Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

I’m hoping to get a copy of this monkey gene and become a highly-productive fanfic writer again. But I hope to avoid any deadly monkey viruses while I’m at it.

There are ten (yes, ten) new drabbles up on the Stargate fic page, for the first ten episodes of Season 5. The Betas’ Choice for this batch is Black Widow, a drabble coda to “2001.” The Author’s Choice is Chaka Zulu, inspired by the real Shaka Zulu.

This brings the Stargate by Drabbles project up to 70 drabbles, a fine biblical number to go with Alas, Tollana. In a few months I may even reach a drabble of drabbles.

Math link of the day: a tribe who can’t count (thanks to Seema)

You may notice a subtle change in the blog design. I think I’ve finally tamed the wild, CPU-eating color switching script. It was especially slow on pages with lots of entries, like the category and monthly pages. Links are no longer colored.

Depending on your browser, it may take time or effort for the cached versions of the stylesheet and script to be replaced by their replacements. Color rotation should happen faster with the new version.

Font link of the day: Olympukes, for Seema

Once upon a time in America, you could walk into a church and get married. It wasn’t quite kidnapping a bride, but it was a reasonably unregulated process. Today in America, you need a blood test and a license to get married. Obviously the Pilgrims weren’t doing blood tests, so where did they come in?

I used to think that it was a simple public health measure to prevent the spread of syphilis (and nowadays AIDS) to the innocent spouse, but that’s not it. The truth is we’ve inherited our heavy regulations from the eugenics movement of the early 20th century. (If you had no idea, here’s a site about eugenics and the law in Vermont.) Eugenics supporters lobbied legislatures for pre-marriage health certification to keep the unfit from marrying, and therefore (to some extent) from reproducing.

So when you take that blood test, remember what it’s really for. Are you fit or unfit?

Crazy rumor of the day: Arlo Rose Working On Doomsday Widget

Here’s a link dump of the nifty and the novel in Mac software:

• ~stevenf describes CocoaBooklet, an app for printing booklets.
• Mac the Ripper, an all-in-one DVD ripping utility, is up to version 2.0.1.
• SafariSpeed will do that speeding-up-Safari hack for you.
• Bookpedia will catalog your books. (Well, you’ll catalog your books, unless you happen to have a bar code scanner handy.)
• Have you been waiting for the reincarnation of HyperCard? It’s no longer necessary to drink that poison Kool-Aid - HyperNext is here!
• iGetter is download manager for the Mac, for those of you who don’t use wget.
• Mike Matas has cool icons that come with a copy of his CatScan.

Weird link of the day: Innovation in India

I was waiting for a DNS entry to percolate down to my little mac, but then I thought, why wait? So I followed this macosxhint to get my mac to contact the one DNS server that already had a clue. It wasn’t really necessary, but it worked.

To check if a domain is having DNS troubles, try Quick Check. When Quick Check verified that the domain was one with the net again, I undid my DNS hack above. No harm done.

I love Quicksilver, but when it crashes, it drags the Finder down with it. Apparently I have it cataloguing too much; I followed the advice in this forum thread to turn off automatic rescanning of the catalog, and QS hasn’t crashed since.

GNXP post of the day: Free MAT

While I was away, Today’s Translations cited this BBC article about the world’s most untranslatable words. TT also gave the top ten list:

The Ten Foreign Words That Were Voted Hardest To Translate

1. ilunga [Tshiluba word for a person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first
   time; to tolerate it a second time; but never a third time. Note: Tshiluba is
   a Bantu language spoken in south-eastern Congo, and Zaire]
2. shlimazl [Yiddish for a chronically unlucky person]
3. radioukacz [Polish for a person who worked as a telegraphist for the resistance movements
   on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain]
4. naa [Japanese word only used in the Kansai area of Japan, to emphasise statements
   or agree with someone]
5. altahmam [Arabic for a kind of deep sadness]
6. gezellig [Dutch for cosy]
7. saudade [Portuguese for a certain type of longing]
8. selathirupavar [Tamil for a certain type of truancy]
9. pochemuchka [Russian for a person who asks a lot of questions]
10. klloshar [Albanian for loser]

The Ten English Words That Were Voted Hardest To Translate

1. plenipotentiary
2. gobbledegook
3. serendipity
4. poppycock
5. googly
6. Spam
7. whimsy
8. bumf
9. chuffed
10. kitsch

I should note that translation of saudade(s) is complicated by the difference in usage between the singular and plural, as explained here (in Portuguese).

I’m a long-time fan of the Earl of Oxford as Shakespeare (although the Kit Marlowe theory also has its appeal). Edward de Vere died 400 years ago, but the mystery remains: who wrote Shakespeare? And if we can’t figure Shakespeare out, how can anyone ever have hoped to find the “historical” Jesus, at five times as many centuries past?

