Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

You cannot love your country only when you win.

Stand up, dammit!

Democracy is not a spectator sport.

“Can i answer the question? No you can not!”

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

Trump should be leading, not lying.

This really is a full service blog.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

To the privileged, equality seems like oppression.

The unpunished coup was a training exercise.

You know he’s going to shit a cat.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

Petty moves from a petty man.

Hi god, it’s us. Thanks a heap, you’re having a great week and it’s only Thursday!

They are not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

Not rolling over. fuck you, make me.

Fear or fury? The choice is ours.

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

This chaos was totally avoidable.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

Just because you believe it, that does not make it true.

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Reader Interactions

92Comments

  4. 4.

    jl

    Thanks for posting the report form. Looks like a great resource but I don’t need it myself.
    I go to the Balloon-Juice Blog comment section which takes me through the process automatically, step-by-step. That thing is fool proof.

  7. 7.

    Mnemosyne

    So, academics, if you included your email address in a journal article, is it okay for random weirdos like myself to email you with a question about said article?

  9. 9.

    Mnemosyne

    @efgoldman:

    I actually clicked on the link and it was basically a reporter calling up a bunch of expensive wedding vendors and asking what their highest-priced option was. No indication that Chelsea actually used any of those vendors — in fact, she probably didn’t since they were willing to go on the record to brag about how awesome they are.

  10. 10.

    Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class

    Finally got done staining and hanging new cabinet doors in the great room. Tomorrow am, I put together a buffet, two Dining room chairs, shop tablecloths and placemats, pay for mani pedi for both and begin cooking Orthodox Easter dinner. At midnight, there’s 4 hours of liturgy, and two of three come over Sunday, along with my parents.

  11. 11.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Mnemosyne: Yes, but… Usually you should start with the primary corresponding author. And make sure you put the title of the article in the subject line. I’m almost afraid to ask what article?

  16. 16.

    seaboogie

    If you’ve ever had hemorrhoids or been constipated, reading the word “butthurt” over and over is far from amusing.

  18. 18.

    Mnemosyne

    @efgoldman:

    Aw, man …

    @Adam L Silverman:

    There’s only one author. It’s an article about the history of irregular marriage in Scotland, and I have a question about a fictional situation that my characters may get into. (Basically, before the start of formal registration in 1855, how did one regularize/document an irregular marriage?)

  20. 20.

    jl

    @Mnemosyne:

    ” So, academics, if you included your email address in a journal article, is it okay for random weirdos like myself to email you with a question about said article? ”

    Yes, that is OK. They should answer straightforward questions.

    Good idea to avoid phrase like “Isn’t it true that…” and or prefaces arguing how the work supports a pet theory of yours, or the work is a pile of garbage, and avoid signaling your foreknowledge that they will unable to answer a simple question which debunks everything they have done, or that you have a knowledge of their ulterior motives for writing the research.

    On the other hand, questions that are too simple and lack context, like “But what’s the BASELINE!!??” or “Doesn’t everyone know that all lab rats get cancer, right!!??” signal you are working on some dumb campaign by an interest group.

  21. 21.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Mnemosyne: Its not Professor Catriona MacDonald from the University of Strathclyde (or wherever she’s teaching these days), is it?* If so, tell her you’re a friend of mine and give her my best. If its someone else, its fine. The reason their email addresses are there is so people can ask them questions. He or she will likely be flattered that someone read his/her article that didn’t have to do so and then wanted to ask a question about it. Just remember we’re coming up on the end of semester in most places, so you might not hear back right away.

    * Friend from grad school.

  23. 23.

    jl

    @Mnemosyne: Mr. Silverman gave you some very sound advice. I think you have an interesting question that might be interesting to the author. Let us know what happens, please.

  27. 27.

    Redshift

    @Major Major Major Major:

    LiveJournal post?

    It used to be a major personal blogging platform, with some proto Facebook-type features before Facebook was an 800lb gorilla. Then it got bought by a Russian company, and became (in addition) a major platform for dissidents, which meant (surprise!) it got hit with frequent hacking attacks and was down a lot, so most non-Russians went elsewhere. George RR Martin’s blog is still on LiveJournal, though.

