Language lives

Erin McKean invited submissions of neologisms in her last column in the IHT. We reply:

Dear Erin,

in your IHT column, you invited the submission of neologisms. Here's a list I *thought* to have come up with during the last two years:

Trump House (play on White House)
to birther (raising the issue of Obama's birth)
public parts (opposite of "private parts")
de-seat (getting up, in analogy to de-plane)
kay (as in: 100k)
thanky
murderee
palinized
rational exuberance
period porn
beltway addicts
palin' around
to unanswer (a question)

http://morefreedomfries.blogspot.com/

Now, before I wrote (composed, haha) this email, I checked the originality of my inventions via Google, and found out that all --- except for the last two ("palin' around" is of course a play on Sarah Palin's expression "[Obama] pallin around with terrorists") --- had already been invented elsewhere before. But still.

One last remark: the prefix negation "un" is getting a lot of mileage recently. To unanswer here is meant to duck a question in a fuzzy way, like in: "The way Barack un-answers things."

Kind Regards, Michael M.

Sunday night bedstory

Captcha from Gabrielle de Vietri on Vimeo.

(Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan)

Lol

Italian for beginners

The washed-up scriptwriter sends this clip, and asks the question ""fact or fiction?":



And here's the transcript:

—De Falco: "This is De Falco speaking from Livorno. Am I speaking with the commander?"
—Schettino: "Yes. Good evening, Cmdr. De Falco."
—De Falco: "Please tell me your name."
—Schettino: "I'm Cmdr. Schettino, commander"
—De Falco: "Schettino? Listen Schettino. There are people trapped on board. Now you go with your boat under the prow on the starboard side. There is a pilot ladder. You will climb that ladder and go on board. You go on board and then you will tell me how many people there are. Is that clear? I'm recording this conversation, Cmdr. Schettino..."
—Schettino: "Commander, let me tell you one thing..."
—De Falco: "Speak up! Put your hand in front of the microphone and speak more loudly, is that clear?"
—Schettino: "In this moment, the boat is tipping..."
—De Falco: "I understand that, listen, there are people that are coming down the pilot ladder of the prow. You go up that pilot ladder, get on that ship and tell me how many people are still on board. And what they need. Is that clear? You need to tell me if there are children, women or people in need of assistance. And tell me the exact number of each of these categories. Is that clear? Listen Schettino, that you saved yourself from the sea, but I am going to...really do something bad to you...I am going to make you pay for this. Go on board, (expletive)!"
—Schettino: "Commander, please..."
—De Falco: "No, please. You now get up and go on board. They are telling me that on board there are still..."
—Schettino: "I am here with the rescue boats, I am here, I am not going anywhere, I am here..."
—De Falco: "What are you doing, commander?"
—Schettino: "I am here to coordinate the rescue..."
—De Falco: "What are you coordinating there? Go on board! Coordinate the rescue from aboard the ship. Are you refusing?"
—Schettino: "No, I am not refusing."
—De Falco: "Are you refusing to go aboard commander? Can you tell me the reason why you are not going?"
—Schettino: "I am not going because the other lifeboat is stopped."
—De Falco: "You go aboard. It is an order. Don't make any more excuses. You have declared 'abandon ship.' Now I am in charge. You go on board! Is that clear? Do you hear me? Go, and call me when you are aboard. My air rescue crew is there."
—Schettino: "Where are your rescuers?"
—De Falco: "My air rescue is on the prow. Go. There are already bodies, Schettino."
—Schettino: "How many bodies are there?"
—De Falco: "I don't know. I have heard of one. You are the one who has to tell me how many there are. Christ."
—Schettino: "But do you realize it is dark and here we can't see anything..."
—De Falco: "And so what? You want go home, Schettino? It is dark and you want to go home? Get on that prow of the boat using the pilot ladder and tell me what can be done, how many people there are and what their needs are. Now!"
—Schettino: "...I am with my second in command."
—De Falco: "So both of you go up then ... You and your second go on board now. Is that clear?"
—Schettino: "Commander, I want to go on board, but it is simply that the other boat here ... there are other rescuers. It has stopped and is waiting..."
—De Falco: "It has been an hour that you have been telling me the same thing. Now, go on board. Go on board! And then tell me immediately how many people there are there."
—Schettino: "OK, commander"
—De Falco: "Go, immediately!"

