Word for the Day - comedo

"Comedo" is the technical name for a blackhead pimple.  According to Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, it is derived from New Latin, from a Latin word meaning "glutton," from comedere "to eat."  I'm not entirely clear on what the connection is, but everything I can think of makes me vaguely ill from the associations.

I didn't know this word, and thanks to that horrible, horrible etymology, I suspect I may never forget it.  And now, perhaps, neither will you.

You're welcome.

Coins

I was looking through some old boxes the other day (searching, somewhat fruitlessly, for the bike computer manual on which I had recorded the code for the wheel size) and I found an old stash of foreign coins, and I discovered that a Mexican 5-peso coin from 1980 is slightly larger and heavier than a quarter, but not quite as large as the American half-dollar, and thus almost exactly the same size as the Canadian Loonie, a coin recommended as ideal for rolling across one's knuckles.  My skills develop apace, and there exists a possibility of a video in the indefinite future.

Laser Class

No, not where you sign up to learn how to emit coherently.

Commercial lasers are categorized into 4 basic classes (with some further subdivisions), on the basis of wavelength and power (directly related concepts in EM radiation).  I'm not going to give the actual power ratings, though, because they can apparently vary depending on the construction and type of the laser.  Most classification is done instead by "accessible emission limits," a formula depending on power, exposure time, and distance from source.

Class 1 lasers are the least dangerous-- there's still no good reason to look into them, but they're unlikely to do any real damage if you do.   Class 1M lasers are safe for all use except under magnification, which tends to increase the power over the safety limit.

Class 2 lasers are more powerful but still basically safe, since the eye under normal conditions will blink to protect itself if you accidentally look into the beam, and this will cut off the exposure.  Deliberately staring into it will cause damage.  Laser pointers are often Class 2 lasers.  Class 2M is the next half-step up-- the same rules apply, except (like 1M) in the case of magnification.

Class 3R lasers are dangerous if you look directly into them, but safe if the beam is at all diffused (by reflection off of a matte surface, for example).  Class 3B is slightly higher again, and lasers of this class require protective eye wear when using, and are equipped with key switches and safety locks.

Class 4 is the most powerful class of lasers-- the beam can not only cause damage to the unprotected eye, even indirectly, but it's also powerful enough to burn skin, or light flammable materials.  Most lasers of this class have industrial, medical, or military applications.

Class 5 lasers don't exists, but if they did, the one from Real Genius would probably qualify.

Word for the day -- College widow

A "college widow," according to the venerable Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, is a "young woman in a college town who dates students of successive college classes."

I cannot help but think that there must be some sort of story behind this.  Apparently, it was the title of a stage production in 1904, and a subsequent silent film, but details of the story are lost, so it's hard to know if there is a connection.  At least one reviewer claims that there is, for whatever that's worth, but seems to indicate that the term was part of the common lexicon at the time, indicating in turn that this was a relatively common occurrence.  I'm a little bewildered, I must confess.

A bible for the 21st Century

The 21st Century King James Version of the Holy Bible (copyright 1994) is not a "new translation," but rather a careful updating; specifically, in their own words, "words which are either obsolete or archaic, and are no longer understood by literate Bible readers, have been replaced by carefully selected current equivalents... The updaters have used as their principal authority in matters of English usage the greatest and most complete of all American dictionaries, namely, Webster's New International Dictionary, Second Edition, Unabridged, published by the G&C Merriam Co.*, and in print from 1933 to 1967."
That's the SECOND edition, folks.  The one written in 1934, and significantly superseded by the infamous Third Edition, written in 1961.  So to make a 21st century bible at the end of the 20th Century, they picked as their most appropriate dictionary one that had become obsolete thirty years earlier, having being written 30 years before that.

Now, to be fair, they do have a rationale-- for example, they were extremely impressed by the Second's overblown and unwieldy size and heavy use of the original King James Bible as source for illustrative quotes. Still, if your stated purpose is to make your version accessible and understandable by modern audiences, maybe you should use, I dunno, a current dictionary?  Just a thought.

*Now known as Merriam-Webster, Inc, aka the people who pay my tasty, tasty salaries, for those not keeping track at home.

Craft service is not catering

Pretty much just what the title says.

If you're working hard on a movie set, especially one with a reasonably solid budget (the new installment of Pirates vs. Dinosaurs vs the Harlem Globetrotters, perhaps) then round about noonish a catering truck will deliver a few meal options for your lunching pleasure.  A few hours later, you may once again be feeling peckish (those basketball game scenes vs the velociraptors really take it out of you), but the caterers are long gone.  The tables of water and snacks (fruit, chips, maybe some cold cuts if you're lucky) are provided instead by craft services, which is apparently a completely different operation, run by different people, and possibly even with a different union.

