the mail he has to bring down the steps and then up our stairs to our front door. And then we talked about the bags of recycle we have to take down our stairs and up the steps to the recycle bin on Montgomery. And we decided that I didn’t really need ELLE that much.
We aren’t getting a stimulus check from the government. No manna from heaven $$ for stuff. I guess they figure we stimulate the economy as much as we ever will.
The younger niblet, who is doing his Peace Corps stint until June 2010, got his check, though. We’ll put it in his bank account and maybe he’ll be able to tap it at some point if he is in desperate need for something while he’s there. At least it will still be available when he comes home.
Somehow I think his check would go a lot further there than it would in San Francisco. Be more appreciated too. Somehow I think there’s less “stuff” where he is and more “Do we have enough food for dinner and breakfast tomorrow?”
Sunrise. Smoke. Saudade.
The sun rose over Berkeley this morning, a deep orange red through the smoke from the fires. I know the smell of smoke comes from hundreds of fires that are burning right now and that people and their homes are in dangerous straits, and yet, still … though my eyes sting and my throat is more raspy than it would be if the air were clear (raspy throat in part from the cold I brought back from Camp, lucky me), the smell of smoke permeating the air reminds me of Brazil …
Saudade.
We’d always planned to go back to Belém, drag my dad along, check out 189 Consulato Furtado and the park. Take a boat up the river to Manaus. Swim back in the river of time.
Won’t ever happen now. Can’t. The smell of smoke in the air brings memories and saudade.
June 23, 2008
Zimbabwe … Zambia. What other countries begin with Z?
Upcoming trip to Africa was to include South Africa, Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe. …
The organizers just called to say (surprise!) the Zimbabwe leg has been canceled. We’ll be going to Zambia instead. Organizers will pay for all Zambian visas &c. The visas we had for Zimbabwe won’t be needed after all.
June 12, 2008
[URL] Corpus of American English
Brilliant app.
The Corpus of American English (not to be confused with the American National Corpus) is the first large corpus of contemporary American English. It is freely available online, and it is related to other large corpora that we have created.
The corpus contains more than 360 million words of text, including 20 million words each year from 1990-2007, and it is equally divided among spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic texts (more information). The corpus will also be updated at least twice each year from this point on, and will therefore serve as a unique record of linguistic changes in American English.
The interface allows you to search for exact words or phrases, wildcards, lemmas, part of speech, or any combinations of these. You can search for surrounding words (collocates) within a ten-word window (e.g. all nouns somewhere near chain, all adjectives near woman, or all verbs near key).
The corpus also allows you to easily limit searches by frequency and compare the frequency of words, phrases, and grammatical constructions, in at least two main ways:
* By genre: comparisons between spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic, or even between sub-genres (or domains), such as movie scripts, sports magazines, newspaper editorial, or scientific journals
* Over time: compare different years from 1990 to the present time
You can also easily carry out semantically-based queries of the corpus. For example, you can contrast and compare the collocates of two related words (little/small, democrats/republicans, men/women), to determine the difference in meaning or use between these words. You can find the frequency and distribution of synonyms for nearly 60,000 words and also compare their frequency in different registers, and also use these word lists as part of other queries. Finally, you can easily create your own lists of semantically-related words, and then use them directly as part of the query.
June 10, 2008
Organizing the Attic – Week Four BOOKS BOOKS BOOKS
Organizing the Attic – Week Four wherein our intrepid columnist attacks the books in the attic.
Well, numero uno. Books in the attic are never a good idea as Carter Anne Seddon Kinsolving Brown found out decades ago. (She’d put her library at the top of her old house and found that the top was sinking down and the walls were bulging out. … She had to take all the books out of the upstairs library and rehab the house and then reorganize the library somewhere other than the top floor. …)
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Update: ASKBrown bio. The next mail will bring an intriguing query that puts you on your mettle. Or the parlour-maid may come up some morning and announce that your husband’s 18th century dwelling is beginning to buckle under the weight of your books. This actually happened to us last Holy Week [1967], whereupon the Blessed Season was passed in moving 5 tons of books out of the house to the stacks at Brown University. It was a traumatic experience, believe me, with architects clambering about measuring bulges, and carpenters boring holes in the walls from cellar to garret, while Mama tearfully or cheerfully went about designating the books she consulted the least, and movers packed cartons it might well have been termed the Second Battle of the Bulge.
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I read the Week Four column and thought, oh, poor baby:
Ever since then, I have been skittish about the size of our book collection, which peaked at about 600 when we moved into our house in the District seven years ago.
So after going through the books in the attic, our intrepid columnist and her husband wound up donating 25 hardcover and 42 paperback books to their local branch library. 10% of the collection? No big wow there.
The hints from the professional organizer the columnist has on tap?
First, check the condition of the book. “Are the pages so brittle and yellow that you’re never going to read them?” If so, she says, donate. And second, “be realistic about the format you like to read them in.” Most people never re-read paperbacks they’ve kept for a while, especially the smaller ones, she says.
Would she faint if she saw what I need to get a handle on?
June 7, 2008
For those who say, "Sal, your Facebook presence is lame. …
LAME!”
Well, you’re right.
(Or as Heather said last month, “you don’t use facebook”)
Well. No. Not much. Guilty as charged.
I’m doing the Facebook thing because the younger nib pushed and Sue Hough pushed and others, well, you know who you are.
Facebook’d I now be.
But, all the poking and gifting and wall writing and all … Well. I’m a geezer here, folks. I have a hard enough time keeping up with blogs and newsgroups and e-mail.
Bear with me.
I did manage to write on Hana’s wall tonight. (And send Hana and Aarti friends’ requests today … um. yesterday.)
Do you know how many Aarti Singhs there are on Facebook? Aarti had said, “Sign up!” eons ago. Today I finally had the time to go through all the Aarti Singhs on Facebook and find those that were or might be relatively local and then go through all *their* friends lists until I found one who had friends I recognized (Hi, Hana!) in her friends list.
Bingo.