    It was a good platform, and I think most who were on it have fond memories. It was the only place I ever maintained a blog of my own.

  28. 28.

    Mnemosyne

    @Adam L Silverman:

    Eleanor Gordon from the University of Glasgow. “Irregular Marriage: Myth and Reality,” from Journal of Social History, 11/4/2013. I’ll probably see if I can track down some of the books she references as well.

  33. 33.

    jl

    @Adam L Silverman: I wanted to keep the discussion at a certain level of formality, as an example to Mnemosyne when she wrote the academician. But I blew it, I should have typed ‘Dear Mr. Doctor Professor’, insead of ‘Mr.’ I am a slob.

  35. 35.

    Adam L Silverman

    @efgoldman: Both were good games. This afternoon I thought that the Sharks and Blues would be the teams to beat in the West.

  39. 39.

    Adam L Silverman

    The hockey is over for the moment. So I’m to bed. You all have a good whatever it is you’re going to do at this hour in your respective time zones. Catch you on the flip!

  41. 41.

    TaMara (HFG)

    I reluctantly saw Purple Rain tonight. I didn’t want to see it because I was afraid it wouldn’t hold up. I was wrong. Prince deserved all the success he achieved, the genius was all right there in that film. Three things I didn’t remember from so long ago that stood out tonight: Prince was mesmerizing. The movie doesn’t end with Purple Rain, there is an entire joyous concert after that song. And the credits end with these words: May u live 2 see the dawn.

    I’m sure I didn’t know that because when we originally saw the movie, we took the T into town and like Cinderella if you stayed out past midnight, your chariot turned into a pumpkin and you were stranded as the T had stopped running. So we probably booked it out before the music and the T stopped.

  43. 43.

    divF

    @Mnemosyne: Yes. I can’t guarantee I will answer, though.

    @Mnemosyne:
    A question that specific and detailed, I would try to answer, if in no other way with a reference or a link.

  44. 44.

    Redshift

    @Major Major Major Major:

    I know what LiveJournal is, silly. It was just weird seeing it in the embedded document on such a cutting-edge news source as Balloon-Juice.

    Hey, how was I to know? To me, it’s appearance indicated the form was a pretty old joke. If so, I guess I didn’t know that “butthurt” was in common usage that far back.

  45. 45.

    Mnemosyne

    @Adam L Silverman:

    I’ll have to check WorldCat and see if any local libraries have it. The Scotland/England marriage divide is interesting because Scotland maintained a tradition of marriage by mutual declaration in parallel with church marriage while England pretty much only had church marriage. (Hence, Gretna Green, a favorite romance novel plot device.) That’s one of the reasons that Scotland’s marriage laws weren’t modernized until the 1930s — they didn’t want to lose that tradition of marriage-by-declaration that didn’t require a minister or priest.

  46. 46.

    Mnemosyne

    @divF:

    There may not be a definitive answer due to gaps in the records, but a plausible answer that won’t induce potato rage in most readers would be good enough for me. Plus I just like to know how things worked.

  48. 48.

    SoupCatcher

    @BillinGlendaleCA: Nice!

    Is that Brand Boulevard?

    There’s a bunch of fun vestiges of the old Pacific Electric lines scattered through Glendale. One of my favorites is at the intersection of Brand and Mountain where the end of the line used to be. (Bottom two picts on the page).

    I also like the old bridge pilings, stairs, etc. on the hill side of Riverside as it parallels the 5 through Silver Lake right across from Rick’s.

  49. 49.

    Anne Laurie

    @Redshift:

    I guess I didn’t know that “butthurt” was in common usage that far back.

    Having known my share of programmers, I suspect that ‘butthurt’ was invented during the punchcard days. The only thing some of those guys enjoyed more than being loudly butthurt about some tiny flaw in their universe was accusing every other programmer of suffering from butthurt. And I was only involved as a bystander!

