Geek of All Trades

First meal

Yesterday I cooked our first meal in the new kitchen!   

It's not completely done yet - the tiles still need grouting, there are still no handles on the cabinets and drawers, and the light over the table has yet to be hung - but it's close enough that we could start unpacking dishes and pans out of the boxes they've been in for more than four months, and close enough that I could cook a meal.

The tile looks great; it will look better when it's grouted, because the spaces in between won't be as dark.  The stove is a pleasure to use - very powerful, very spacious. 

I cooked orecchiette and broccoli rabe. 

When the pasta and the broccoli rabe were done, I mixed in some grated Parmesan cheese and served it up.

It's a very simple meal, the kind of thing that only takes about 15 minutes to prepare; the kind of thing I might cook on a weeknight.  But it tasted wonderful!  Our first meal cooked in our new kitchen after four months of waiting. 

I also used the new shower for the first time, but I'm not posting any pictures of that!

 

Numerical double-take

A couple of weeks ago, David commented that he is sometimes confused when people use the word "bucks" to refer to currency other than our own U.S. dollar.  He's got a certain sense of the meaning of "buck," of its value, and he finds himself surprised for a moment when it's used to mean something else. 

I didn't think much of the comment - I didn't see why it would be such a big deal.  But then I was happily reading the movie site Passion for Cinema when I suffered a case of mental whiplash upon encountering the following:

But the fan is pissed off. Like hell. It takes a lot of hard work to earn money and then to pay 500 bucks for a movie ticket shows passion. and what does the fan get in return - crap.

500 bucks for a movie ticket???  It took me a moment longer than it should have to remember what I was reading:  that's 500 Rupees .

Bad luck and bad backup habits - not a good combination

I had a computer meltdown this evening - this was a brand new computer so I wasn't expecting it - and I've lost a bunch of stuff that I might not be able to recover. 

If you've ever sent me email, for any reason, and you'd like me to have your email address, can you please drop me a note?  You can send it to filmigeek at comcast dot net.

Almost there ...

A flurry of progress on the condo in recent weeks.  The countertops got installed in the kitchen, and now all the appliances - including the awesome range - are hooked up and working.  In the bathroom, the tiling is complete, and all the plumbing is installed.

Here's a look at the soapstone countertops. 

Here they are a little dusty; after we cleaned them they were a little darker and the veining showed more.  Soapstone can be oiled to give it a dark, rich finish, or left in its raw state.  We plan to oil it, at least in the beginning, but we like the way it looks now as well, so if we get bored of oiling it and stop, we'll still like our counters.

The bathroom looks good too; we're still waiting for the shower door, since there was a series of snafus (not our fault) in the order.

Today we were picking paint colors.  They've drilled the cabinet doors and drawers to install the handles.  The only thing missing in the kitchen is the tile backslpash.  We even got a new little kitchen table!  It's really almost done.  We might be able to unpack our stuff into the kitchen this weekend.

Okay, but did you need to put it so bluntly?

This is what greets me on my YouTube profile page:

Keypads - which way is up?

I am reading Henry Petroski's Invention by Design, an interesting little book about how engineering and invention have been applied to solve such every day engineering problems as clipping papers together, storing carbonated beverages in retail-friendly containers, and crossing bodies of water.

In a sidebar, Petroski notes that telephone keypads and calculator keypads have evolved opposite standards when it comes to key ordering:

Telephone      Calculator

  1 2 3          7 8 9
  4 5 6          4 5 6
  7 8 9          1 2 3
  * 0 #          0 + =

(I hope my attempt at monospace formatting works here.)  In telephones, "1" is at the top left and the numerals proceed across and down to "9" on the bottom right, whereas in calculators, "1" is at the bottom left  and "9" the top right.  I have been a regular user of both telephones and calculators for something like 30 years (though concededly, of telephones having keypads for perhaps only 20 years), and I have never once noticed this disparity of standard. 

Petroski asks, "Do users who alternate frequently between telephones and calculators find the difference to be a serious problem?"  From my own experience, I have to say no, patently not.  How is that possible?  I have no idea what the answer is but I suspect there is a psychological explanation.  There must be a separation in the brain's task space between the act of punching in a telephone number on the one hand, and that of entering numbers for calculation on the other, a separation sufficient that when turning one's attention to one of the two tasks one isn't even momentarily confused by expectations associated with the other.  Or something. 
I am amazed that I never noticed this myself and I'll have to give some thought to why that is. 

