Not really important

I just learned that Benedict Cumberbatch is going to be the voice of Smaug in the upcoming Hobbit movie(s) against Martin Freeman's Bilbo.

Pardon me while a squee like a little girl.

Squee!

Shotgun House

A "shotgun house" (or "shotgun shack") is a typically small house in which all of the rooms are arranged in a single line from one end to the other.  It's a bit like a railroad apartment only without the hallway running alongside.  They've become associated with the lower economic class, although they used to be popular middle class housing a hundred years ago.


Supposedly, or at least apocryphally, they got their name from their straight floor plan, one which would allow a (shot)gun to be fired straight through from one end to the other.  A more likely possibility is that the name is related to another sense of the word "shotgun," one that the OED defines as "made or done hastily or under pressure of necessity," as in "shotgun legislation" or "shotgun resignations;" probably at least somewhat related to the "shotgun wedding."  Still another theory derives it from a vaguely homophonic African term (the design probably originated in Africa) meaning "assembly place," although I personally find that explanation a bit dubious.


Two such houses, built alongside each other and sharing a single dividing wall, are naturally referred to as "double-barrelled."  A partial second story is also sometimes added, creating the "camel-back" shotgun house.

Cock-a-doodle-please-don't

We (I and my carpool buddy) drove into work the other morning.  He was doing the driving, which meant that I was doing the sleeping.  Division of labor, you know.  We pulled into the parking lot, I stretched, stumbled out of the car, grabbed my bag from the back seat, and was greeted by the somewhat unexpected sound of a crowing rooster.

That's right, the people in the house on the other side of the fence from the parking lot have apparently installed a chicken coop.  In the middle of downtown(ish) Springfield, Mass.  It's... I... what?  And my second coherent thought, after processing all of this, is, "There are a  lot of feral cats in this neighborhood.  I wonder how long it will last...?"

Well, if nothing else, I sure didn't need any caffeine that morning.

Word For The Day -- Crossfoot

In a spreadsheet, you have the traditional option of summing up a series of numbers in a column, but it will also offer you the option to sum up numbers arranged horizontally in a row.

Today I learned that this (in some circumstances) has its own name-- to wit: crossfooting, which you would already have guessed if you read the title of this post.

Hey, I'm not writing these to create suspense, you know.

So anyway, apparently the traditional summing of entries in a column is or at least was called "footing" in accountancy circles.  If you have several columns that break down figures into various categories, with a running total at the end, a good accountant will add up the individual column totals and check it against the running total.  So after you've footed down, you foot sideways in order to cross check your results.  Viola!  Crossfooting.

Newton's Eyeball

Before the famous experiment with the prism, before he discovered the rules of gravitation (although probably at about the same time that the apple apocryphally fell on his head), Isaac Newton performed a brief experiment in anatomical optics.  Paraphrasing from his own notes, he took a small knife (a bodkin), and pushed it into his eyeball as far back around the curve as possible, in order to see the effects it had upon his vision.

Now, to be fair, the accompanying diagrams do make it look as if A) the bodkin was blunt, possibly the "large needle" instead of the "dagger" sense, and B) although it's not clear, it might have been outside the eyelid.  Rather than something more last-act Oedipal, it may have just been an extreme version of rubbing your eyes hard in order to see the pretty lights.

Still, this is clearly a degree of dedication to scientific inquiry that is seldom equalled in this day and age, or frankly in any other.  Which, honestly, is as it should be.  I mean really.  A true scientist would poke the eyes of a random sampling of other people, careful not to hint at any potential expected outcome.  Hadn't he ever heard of a single-blind study?

Maine Fjords or, "Fjording for the Pines"

See, because there are a lot of pines, and lot of rivers you have to cross, and... you know, never mind.

Here's the thing.  Everyone's heard of fjords-- they're what the parrot was pining for.  They're in Norway.  Some sort of geological formation river thingie.  Right?

But if a particular arrangement of rock and water can occur in one place, why can't it occur in others?  There are a few such things that only really happen in one specific part of the world, but not that many, really.  Cenotes are mostly found in the Yucatan, for example, but there are very similar formations in Australia, and Cuba, and even Canada.

So.  A fjord, according to a popular American dictionary of enormous size, is "a narrow generally deep inlet of the sea between high cliffs or steep slopes (as on the coasts of Norway and Alaska)."  And right there, you have it-- Norway and Alaska.  Not just Norway!  I never thought of that!

And as it happens, there are bits of Maine coast that could easily qualify as well.  As we discovered somewhat to our chagrin a few weeks ago, up there on vacation, when we decided to try to bike along the coast a bit.  We're used to thinking of coast as flat, you know?  The water's flat, after all, and the coast has to meet it, so...  Turns out land can go upwards pretty sharply in some places.  And not just in The Land of Extraneous J's.  Who knew?

The Kosher pig?

According to traditional Jewish law, the pig is unclean basically because it has cloven hooves, like a cow, but does not chew its cud; the specifically allowed animals are all cloven hooved ruminants.

Well, a couple of years ago, they discovered a new form of pig that departs from the normal pig-type-- to wit, it has a single, non-cloven hoof.  Unfortunately, this is the wrong element of the rule to switch on.  Having a solid hoof and not chewing its cud just makes it even more unclean.  However, I see this as a sign of hope-- clearly, the forces of God or evolution or man (it's unclear whether the mulefoot pig was deliberately bred or not) are trying to bring the gift of bacon to all mankind.  A noble goal, to be sure.