Word of the week: earodynamic

Audio equipment that’s been adapted to human hearing is earodynamic.

Cut up

I was back again at the dental surgery after the recent debacle. This time I managed to stay conscious, even though the surgeon decided to make no less than two biopsies from different spots for a more definite diagnosis. So I am now in stitches though I do not feel like laughing much. Another side effect was that I passed the maximum limit for health care payment, so doctor’s visits are now free until October.

Analysis results will be in in a few weeks.

Sån’t gör man numera, som fröken vet, med elektricitet

Upphittat av Gullebullen på Stockholms Stadsbibliotek:

I am a mullah

As I was walking home I came upon a gaggle of boys, around twelvish. One of them asked if I could help them. Well, sure, what’s the matter? Isn’t this a Thor’s hammer? So it seems. Wouldn’t it be haraam for a Moslem to wear it? Aaah, ha ha, you’ll have to ask your imam about that.

I eventually figured out that one of the younger boys in his innocence had gotten himself the pendant and just been challenged by the more theologically astute boy who first had addressed me. He proposed it would be humiliating to be wearing the symbol of another god. I suggested it was just an ornament, to be worn for æsthetic reasons, but by now the boys had reached the decision they should get rid of the heathen symbol. They offered me to buy it for cheap, but I declined on the grounds that I never wear jewellery. Another reason is that all too many wearers of Thor’s hammers tend to be of the nationalist persuasion, so I, too, had symbolic reasons not to wear it.

Veckans ord: stafettfinne

Hannu Poussu är en framstående stafettfinne.

Older than it looks

Someone referred to the USA as “a young nation”, but compared to what? USA is older than Belgium, the Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Italy, Slovakia, Slovenia, …

Transcender

Among the many things Honeybuns has given me, is a set of new friends and acquaintances that are nothing like the ones I have from before. To begin with, none of them has an engineering degree.

At a recent party I found myself the only heterosexual male in the room. Or, at least that’s what I assumed, but I couldn’t be entirely sure—some of the people in the room, quite consciously, defied my attempts to sort them into definite male/female categories and I was annoyed with myself for even attempting, yet some deep-rooted reflex demanded certain knowledge.

I was reminded of once when I was visiting my parents. The OBCM was taking an advanced course in numerical analysis at the time and had brought along some homework. My father asked what she was doing and got an explanation of how she was computing the (parabolic) velocity profile of the water flow in a pipe. My father was intensely provoked by this. “Clearly the water comes with full force!” he decreed. If I hadn’t been so annoyed at the time it would have been an interesting example of how something that goes against one’s preconceptions can be rejected out of hand, even when a tiny bit of physical reasoning would let one work out one’s misconception.

I’ve often seen the same rejecting-out-of-hand non-reasoning with regards to transgender/intersex people, so my lack of equanimity disturbed me, but then again, as I’ve mentioned before, living correctly with respect to others requires constant awareness.

I wouldn't want to write the parser

As in Algol, the programs are pretty-printed in different fonts, as in ABC 80 BASIC, the pretty-printing is enforced, as in COBOL, the programs pretend to be in English, as in Fortran, you have to use continuation characters, as in C++, the error messages are incomprehensible: AppleScript.

Here is our old friend, the Hailstone program:

on run
    display dialog "Seed" default answer "" buttons {"OK"} default button "OK"
    set a to (text returned of result) as integer
    set outstring to a as string
    repeat until a is equal to 1
        if a mod 2 is equal to 0 then
            set a to a div 2
        else
            set a to a * 3 + 1
        end if
        set outstring to outstring & ", " & a as string
    end repeat
    display dialog outstring buttons {"OK"} default button "OK"
end run

Parking plot

The other day we saw people working on filling out the muddy part of the lawn by the train station. Good! It was time to replant the grass and maybe add some flowers. Pfft! Turns out they were turning it into yet another unnecessary parking space…