Catkin

Those fluffy puffs (not a breakfast cereal) on the branches of various trees and shrubs are called catkins.  The word catkin is a derivative of the Dutch katteken, meaning "kitten," from their quasi-resemblance to a cat's tail.   The fact that they are found on, amongst others, the pussy willow, is... not exactly a coincidence, but neither is it directly connected.  The word "catkin" was around in England for approximately 300 years before the willow (genus Salix) was named in the US, for example.  It might best be described as a case of parallel linguistic evolution-- the flower clusters in question (for that is what they are) were named because they resembled a cat's tail, and the pussy willow tree was named, well, because it has growths that resemble a cat's tail.  So pussy willows have catkins not because someone was trying to be especially clever, but just because some descriptions are fairly universal.

Oh, and the technical name for a catkin is an ament.  Interestingly, they have also been called aglets (their true purpose is sinister).

Black Velvet

Black Velvet is the name of a song that was popular a while back, when I was younger.*  Apparently, it was about Elvis. "Mama's baby's in the heart of every school girl // "Love me tender" leaves 'em cryin' in the aisle"

"Black velvet," as it turns out, is apparently also a term used in Australia to refer to, shall we say, the proclivities of well-situated Caucasian males in the field of Aboriginal extracurricular activities, or possibly to those "activities" themselves.  Ahem.

A "black velvet" is also a drink made from Guinness and champagne, which to me at least, sounds completely wretched.  What a horrible thing to do to champagne.  It was created in honor of the death of Britain's Prince Albert.

Finally, it is, of course, the material of choice for paintings of sad clowns and unicorns.

I am reasonably certain that these things are essentially unrelated, with the possible exception of black velvet paintings of Elvis.  At the very least, we can hope so.

*Yes, I'm aware that that statement is semantically somewhat redundant, or at the very least extremely unhelpful.

How to tell an anteater from an aardvark.

Parallel evolution is a curious thing, but these two (unrelated but very similar) creatures do have some distinguishing characteristics.  Most obviously and notably, the anteater has a streamlined, narrow head, curving smoothly to a very long, pointed snout.  They also have small ears.

The aardvark has much longer, sort of donkey-looking ears, and its face ends in a very pig-like large-nostriled blunt snout.

Cerebus was an aardvark, not an anteater.  Arthur is just a mess.  The blue aardvark in the Ant and the Aardvark was in fact a (poorly drawn) aardvark, so kudos to them.  Cardiff's famous anteater is an anteater.  And none of them are wombats, who have nothing to do with ants in general but are frankly much cuter.

It's on Fire!

I got to spend a couple hours today at work playing with a Kindle Fire (we have a few new books coming out in Kindle version, and we have to make sure they look right on all the possible platforms, after all.  Truly my life is a vale of tears.) and I found out something kind of interesting.

Whatever version of the screen capacitive sensing technology the Kindle Fire uses to register touches, it's very sensitive.  And by very sensitive, I've discovered that I can get it to register without actually touching the screen.  You have to get very close-- possibly under a millimeter-- but it will pick up on the presence of your finger and act like you've touched it.

On the one hand, this is occasionally annoying, if I have my finger poised to tap but haven't quite committed yet, and it jumps the gun.  On the other, it means that if I can keep my finger steady enough, I can hover over the edge of the screen and actually achieve a sort of fast-forward scroll that's faster than repeated tapping.  Which is kind of cool, really.

Word for the day -- Redowa

A redowa is a Czech dance, kind of like an energetic waltz, that was popular in Victorian ballrooms.

That was very short, so here's a little extra that I learned at the same time.  In London, before 1924, printed works that were deemed worthy of legal protection were not marked as "copyrighted."  Instead, they bear the label "Ent. Sta. Hall," which stands for "Entered at Stationer's Hall."  The Stationer's Hall, as best as I can tell, is the official headquarters of what is now the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers, originally founded in 1403 as the Stationer's Company, one of the original Livery Companies of the City of London.  Protection of copyrights appears to be one of their main duties in the contemporary era.

Black Hills Gold

Texas...Turquoise?  Well, no.

Black Hills Gold isn't strictly speaking, any different from any other gold.  There's no unusual chemical or elemental composition (alloying notwithstanding, see below).

But Black Hills Gold Jewelry does have distinguishing characteristics-- to wit: firstly, it is jewelry, made from gold, that is manufactured in the Black Hills area of South Dakota.  Secondly, it uses a motif of grapes or grape leaves in its design.  Thirdly, it typically uses a combination of pure and alloyed gold for a combination of pink, gold, and a sort of greenish-white tricolor.

