Older blog entries for marnanel (starting at number 1280)

oranges, sausages, and a dragon

A toddler I know started “reading” a story aloud from a Bible. With permission from their parents, I’ve illustrated the story:

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People send one another oranges in envelopes.

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The Princess and the Queen are married...

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...and sat down at the table to eat sausages.

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Then they ate sausages again, but this time with mash.

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Then they ate children.

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Then they ate sausages again.

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Then they ate the castle, which was made of sausages.

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Suddenly, a dragon appeared!

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They said, “Shoo shoo shoo shoo shoo shoo” at the dragon...

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...and it went away. The end.

This entry was originally posted at http://marnanel.dreamwidth.org/385103.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Syndicated 2017-02-05 01:33:54 from Monument

wizz for coding! part 3, alan turing

alan turing invented the COLOSSOS, machine for understanding ger., lat., fr., ect which won the war for BRITTAN cheers cheers cheers. even tho he was a grate pionear of computer sience, the goverment did not respekt him, becos he did not hav a beard.

all mr turing’s discovereys are v popular at st. custards, eg the HALTING PROBLEM, which shos that you canot tell whether or not hedmaster’s pi-jaw will go on for ever.

mr turing also invented the turing test. this demonstrates that a computer is intelegent if a human canot tell whether it is another human. hence super wizard wheez to see whether sigismund the mad maths master wil notice if i send the MOLESWORTH-O-TRON 9000 to maths klass while i stay in bed.

SIGISMUND: molesworth, why hav you not done your prep
MOLESWORTH-O-TRON: is it becos I hav not done my prep that you speke to me
SIGISMUND: what is the square on the hipotnus?
MOLESWORTH-O_TRON: some of the squares on the other sides
SIGISMUND: corekt
PEASON: sir sir i have a question sir
SIGISMUND: what is it peason
PEASON: ; drop table mathematiks; –
(with a grate CRASH the molesworth-o-tron fall to the floor)
SIGISMUND: well i never, molesworth is a computer

thus we see, my deres, that i, nigel molesworth, hav absolutely 0 brane at all. This entry was originally posted at http://marnanel.dreamwidth.org/384979.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Syndicated 2017-01-22 10:08:41 from Monument

wizz for coding! part 2, rekurshon

[Part 1 is here]

rekursion is not e.g. when you drop a shottput on yor foot and shout D— B— S— ect in front of GRIMES and get yor mouth washed out with soap. it is a way to find ansers in funkshonal langwidges that require BRANE. this is becos funkshonal langwidges never do anything useful exept by side-efect, and who can blame them.

the ordenry way of finding ansers is for one funkshon to aks another thus:

FOTHERINGTON-TOMAS: Hello clouds hello sky, hello peason. who is the strongest boy in all st. custards?
PEASON: er, i dunno. molesworth, who is the tuoghest in st. custards?
MOLESWORTH (chest swelling with manly pride): it is i (gramer)
PEASON: it is molesworth. (he burst out laffing)
FOTHERINGTON-TOMAS: Hurrah, i hav my answer. (he skip merily away.)

but a rekursiv funkshon can aks itself for an anser.

FOTHERINGTON-TOMAS: Hello clouds hello sky, hello molesworth. who is the strongest boy in all st. custards?
MOLESWORTH: i shal aks myself. molesworth, who is the tuoghest in st. custards?
(i turn around. i am looking into the eyes of a handsom stranger.
could it be MYSELF?)

MOLESWORTH: dere me, who is the tuoghest in st. custards?
MOLESWORTH-PRIME: it is me.
(but as i turn to tell fotherington-tomas, we hear the footstepps of the glamorus under-matron PRUDENCE ENTWISTLE)
MOLESWORTH-PRIME: wait! i must veriffy the result. prudence, who is the tuoghest in the skool?
PRUDENCE: you, my sweet.
(she kisses him and they depart arm in arm without me chiz chiz chiz)

rekurshon was invented by som monks in hanoi. they had three huge needels and a hundred disks. they spent hundreds of yeres moving them about it was worse than detenshun. they shud hav just spun them around like radio LUXEMBURG hem hem. anyway one day the americans invaded.

