guess what i found today at the bookstore
In Area 51, do they study Grays’ anatomy?
Strange but true — People study for years to talk like this:
Infant is status post initial ampicillin and gentamycin for rule out sepsis workup.
I don’t suppose there’s any country where there wasn’t grumbling, when the French Republican system of measurement was proposed, that it is unnatural, lacking traditional measurement’s intimate link to human scale. And likewise I doubt there’s much agitation to go back in any country where meters and grams have been the rule for more than a generation. But . . .
I’ve read several stories in which seconds, kiloseconds, megaseconds, gigaseconds are the only units of time. The first that I remember was The Outcasts of Heaven Belt by Joan D. Vinge; another is her ex-husband’s A Deepness in the Sky; most recently, Charlie Stross’s Glasshouse.
Unless the human sleep cycle is somehow made obsolete, I can’t believe that people would not keep a word for a unit of roughly 86400 seconds. The key question is how roughly is is too rough? Can most people adapt to a cycle of 100000 sec (27:46:40)? I wouldn’t count on it, and anyway, it would be atrocious to impose such a cycle for the sake of mere notational convenience.
“Tooth and Claw”, a recent episode of Doctor Who, features the Koh-i-Noor, a famous diamond: but the shape is wrong, a classic Brilliant cut. The writer missed an opportunity to say that it has its present irregular shape because part of it was vaporised by the events of the episode!
always look on the bright side
With the Wall Street Journal added to the Murdoch empire, I look forward to seeing Page Three Girls in that distinctive engraving style.
Madhu, on his way out of town, treated me to a tasty buffet lunch at Turmeric in Sunnyvale. I got there ahead of him and had time to loiter in the street, feasting my nose; the whole of Murphy Avenue between Evelyn and Washington was redolent (a word I’ve never used before) of temptations. A very good thing to know, next time I’m hungry in Santa Clara County.
What, if anything, does this mean?
The racial, ethnic, and gender diversity of the United States has increased exponentially over the past two decades . . . .
Besides wondering whether the writer knows what exponential means, I’m curious about how much range there is for gender diversity to increase.