Exoticized lettering: Arabic- and Urdu-styled Roman

Here are a couple more for the exoticized lettering series (and here's the archive category collecting all such posts).

First, a very pretty example from the website of Ahiida, a company that sells the "burqini," a modest bathing costume.  Ahiida's logo is the Roman characters "ahiida" styled to resemble Arabic calligraphy.  It's a really lovely sample, amazingly evocative - those ascenders are reminiscent of minarets.

Then, John of bradshaw of the future keeps finding the best examples - he sends this gorgeous poster that says "Marudanaayagam" in Roman letters styled to look like Naskh-style Urdu.  John found this in Street Graphics India, published by Thames & Hudson; click on the picture for a bigger version.

And thanks to Manish of the excellent and thought-provoking Ultrabrown for the link. 

Bathroom, tiled

Our renovation project was dormant for a couple of weeks, while contractors were on vacation and other delays happened for reasons that are not entirely clear to us.  In the past week, though, stuff started happening again.  Two very friendly guys have been hard at work tiling our bathroom - they poured a new concrete underfloor last week, and then got to the tiling on Monday.

Something I learned about tile: grout is not mortar.  The tiles are glued in place, and grout is applied afterward to fill in the spaces between them.  We did not select grout (there are a wide range of colors to choose from) until after the tiling had already begun. 

Today, all the bathroom tiles are in place, but the grout has not yet been applied.

(Click on the pictures for a bigger view.)  We chose a pale green ceramic tile for the floor.  The wall is white subway tile with a border of green glass.   The wall tile goes up to 42" with a chair rail edge at the top.  Above that, we'll probably paint the walls to match one of the greens in the glass border.  I have fallen madly in love with subway tile and I'm tempted to cover my whole house with it.  That's probably a little excessive, so instead of that I'll just use it in the bathroom and in the kitchen for the splashback behind the counters. 

The floor of the shower is the same tile as the bathroom floor, except in a smaller version - 2" tiles instead of 6" tiles.  This is because the shower floor is pitched inward toward the drain, and a smaller tile is needed to follow that contour.  Inside the shower we've used the same subway tile and border as outside, all the way up to 7'.

Here's one more look at the floor and the wall together.  This is where the toilet will be. 

In the kitchen, there is also starting to be some progress.  The kitchen hasn't changed much in the last three weeks.  But today a stone fabricator is here making a template for the countertops, and either today or tomorrow we are heading to the stoneyard to pick out our actual piece of stone. 

Philosophy of mind-reading, and stress

Here's a very nice post by Language Log's Heidi Harley that illustrates what happens when good noun modifiers go bad.  In the example she gives, there are three consecutive noun phrases and it's not immediately obvious how to identify heads and modifiers among them.  The phrase is "philosophy of mind reading group" - the ambiguity is between (philosophy of mind reading) (group), on the one hand, and (philosophy of mind) (reading group) on the other. 

Prof. Harley's post is made more interesting by sentence diagrams and sound files illustrating how, in spoken English, stress breaks the ambiguity.  She refers to the "compound stress rule" and links to another Language Log post on the subject - the link is broken, so I found a different one to link.

English forms compounds so readily that I wonder if there is really an analogue to the compound stress rule in other languages that are less compound-friendly.  Is there a change in stress when compounds form in German, one of the few languages that is more compound-happy than English?

Hindi is a very even-stress language; unlike English, in which there are complex rules of word stress, all syllables in Hindi should be given the same stress.  What might be heard to English-speakers as difference in stress (for example, in the minimal pair कमल kamal, lotus, and कमाल kamaal, wonder) is actually a difference in vowel length.  So although Hindi does form compounds, I don't think there would be any stress-shift analogous to English.

We are all of us Simpsons

David and I saw the Simpsons movie and liked enjoyed it.  I'm not going to review it.  There are plenty of reviews out there that get it right - it's funny, it sustains, it's about as good as a good episode of the TV show.  We've been singing the "Spider pig" song all weekend -

Spider pig, spider pig
Does whatever a spider pig does
Can he swing from a web?
No he can't, he's a pig

And I've found myself quoting lines, like President Schwarzennegar's "I was elected to lead - not to read!"  So all in all it was a successful film, I think. 

The official website is the best part though - you can make yourself a Simpsons-style avatar.  Here are David and me.