Update (Telegraph):

In a pre-planned stunt advertised on Facebook, captain of The Concordia, Francesco Schettino, sailed perilously close to the coast of Giglio so that the ship's head waiter could salute his family on land.

Minutes before the cruise ship hit the rocks, the waiter's sister Patrizia Tievoli had posted on Facebook that: 'In a short period of time the Concordia ship will pass very close. A big greeting to my brother who finally get to have a holiday on landing in Savona.'

Pure speculation, or Troops of Truth (2) (reposted)

Remember our not-so-prescient words from a recent post:

"And the press of the Free World is eating this up as if it were Yorkshire pudding."

Our words, or something else, triggered Arthur Brisbane, public editor of the NYT, to wonder publicly whether the press should try to sort out the truth, for a change.

And he gives an example:

On the campaign trail, Mitt Romney often says President Obama has made speeches “apologizing for America,” a phrase to which Paul Krugman objected in a December 23 column arguing that politics has advanced to the “post-truth” stage.

As an Op-Ed columnist, Mr. Krugman clearly has the freedom to call out what he thinks is a lie. My question for readers is: should news reporters do the same?

If so, then perhaps the next time Mr. Romney says the president has a habit of apologizing for his country, the reporter should insert a paragraph saying, more or less:

“The president has never used the word ‘apologize’ in a speech about U.S. policy or history. Any assertion that he has apologized for U.S. actions rests on a misleading interpretation of the president’s words.”

Yes man, great. Politics went off the cliff because politicians could be sure that the press would eat their Yorkshire pudding all the time, reporting anything with hands-off  neutrality, then seeking middle ground somewhere between facts and absurdity. This should stop. Yes, press of the Free World, this should stop, so stop this and join the depleted ranks of the Troops of Truth, of which this blog is a shining example (spell checker still does not know the word "blog"). And whenever Romney and his ilk say something, check first whether there is some factual basis to it. Like in: "I want to be your President because I know how to strap my dog to the roof of my car when I go on family vacation to Canada, and the dog's name is/was Blondi." This statement is well-anchored in facts, and it can pass your editorial muster without any additional comments, even if he got the name wrong, since the real name of his dog was Seamus, there is no need for editorial commenting, since the dog's name is auxiliary to the fact of dog-strapping (flatus vocis)...



...even though it was the name of Hitler's dog. Halt, hold on, which government agency did I intend to shut down, no, that wasn't Romney (Romney didn't even get it for a slpit second, as he was suggesting, helpfully: "The EPA?"), we get confused here, perhaps ... Anyhow, this post is already too long, so we stop now.

PS: 80% of the Republican attacks on Obama are just insinuations. "Obama want to bring the US under UN goverment," "Obama wants to introduce European-style socialism," (no socialism here, by the way) etc. Did you realize that? Just insinuations. Perry, where are you when we need you?

Pure speculation (Swiss for beginners)

Philipp Hildebrand, the CEO of the Swiss National Bank,  had traded on the foreign exchange markets a few days before his bank had forced a peg of the Swiss Frank with the EUR that would guarantee an enormous profit to himself personally. No, wrong. It turns out, it was only his wife Kashya  --- nice name, boobs, attractive, a former model perhaps, no, just a former foreign exchange (FOREX) trader, running an art gallery now, Kashya, who knew nothing of her husband's plans to peg the Swiss Frank to the EUR at 1.20, and who, by exchanging enormous amounts of Swiss Franc at the right time, would make an enormous trading profit. Note that we don't use the word "speculation", the word "speculation" has been defenestrated, even here in France it's "trading" now (imagine the French pronunciation), since "speculation" triggers the wrong instincts --- instincts that were already abrogated by Queen Victoria, her of the Victorian age, the woman who famously informed her cabinet that a "wife knows everything her husband knows." So it was only Kashya, and it was only a matter of convenience that she did use her husband's account since the poor thing did not have a trading account in her own name, but it's clear that it was her, and not Hildebrand, who did the trade, since she, as a FOREX trader, knows the future.

