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| So it's getting to holiday season, and I was trying to figure out what to get Jono for the holidays. I'm not really big on present-giving at a designated time of the year, but I like the idea of a grand gesture once a year. I know he's really into music, and when Isaac came down last time, Isaac had suggested that Jono pick up the guitar. For some reason, guitar didn't feel ... right. Jono started with learning music theory, and all of these fingerings and chords just seemed like an extra step from the theory. It made more sense in my head to find an instrument where you can quickly bang out a melody, and where you can easily create a chord harmony. The thought rolled around in my head for the last few weeks, until on Wednesday night, I asked Jono, "So... I want to get you an instrument for Christmas/birthday. Would you like a guitar... or an accordion?" "ACCORDION!!!" was the Jono response. Makes sense, as Weird Al and John Linnell both play accordion. I looked online and ... man, accordions are pricey! The big professional ones *start* at $1000, and the "beginner" ones start at $400. Jeez! And apparently buying via the internet is not always recommended because it's composed of a bajillion parts that might wiggle and break in shipping. By now Jono had found youtube videos of people playing Tetris with Accordion, and the super-cool theory-friendly bass note schematic and was getting increasingly excited. Even though the right hand chromatic button system is pretty cool and easy for transposing, Jono decided he wanted a piano accordion for transferable skills. At this point, I'd found an ebay accordion that seemed to be in my price range (~$400), but Jono's like "so sketchy!", so I looked for info about the sketchy ebay accordions, and in the process, found an accordion shoppe in Oakland! With accordions ranging from $200 to $7000. So we made plans to visit on Saturday. The rest of the week, Jono looked up a ton of accordion youtube videos and got increasingly excited. Until finally it's Saturday, so we hustle up the Oakland to the accordion shoppe. It's the sketchiest storefront ever: you enter through a side door and it's an enclosed room in an empty warehouse. But this dude was there and we went in and there were a ton of accordions! Jono quickly decided on a 34 key 72 bass accordion that's like this one, except red. That plus the instruction book came out to about $790, so I paid for part of it, and Jono paid the rest. It comes with a 1-year warranty, as well as a 75% trade-in deal. (So if Jono ever wants to upgrade...) So now we have an accordion! It's pretty cool! :D | |
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| Hello everybody,
I'm writing a story in which a 19-year-old girl recieves a lobotomy, during 1953. I know inhalational anaesthetics were in use during this time, but does anyone know if they were used in conjunction with intravenous anesthetics, as they are today?
In addition, whether anesthetic was given inhalationally or intravenously, would it be normal practice to have the patient count down from 20 or 10 or whatever number? I know that's what happens today but not sure about 1950s.
I've tried to research a lot of this on my own but most articles about 50's era anesthetic is way too medical for me and focuses on the drugs and their usage rather than these sort of little bits. Hope you guys can help me! | |
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| Does anyone have any information on magical beliefs with regard to language, specifically written language? Preferably magical beliefs over religions beliefs; I'd rather know about a culture where, say, people believe a thing written in a certain way will come true than that a particular text is the word of God and therefor sacred or things like that.
I've asked elsewhere for information on both written language and tattoos, because in my mind their connected (a form of language related to body modification?), but everyone just gives me information on tattoos, which is fairly easy to find. No one's managed to dig up information on linguistic mysticism itself. Any suggestions? | |
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| Hello there C: I'm looking for some personal experiences related to the taste of things like pigeon eggs, pigeons, squirrels and maybe even lizards and snakes
The setting I'm working with is "post apocalyptic" America, the "apocalypse" having been a sun/gamma burst-caused shut-down of electronics and the chaos/riots/sickness/people failing at survival that caused the already-collapsing-under-their-own-weight megametropolis areas to be partially abandoned, in disrepair and partially reclaimed by nature. I'm trying to configure cuisine that would be found in an urban environment,and besides deer, turkey and other game wandering back in from wildernesses, and aside from game that can be raised in the city and gardens/farms that can be placed on rooftops... I figure pigeons, raccoons and squirrels are among the first meats to show up plentifully on crumbling city menus.
