Pappus' plane

South Africans sound funny when they say 'ice cream'.

This post is brought to you by Kepler Wessels and my general lack of stuff to write about.

Actually, in the time since I wrote that last sentence, I thought I could make a scatterplot.

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SMH story about legal music download companies:

None of these sites was started by the music industry, which has diverted energies, until recently, into propping up the ancient regimen instead of preparing for the digital revolution.

The word 'regime' wouldn't get automatically corrected, since it's in the dictionary.

The comment at 07:18:21 by Dozer on this entry:

In an attempt to show her cultural knowledge in art, a bogan friend of ours named their little girl ‘Monay’ not Monet, as in Claude Monet. When questioned about the spelling, she replied she didn’t want the other kids calling her daughter ‘Monnett’ when she went to school.

Stupid Impressionism fans.

The frequency, f, of a system is equal to the reciprocal of the period, T.

I hate those commas. They take fast-moving smooth text and turn it into some hobbling bumpy thing. Even worse are brackets, which both slow down the text and look horrible.

The frequency f of a system is equal to the reciprocal of the period T.

That's much better.

This is a Google search on "the frequency f", restricting it to arxiv.org. On the first ten pages, only ten results have either a comma or a bracket separating 'frequency' from 'f'.

Certainly you could argue that not all of the other 90% are examples of precisely this phrasing, but it is pretty clear that using commas here is a minority variant.

I own it now. After reading the scathing reviews of versions 1 to 3 of the CD-ROM, and learning that even as an alumnus member of the library, I wouldn't get access from home to the OED, I had started to prepare myself for life without being able to look up citation histories, historical spellings, etc. But then I saw that version 4 of the CD-ROM had been released earlier this year, and the early reviews were overwhelmingly positive. The stupendous level of copy-protection had been reduced to a single authentication following the installation.

So I went to Amazon and ordered a copy, the Aussie dollar at the time (and still today) being quite strong relative to the US dollar, and so it was only $238. The Amazon email said that the expected arrival date was 28 October. People complained about Peter Costello's budgets under-estimating the surplus by a few billion dollars each year; this was far worse. The total shipping time was under half what they said it would be.

I shouldn't complain. I had been busy on the previous few evenings, but tonight I got around to installing it. I needed to refer to the manual because it turns out that you have to insert the install disc (not the data disc) when you run the program for the first time. Anyway, I inserted the install disc, and it made funny noises before saying that it couldn't authenticate the disc within the time limit. I Googled, and an Amazon reviewer had said that you just have to click the 'Retry' button until it works. So I did, twice, three times, four times, maybe a fifth time, I can't remember, and then there was an error message that said, with great finality, that the disc could not be authenticated. That was that. No 'Retry' button.

Then I tried running the program again, and it ran. Now I can look up words.

jirble, v. Chiefly Sc.

[Imitative of the characteristic sound.]

intr. and trans. To spill (a liquid) by shaking or unsteady moving of the vessel; to pour out unsteadily; hence, to pour (liquid) from vessel to vessel.