AMERICANS: wot are you doing
BROTHER MOLESWORTH: moving disks around
AMERICANS: why
BROTHER MOLESWORTH: no time to talk, got to move this disk around
AMERICANS: dont drop it on your…
BROTHER MOLESWORTH: oh S— B— D—
ABBOT: report to the scriptorium to have thy mouth woshed out with soap

tho to be fair it is probbly less rude in vietnamese. This entry was originally posted at http://marnanel.dreamwidth.org/384707.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Syndicated 2017-01-16 22:47:38 from Monument

Idealistic

I once told a toddler the story of Plato's cave. She said, "Well, I'm going on holiday there soon."

When she got home, she told her mum, "I'm going on holiday to a cave where you can only see shadows on the wall."

Her mum said, "You've been talking to Marn, haven't you?"

This entry was originally posted at http://marnanel.dreamwidth.org/384070.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Syndicated 2017-01-13 01:17:21 (Updated 2017-01-13 01:17:42) from Monument

A poem I wrote at Christmastime when I was 13

FRIENDS

They will stand beside you
When all things are good.
And in the times when things are bad
Beside you they have stood.
They always tell the truth to you
As every good friend must
And they are reliable:
Friends you always trust.
They never will say nasty things
About the clothes you wear
They'll stand up for you against others
When you're not there.
You can always trust your friends
To hold your place in queues.
They'll always tell you "You played well",
Even if you lose.
Always keeping by your side:
Friendship never ends.
Yet, after all, we're only human:
Who has friends?

This entry was originally posted at http://marnanel.dreamwidth.org/383502.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Syndicated 2016-12-24 18:57:24 (Updated 2016-12-24 18:57:59) from Monument

Three simple points to change someone's attitude


[Content note: mention of road accidents, and death of children]

Now more than ever, we on the Left need to change people’s attitudes towards the poor and marginalised. Persuasion has three parts:

  • Why should you listen to me?
  • Here are the facts.
  • But let me tell you a story…

(Why should you listen to me about this? Because I’m a writer and I study the structure of stories. Also, because this pattern has stood the test of time: it was set out by Aristotle in 350BCE.)




Who’s speaking: You. Or not. Don’t assume your job is to speak up for the oppressed, if you’re part of the oppressing group. That generally results in speaking over them. People won’t listen, and they won’t have heard from oppressed folk either. Instead, find someone of the oppressed group who’s speaking up for themselves, and use your privilege to amplify them.

Facts are vitally important, and they’re what we do best. We have fact-checkers and myth-busting websites coming out of our ears. But people don’t listen to facts alone.

Stories, worldviews, are the framework for facts.  If someone’s been sold a lie (“immigrants are taking all the jobs and houses”), they’re sold a story to put it in (which starts with “there’s a shortage of jobs and houses”). Then when you point out the number of houses standing empty, it doesn’t fit the story. So it gets ignored, or twisted into something you didn’t say. The answer to false stories is to spread true stories.

Not convinced? Let me tell you a story.


Once upon a time in 1964, the road safety people ran adverts saying “Don’t drink and drive”. They gave statistics. But the adverts weren’t very effective. So they tried a new idea.

The existing story was “Driving drunk is difficult, so I’m more of a man if I can do it.” The new adverts gave them a better story: Here’s a kid who can’t sleep because her father killed someone. Kill your speed, not a child.

And why should we believe what we’re hearing? Because we’re hearing it from actual people who had been injured in road accidents. Even though the people were fictional characters, it still persuades. And now drinking and driving deaths are one-fifth of what they were 40 years ago.


Persuaded? Share it and persuade your friends.


This entry was originally posted at http://marnanel.dreamwidth.org/383431.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Syndicated 2016-12-19 18:36:03 from Monument

Deaf/HoH symbol in Unicode

I'm working on a proposal to add the [dD]eaf/HoH symbol to Unicode. Help, encouragement, and suggestions are very welcome.

The symbol I mean is in image 1 here:

We should probably also include the induction loop symbol (number 2 in the image).

This proposal is about encoding the symbol as an ordinary character: it isn't quite the same thing as an emoji. But some characters can alternatively display as emoji, and in this case I think it should be white on blue, as in 3 above.