Kashya and Philipp Hildebrand, note the plant in the background

And the press of the Free World is eating this up as if it were Yorkshire pudding.

Imagine you're writing a movie script. What's next?

A missing email perchance, that one particular email mysteriously absent from the records that the Swiss National Bank supplied to some thorough investigator who had been instituted to go to the bottom of this and who went there, and could not see anything wrong since the missing email was missing? Or was it somebody else, a highly-payed person (he/she) from a worldwide accountant firm with an interminable name? Like PriceWaterhouseCoopers? Yes, that's it, PwC. PwC, which failed to spot an accounting error of 54.5 billion EUR in the accounts of the Deutsche Hypobank only 6 weeks ago?  The largest accounting error in the history of the planet? That's the ticket if we need somebody to go Santorum.

And now what? Somebody's dropping a glass, it shatters, and Colombo has a heureka moment? Somebody's whispering in the dark? Somebody's impersonating the dog that didn't bark in the dark?

We don't know. What we do know, however, is that the missing email resurfaces, reappears as mysteriously as the account of Hildebrand's trading account itself had resurfaced (which it should not have, since there's the Swiss banking secret, and furthermore, it was sheer coincidence that Hildebrand's wife did trade in her favor on the FOREX market etc etc, it's so unfair).

Queen Victoria

Now, it is now that the script writer reaches the delicate point where he has to go into the finer points of the matter, for which he has the internet here.

You get the gist. Everything is OK. Hildebrand's story is consistent. There's just one minor problem. There was another email, or phone call, or whatever, from Hildebrand, to his bank, to the effect that the last trade was OK (it will never happen again, but the last trade was OK), and that it was OK to "augment" this trade (so as to enlarge the position that led to the profit).

Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, some wit once observed, but that's the best we can do. Hildebrand stepped down yesterday. Life's unfair.

 Relax. Here's a picture from a better Swiss scene:

View of the Valais (Wallis) valley, Switzerland, 2012

Ronald Searle died

Circus cat, secretly rehearsing Hamlet

Update: He lived nearby, actually, in Draguignan (north of St. Tropez), where the headquarters of the French Artillery are located, the final stop of the local choochoo-train that also stops in Le Trayas

Fundamentalism in trouble (Dirk)

And while we are at it, lets reminisce: We are driving across the US, as usual, have spent the previous night in a hotel in Wyoming where the Gideon Bible is an accessory to every night table, have read the Genesis chapter, have crossed into the God-fearing state of South Dakota, and are driving past a evangelical billboard saying: "Noah planned ahead.." (the import being that you should plan ahead, too, etc). Well, no, Noah did not plan ahead. He was ordered by God to build the arc.

One of the tricks of today's American fundamentalists is their illiteracy; they have, in fact, not read the Bible.

And now for our final, and definitive Christmas post (Jacki)

(We performed it on Christmas eve 1985 during our visiting stint at the Rockefeller College, SUNY, Albany to rave reviews from a disoriented faculty)

Find a caption

Ordinateur (French for beginners) (Vincent)

The "urban word" of today, Computer, is defined as a "machine for downloading porn."

And, by sheer coincidence, Vincent sends this:

Une enseignante francophone expliquait à sa classe que dans la langue française, les noms, contrairement à l'anglais, sont désignés au masculin et au féminin. Par exemple : maison est féminin.. une maison ; crayon par contre, est masculin...un crayon.

Un élève demanda à l'enseignante de quel genre est donc le nom ordinateur [computer].

Au lieu de donner la réponse, l'enseignante a séparé la classe en deux groupes, garçons et filles, leur demandant de décider d'eux-mêmes si ordinateur est masculin ou féminin. Elle a demandé à chaque groupe de donner quatre bonnes raisons pour appuyer sa recommandation.

