why does this newsgroup have beasts

Read "civilizing influences" as "sufficiently pompous insults."

John

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Geez... and here I thought he was talking about _me_...

Judging from the civility of the responses I get, I doubt if I'd qualify.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

There you go - poor innocent little me tells John Larkin that he may be labouring under a misapprehension, and backs comes this aggrieved response complaining about "pompous insults".

I wonder what the civilised response to that would be - try and sooth his ruffled feathers? But then he will just come up with some other barbaric rght wing myth about welfare sapping the moral fibre of the recipients, or the like.

Try and introduce him to a few socio-economic studies on how welfare recipients actually behave? Very civilised, but I'd have to find them first - I'm an unemployed bum, and exhibiiting that sort of industry would falsify his world-view.

Happily, I don't see myself as a civilising influenece, but as an irritating persecutor of fatuous fallacies - and we all have a few of them - and I'm free to point out that producing pompous insults is a civilised art form that he hasn't yet mastered.

So there you go Mr.Larkin - you are just an envious barabarian, ineptly deriding the civilisation you can't quite emulate.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Just got back from our neo-tradition: drive down Interstate 280 to Highway 92, then down past Skyline Boulevard to our favorite Christmas tree farm in Half Moon Bay. The Brat's job is to roll around in the mud, sawing off the tree, and having a broken foot doesn't get her off the hook. Then we bungee-cord the tree on top the Golf and loop up California Route 1, the coast highway, past Mavericks. It's sunny and mild, cool t-shirt weather, a 1-day break between winter storms, and the surf is up and the surfers are out. When Mavericks is running, surfers from all over the world grab their boards and head for airports. Past Mavericks and the big dish antenna we have lunch at the Moss Beach Distillery on the cliffs... fried seafood platter (fish, shrimp, calamari) and wheat beer. Then drive up through Devil's Slide, truly awesome, through the woods and Pacifica, back into San Francisco.

I'm doing Beef Wellingtons and garlic shrimp for Christmas dinner. Hope I get the fillets cooked right... it's thermally tricky.

I forget: which civilization am I supposed to envy?

John

Super-heated and very *fragile* egos, in fact.

--

"What is now proved was once only imagin\'d" - William Blake

And that would be *you* would it, Bill??

--

"What is now proved was once only imagin\'d" - William Blake

The one where life is simple and you don't need to brag.

The one where I cook Peruvian green asparagus and eat it with bottle of Chateaux Marquis de Terme 2000 Margaux - all from the local supermarket (though the Margausx was bought a couple of years ago). Tonight we won't be eating their meat - Nijmegen's good butcher does appreciably better. Last night's venison did come from the supermarket, and while it was admirably tender, it didn't havve the sort of flavour we get at good restaurants, where they can get their hands on genuinely wild game.

Beef Wellington is a pre-cholesterol dish. I could probably manage it if I could find someone who would eat it - Beck, Bertholle and Child has a recipe, and I can manage pastry - but nobody around here has enough spare arterial lumen to risk eating it.

But enough about these barbarian skills - I was banging on about the totally useless higher arts. My Christmas present to my wife was "The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within" by Stephen Fry ISBN:

009179661X - a sort of guide to amateur poetry writing for the week end hobbyyist. Not that my wife needs it - she has the (probably) unique distinction of sneaking a multi-page poem into a refereed journal. The editor didn't notice that it rhymed, though one of the referees did, and wrote his review in the same style, and the editor didn't notice that either.

Since the paper shows that only 15% of readers notice rhym and rythme in written text (if it isn't formatted to emphasise them), she was a bit unlucky with the referee. I certainly didn't notice it directly when I read the paper, though I did wake up about half-way through when I ran into a sentence that had had to be mangled to get the rythm right

- I know my wife's style well enough for that to be a clear indication that she was up to something.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Boredom, seeing other people respond with upset, and also a bit genuine 'f*ck you, I am right'.

[snip]

I've taken to using a good probe thermometer with a remote receiver.

Did the prime rib yesterday, pulled it at 118°F, covered it and let it rest/coast up to 130°F.