I already binged/looked up some stuff on various sites and found nothing relating to taste or comparison of taste,so a friend directed my question to this community.
I'd love any help or discussion involving this topic! Thanks much~ | |
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| Today's post is a collection of mini-rants about how modern software is made of fail. First up is GSAK, which when I imported a set of waypoints from Geocaching.com decided to overwrite any existing ones in its database. I'd actually gone through all the child waypoints for multi-caches and renamed them to a) fit the 6 character limit on my GPS receiver, and b) have names that I can find easily. Fine, so I imported with the defaults which updates existing records, so this is semi-expected. Would have been nice if it had prompted me. Anyway, restore from backup (GSAK takes automatic backups on exit, which is a very good thing to have), change the option to "Add", and reimport. Apparently in GSAK "Add" also means "feel free to replace existing records", and it went and blatted some of the waypoints anyway. Second up is the Microsoft Security Resource Centre blog, which is syndicated on LiveJournal as and which until a couple of minutes ago was on my friends page. November's bulletin includes an embedded video for the webcast. Fair enough, saves people having to follow a link to view it. What's not nice is automatically downloading the entire video in the background as soon as the page has loaded, without waiting for the user to click play. How did I find that one out? By Internet Explorer taking several tens of seconds to load my friends page and doing some hefty disk activity at the same time. Turns out that it copies the wmv to the Temp directory when the page loads, and the wmv is 200MB. That'll be a rude surprise for anyone using a low-bandwidth or capped connection. There's no obvious way to disable that behaviour either. Honary mini-rant at Youtube, which doesn't appear to let you stop downloading a video once you've started playing it but will at least wait for you to click play (or have the video auto-play when you go directly to a page on youtube). - Tags:nablopomo, rant
- Listening to:Now We Are Free ~ Hans Zimmer & Lisa Gerrard/Gladiator: Special Annivesary Edition
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| I have a really small and probably quite simple question. I want my high school character (10th or 11th grade) to write a paper/essay on 'diversity of modern literature' (and choose an HIV+ gay author). What course would it be appropriate for? Literature? Journal Writing? Something else?
Setting: modern (about 5 years ago), USA, Kansas.
I googled 'usa high school literature', 'usa high school literature curriculum', and looked up 'Education in the United States' in Wiki. | |
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| So I'm thinking of getting a smart phone.
Actually, let me back up a bit.
So, Jono isn't happy with his Verizon plan -- they keep charging him for services that he doesn't want. I kinda want to get out from under my parents' plan. Since we want to keep our phone numbers, our options are:
A) switch to a carrier that is neither TMobile or Verizon
B) I break from my family into a new family plan (I think they allow me to keep the phone # that way), and add Jono as a new user
So I figure this is a good time to consider getting a new phone.
I currently have a very old-school Nokia. I like how simple and straight-forward it is -- carries a charge for a week, easily customizable functions, no mysterious money-sinks, etc.
But there are a few things that I envy in smart phones:
- GPS/mapping ability. I tend to freak out a bit when driving in unfamiliar places -- San Fran, Oakland, etc. Being able to instantly find destinations and driving directions is very helpful.
- Internet access when I'm not near my computer. Jono scoffs at this because he is rarely not with-lappy, but if I'm out at a restaurant, or out with friends, or in another city (Chicago, etc), it might be handy to have reliable internet access.
- Ability to have something to do when I find myself unprepared for boredom. Like at the dentist's office, or waiting for someone, etc. If I had a smart phone, I could read things on the internet, or load things from the mini-SD card or whatever.
So I'm wondering if the price of the smartphone is worth the features that I'd use.
Here are the costs:
- If I stay on T-Mobile:
I can get an Android phone, but T-Mobile will force me to get the $30/mo data plan if I do it "legit". The savings of the phone price would be negated by the price of the data plan. To buy the phone separately would be $399. Then I still have to finangle the now-discontinued T-zones data plan, and I found an internet source that says that T-mobile kicks G1 users off of that.