At the moment, what we need most of all is examples of the symbols used in running text, as a symbol rather than a diagram off to one side. Here's the sort of thing I mean:



...except that I just made that up, and I'm looking for real examples. Manuals and so on might be good places to look. Can you help?

If you want to see a finished version of the sort of proposal I'm writing, take a look at the proposal to encode power symbols in Unicode. That proposal successfully included the power symbol characters about two years ago. The images in the section called "Evidence of Use in Running Text" are the sort of thing I'm asking for.
This entry was originally posted at http://marnanel.dreamwidth.org/383146.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Syndicated 2016-12-13 12:38:28 (Updated 2016-12-13 12:43:07) from Monument

Jargon obscures

In 2012 the Bishop of Leicester wrote an opinion piece for the Guardian called "There is no place for homophobia in the church." Someone in the comments asked whether an imam would be writing an article called "There is no place for homophobia in the mosque."

There's a lot to say about that, but I want to point out something about jargon. Turning "church" into "mosque" shows that the commenter thought the bishop was talking about a building. But the article's context shows that the bishop meant "the community of all Christians". (I believe the Muslim equivalent is "Ummah"; please do correct me if I'm wrong.)

I hadn't even considered that the headline might mean there was no physical place for homophobia in a building. I suspect the bishop hadn't either. I wonder how much more of what Christians say is obscured by jargon and misinterpreted by almost everyone outside the church.
This entry was originally posted at http://marnanel.dreamwidth.org/382969.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Syndicated 2016-12-10 20:40:12 from Monument

8 Dec 2016 (updated 8 Dec 2016 at 18:08 UTC) »

My Plover steno dictionary

Here are some interesting definitions from my personal Plover steno dictionary.

Proper nouns

I have a habit of setting up proper nouns with -LZ on the right hand. (It's unlikely to clash with anything; there's no reason beyond that.) So for example:

"K-LZ": "King's Cross",
"SP-LZ": "St Pancras",

(K-LZ and SP-LZ were for typing out this story.)

Punctuation

"KR-GS": "{^~|”}",
"KR-GZ": "{^~|\"}",
"KW-GS": "{~|“^}",
"KW-GZ": "{~|\"^}",
In the standard dictionary, KW-GS and KR-GS are open and close quotes, respectively. I've remapped them to curly quotes. The straight quotes are moved to KW-GZ and KR-GZ in case I need them.

"-RBS": "{^,” said}",
"SKHRAPLS": "{^!” said}",
Separate chords for typing things like comma, close quote, "said", These save me a lot of time. SKHRAPLS also avoids writing a capital S in, for example, "Woof!" Said the dog (because the exclamation mark makes Plover think you've started a new sentence).

"R-R": "{^}{#Return}{#Return}{^}{-|}",
"R-RS": "{^}{#Return}{#Return}{^}“{^}{-|}",
Because I can never remember the chord for "new paragraph".

"TK-RB": "{^—}",
TK-RB is the standard stroke for a dash, but here it's remapped to an em dash.

Pedantry
"TEUL": "until",
"TIL": "till",
In the standard dictionary, these are until and 'til, respectively. I have remapped them because 'til is not a thing.
 
Others
"OG": "oh",
"PH-R": "Mr {-|}",
"PH-RS": "Mrs {-|}",
"SED": "said",
"THO": "though",
"WAOEU": "why"
The standard strokes for oh and Mr are bizarre and unmemorable.
This entry was originally posted at http://marnanel.dreamwidth.org/382232.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Syndicated 2016-12-08 14:31:08 (Updated 2016-12-08 17:42:59) from Monument

"Stop this brain working!"

"At [Gramsci's] trial in 1928, the official prosecutor ended his peroration with the famous demand to the judge: "We must stop this brain working for twenty years!" But, although Gramsci was to be dead long before those twenty years were up, released, his health broken, only in time to die under guard in a clinic rather than in prison, yet for as long as his physique held out his jailers did not succeed in stopping his brain from working."

- Hoare and Nowell-Smith, "Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci", 1971

This entry was originally posted at http://marnanel.dreamwidth.org/381653.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Syndicated 2016-11-16 16:30:21 from Monument

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