atomic_fungus (atomic_fungus) wrote,
atomic_fungus
atomic_fungus

#7019: Being amused by the hyphenation of words

Most people are not. Most people don't notice it. The ones that do are commonly referred to as "grammar nazis". But I'm not talking about mistakes; I'm talking about hyphenated compound words that amuse me.

Example: Twigs, once I was home from a quick trip to the supermarket, went on a tear. If you've had cats you know what I mean; he started racing around the house at mach nine and meowing at random things and, in general, being a hooligan.



Like that.

Anyway, unlike Simon, I don't just sit there; after the second or third loud noise I'll yell something. The exact content of the yell is not really important. It just needs to be in the right tone of voice so the cat understands put on the brakes and stop knocking shit over.

Today, I yelled, "Twigs, what the hell are you doing, you crazy ass-cat?" Purposely making "ass-cat" the compound word instead of "crazy-ass", which would be typical.

Ever since I came across that WoW quest where an NPC refers to the player character by saying "you stupid ass-[class]" I've had a heightened awareness of how words hyphenate. (When that NPC called Ormus an "ass-mage", for example.) And I've realized that the conventionally hyphenated words aren't the only way to do it. In fact, usually, you can move the hyphen to fit between two other words nearby, and when you do that, the sentence still makes perfect sense but you've changed the emphasis.

So: saying "crazy-ass cat", you are using "crazy" as an adjective that describes "cat". "Ass" is an intensifier, amplifying the amount of "crazy" that is present. Moving the hyphen flips that: "crazy" is still an adjective, but now "ass-cat" is the noun.

And so, when I come across sentences with hyphenated words in them, I mentally move the hyphen around to change the way the sentence reads. It doesn't change the meaning so much as it does the connotation. I've gotten some amusement from doing that.

Yes I am a boring person. I thought we all understood that.

* * *

Ran to the store to get bread, peanut butter, and some Mucinex. Decided, at the store, to get something for dinner, which ended up being about $20 worth of ingredients for pot roast. (2.5 lbs chuck roast, $13--*sigh*--but there's no inflation. Plus onion, potatoes, and carrots. I'm glad I bought the latter two; turned out what we had on hand wasn't usable any longer.)

Pot roast, made in the crock pot, is amazing stuff. The list of ingredients is dead simple: chuck roast, onion, potato, carrot, salt, pepper, garlic powder. End of list. You don't need anything else, nothing fancy--no cream of mushroom soup, no mixes, no fancy ingredients. Friend in Iowa always used to make a big production out of it, and while the outcome was tasty enough, it was not so much more tasty than my recipe as to be worth all the bother.

Tossed all that into the thing and set it on "low" and around 7 PM, dinner.

Where it gets you, though, is that it's going to sit there in the crock pot smelling delicious all day, but it won't be ready to eat for six hours. *sigh*

* * *

Oh, great. Now Twigs has Critter riled up. At this rate, all three of 'em will be tearing around.

* * *

So, Betelgeuse--we have to wait about two weeks before we'll really have any real indication of what the star is doing*. Its variability has a whole bunch of different periods, and one period comes to an end around then. If the star begins to brighten, then we'll know more than we do right now. If it doesn't, we won't.

But:
"...even if the 430-day period is still working, this would indicate a minimum brightness near 0.9 mag--much brighter than the current value near 1.6 mag. So something very unusual is going on."
Betelgeuse is very interesting precisely because of what it is: a red supergiant which is very close to the end of its lifespan. Everyone involved knows the thing is going to blow up; the question is when? We have an opportunity to learn a lot about how red supergiants go supernova.
Betelgeuse is a highly evolved red supergiant--the type of star that could collapse and explode at any moment. Indeed, the dimming of Betelgeuse could be explained if the star has suddenly contracted to 92% of its previous radius. But that's not the only possibility. Betelgeuse might be dimmed by a giant starspot--or maybe it is shrouded by an outburst of stardust from its own cool outer layers--or something else entirely. No one knows.
No one knows. It'll be interesting to find out.

* * *

* By which I mean that we don't have any indication of what the star was doing 640 years ago, which is what we're seeing now because it's taken that long for the light of the event to reach us.

* * *

I do not trust the government numbers for coronavirus. They do not add up.

* * *

The Democrat-media complex plays this game every time power changes hands. When one of their guys gets in, he cleans house and appoints his own people to jobs. When a Republican gets in, if he replaces so much as one official, it's an unprecedented abuse of power.

The thing is, the President has a lot of power to hire and fire people as he sees fit. There are a crapton of "patronage" jobs in the executive branch, and every last one of them serves at the pleasure of the President--including diplomatic staff.

Okay? Every last one of them.

That includes the director of the FBI, the entire Justice Department, the entire State Department, and so on. Especially if it's something that's handled by a cabinet member. Trump would be within his rights to say, "Okay, everyone down at State--all of 'em, right down to the janitor--you're fired." Or "Treasury" or "Interior" or who-the-hell ever.