I can get an iPhone, either factory unlocked ($600?) or jailbroken ($2-300), and then go the T-zones route, which apparently is legit for iPhone. But the iPhone is less "open" than the Android...
Or I can give up T-Mobile and move to
- Verizon: $70 for family plan and $30 for smart phone internet use, and get the Droid
- ATT: $60 for family plan and $30 for internet, and get the iPhone
Or I can give up altogether and just get the plain jane TMobile family plan for $60/mo and learn to deal with new places the old-fashioned way.
Opinions? | |
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| - Tags:ceramics
- Current Mood:to the point of insanity......
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| Title's not great, but I need to explain what I mean. I'm writing a (crack) fic where King Arthur is resurrected about once every hundred years up to the 2020's -ish. Assuming he starts off in England in about 1000AD speaking Old English, at what point will he stop being able to understand spoken English? Please note that each time he is resurrected he doesn't have time to pick up any of the language, as he invariably dies within about a day.
The fic is for the Merlin BBC series, if that makes a difference (let's face it, Arthurian legend is not generally great on historical accuracy).
I've been through the posts on this comm, but I don't really know how to search for the answer. Thanks in advance.
ETA: Thank you everyone! And while all the discussion of Welsh etc. is very interesting, I'm going with Arthur speaking English (KNIGHTS IN SAXON TIMES is all I'm saying...). | |
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| Believe it or not, this is a very hard thing to google for! I've tried all manner of combinations of "gay/homosexual"+"Japan/Japanese"+"school"+"bullying/harassment/teasing/etc." i.e. "Homosexuality in Japanese schools", "Gay bullying school japan", "harassment in Japanese school", etc. etc. but I keep turning up blanks (or links for yaoi manga, *sigh*).
Basically, I know that affectionate interaction between boys in high school is not unusual and there are plenty of common behaviors that in the US would raise red flags which don't even turn a head in Japan. But say someone started a malicious rumor or KNEW that a kid was gay. What sorts of things would bullies do to that kid? What would they say? How would they go about bullying a kid they knew was gay? Once it got out that a kid was gay, how would other students as a whole react to them? Avoidance? Would they just ignore it? Subtle teasing or non-so-subtle? What about teachers? Would they defend the gay kid, ignore it, join in?
I was hoping to find actual stories/accounts of personal experiences, but my google-fu has failed me. I looked back through the tags of the community too, but didn't find anything applicable.
(Just out of curiosity (as I haven't actually done the google research for this), what sorts of things have you seen/heard in/about other countries? UK? China? Italy? Anywhere else?)
Thanks so much! Love this comm. :) | |
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| Setting: Washington state, USA, current time. Basically last week.
What would happen to a cell phone's reception while the phone is going through an x-ray machine at an airport security checkpoint? Would the x-rays interfere with or block the signal, or would it work normally? If someone tried to leave a voicemail message (if, for example, the call got through but was not answered because the phone was in the scanner), would the resulting message be affected? Alternately, would the construction of the x-ray machine itself (I assume there's lots of lead and other metals involved) block the signal?
My ideal situation is that the protagonist, on his way out of the country, gets a call from his boss, who is trying to give him important information about sudden changes in their plan. I want the phone to ring, either in the x-ray scanner or just before going in, but either the phone's reception is cut off, or the message is garbled - the end result of the scenario should be that the necessary information doesn't get to the protagonist right away (but he knows that his boss tried to call him). Is this a reasonable scenario?
I've Googled various combinations of: cell phone reception in airport security x-ray scanner, are cell phones affected by x rays, do x rays affect cell phone reception, et cetera; I've also asked some technologically-savvy relatives, who weren't sure.