The story is that Black Gold Hills jewelry was first created by one Henri LeBeau, a French jeweler who set up shop in the Black Hills during the great gold boom of the 1800s.

Kindle documents

I learned something useful at work today.  I'll warn you now, it's not very interesting-- I'm sure half of you already knew it, and the other half didn't care.  But I didn't know it, and it was in fact relevant to my earning of tasty tasty salaries.

In order to put a non-Amazon-ordered document onto a Kindle (keyboard version, we're still messing with Fire.  Um.  You know what I mean.), all you have to do is plug it via the handy USB cord into a computer, and it shows up just like any other removable drive.  Copy the document into the "documents" folder, and you're done.  This is apparently sometimes called "sideloading," after "up-" and "down-."

Food review-- Patak's meals

I've been awfully foodie lately.  Guess that's just the way it goes, sometimes.

Anyway, my local grocery store started carrying Patak's Meals.  I've been a fan of their various jarred curry-style "simmer sauces" for a while now (mmm, Jalfrezi), and it's damn hard to find Indian frozen lunches that taste remotely good.  Ethnic Gourmet, I'm looking at you.  And now I'm not, because you're vaguely wretched and I don't want to look at you anymore.  Anyway, back to Patak's.

The first thing to note is that these aren't frozen-- they're room-temp packaged meals, which wouldn't be interesting, except that one of the offerings is Butter Chicken, and the room-temp chicken always makes me nervous.  It shouldn't, I guess, but I approached that one with some trepidation.

So far, I've tried the Butter Chicken and the Lentil Curry, with the Chickpea Curry still in the pantry waiting for its turn.  And I have to say, not too shabby, Patak's.  While still not at the level of home-made Indian food, these are both a definite notch up from pretty much every other packaged Indian meal I've ever tried.  Medium spice, just enough to make me sweat a little but not blow out my taste buds, and surprisingly low-fat (but not low-calorie, which is something I really appreciate).

There are of course a couple of negative points.  The texture of the rice is a little odd-- I'm not sure if it's just the variety of rice that they use, or something about the way they process it to be room-temp stable, but it seems... off.  Not exactly gummy, but... heavy, somehow.  It's not unappetizing, but I notice it.  The other point is possibly more idiosyncratic.  Something in the Butter Chicken-- maybe some tomato paste in the sauce, maybe a thickener, I don't know exactly what-- gives me a shockingly vivid sense memory of eating Spaghetti-O's when I was much younger.  It's a trifle disconcerting when you're in the middle of a very different cuisine.

Anyway, the verdict:  Absolutely.  They're priced about the same as many frozen meals, and I can keep them in  the pantry where they take up less space and keep longer.  I plan to keep a few of these on hand more or less permanently (I'll probably look for a sale and try to stock up) in case of lunch emergency.

Beware, the chocolate Twinkie!

Actually, that's pretty much literal.  Hostess has released some limited-time special-edition-whatever "Chocolate creme filled Twinkies."  They're almost exactly what you'd expect, and they're not very good.  The chocolate is just too strong for the "yellow cake," overpowering it completely.  You end up with this sort of gooey chocolate taste (not inherently bad, but) with this separate odd cakey texture which is all the cake supplies.  No actual taste makes it through.

Verdict:  Don't bother.

Currant events

My wife enjoys Zante currants in her breakfast dishes.  Nothing wrong with that.  But I did notice recently that the packaging for said dried fruitstuffs that the company claims that they're made with "Just Grapes and Sunshine".  Which is odd, because a dried grape is a raisin, not a currant, right?

Turns out it's confusing.  Of course.  A currant is usually a fruit of a shrub in the gooseberry family (genus Ribes) .  But the word has also historically been used for a small raisin that grows in the Levant (Israel, Jordan, Syria, etc.).  But that's a regular currant, usually called a red, white, or black currant.  Zante currants are a specific thing that is not a currant-- they are, in fact, the dried fruit of the Black Corinth seedless grape (Vitis vinifera).  In other words, a raisin.

So, to sum up, currants are gooseberries, unless they're Middle Eastern raisins, and Zante currants are always raisins, and can't be currants at all, since they're mostly grown in Greece (and to a lesser extent California).  Clear?

Potstickers

Tonight, I learned that wonton wrappers are not the same thing as potsticker wrappers.  The results were still pretty tasty, but the texture of the dumplings was a little odd-- more noodle-y, less dough-y.  My technique is pretty good, though.  The bottoms came out nice and brown and crispy, and the filling was very tasty.  I just have to try to find a source of proper wrappers for next time (the wonton wrappers were, as far as I can tell, literally the only such thing available in my local grocery).