It would be incredibly disruptive and counterproductive to do it, and no one in his right mind would do so absent some pretty dire circumstances...but the President has the power to do it.

So the to-do about Trump firing these asshats in his administration who testified against him? There's absolutely nothing about it which is an abuse of power. He didn't appoint them--one of his predecessors did--but they serve at the pleasure of the President and they have displeased him. Trump was magnanimous (and sensible) in leaving them where they were until the impeachment shit was done with--but now that there are no active investigations and no pending charges, Trump is free to fire whoever the fuck he wants to.

* * *

There is one thing I don't understand about this article. The DNC is setting itself up to split, all right; but why "Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard"? I haven't heard one thing about Gabbard being a socialist. She's probably--at least to my admittedly untrained eyes--the most moderate and centrist candidate that stood for the nomination this time around. Certainly no one has (until this article) mentioned the two of them in one breath.

Did Sanders suggest she could be his running mate? That'd be a good move for Sanders (and probably for her too) but are their ideologies that closely aligned?

In any event--the Democrat party cannot go further left and continue to win elections. The debates are already a pander-fest, candidates each promising more and more free stuff, stuff that at least some of them know the US cannot afford to buy. (It goes without saying that they don't care about providing sub-par "stuff" to everyone as long as they're in the elite and get the good stuff, but at some point there has to be a hard limit, and everyone knows it. We merely disagree where that limit is.)

If you believe that the pendulum is swinging right again, then you believe that the leftists will split from the DNC and fade into irrelevance. DNC has been around a long time (much longer than GOP) so I don't see them disappearing. The question is, which party takes the title? The hard-left Stalinist communists like Bernie Sanders? Will the DNC of the future start brandishing the hammer and sickle?

* * *

By the way, here's a handy graphic showing the rankings in the leftist grievance parade. Apparently "muslim" is now more important than "black", which used to be the top rung until 9/11 happened.

How interesting it is that "jewish" does not appear on that list. Interesting...but not surprising. The left has always hated Jews. Anti-semitism shows up in every last leftist totalitarian regime, from the early days of communist Russia, through Nazi Germany, to the present "BDS" movement against Israel.

And yet so many American Jews vote Democrat. *shakes head*

* * *

So, the district attorney thinks she represents the criminals? Is that what we should take away from that? Cripes, no wonder there's so much crime in Chicago.

* * *

New York City now provides criminal defendants with names and addresses of witnesses and victims and the result is exactly what was predicted.
A New York man willing to testify against MS-13 members who attacked him in 2018 was found dead earlier this week after his identity was disclosed to defendants' attorneys in pre-trial proceedings, police say.
If you think that a gang won't have a lawyer who will give them this kind of information while being fully aware of what will happen, you live in a dream world and should not be allowed to vote.

Lawyer: Hey, here's the problem. The DA has an iron-clad case against you, and you're looking at going to jail for a long time. Now, this is their star witness. Without him, they have a lot less evidence against you. I am telling you, whatever you do, do not go anywhere near 11234 New York City Road Apartment 12b, you hear? Do not go there and kill that man. Just don't do it, because then I have to file a motion to dismiss the charges against you, which would likely be granted in the absence of this guy's evidence. Okay?

...which probably approximates what happened in this case.
So a man who was going to testify against to assailants had his personal information given to the people he was going to testify against, and he ends up dead.

Who didn't see that coming?

That is such an obvious outcome that I can only believe that is what the Democrats who passed this bail reform law want.

They want zero enforcement of the law.

They have turned "snitches get stitches" into actual legal policy.
And why would they want that? Because a population that doesn't feel safe is one that's willing to give up whatever they have to in order to feel safe. You take away their guns and you ramp up crime (always under the auspices of "being fair" and "avoiding racism") and pretty soon people don't mind walking through metal detectors and being subject to random searches and-and-and.

Crime is a tool to the left. That's all it is, and that's why the American left has always been anti-police. It has nothing to do with racism; it has everything to do with setting up a condition where the people are begging you to take away their civil liberties in the name of stopping crime.

And then you own them.

Second City Cop on the same incident, and the same conclusion.

* * *

Ah, Mr. Carville, you are wrong.
I want to give you an example of the problem here. A few weeks ago, Binyamin Appelbaum, an economics writer for the New York Times, posted a snarky tweet about how LSU canceled classes for the National Championship game. And then he said, do the "Warren/Sanders free public college proposals include LSU, or would it only apply to actual schools?"

***

Appelbaum doesn't speak for the Democratic Party, but he does represent the urbanist mindset. We can't win the Senate by looking down at people. The Democratic Party has to drive a narrative that doesn't give off vapors that we're smarter than everyone or culturally arrogant.
You see, Appelbaum says exactly what the Democrat party is. The entire leftist movement is--and has been--a position taken by intellectuals, and they have consistently claimed to be smarter than everyone else in the room, quite possibly the world, even.

