- Yesterday on the way to work, there was a sign at the top of the exit that said “Lane closed 1500 feet ahead”. About 50 feet past that, the lane was closed for some road work. I assume that the road work being done was “install a more accurate sign”.
- xkcd proposed that YouTube commenters be forced to listen to their comments read aloud before they are posted. This is now a (sadly optional) feature of YouTube. I for one welcome our new stick-figure overlords
- Yesterday evening on the way home from work, there was a sign in downtown Baltimore that said “2 left lanes closed ahead,” so I got over. The “2” had been affixed over the original text of the sign when they had upgraded the lane closure. Suddenly, I had to fight my way over another lane, as just up ahead, 3 lanes were closed. Is this the month of inaccurate road signs?
- A friend of mine is pregnant and close to her due date. The past few months, I have heard the word “cervix” spoken aloud more often than in the entire rest of my life. It really does sound like the name of a Doctor Who monster.
- Joe the Plumber, as it turns out, is a tax cheat. Also, he’s not even really named Joe. And does not have a license to plumb.
- At work, a word we use a lot is “releasability”, which spellcheckers everywhere tell me is not a real word, although “releasable” is. A colleague suggested that anything which is -able ought have an associated -ability (just as I think any adjective has an associated -ly adverb. I bluely believe this to be the case), but perhaps the problem is that what we have is actually “release ability” rather than “releasability”, much as he, being able to ride a bicycle, has a “bicycle ability”. I pointed out that “bicycle ability” and “bicyclability” are very different things: “bicyclability” would mean “the capacity to become a bicycle”. My colleague has bicycle ability; carbon fiber has a certain bicyclability (though I would argue that aluminum has a higher bicyclability, because it is far more able to become a bicycle — while carbon fiber bikes are excellent, it requires much more effort to hew a bicycle out of carbon fiber.). The only being I know of who possesses both bicycle ability and bicyclability is Cy-Kill, leader of the renegade Go-Bots
- Stuck in head most of the time now: Seven Wonders by Fleetwood Mac. In spite of this, I think that it is one of the only songs which is actually better if you hear the Kids Incorporated cover.
- It is so weird that as we demand larger and higher-definition TVs, and video snobs insist that even the sight of a standard-dev TV makes them want to puke and all that, we simultaneously are more than ever willing to huddle around a QVGA low-bitrate image on YouTube.
- Also, it is really amazing how quickly you stop minding that when you watch standard definition tv on a high def TV without correcting for the aspect ratio, everyone is a third again too wide. In fact, whent I watch video from my computer (which is smart enough to automatically correct the aspect), everything looks too narrow.
Nature provides for us a safety net; whatever we do, we can never forget. -- Barenaked Ladies, I Live with it Every Day