Kablammo!

Are the fire hydrants in your neighborhood turned on?

He explains all the district’s hydrants, including those in Alexander Ranch, have had their water turned off since just after 9/11 – something a trade association spokesman tells us is common practice for rural systems.

“These hydrants need to be cut off in a way to prevent vandalism or any kind of terrorist activity, including something in the water lines,” Hodges said.

But Hodges says fire departments know, or should have known, the water valves can be turned back on with a tool.

. . .

The neighborhood association’s now working to get the tools in the hands of homeowners, as an extra precaution.

I can’t get over how absurd this is. I mean, come on.

H/t Bruce Schneier.

So, as it turns out, a single Pilot V Razor Point lasts through less than two weeks of a full courseload. After around 80 pages of notes (some pages letter-sized, some legal) and a bunch of newspaper crossword puzzles, the pen ran out of ink and sputtered out completely.

Next up: a Pilot Razor Point. These are basically my favorite pens ever. Not only do they have a wonderfully thin line, but their look is a classic of industrial design. Everything, from the cheap feel, to the shiny-speckle color, to the yellow plastic ring on the cap, is absolutely perfect. I’ll see how long this one lasts.

In other news, while researching this post I discovered Pen Addiction and Pen Quest, two blogs that frankly scare me.

(Pictures from Pilot Pen)

You can tell I’m back in school because the trash can in my kitchen is overflowing and includes a precarious stack of take-out containers. (I swear, I’ll get to it soon.) Also by my backpack crammed full of weighty tomes. This time, they’re on topics like civil procedure and torts rather than aerodynamics and solid mechanics, but they’re still just as dense, jargon-filled, and pricey. Good times.

Not even kidding, by the way. Thus far it has absolutely been good times. A bunch of reading already, but it’s actually been quite interesting. I am enjoying this.

In other news: I’m extremely unhappy with some aspects of my Very Expensive University’s IT setup. They maintain a “portal” providing access to a bunch of different things, like schoolwide announcements, class listings, assigned reading, syllabi, email, and so on. Even before I was enrolled, I was granted limited portal access as an admitted student. At that time, I created a username and password for the portal, which later served as my username and password for school email. As was my wont, I selected a password that was mixed-case, included numerals, and didn’t have any dictionary words in it—you know, a “good” password. So far, so good.

The problem arose when I attempted to log in to the school’s wireless internet connection. My http traffic was redirected, as expected, to a login page. I’d been assured that my portal credentials would serve as my WiFi credentials as well—but every time I tried to log in to WiFi, I was informed that my credentials were invalid. I checked and doublechecked them, and made sure they still allowed me to check my email at the dedicated email stations around the corner.

So I made my way over to the help desk and explained my problem. The helpful and friendly (and patient—I was far from the only person asking for help at the same time) operator asked for my VEU student ID, which I provided her. She typed some stuff into her computer and started copying information from her screen to a sticky note, which she proceeded to show me.

On the sticky note were written my username and my password. Even worse, it wasn’t actually the password I’d set for myself, since it had been converted to lowercase. It turns out the reason I couldn’t log in was that the WiFi authentication was expecting my password all in lowercase.

Can you get any further from best practices? Not just storing the passwords as cleartext, which is bad enough, but forcing them to lowercase. I can’t decide which upsets me more.

Best idea ever: using CAPTCHAs to decipher old, damaged texts. Kind of the inverse of using browsers of internet pornography to break CAPTCHAs, in a way.

I really like this approach, especially since I myself would probably have contributed much more to PGDP if it were presented as an unobtrusive word at a time, rather than requiring me to actively complete an entire page. Because I’m lazy like that.

• A digraph is “a pair of letters representing a single speech sound, as ea in meat or th in path.” Makes sense: di- meaning ‘two’, and -graph meaning ‘something written or drawn’.

  So how come a monograph is completely different? Shouldn’t a digraph be composed of two monographs?

• In other news, I’m quitting my job today. Woo!

• A few months ago, I became eligible for a work-issued laptop, allowing me to RDP into my workstation to work from home. Basically, it’s a device to simplify working overtime, as I still have to spend 40 hours a week at the office. So I signed up for a laptop as soon as I became eligible, and yesterday I was finally issued one.

  The funny part is, I’m resigning as of next week, and I’m now in the process of filling out a bunch of paperwork and getting signatures showing that I don’t owe my employer any money—or any laptops. Fun times.

  I’ve already used the laptop a bit, and I plan on using it more this week-end, when I’m up in Boston for a friend’s wedding celebration. This will be literally my only chance to ruin a vacation by literally bringing the office with me, so I intend to make good use of it. For some reason.

• Speaking of higher education, here is a great, thought-provoking essay about some of the pitfalls there are. I will do my best to keep it in mind. On the other hand, this essay, while also quite interesting, reeks of nothing so much as bitterness and sour grapes (Wondering about the octopus? It’s here.). Odd, perhaps, that I respond better to condescension than disdain, though both tones are equally capable of pompousness and (for lack of a better word) elitism.

Two years and two weeks after I began this job, I got a phone call that ended it. Well, I mean, it hasn’t ended yet but the end is very clearly in sight.

“Be careful what you wish for,” they say, “because you just might get it.” I think I was careful—despite leaving everything to the last possible minute and doing it sort of on a whim to begin with—but I suppose I’ll find out soon. Now I “just” need to figure out how to pay for that.

I haven’t felt this eager/giddy/anxious/paranoid in, oh, about 7 months. That turned out great, so I’m cautiously optimistic at the moment.

