If I were Pope Gregory’s advisor, I’d urge this: all months to have 30 days until the first (or last) of some month falls on a solstice or equinox; thereafter, alternate 30, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31, 30, 30¼.

Unrelated link: Questioning 7/4

Friday I happened to pass a bookstore (believe it or not!) and found A Gateway to Sindarin by David Salo. It’s a few years old now; I wonder how I missed it.

After overviews of the history and writing systems, there’s a list of 248 sound-shifts from proto-Elvish to Common Eldarin to Lindarin (Telerin) to Old Sindarin to Middle Sindarin to Classical Sindarin to the Third Age and various dialects. Wow. The accedence paradigms are surprisingly complete, though Salo remarks that no second-person verb endings are attested (he used a reasonable analogy to invent them).

Criticisms: Breaking up the word list into common words and three lists of proper nouns (echoing the index to LotR) is a strange choice. I would like to see some discussion of Salo’s methodology.

— My handle on Wikipedia and a few other places is Tamfang, intended to mean copper beard. The first root is attested only (so far as I know) in an early version of The Chaining of Melko. The canonical words for copper (according to Salo) are urun (metal) and rust (color), but these don’t appeal to me; so I postulate that a form related to tambe survived in some language east of the Misty Mountains.

I had forgotten, until Mike Linksvayer reminded me, that Users must be registered and logged in to comment was switched on. Akismet seems to do a good job of catching spam, so I’ve turned off the registration requirement.

Can’t sleep.

I’ll probably delete this post later, but meanwhile — If anyone is still reading this pathetic drivel, do me a favor and let me know.

I don’t know for sure that such attention would help this mood any, but it can’t hurt.

Heard on KDFC:

Don’t miss this critically acclaimed production that epitomizes the pure classicism that defined the romantic ballets.

Er, isn’t Romanticism generally distinguished from “pure classicism”?

Crimson Dark is a space adventure strip, with occasional allusions to Firefly so it can’t be all bad. It’s mostly rendered in Cinema 4D, with details like clothing added by hand. Dude’s insane.

For years I’ve wished to learn enough hyperbolic geometry to write a simple ray-tracer. Recently a post on comp.graphics.algorithms advised me to look up Euclidean and Non-Euclidean Geometry by Patrick J. Ryan; I was pleased to find that its subtitle is An Analytic Approach. Indeed it gives most of what I was looking for; though it relies so much on cross products that extending from two dimensions to three may be difficult.