DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

After an evening playing Scattergories, in which the challege is to supply words, all beginning with the same randomly-selected letter, for each of 12 categories, my wife and I spent an obsessive few minutes populating the “cheese alphabet,” just in case “cheeses” was one of the categories in the game. (It isn’t, we learned with regret at the next session.)

Purely from memory, we got this far: asiago, american, brie, bleu, camembert, colby, cheddar, devonshire, dry jack, edam, feta, fontina, gouda, gruyere, goat, gorgonzola, green, havardi, jarlsberg, Kopfkäse, limberger, mozzarella, monterey jack, parmesan, pepper jack, provolone, provel, queso, raclette, romano, swiss, toe, tofurella, velveeta, wensleydale

I’m sure there are cheeses whose names begin with i, n, o, u, x, y, z, but I’m equally sure I can’t think of them!

The day after I spent four hours in the kitchen baking three dozen bagels and three baguettes, someone asked me whether I had any more bread in the works for the evening’s dinner. “No way,” I said, “I’m really fried on baking.”

We both looked at one another. “That came out oddly,” I said; “Let me try again: I’m really burned out on baking.”

I really said that. And if you give me a minute, I’ll cook up some more kitchen slang.

More fun for nerds… use Google to search the Jargon file (aka the New Hacker’s Dictionary).

ESR calls this tool jargoogle. It supplies a standard search form as well as a promising JavaScript widget (that, I regret, does not appear to work in Mozilla 0.9.6).

Some favorite entries: astroturfing, VAXectomy, Zawinski’s Law, Gates’ Law, Hanlon’s Razor

Well, this is interesting, at least to me.

There need no longer be any confusion as to whether a storage device claiming a capacity of, for example, 10 GB, actually holds 10 x 1000 MB or 10 x 1024 MB, and further whether a megabyte is 1000 Kb or 1024 Kb, etc. Although these measures have been applied somewhat randomly in the past, most egregiously by disk drive manufacturers, the “fix” has been available since December 1998. I just learned of it today, from Macintouch.

In short, the resolution was to create and standardize new unambiguous names for various things. Sample:

one kibibit 1 Kibit = 210 bit = 1024 bit
one kilobit 1 kbit = 103 bit = 1000 bit

Here is the full list of the “new” Prefixes for binary multiples, from the IEC. This is a part of the fantastically useful NIST Reference on Constants, Units and Uncertainty, which among other tidbits provides a complete listing of all the standard prefixes (or prefixen ? I’ll have to check the suffixes page!) from yotta (10²⁴) to yocto (10^-24).

Within your children’s lifetimes, someone will probably have to expand that list, as speeds and capacities grow. Now that is a cool thought.

Jon Carroll wrote a column last week about the war. It struck a chord… I agree with him.

This is the piece: Not to be entered into lightly