Six Deaf Taxis

Over on Barking Moonbat, some guy named Alan (BM's Secretary of War), just posted the number of democrats and republicans in Congress by year for the last century, and claimed it showed "the long slide downward into the night for the Democratic Party."

Well, I looked at the graphs, and didn't see any clear trends. So, just for fun, I downloaded his Excel spreadsheet and added a couple of trendlines. If you use a 2nd order polynomial trend, Alan seems to be right. Of course, if you use a logarithmic trend, he is completely wrong. Aren't statistics fun?

Today's assignment is...

Compare and contrast:
Jehovah's Witnesses
Abu Hamza's Supporters of Shareea

It isn't the coolness factor, although it is very cool.

It isn't the design, although it is well-designed.

It isn't the sound quality, although they get amazing sound out of a pack of cards and some earbuds.

It certainly isn't the price, since it is way too expensive for "The Rest of Us."

Nope, the iPod is so popular because you don't have to make up your mind. You don't have to think. You don't have to decide, "What music should I bring with me today?" How many times have you tried to decide what cassettes, CDs, or MP3s you wanted to throw in your bag, car, or flash before heading out in the morning? Who even has time to do that? Not me. The result is that I rarely listen to my music except when I am near the central database (that used to be my stereo with stacks of CDs, now it is my laptop with gigs of MP3s).

So, if anyone is looking to commit a random act of kindness, just send me an iPod...

Left the house at 7:30am, and just got back a little while ago. Who says state workers don't work hard? It's shotgun deer hunting season here, which is the one time of year that I don't work out in the woods. Just too many folks out there to be able to get anything done. So, today was spent teaching my boss how to use some arcane forestry software and wrestling with the same (the software, that is, not my boss). Everything was going fine until I decided to cheat and change a bunch of data behind the program's back (it stores everything in an Access database). Took the better part of an hour to straighten out the data enough so that the forestry software would stop crashing, but it was still worth it. Halfway through it, my boss said, "I'm completely lost." I said, "that's alright, you'll never need to have to do this part, and I'm only about half lost, and on my way out of the woods."


The Geek Forester triumphs. Sort of.

A friend pointed out Merriam-Webster's Words of the Year 2004 and wondered why defenestration made it to the top ten list. My guess is for the same reason that the other words made the list:

People just can't help think of defenestration when they think of that partisan electoral incumbent who grabbed the sovereignty of our country, and dismissed our rights like a peloton of insurgent cicadas tossed in a hurricane.


(Another friend noted that I'd missed the #1 word: blog. Just a victim of cut-and-paste composition, I'm afraid.)

Allessindra, a friend on a mailing list I've been on for the last 18 years, pointed me at Leda Horticulture's recent note about a very funny typo. After she posted my response....


And if you google for manhoot, you find that it is a very common typo in salacious stories. I predict that within a year it occurs in some rap song.

.... lexically speaking, he thought that he was freaking,
"Oh, Jeannie", he moaned, as his manhoot she was tweaking.
He practically groaned, as he lay there barely speaking,
her fingers deftly circling, his vocabulary murky,
'til some blogging herky-jerky, sent his words from here to Peking ...

[break for chorus]

...I figured I'd better get on this LiveJournal thang.