medGadget has a post about the physiology of "clicking languages." Ultrasound was used to image poorly understood "clicking languages" (I don't know what the proper term is and that's what the article used). In this particular case, they were imaging native speakers of N|uu, of whom there are less than 10 in the world (grammar fail?).

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

We originally looked for names, to start, of Russian explorers. She's a Russian Blue, and the palette of nifty-sounding Russian explorer names didn't always sound right, so I was poking around and came across Novaya Zemlya, which is an Russian arctic archipelago. Arctic is totally a bonus for us.

Reading more about Novaya Zemlya, yeah, I was amused by the "nuclear test area" history of part of the area, but I also then discovered, as a fairly large coincidence, it was part of Arkhangelsk Oblast, one of the 83 federal subjects of Russia. This is interesting because Arkhangelsk Oblast, near Arkhangelsk (the city which is the administrative center of the Oblast), is the closest anyone knows to the origin of the Russian Blue breed, in fact, "Archangel Blue" is another name for "Russian Blue."

We also like "Nova" as a nick.

Franz Josef Land is another part of Arkhangelsk Oblast we're fascinated by, but we're saving "Franz Josef" for any putative male Russian Blue we might have in the future.

(There's coverage in Wikipedia of all the relevant geography.)

ETA: The Novaya Zemlya Effect also sounds very cool.

I tried Googling various things like how long it could take the average person to get drunk, how many drinks it takes on average to get drunk, etc, but it seems like it's just too subjective for there to be any basic answer. Especially considering what I'm going for.

The setting is 2009, in a hotel room in a big city neighborhood that's just this side of "Holy god, why would you want to stay there?", so access to a cheap liquor store is pretty much guaranteed for the character. What I'm trying to figure out is how realistic it would be for this character to be at the 5th stage of drunkenness as described on this page. For the linkphobic, they basically describe it as the stage where incredibly stupid decisions are all but guaranteed, but you can still speak reasonably well without slurring.

My character is early 30s, with a BMI of 20.2 (pretty good for her height, 5'11"). What I'm wanting to write is her going to her hotel room and getting drunk, then doing something incredibly stupid that I'm still working on. This will happen maybe two hours after she started drinking and her drink of choice is going to be either beer, rum, or vodka. Is what I'm aiming for in terms of how drunk she'll be realistic or off-base? If it's off-base, what would be a better way to get to the point I'm aiming for?

I'm working on two separate, but related stories. Both take place in the present day. My MC lives in the Tribeca neighborhood of Manhattan.

1-He needs to drive from Tribeca to Delaware. He begins in the early morning. Between 6-9am. I don't have a particular day in mind, so it could be a weekday or weekend. But I do know it's late winter or early spring. It's cold and there is some snow on the ground. 

What route would he take? How long would it take? What would he see during the drive? I've done NJ to Delaware but that was last over 10 yrs agoa and I wasn't driving, so I don't remember a lot. Just that Delaware has a bridge and a tunnel available to cross the river.

2-My MC is traveling from Tribeca out to Teterboro Airport in NJ. It's a Wednesday afternoon/evening, approx 3-5pm when he starts out. The season is Summer.  I haven't decided on the exact month yet. Either a week or so after Memorial day, meaning mid-June. Or, it's after July 4, mid-July.

Again, what route would he likely take? How long would it take? What would he see during the drive? Mapquest suggests a travel time of 24 mins via George Washington Bridge. I'm pretty sure that's unrealistic.

Hi,

What is required to keep soap kosher and halal? I know that it can't be pork for halal, but does it need the fat need to be procured from a halal butcher? does the lye need any special treatment? Is it even relevant to a non-food item?

What about kosher? I believe dairy and meat can't mix (is that correct? thats what I"ve been reading) but I'm not sure if it applies to soap.

What details do I need to know to keep soap all inclusive? (I've already figured vegetarian, ovo-lacto vegetarian and vegan).

Searches i've done...the web generally, ask-an-imam (no response as of yet), wiki, and the halal knowledge center.

Sorry if this is offensive - I"m trying not to be and making sure not to offend by getting it wrong!

http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/quantum-memory-and-turbulence-ultra-cold-atoms-23148.html

Scientists at MIT have figured out a key step toward the design of quantum information networks. The results are reported in the July 20th issue of Physical Review Letters and highlighted in APS's on-line journal Physics (physics.aps.org).

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap090719.html

After the most famous voyage of modern times, it was time to go home. After the most famous voyage of modern times, it was time to go home.

Back from Boston. Animals ate some of our veggies (grrrrr), but the plants held up well overall.

Have dealt with a number of unfortunate bug incidents in the house since our return.

Meanwhile, in fannish news Gallifrey One got moved to a week later, which is neither here nor there for me, and hey, George Moffett is really a guest! Meanwhile, Barrowman apparently got into some crash while filming Top Gear and i wish I had never read about it as it involved EYE THINGS. Finally, Torchwood comes to BBCA tomorrow, and I'm sort of looking forward to watching people experience it without having to go through it again myself (of course, I am planning to buy the DVD). Lots of fan work stuff I need to get on, but won't happen 'til tomorrow.