Les garçons ont décidé à l'unanimité que "ordinateur" est effectivement du genre féminin (une ordinateur) parce que:

1. Personne d'autre que son créateur ne comprend sa logique intérieure;
2. Le langage de base que les ordinateurs utilisent avec d'autres ordinateurs est incompréhensible pour quiconque;
3. Même la plus petite erreur est conservée en mémoire à long terme pour être ramenée à la surface plus tard;
4. Aussitôt que vous utilisez régulièrement une ordinateur, vous vous exposez à dépenser la moitié de votre chèque de paie pour acheter des accessoires pour elle.

Le groupe de filles, toutefois, a conclu que l'ordinateur est de genre masculin parce que:

1. Afin d'accomplir quoi que ce soit avec lui, tu dois l'allumer;
2. Il est bourré de matériel de base, mais ne peut penser par lui même;
3. Il est censé régler beaucoup de problèmes, mais la moitié du temps, c'est lui le problème;
4. Aussitôt que tu en utilises un régulièrement, tu te rends compte que si tu avais attendu un peu, tu aurais obtenu un meilleur modèle.

Les filles ont gagné !

The view from Chang's bed this morning

A Christmas Carol (Jacki)

A married couple has been out Christmas shopping at the mall most of the afternoon, when she suddenly realizes that her husband has “disappeared.”

Disoriented, she calls her husband’s cell and asks “where the hell are you ?”
“Darling, remember that jewelry shop where you saw the diamond necklace and totally fell in love with it; and remember that I didn’t have the money at the time and said ‘Baby it’ll be yours one day.”

Somewhat embarrassed and with a blushing smile, she replies “Yes. I remember that my love.”
“Well, I’m in the bar next to that store.”

Ditto (Siggi, Dirk)

Dirk sends this...



...and writes: "This has been around for a while but still. As the story goes, the guy that owns this house lives north of Cincinnati, Ohio .. Police were constantly being called for traffic jams and accidents in the neighborhood so they asked him to shut it down during certain hours. Instead he started charging by car load to pay off duty police to be there."

And while we are at it:

Swedish for beginners: Occupy Thanksgiving (reposted)

Why banks have become dysfunctional

James Saft, the Reuters' columnist, has a piece in the IHT about a talk by Andrew Haldane, the executive director for financial stability of the Bank of England. Once in a while, somebody writes a few lines we ("we") really should read, and here they are:

The purchaser of a portfolio of global banking stocks in the early 1990s is today sitting on a real loss. So who exactly is it extracting value from today's banks? The answer is twofold: shorter-term investors and bank management. Because banks have, over the past two centuries, migrated to a limited liability, shareholder-owned model, there is a natural tendency for owners to make riskier loans and trades and to increase the bank's assets.

Andrew Haldane

A bigger, riskier balance sheet with more leverage produces terribly volatile results, with many good-size profits mixed in with the occasional catastrophic loss. But with limited liability, executives and shareholders can simply walk away from the smoking wreckage, having pocketed the gains when times were good.

Bank of England

Banks then have a built-in incentive always to increase leverage, and the tyranny of quarterly earnings places huge pressure on them to enlarge their asset books, even if there is no one creditworthy left to lend to.
That was one of the main causes of the subprime episode. Faced with the prospect of not increasing earnings, banks simply began to manufacture borrowers where none really should have existed.
The situation is exacerbated by the fact that debt is tax-deductible while equity is not, giving banks even more incentive to borrow. While the typical leverage of an American or British bank in 1900 was five or six times equity, that figure peaked at about 30 times before the crisis, and is higher still now for many euro zone banks.
Bank bondholders have been unwilling to play their role as vigilantes, in part because they quite rightly expect to be bailed out by governments if banks go to the wall.
In the past 30 years, many banks have moved to measure their performance -and set their bonuses -on the basis of a measure called return on equity, which measures profit compared with equity. What return on equity does not adjust for, of course, is risk, and it looks as if return-on-equity targets in a leverage driven business have produced a lot of risk in the form of extreme bank earnings volatility, and badly compensated volatility at that.

