marcusmarcusrc

I often need to copy text from adobe pdfs and paste it into other programs (Word, Mozilla), and something that happens in Windows XP is that when pasting words containing ligatures* ("fi", "fl", and presumably other ligatures that are less common) an extra space gets added after the ligature in the pasted =document: eg, I copy "efficacy" and it becomes "effi cacy". Is there a way to turn this off so I don't have to waste time deleting these extra spaces?

*this is a new vocab word for me... just learned it when trying to google for this problem.

If you didn't already know, Othar has a Twitter account: http://twitter.com/Othar


Also, almost 2 feet of snow in DC is great fun!!! Fortunately, I wasn't scheduled to fly out until tomorrow...

I can't remember who among my livejournal friends recommended this... I was blaming firstfrost, but didn't find it in her archives, nor in the archives of the 2nd most likely candidate, arcanology... but I wanted to thank them. It was a neat book, which I really enjoyed over the last 2 weeks, mostly in metro rides and over breakfast until Tuesday when my life was my own again.

I found the premise really neat, and fairly original. I'm still not sure that I'd totally buy it if I looked too closely at it, but I thought the author did a good job in making it believable enough at first glance that I was easily able to suspend disbelief.

Anyway, thanks, oh livejournal friend of mine.

Superfreakonomics is the sequel to Freakonomics. Chapter 5 is on climate change. You can google it to find out that dozens of people from Krugman to the Nature Climate Blog to Realclimate have weighed on in how wrong chapter 5 is. A quick summary: Levitt & Dubner are basically claiming that geoengineering by shooting sulfur into the stratosphere is the quick easy fix to global warming, so why aren't we doing that instead of trying the expensive option of reducing CO2 emissions? While there are quite a number of factual errors in their chapter, the counter is basically several-fold: 1) stratospheric sulfate cooling will not perfectly counter all the effects of CO2 warming. 2) stratospheric sulfates have other effects other than just cooling. 3) if we keep emitting CO2, then we'd have to keep increasing the sulfate injections... and if we then ever _stopped_ the sulfate injections, we'd get decades of warming happening in a year - it would be catastrophic. 4) CO2 has other effects than just warming: eg, ocean acidification.

Well, Levitt apparently finally got around to responding to this last point on an interview on the Diane Rehm show (and it is odd that he didn't address it in his chapter, given that one of his main sources for the geoengineering information was Ken Caldeira, an acidification expert), and stated:

"Of course, ocean acidification is an important issue. Now, there are ways to deal with ocean acidification, right, it's actually, that's actually, we know exactly how to un-acidifiy the oceans, is to pour a bunch of base into it, so, so if that turns out to be an incredibly big problem, then we can deal with that."

I don't know about anyone else, but... I would think that the average 3rd grader could figure out that this could be a problem. After all, we're basically injecting several gigatons (that's several billion metric tons, equal to, well, the weight of all the coal and oil and natural gas that we burn every year) of CO2 (and therefore, a weak acid) into the oceans. In order to neutralize that, we'd presumably need several gigatons of some kind of base. Now, aside from the difficulties of producing several gigatons of base and scattering it in the oceans, one might think that there could possibly be some side effects from this? Of course, I bet Levitt could find a solution to that too. Perhaps terraforming Mars and moving us all there?

I have two pieces of homework for Mr. Levitt:
1) Read classic children's songs: http://www.poppyfields.net/poppy/songs/oldwoman.html
2) Watch Futurama: http://www.tvtdb.com/futurama/transcripts/5x01.php "Thus solving the problem once and for all!"

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/15/business/energy-environment/15degrees.html?hpw
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/14/a-greenhouse-gas-thats-already-a-commodity/

And no, I don't know why my name is linked to a friendster account that I haven't updated in ages... now I need to go sanitize that account, just in case.

I've gone to actual movie theatre thrice in the last month... which, I think might be more times I've gone than in the entire past year (Milk and Star Trek are all that come to mind). I'd recommend all 3 movies, though with different caveats:

( No real spoilers, but cutting just in case )

Ugh. I was in CVS today, trying to figure out what the difference was between two brands of Colgate (my suspicion being that they have a high-priced brand which is basically identical to the lower-priced brand, but that a certain percentage of customers will buy it because "more expensive must mean better, right?") and I noticed that the young, black guy next to me was taking an odd number of floss packages off the shelf, and didn't have a shopping basket with him. While my brain was slowly going through analysis and options (is he shoplifting? am I being unduly suspicious because of his skin color? what is the right thing to do - call the store management, ask him what he's doing?) he took the opportunity to grab some stuff, move close to the exit, and then run. A clerk ran after him, but he was long gone...

Anyway, I feel vaguely soiled by the whole experience. But, for future reference, should this happen again - what is the right course of action? Tanatoes, I know you have shoplifting problems at your store - do you have suggestions?

(in other life, things at the EPA keep heating up. It is exciting, but life-consuming - I had dinner at work the last two nights... I look forward to sharing what we're working on when it goes public in a couple of months)

So, I recently read the Inkheart trilogy, and was curious about the upcoming move. A Salon review

http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2009/01/23/inkheart/

tipped me off to the fact that the scriptwriter is David Lindsay-Abaire, known for various odd theatrical plays, one Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and the script for the musical versions of Shrek and High Fidelity, but perhaps best known in my circles as the director of my 8th grade production of Harvey (starring me as Dr. Chumley and arcanology as the telephone, among others) (he has appeared in this livejournal several times now).

Alas, the review is only so-so about the movie itself.

I was trying to remember how my social circle got started with telephone pictionary.

My hazy, reconstructed timeline starts with games of "traditional" pictionary in the ET living room, and one day arcanology deciding that the words we were drawing were too easy (eg, "tongue") and getting a dictionary with which to inflict upon us "abusive pictionary" words like "gratuitous" and "honor". This was perhaps sophomore year?

Sometime between then and going to Caltech I acquired telephone pictionary as an obsession, because I remember trying to spread it to my Caltech social group with limited success. On one return trip to Boston I think I remember bringing back telephone pictionary to the new undergrads, it having temporarily died out in the interim. But I have no recollection of whether we invented it (presumably an example of convergent evolution with other telephone pictionary inventors around the world and throughout history) or whether it was brought to us from the outside world (or whether it had been around ET before arcanology and I ever arrived). Does anyone know or remember?

(Wikipedia has a reference to a 1995 games books including the game: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eat_Poop_You_Cat)