The history of the Portuguese Age of Exploration is relatively well-documented. Under the Infante Dom Henriques (Prince Henry the Navigator) Jo?£o Gon?ßalves Zarco discovered the islands of Madeira around 1420, either Diogo de Silves or Gon?ßalo Velho discovered the Azores in 1427, and various expeditions explored the West African coast, reaching Cape Verde around 1460 and S?£o Tom?© e Pr??ncipe around 1470. Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, Vasco da Gama established the sea route to India in 1498, and Pedro ??lvares Cabral claimed Brazil in 1500 (although its borders had already been established by the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494). In 1519–1521, Fern?£o Magalhaes (Magellan) sailed west for the Moluccas; though he died along the way, he had already made it to a longitude he’d been to before, making him the first man to circumnavigate the globe—not the Spaniards who turned pirate after his death and limped home with 18 out of the original 270 crewmen.

It’s a simple story encompassing every important sea expedition of Western history, all in the space of 100 years, all undertaken by Portuguese nationals. You may think that there’s one missing, that some Italian named Columbus discovered America. The usual answer to this claim is that the Portuguese discovered Brazil before 1492 but kept it a secret. But there are more radical answers to the Columbus Question. Some Portuguese scholars claim that Crist??v?£o Colom (or Cristof?µm Colon) was the Portuguese pseudonym of one Salvador Fernandes Zarco, a native of the city of Cuba in the Alentejo and grandson of the Zarco who discovered Madeira. Most of the information about Colom is only available in Portuguese: Cuba, em portugu?™s antigo ‚Äúcoba‚Ä? significava ‚Äútorre‚Ä? e n?£o tinha qualquer significado noutro pa??s. But here’s an English version.

I don’t expect any non-Portuguese readers to buy the Colom story; I just find it fascinating that we can have such exotic doubts about the identities of people who were well-known in their own day. The true identity of Shakespeare is supposed to have been known to many of his contemporaries, and Salvador Fernandes Zarco’s grandfather had been a governor of Madeira for forty years before “Columbus” married the daughter of another governor there. It’s hard to imagine that people didn’t know these things, but easy to believe they didn’t feel it necessary to write down that Colom wasn’t some random Genovese shipwrecked on the Portuguese coast at 25, never to return to Genoa, as the official version goes.

In both stories we have two lives glued together: that of the actual man who did the deeds (whether sailing or writing plays) and that of some random schmo with the right name and paper trail. Shakespeare’s case is supposed to have been a matter of genuine deceit, whether because Marlowe was playing dead or a nobleman (Oxford or Bacon) was preserving his reputation. Colom’s case looks like later Italian self-deception.

It’s also harder to correct; Oxford, Marlowe, and Bacon were all Englishmen (and Marlowe not even a nobleman), so national dignity isn’t at stake in the Shakespeare Question. But if Colom was Portuguese, that puts all the descobrimentos squarely in the hands of the Portuguese navigators—a logical conclusion, but not one likely to be popular with Italians or Spaniards.

Look-and-feel link of the day: Firefox - Switch

I was going to redecorate with pretty fonts (possibly Tengwar), as described in dynamic text rendering at A List Apart, but I ran out of web design energy. If you want to try it at home, here are some useful links I found in the comments:

• WATS.ca on relative image sizing
• Some advice on converting fonts in case you have trouble
• Nevel’s plan to eliminate the JavaScript component in favor of PHP

Freebie of the day: Westciv’s CSS Level 1 course

I’ve joined a few new writing mailing lists lately. As a result, the number of HTML emails I get in teeny weeny fonts has skyrocketed. I don’t know whether it’s AOL’s fault, Yahoo’s or the ever-culpable Microsoft’s, but tonight I got annoyed enough to do something about it.

Once again, macosxhints came through with a solution: using a local stylesheet to control Mail. Don’t follow the directions there without reading all the way through to the comment that shows the simplest way to do it. Or follow my summary here:

First, you need the stylesheet. Save the following in a plain text file called, say, mail.css:

font[size="1"] {
    font-size: 10pt;
}
font[size="2"] {
    font-size: 11pt;
}
font[size="3"] {
    font-size: 12pt;
}

Adjust the font sizes if they’re still too small. If you know CSS you can tweak to your heart’s content—put in a nice background watermark that says Munged by Microsoft, De-munged by WebKit, for example. I’ll skip that step, though.

Put your mail.css file in a safe place and note the path. For example: /Users/jemimap/Documents/mail.css

Quit Mail. Open the Terminal. Cut and paste the following line into the Terminal and hit return:

defaults write com.apple.Mail WebKitUserStyleSheetEnabledPreferenceKey -bool True

Cut and paste the next one the same way, but change the path to match where you put mail.css:

defaults write com.apple.Mail WebKitUserStyleSheetLocationPreferenceKey '/Users/jemimap/Documents/mail.css'

Terminal won’t give you any feedback when you hit return, but it’s now safe to quit the Terminal and open Mail. Your mail should now be de-munged.