Typing this in a non-qwerty layout on a new ergonomic keyboard. Learning the alphabet anew is of course a challenge, as is getting to know the keys themselves. My pinkies want to rest on the upper row, and the upper thumb keys are hard to reach; I think both these problems could be lessened if the palm rest were higher on the pinkie side.
When I started shopping for a new keyboard, I found quite a rabbit-hole of enthusiasts. The cool kids use home-built boards of only 34 or 36 keys.
I have been active on Wikipedia since 2005, mostly making incremental improvements – correcting punctuation here, tightening sloppy language there – with emphasis on heraldry and polytopes but wandering over a very wide range of subjects as whim takes me.
I have set the option to add to my watchlist whatever I modify. The result was a watchlist far too big for me to keep up. (Until recently there was no option to watch for a limited time.) A few months ago I began a campaign to trim that down from 18511, one by one; at the moment it’s 14876. In a year or two I should have it licked.
I have also been looking at my past participation on Talk pages, and am gratified at how often this happened: someone said “we should rename this article to …”; others pointed out disadvantages of the proposed new title; and I, coming in late, proposed yet another title, which was adopted. Among them: “Ambiguities in Chinese character simplification”, “Fossil fuels lobby”, “Growth hormone in sports”.
If I were in charge of the partition of India, I’d do it bottom-up. Starting with the smallest practical districts, ask in each one: For each of your neighbors, would you amalgamate? Do the most favored mergers (skipping any that would create enclaves), and ask again.
(It appears that I had this idea first for Iraq after US occupation and later applied it to India.)
I imagine the result as perhaps a hundred unitary states in twenty confederations, each including both new republics and old monarchies.
A new thought. Suppose that, where mergers are least popular, we make the boundary permanent and not ask again. We might end up with some C-shaped states, partly divided by an internal boundary (imagine that France’s borders include the Loire). What would that mean?
Rhino Records made a series of CDs of Billboard Top Ten songs for various years. I wonder, if you summed every sequence of 52 consecutive weeks, how many songs would show in those Rolling Top Tens that never made a calendar year Top Ten?
Being nerdy, I might suggest this to Rhino: package the Top Ten of the chart’s first 52 weeks, and thereafter make a new package each time ten songs not in a previous package have reached the Rolling Top Ten.
I have a very vague – call it abstract – memory of watching the beginning of this movie, but it seems not to exist, so I guess it was a dream.
The main character is a spy’s only daughter. Daddy (now dead) taught her to lose a tail, improvise a disguise, pick a lock, do basic forgery; normal father-daughter bonding stuff. She is now grown up with a career to which such skills are irrelevant, but in establishing scenes she practices them for fun.
She meets a girl (~14) who is running from Bad People and distrustful of the ostensibly Good institutions. She becomes the girl’s protector, and suddenly spycraft matters.
The local spooks become aware of her and are rattled. Who is this new player? Who is she working for? How long has she been here, and what else has she been up to?
A generation ago, it was reported that Readers Digest Condensed Books planned an edition of The Bible, provoking obvious jokes that it would cut three Commandments and four Apostles.
Now that I’m reading the thing, though, I do see where it could be shortened with little risk of offense.
I will likely add to this later.
In some places the repetition makes me think the tale was relayed orally for some generations before being written.
Not a week goes by when I don’t read that some trial court has “granted qualified immunity” to some criminal with a badge. That’s inaccurate. The aggressor was granted qualified immunity by the Supreme Court when it invented that doctrine in 1982.
In the popular mind, I guess that word “qualified” is taken to mean that the officer qualifies for immunity as a consequence of his office. But here it is a legal term of art meaning “conditional”, contrasting with the absolute immunity enjoyed by judges and prosecutors in their abuses of discretion.
When a trial court says to a plaintiff, “No recourse for you, because you haven’t cited a published precedent finding liability with exactly similar facts,” it applies the QI rule; but there is nothing qualified about the dismissal. (The q-word would apply if the judge were to dismiss the case without prejudice, allowing the possibility of a new trial if new facts come to light. Does that ever happen in police cases?)
When the pig is so unlucky as to violate “clearly established law”, he still has qualified immunity, which happens not to protect him for this incident.