PS: Conspiracy, conspiracy. If you search for James Saft on IHT's web site, it comes back with " 'James Saft' did not match any documents under Past 30 Days." If you search for the column's title "Why banks take such huge risks," it comes back with all sorts of articles (about Berlusconi, among others), but not with Saft's column. However, if your search for the same title on Google, it comes back with a mirror site of the column as first result. (Lol)

We missed rapture day

Rapture had been scheduled for May 21, and was then rescheduled for Oct 21 (an error in the calculations). Yesterday, folks. And we missed it.

 

An alternative explanations is, of course, that we all got raptured yesterday (or at least everybody we know), and are now in heaven. You decide.

History of the world: Apple Computers (7)

Click here for earlier acts.

Interlude.

History of the world: Apple Computers

Act II. Somewhere in 1978 or 79, the Amsterdam department store De Bijenkorff opened a new sales corner on its 4th floor, mysteriously named "huiscomputers" and it featured a new product, the Apple II home computer. At that time most people, including myself, would conceive of computers as "electronic brains" (Germans called them "Elektronengehirne," before they called them "computers," before they called them "Rechner,") all built by IBM, all infinitely expensive, large, and remote.

Act I. My first contact with computer had been in 1972, when I took an algebra class at the Free University of Berlin and we were tasked to program matrix inversions and some such in Algol68, the programming language du jour. This was done by (1) punching Hollerith cards in the right places, on special machines located in the university's computing center, then (2) placing the cards in the intray located in the hallway outside the main operating room where the computer was located (there was only one), (3) waiting for an operator to appear to empty the intray (he would open a wing door, and allow you a glimpse at the electronic brain, humming and chugging along in fluorescent light, tape decks clicking back and forth), (4) then waiting another hour or so for the operator to reappear with the "output," --- folded stacks of paper in a very large format, the name of the "job" (no pun intended) printed in very large letters on the first page. If your stack was very thin (as it usually was) this could mean only one thing: something had gone wrong. You would (5) try to find the error, or try to find some help to find the error, correct it, (6) resubmit your job, and repeat the process ad infinitum. Usually, it would take only a few days  until a program of a few lines code would finally run properly.

Act II, cont'd. So far so good. Back to the department store. What could you do with a home computer, I asked the sales person. Well, he said, you could store cooking recipes and call them up as appropriate. I didn't buy one.

Act III. We're now at Dartmouth College, NH, and the day is Jan 16, 1984. In  between, I had become interested in a computer simulations,  and was visiting there Dartmouth's Research Policy Center, run by Dennis Meadows of The Limits to Growth fame (the book) to learn more about his approach, called "System Dynamics." To repeat, the day is Jan 16, a Monday, and we all must go and have a look at the new Apple computer, the Macintosh. So we cross the icy, snowy campus, and arrive in a dedicated room of the computing center, where a passionate lady demonstrates to us what a rectangular box, white, with a small screen, and a funny device, called "mouse," linked to the computer could achieve together. There was also a small matrix printer with ugly output. But, but, you could create sketches on the Macintosh screen by moving the mouse across the table, and then print them on the printer. Also, you could use different fonts, when printing a text. This led to typographic orgies of the worst kind for months on end (don't ask).


Act IV.  A year and a half later. I'm returning to Dartmouth College on a regular basis for various projects, and spend a lot of time with Perry LaPotin, the polymath grad student, who has become an invaluable part of the Cold Region Research Lab of the Corps of Engineers, conveniently located next to the college. Perry was already writing programs for the Macintosh. There was only one small problem. You could not write Macintosh programs on the Macintosh, since its memory was too small. Apple had built another machine, the Lisa, sold only to professionals, whose memory was large enough, since it had a hard disk (HARD DISK). The hard disk was really large, 10 megabytes, but the was a little glitch in the hard disk space management. Lisa didn't always know when the hard disk capacity was exhausted, which led to hard disk malfunction, which then Perry had to repair by using a mix of erratic reset activity (the escape button, yes), brawn, and black arts. He spent roughly half of his working day resetting the hard disk. I still see him sitting there, patiently kicking our Lisa back to work. When we would finally go home, belatedly, exhausted, we turned our attention to the regrettable downward tendency of the Apple Computer stock price. Apple was already on its way out, since the Macintosh was fairly useless.