Remember how the press gushed over Obama, how smart he was, how he was so intelligent he was bored by being President? It wasn't enough of a challenge for someone as brilliant as Obama! And that kind of talk has been deployed about every last major Democrat politician for decades--they're always really smart and really well-educated. Meanwhile, Republicans are always--to a man!--stupid, uneducated, senile or crazy.

This has been the playbook for decades. Even, yes, when Carville himself was Bill Clinton's strategist.

Of course, the tell is the last sentence in the blockquote, and in fact just the first clause: "The Democratic Party has to drive a narrative...." That doesn't mean "tell the truth". That means "get ads out there" and "promote this" and "make an ad campaign out of" and "get the press talking about". That's Carville's job, "driving a narrative", and the narrative doesn't have to be true. What he is saying there is that the Democrat party needs only to change the perception, not to actually change its behavior, in order to win elections.

The problem is, the cat's out of the bag. That's why and how we have Trump in office; once GOP voters twigged to what was happening, something like Trump became inevitable.

* * *

Pixy Misa starts this post with, "640 Cores Is Enough For Anybody Edition". Why?
The Threadripper 3990X gets put to the test. (AnandTech)

Key stats: 3.45GHz all core frequency, 4.35GHz single core. The single core performance is actually slightly above the rated speed, which is nice.

It draws 3W per core at full load vs. 7W for the 3970X, for only a 10% reduction in clock speed.

Also, it has so many cores that Windows can't recognise it as a single CPU. Depending on your workload you might need to upgrade to an enterprise version of Windows - or, as a quick hack, disable SMT.
Go to the post to follow the link if you want to. But the "640 cores" bit hearkens back to the DOS days, when someone (Bill Gates, allegedly) said that 640k of memory should be enough for anyone. "My dear boy, this was 1981," and the IBM PC 5150 had just been introduced, and supposedly Bill Gates said that.

The idea that the regular Windows desktop OS cannot handle 32 processor cores seems a bit short-sighted--at least at first glance--which is why he says what he said.

WTF I got a chuckle out of it.

...but about ten years ago I predicted this would happen. Actually, I predicted we'd be running a lot more cores than we are; technology is only just starting to catch up to what I'd thought would happen. But desktop Windows is going to have to handle more computing cores, and it will, in good time.

* * *

Incidentally, I recall that three years later--in 1984--Steve Jobs insisted that 128k was more than enough memory for the Macintosh, and that no memory expansion would ever be needed. So who, really, was more short-sighted?

* * *

I finished reading Good Ending last night. It ended about how I expected it to, though it took another couple of roller-coaster ups-and-downs before it got there. Holy crap, I didn't think any series could out-do Marmalade Boy in angst and shed tears--was I wrong! Good thing this was fictional or we'd all need waders, and some crazy guy would be building an Ark....

* * *

So, yesterday at work--had to go to the "tower control room" at one of my offsites to replace a computer, which entailed walking through the production area...and it stank.

One product made there is some variant of sodium larel sulfate, I think. That's a component of a lot of health and beauty products, and in fact in the lobby of the main building they have a whole display case full of products nicely labeled with which company product is used in the formulation. The products have brand names and I have never seen any listing of what name was what component.

What I do know is that the facility uses a lot of sulfuric acid. So I walked through the control room, resplendent in my PPE, with a computer under one arm, and out into the plant, and I walked into this wall of sulfur stink. Heavy on the hydrogen sulfide, but some other stuff as well. Not eye-watering strong, not dangerous, but certainly not what you want to be smelling, either.

Up to the tower control room; by the time I got there the stink wasn't so bad, and anyway in there it smelled better and I was able to go about my work. But when I opened the door to leave again--

Well, the company I work for is in the chemical supply business. It's why I have to wear steel-toed boots, a hard hat, and safety goggles whenever I'm in a production area. It's why I need to be "safety certified" for each location I work at, and part of that certification stresses that you always have at least a good idea of where the nearest eyewash and safety shower station is. Because if you get something on you, flushing it off with water soonest can save your life.

Their safety record is good, with only minor and occasional "loss of containment" episodes. So I'm not worried.

Anyway, that control room is at the top of several reactor vessels. Getting to and from it, you walk through a maze of pipes. The whole thing is fascinating to me and I feel like I could spend a couple of days just wandering around the various sites and looking at stuff.

Got everything done that I'd wanted to, then hit the can and left the place; when I got back to the office I noticed that my hands still smelled like sulfur compounds even though I'd washed them thoroughly. And last night, sitting in my rocking chair and listening to music, I thought I could just barely smell that stink. I wonder if some of the odor got into my shirt, maybe...? But Mrs. Fungus didn't report smelling anything unusual.

...then I went into the bedroom and it smelled in there. Sulfur compounds.

My pants. *sigh*
Subscribe

  • Post a new comment

    Error

    default userpic

    Your reply will be screened

    Your IP address will be recorded 

    When you submit the form an invisible reCAPTCHA check will be performed.
    You must follow the Privacy Policy and Google Terms of use.
  • 0 comments