Time for True Blood and bed.

dragonfly

Dragonfly today. Click through to Flickr for some pics from "Hat Day" at church, if you like.

The story I'm writing involves two schools with a considerable rivalry. They're both in a moderately sized American town, and one is the large public school in the town, the other is a small, exclusive private school.

If both schools play football in the same division/league/term-I-don't-know, would it be guaranteed they'd play each other during the season, or would that depend on how they played against other teams?


Thanks!


EDIT: What if the schools are the same size?

Googled "navy nurse", "typical day of navy nurse" and variations on a theme, read the websites of the UK and US Navies concerning nurses.

I'm writing a Star Trek reboot fic containing a nurse. I'd like to know what her usual standard duties would be for the days when there are no life-threatening emergencies. I thought that a good analogy would be to look at what nurses serving on ships today do, and extrapolate from there but I'm having problems finding exactly what I'm looking for. How would she interact with patients - what sort of injuries/checks could she be responsible for sorting out, and what would be handled by a doctor? What would she do with her time if there were no patients demanding her attention?

Thank you to anybody that can help me.

I'm looking for a nickname in Spanish. The character is a tough, red-headed seventeen-year old jockey. I'm thinking something along the lines of Red or Scrappy, but need to have it be in Spanish. The nickname is given to her by a fellow jockey, who is from Mexico.

Anybody have any ideas? Thanks in advance for your help.


Kitten! Novaya Zemlya Kitten! Novaya Zemlya
We have a new kitten at home. She is quite frightened yet, but I did manage to get a glimpse of her in her safe place. The name is a long story, but you can call her "Nova" for short.

DADT repeal in the House now has 162 163 co-sponsors and counting.

The Servicemembers Legal Defense Network is trying to add 60 more in 60 days. Their instructions and links make it simple to find your Representative, find out their phone number, and find out if they're already a cosponsor.

From there, it's just a call and a sentence or two, suggested wording at the link.

Please pass this along. Thanks!

http://cogprints.org/4007/1/RootsOfGender.pdf

It's an interesting hypothesis. I don't know how much it applies to other languages, but it ccertainly gives some reason to the seemingly rhyme-and-reason-less concept of gender.

If you don't feel like reading it, here's the hypothesis in a nutshell: grammatical gender came about in Russian (and Russian's ancestors) because it served to distinguish dangerous things from non-dangerous things. Gender is determined by:
"1) the size of animal (big vs. not big),
2) immediate danger to man (animal, an encounter with which is life threatening vs. animal, an encounter with which is not life threatening),
3) edibility (edible vs. inedible),
4) possibility to use the animal’s hide for warm clothing (furry vs. non-furry animal),
5) visually distinguishable gender of the animal."

For example, smaller, less dangerous animals, such as рысь ‘lynx’ and лиса [лисица] ‘fox’, are female, while the more dangerous animals are male, such as медведь 'bear' and волк 'wolf'. There's a table of nouns and explanations for their gender on page 10.

Also I've always thought that the concept of gender in languages is silly, simply because giving animate objects gender is... meaningless, I really started to think about it when a French teacher of mine tried to explain gender to the class as such: "Gender doesn't mean actual gender; a chair is not going to dress up and put on earrings." It made me wonder: what is the point of this seemingly random classification? What could have come out of it? I've always, always liked English's 'it' pronoun. It just makes so much sense, in my opinion, and I actually consider this small, two-letter word one of my favorite things about English.

So, what do you think about this paper? Do you know of any other hypotheses that relate to the phenomenom of gender in language?

One ex-woodchuck sprawled in the other lane of Green Point Road.  Rather a poor turn-out of corpses for nearly three hours on the road.

Slathered on sunscreen against that unaccustomed bright spot in the sky, headed up-river on my trusty steed, across, and back into the hills.  Encountered a high number of motorcycles out enjoying Scenic Maine, probably related to the HOG (Harley Owner's Group) summer party back in the Great North Woods.  No roadkill report from that, although I would not be surprised . . .

Usual suspects in the botany department, plus possible goldenrod and Joe Pye weed.  Wife reports Canada lily and yellow ragged orchids at the nature center.

35.01 miles, 2:49:15

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

Hi again!

For both Chinese and Spanish, I'm at this level of proficiency where I can survive in a Mandarin- or Spanish-speaking country and can carry on basic conversations, but can't do much more than that. (I took five years of Spanish in high school, and I'm a heritage speaker of Chinese.) I have a couple books that I'd like to read, but my level of Chinese is at such a low level that I can only read maybe 1/3 or 1/2 of the more common characters, which excludes the characters that give the detail regarding the story; I was able to struggle through the readings for Spanish lit and get the general gist, but rarely the details.

Anyway, I have a book that I'd like to read (第8號當舖 by 深雪, aka Zita Law), and I find that, if I try to look up every character I don't know (basically every other one), I read at an impossibly slow rate. At the same time, I want to learn all the characters that I don't know... but it feels like this would be at the expense of actually taking in the story and reading the book. (I wish there were something like Chinese Pera-kun for print books! Sigh, it makes reading Chinese much easier online...)