Just prior to serving give it 500°F for 10 minutes to brown.

Yummy ;-)

...Jim Thompson

--
|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
"Winners never quit, quitters never win", Jack Bradley Budnik ~1956

They would seem to sub-vocalise, and that means that they aren't speed readers, but IIRR they can still hit around 500 words per minute, which is fast by most standards, if about a third of what a speed reader can manage. My wife and a very smart electronic engineer mate of mine are both in this group, and have never been perceived as slow readers. I'm a notoriously fast reader, and that is noticed from time to time.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

We who live in peace and affluence, and who have skills, can go pretty much wherever we want. We can walk in the woods in the snow, in the desert, in a park, or on a beach. We can borrow a rusty saw and cut down a Christmas tree, or dig up a live one. We can cook for the people we love... a pot of pasta with butter and garlic, for $2, would be excellent, too. Vintage French wine is nice, but $2.50 will buy you a better red than Louie XIV ever tasted. We can elect to be grateful that we are alive and have the opportunities and skills and friends that we have.

The best parts of my little trip cost nothing. Most of us are lucky enough that we can enjoy our stay on this planet and the people who share it with us, and have an obligation to make it a better place for the people who are less smart and less lucky... not to mock them for being poor and dumb. Or we can indulge in anger and whining and envy and boasting, but a lot of crap we don't need, and can devote our time and talents into honing the art of the elegant (or crude, if that's your speed) insult. We think, so we have that choice.

So my message to Bill is that I don't have his skill at putting people down, and I don't need it or want it. No political system can bring justice and happiness to mean people.

John

I have a cheapie Omega type K thermocouple meter at work.. it usually manages to hit within 2 degrees C when it's in a good mood. I should buy one of the hypodermic thermocouples to go with it; you could poke the meat or chicken or brownies or bread pudding in various places and really get things under control.

John

I'm guessing that the 15% who notice read much more slowly than the others, on average.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

--
"it\'s the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog  Info for designers:  http://www.speff.com

I've got a liberal supply of happiness and justice - I'd prefer to have a job, but rebuilding Dutch society to eliminate the endemic age-ism is too long-term a project for me to tackle.

I get mean about other peoples situations.

The US produces an immense amount of food, and dumps a lot of it on the international market, to the disadvantage of farmers in a number of third world economies.

Combine that with the observation that some 13.5 million households in the U.S.A. are "food insecure" and 4.4 million are so insecure as to qualify as "hungry" by the US Department of Agriculture's rather coservative criteria, and it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that your country is not run as well as it might be.

A spot of justice, mercy, or at least enlightened self-interest would seem to be called for.

Sorry to be mean on Christmas Day, but 13.5 million American households could use a bit more Christmas spirit. all the year round.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

That's more interesting, because it might meant their brains work a little differently. Any correlation with left-handedness?

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

--
"it\'s the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog  Info for designers:  http://www.speff.com

Left handers distribute their speech processing around the brain more randomly than right-handers, but I've not seen any suggestion that there is any difference in the nature of the processing. I'm left-handed, and my wife isn't.

The guy I'd love to run some tests on was a "dyslexic" electronic engineer at Cambridge Instruments, who wrote "there", "their" and "they're" with all three spellings in all three possible contexts. Cleary, he generated phoneme coded text and used any phoneme to grapheme translation that produced the right phoneitc output on the page.

You'd think that he would have to be concious of ryhm and rythm while he was reading, because he'd have to encode the phonemes to store them .... My wife has argued that the same lexicon is used for perception and production, and he'd constitute a test.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

I heard a popular chef (in the Phoenix area, Chef Jean Paul) interviewed on radio a few days ago.

He opined that the high heat cycle seals nothing, just adds taste from the seared fat.

I just had a demonstration that fat is where all the flavor is...

The wife decided to make her own beef broth for French onion soup.

Started with a chuck roast and slow-cooked till it was falling apart.

The resulting broth was magnificent as the soup base, and the (nearly falling apart) beef was delicious on sandwiches.

...Jim Thompson

--
|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
"Winners never quit, quitters never win", Jack Bradley Budnik ~1956