To this point, I have read one of Dostoevsky’s novels and started reading another. Both have been thoroughly enjoyable and enlightening, but that’s not what I’m here to talk about.

No, the theme of today’s discussion, as you may have noted from the title of this post, is man. In each of his books I’ve read, Dostoevsky has had the narrator define man. The definitions are different from one another, but both are quite interesting.

The narrator of Notes from Underground provides these thoughts:

Gentlemen, let us assume that man is not stupid. (Really, you know, it is quite impossible to say that he is, if only because after all, if he is stupid who can be clever?) But if he isn’t stupid, he is monstrously ungrateful, all the same. He is phenomenally ungrateful. I even think that the best definition of man is: a creature that has two legs and no sense of gratitude.

And here is what Aleksandr Petrovich Goryanchikov, narrator of The House of the Dead, has to say:

When it got dark we used all to be taken to the barracks, and to be locked up for the night. I always felt depressed at coming into our barrack-room from outside. It was a long, low-pitched, stuffy room, dimly lighted by tallow candles, full of a heavy stifling smell. I don’t understand now how I lived through ten years in it. I had three planks on the wooden platform; that was all I had to myself. On this wooden platform thirty men slept side by side in our room alone. In the winter we were locked up early; it was fully four hours before everyone was asleep. And before that—noise, uproar, laughter, swearing, the clank of chains, smoke and grime, shaven heads, branded faces, ragged clothes, everything defiled and degraded. What cannot man live through! Man is a creature that can get accustomed to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him.

Both definitions are true to a certain extent, and they’re certainly not exclusive of one another. Both apply to me, for example, so I can’t really disagree with either. I’m wondering whether this is a theme repeated in Dostoevsky’s writing. Does every one of his narrators reduce man to a pithy phrase like this? How would Fyodor himself have defined man?

Song of the Moment: «Med en gong eg nÃ¥r bÃ¥nn» — Kaizers Orchestra

Wired’s Threat Level is reporting on a list of street gang slang compiled by law enforcement officers. I am reminded of that one part of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas where dude is at the drug conference. Hilarity all around.

Before I get to my main point, here are some [verbatim] entries I’ll comment on:

ACETISM…..(Satanists)…..Sacrifice of self comforts, finances and personal effects for the “Cause”
BEES KNEE’s…..(Latin Kings)…..An extraordinary person, thing, idea, The ultimate
CATS MEOW…..(Latin Kings)…..Something splendid or stylish.
CAT’s PAJAMAS…..(Latin Kings)…..Same as “Cat’s Meow).

Not only can’t the makers of this list spell or use apostrophes correctly, they evidently can’t recognize regular English words and idiomatic phrases. Webster’s defines ascetism as “asceticism; the condition or practice of self-denial.” It would appear the Satanists are using a word according to its standard dictionary definition; does that really count as slang?

The bee’s knees, on the other hand, is slang: “the bee’s knees, Older Slang. (esp. in the 1920s) a person or thing that is wonderful, great, or marvelous: Her new roadster is simply the bee’s knees.” However, this is also a standard usage, and certainly antedates the Latin Kings. Wikipedia says the gang was founded in 1940; but the bee’s knees dates from 1923. There was “a fad around this year for slang terms denoting ‘excellence’ and based on animal anatomy” that was also responsible for such phrases as the cat’s pajamas and the cat’s meow. Wait, where have I seen those before?

Anyway, the main reason I bring this up is to note that the Aryan Brotherhood apparently uses Cockney-style rhyming slang. Here are a couple examples:

APPLES and PEARS…..(Aryan Brotherhood)…..Stairs; Tiers also.
BARKLEY HUNT…..(Aryan Brotherhood)…..Vagina; cunt
BURT and ERNIE…..(Aryan Brotherhood of Texas)…..A lawyer.
CANDY WRAPPERS…..(Aryan Brotherhood of Texas)…..The Crapper (bathroom).
DAPPER DAN…..(Aryan Brotherhood)…..Can
EAGLES NEST…..(Aryan Brotherhood of Texas)…..One’s chest.
FIELDS of WHEAT…..(Aryan Brotherhood of Texas))…..Streets/outside.
GAG and CHOKE…..(Aryan Brotherhood of Texas)…..To smoke.

You get the idea. Some of those are hilariously appropriate (GAG and CHOKE, in particular), but it’s interesting to note that the Aryan Brotherhood allegedly uses a slang term based on the name of a region in Gloucestershire, England. No way that one wasn’t borrowed from some Cockney. Do they have prisoner exchange programs between the US and the UK, to allow for the cultural growth of convicted felons? Why should university students get all the fun and opportunities for self-improvement? If not, how did this spread?

Anyway, I can’t get enough of rhyming slang. Once I learned that a famous anti-apartheid activist was code for an awesome beer, I was hooked. So it’s kind of heartening, I suppose, to see it in use in the States.

I have no idea how to even begin researching these questions, so I’m just throwing them out there.

• You hear about plenty of clinical trials where Drug X is shown to be no better than a placebo in treating Condition Y: patients are told they’ll get medicine, but they’re randomly assigned to get either medicine or sugar pills. How about a trial to see whether Drug X is any worse than a placebo? Run the test like normal—but then run it a second time, telling all the participants that they’re getting a placebo, even though half of them are getting Drug X.
• If the placebo effect depends on the recipients beliefs about the treatment, does the type of belief and the type of treatment affect it? Do Southern Baptists respond better to placebos that have been blessed by an ordained minister?