What tips or strategies do you guys have? I can pick up a few of the characters and phrases from context clues, but the thing with Chinese is that you can't pick up the characters' pronunciation, which I'd like to know for my spoken Chinese as well.

Advice regarding Spanish is great too, although this more closely pertains to Chinese.

Also, this might be a stretch, but does anyone know why Ubuntu's SCIM input of traditional Chinese characters doesn't go according to the same frequency-based system as its simplified input? Can I fix this? It's a little annoying when I want to type in traditional.

Thanks in advance! You guys are great!

http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/blog/7886-how-realize-real-benefits-fish-oil-23147.html

Just because you are taking fish oil everyday, it doesnt mean you are getting the benefits of fish oil. Discount fish oils don't really give any benefit and you may be starting to wonder why there is all the hype around fish oils. Chances are you are getting harmful effects and no benefit from that $10 fish oil bottle that lasts 6 months.

http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/blog/7886-fish-fish-oil-and-omega-3-fatty-acids-blog-23146.html

I have created a blog to update regularly evidence based scientific information about fish, fish oils, omega-3 fatty acids at http://www.best-fish-oils.com.

I've switched over the main gallery code (gallery pages and "leaf" (e.g., single-image) pages from CGI/PERL/flat file to PHP/MySQL. There shouldn't be much of a visible difference, but if you see a problem, let me know.

What this *does* mean is that a lot of changes I've been hoping to make in the past to the site are more tractable, or will be.

I do need to write more tools to allow me to more easily hand-edit my data first, but that looks straightforwardly dull, and for now I can get by pretty well with PhpMyAdmin for small changes.

More importantly I should now be able to more easily make incremental changes I'd been sitting on for years: being to better link specific prices to specific prints, reorder galleries more easily, test that an image being in two galleries works fine, provide information on the edition size of each image, perhaps expand the "Read More About This Image" feature to be able to handle links to other sites rather than assuming that the link is to P'blog, and so on.

I also need to remove (or ... make harder to find) anywhere from 25-75% of the images on the site. There's just too much material there, and while all of it is (IMHO) good, some of it is better, editing back some of the merely good is the best way of increasing the average quality of the images that readers actually get around to viewing. Most viewers haven't looked at all four hundred and forty-two, most viewers never will, so it's critical to guide folks to the best images first.

  • Everyone stops and asks us for directions and thinks we live here because we're lesbians. EVERYONE. We kiss in public, and then suddenly someone is interrupting us to ask where the T is or a given mall. OVER AND OVER AGAIN.

  • So many gay families, OMG!

  • Wearing the suit was interesting and highlighted to me how much there are two Bostons: queer Boston and New England wealthy Boston. New England wealthy Boston involved men looking the _suit_ up and down and then glaring at me. Queer Boston involved certain level of eye-contact and engagement that I was unused to -- both as a New Yorker and as someone still leaning to wear the suit in public and feel like it won't engender unpleasant commentary. The gaze of people here feels so much more informed: is that person trans? is that person gender queer? is that a butch lesbian? People want to know and do the right thing -- the way I look doesn't necessarily make it easy though.

  • It does feel different to be gay in public here, which surprises me. ALthough, while New York is very safe and Patty and I are very affectionate in public, I realize that it is still often not the norm in NYC. I don't see queer couples holding hands constantly back home. Here I do see it, all the time. It's like that thing about "I'm not a hero for turning you on" -- I'm not a hero for being normally affectionate with my partner here. No one looks at us and smiles, because we aren't the only ones and we're not setting an example.

  • Did have one particularly bizarre moment in which a man who was clearly with his two wives (in trying to describe that this was a Muslim traditional-seeming family and not a poly grouping more similar that of many of my friends I inadvertantly said something that was offensive to poly poeple. I do not have a problem with poly people or poly relationships, and I apologize. I should also note I was aware of the relationship status between these three people because I had been walking behind them for several blocks and overheard their conversation, and I was not making an assumption about their relationship status based on their clothing or biases about Muslims -- however, I may additionally still be engaging in inappropriate biases for assuming their poly relationship is any different from that of my various friends', I am trying to do good here and feel that I am so clearly fucking this up, and I should perhaps delete this entire story, the original point of which was that there are such a huge variety of relationships and reactions to relationships that I was entirely charmed by the entire thing. Anyway, I fucked up, I've sent individual apologies as well, I intend to do better next time.) Anyway, the man was arguing with the women, because they thought a gay male couple holding hands were so cute ("they were holding fingers!") and the guy was all "it's worse than San Francisco!"

    • I've been front-paged on Pam's. (Direct link to my post, which I posted here on LJ yesterday or the day before.)

    My reviews for The Diva Takes the Cake and The Baker Street Letters are up on Reviewing the Evidence.

    ( A so-so week, but still a busy one )

    Today the big thing is going to be another trip up to the Book Thing - I convinced the folks running the charity yard sale that unsold books ought to go to the Thing instead of being packed up for Goodwill. I'm going to take a slightly different route so I can swing by Donna's and pick up another of their lovely chais.

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