Act V. Now comes the part that is omitted in all the obituaries. A few weeks later, still 1985. The Apple laser printer appears on the market. And it prints like a professional printer, plug and play, 50 different fonts, some very convincing ones. Your manuscript looks just great, your letter looks just great, your writ, opinion, table of content, graphics (Graphics) they all look great. It looks almost as if you can stop arguing, just putting your breath-taking graphics of the front page of your important contribution (the PC-world of MS-DOS, might, just might be able to connect to some laser printer and print something in Courier font until the next software glitch puts an end to such pretentiousness) but we, with our Apple laser printer, we rool (we meant "rule," but rool is even better) we rule the world. My research grant applications are looking so much better than those of the competition, I'm collecting one grant after the other, until I get a Pioneer Grant from the Dutch goverment that allows me to start my own research institute, the Applied Logic Laboratory. I'm still convinced that my success in those years hinged on the flawless Macintosh laser print of my submission, and in particular on the flawless laserprinted  tables of content done by the best text processor of those days, Wordperfect. For example, the committee for the Pioneer grant met only once, with forty longish application to evaluate, and only one grant to award. You an bet that they started reading the stuff when stepping on the train for their meeting in The Hague (much Dutch work gets done on trains, as Paul Krugman), and they had barely time to read the tables of content. Mine was the best.

Anyhow, the laser printer constituted a quantum leap, and many people understood, got their Macintosh laser act together, bought the stuff. and saved the company.

Stay tuned.


Act VI.  It's three years later 1988, and I'm back in Amsterdam. The Macintosh II appears on the market, the first bona fide machine with a color screen. Somebody wrote a program that would generate Mandelbrot's fractals in real time and the annual Dutch software exhibition features nothing but magic lanterns that move according to the incorruptible logic of Mandelbrot's algorithm.

A typical Mandelbrot image (Helix 2)

Interlude (short). We're also getting a research contract with IBM, since IBM has now a Unix machine, a mini computer, half way between a PC and a small mainframe (for insiders only: think VAX). We would get the computer for free (listprice perhaps 100 kay, regardless of the currency), work with it, and produce a report. Nerd alert: IBM has a Unix machine. Not Unix of course (nor Linux, which didn't exist in those days), but some Unix dialect that is supposedly compatible with standards Unix (of course it isn't). A small step for mankind, but a big step for IBM.

Now, in order to use the machine, we had to connect it to our network. And it's an ethernet-(work). "Is your new machine ethernet-compatible," we ask IBM. "We are the best," the man in the blue suits sing in unison while pummeling their breasts (there was a dress code at IBM in those days, blue suits, white shirt, tie), "so our machine is ethernet compatible."

So we connect the IBM machine (something with lot's of "8" in the name) to our Ethernet. Nothing happens, of course. We call IBM. "It's your fault," the men in the blue suits sing over the telephone while pummeling their breast, have you though of switching your network on?" This goes back and forth for a few month. "Have you thought of this, have you thought of that?" Yes, we have. One fine day, A delegation from IBM descends from heaven in the spaceships that Emmerich's Independence Day made so famous. Several people. They switch on the machine, they think of this and of that, but nothing happens. This takes the whole day. Finally, finally, they have the answer. "Yes, they say, it's obvious, you are using the latest Ethernet version, and our machine is not yet compatible with your version. It's your fault."

I'm not making this up.



Act VII. My research center (initially cursed with the hopeless name CCSOM) is growing, and we need more computers

Bible Studies (4)