Thanks in advance! | |
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| I'm looking for an area in Ireland that would have been aware of Celtic legends in the late eighteenth century/early nineteenth century, preferably rural-- just enough so that a local boy would have some idea of what was going on if he was approached by Fair Folk. Is that reasonable, or would the English acquisition of Ireland have driven most of the old superstitions out of common knowledge? | |
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| Where: New Jersey, USA
When: Modern day
Some of you may be familiar with the question I'm asking, as it's for a House M.D. fanfic. Let's say a doctor was administering morphine through an IV drip to a terminally ill cancer patient. The doctor tells the nurse the code for the morphine drip, but says it really loudly so the patient can hear. His intent is for the patient to be able to up the morphine, overdose, and die- which they eventually do.
For the sake of drama (and my fanfic), let's then say another doctor figured out he did this. If the other doctor wanted to get him in trouble by reporting him, what would happen?
Search terms tried: euthanasia laws, euthanasia, doctor caught using euthanasia/assisted suicide, assisted suicide, I think some more. I read several articles but most of them are about the legality of it (which I know it's not legal in New Jersey), its history, or the differences between different types of euthanasia. Also I tried searching the tags but I didn't find anything.
edit: In case it makes a difference (completely forgot to note this), this doctor gave a speech at a medical conference basically admitting this story and what his intent was. | |
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| In a fantasy story with medieval-level technology I have a character who needs to light a candle in the woods with no other source of fire around.
Would flint and steel be her only option, or were there other methods? No magic allowed. | |
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| Well, that's rather annoying. I had a wonderful plan for today's (ok, technically yesterday's but I've not gone to bed yet) post, involving an inline version of last year's Storyteller. Unfortuantly this was scuppered by several things: 1) LiveJournal does not allow IFRAMES, 2) using the OBJECT tag with HTML doesn't reliably work in IE6 (it loads the page but doesn't display it), and 3) when you use the OBJECT or EMBED tags in a LJ entry, what actually happens is their backend wraps it in an IFRAME using the lj-toys.com domain. This eats the referer, and so I can't find out which user is viewing that entry.
I could probably make it work by dynamically generating an image and including that - images still get directly included, and so the referer header should still be present. Doing it that way feels like a horrible hack, but that's the Internet for you. | |
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| Research done: read The wikipedia entry & a quick google (ibn khadoun, works of ibn khadoun, ibn khaldoun translations, muqaddimah translations) I'm looking for a name to drop, of a particularly egregious translator/translation, preferably with squidgy colonialist overtones/agenda - for comparison to another egregious translation. And since I am neither deeply familiar with the author or the source, so while I *am* finding translations, I'm having a difficult time determining which translations are "I have to laugh so I don't start crying with rage" and which are just standard colonialist BS. The name-drop is in the sense of, "Oh my god you're reading [Modern Idiot Translator]. He's almost as bad as [Historical Idiot Translator]." ( additional context ) | |
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| Today's discovery at work included a genuine 10Base2 to AUI adapter that may well be as old as I am. | |
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Notes augmented
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Photos of the week
We have more dazzling images posted by talented LiveJournal photographers from around the world. We're hoping to span the entire globe, so please continue posting and tagging. Of course, you can also sit back and enjoy the view at lj_photophile.
You can see a sample of this week's gorgeous photos and check out spotlight communities and awesome user content after the jump!
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Curtains
We thank you, once again, for joining us. See you next week! | |
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| Before I realized it, I was already obligated to post to this. :) From ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) ctrl_a • Anyone who looks at this entry has to post this meme and their current wallpaper on their LiveJournal.
• Explain in five sentences why you're using that wallpaper!
• Don't change your wallpaper before doing this! The point is to see what you had on!1) I worked at Apple this past summer. Everyone gets a loaner MacBook Pro for work usage. This was the desktop I selected for my work machine. 2) This pic was actually copied from my sister's MacBook G4. Too many pretty desktops not to. :) 3) I like lotuses. The Buddhist symbol of purity, they rise from dirty mud into stunning (clean) beauty, an analogy to the pure soul rising from the filth of the world. 4) My iPhone and iPod touch both have the related lotus wallpaper, so I match across all of my computing platforms. 5) Basically, I'm trying to make my Dell's desktop look as Mac as possible without actually having a Mac. XD It still needs more RAM and an OS reinstall though (as per my stickies :P).  | |
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