  52. 52.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    @SoupCatcher: Yup, that’s Brand; near where In-n-Out is now. I didn’t even need to look at the pics, I know where that is, I’ve take some pics from there. Are you talking about the rail bridge pilings near Fletcher? There’s also the remains of the bridge across the river by the Los Feliz bridge.

  53. 53.

    NotMax

    Enjoying a weird dinner just now.

    Pulled pork barbecue on seeded rye sandwiches accompanied by pickled garlicky Brussels sprouts from a jar found lurking in the recesses of the icebox.

  54. 54.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    @Anne Laurie: Gawd, punchcards. You could always tell the CS majors when I was in college, they’d be carrying these boxes around campus. Well, until they’d drop them and the Santa Ana’s would pick up the cards and carry them around campus. Oh, the card printers never had usable ribbons so you couldn’t actually tell what was on the card so: if you could actually find the all the card, you’d actually have to run them though a reader to get a listing to get the cards back in the proper order.

  56. 56.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    @SoupCatcher:

    Yeah. The old Fletcher Street bridge (looking towards Atwater).

    Kind of weird not seeing the 5 in the pic.

    I’m familiar with the one in La Crescenta(we used to live in Montrose). We have 2 In-n-Outs, one in the Galleria on Brand and the other on Harvey by Glendale Adventist.

  57. 57.

    NotMax

    @BillinGlendaleCA

    Temperamental tractor feed printers were no picnic either.

    Mainframe computer room back in college days also had a decollator machine that never did work properly. Expensive dust collector, that one was.

  58. 58.

    SoupCatcher

    @BillinGlendaleCA:

    I’m familiar with the one in La Crescenta(we used to live in Montrose). We have 2 In-n-Outs, one in the Galleria on Brand and the other on Harvey by Glendale Adventist.

    That one came too late to do me any good. I went to school at Glendale Academy (and Elementary before that) and went right past that location every single day, but graduated before it went in.

  59. 59.

    Origuy

    @BillinGlendaleCA: I was a CS major at Illinois in the 70s. The second class for majors was data structures; we had to write a program in Pascal and then the same program in assembler. The system we used was a DEC PDP11 with a card reader and line printer, off in a room by itself. The computer building doors locked at midnight, but they’d let you stay there all night. However, the keypunch room also was locked at midnight. People who wanted to fix their programs after that would have pre-made cards with things like semicolons, parentheses, etc. to fix common bugs. Some people got good with Xacto knives. One night we got tired of this and just before midnight four of us liberated a keypunch and took it to our computer room. The campus police were called but nobody would point fingers.

  61. 61.

    Just One More Canuck

    @Mnemosyne: I did just that on Thursday. Emailed the author of a journal article (in this case, Criminology) and got a detailed, thorough and friendly response within hours

  63. 63.

    JCT

    @BillinGlendaleCA: Yup, my first year at Cal all my CS courses were on punchcards – ah, Fortran. Best part was launching g your stacks off the dorm balconies at the end of the quarter.

  68. 68.

    I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet

    @Mnemosyne: As others have said, she’ll probably appreciate your interest.

    There was an article/interview in NutritionAction with Martijn Katan (an emeritus prof in the Netherlands) on cholesterol and the like. I sent him some brief questions (specifically about the latest story here that carbs and sugars are worse than fats), explained my interest, etc. He wrote a nice reply back with a journal article with much more detail about the science and his view of the popular diet fads. It was quite worthwhile.

    Good luck.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  69. 69.

    dnfree

    Where is the form I can use to complain if I find the term “butthurt” offensive? It’s right up there with “douchebag” for me, for similar reasons. Isn’t there a politically correct alternative?

  70. 70.

    different-church-lady

    @dnfree: Yesterday I was informed of the origin of “Doing you a solid.” I shall no longer be flinging that phrase around lightly.

  71. 71.

    dnfree

    As for all you old-time computer people whining about punch card days, where I went to school the first computer (for the whole university) did not even have a disk drive. No disk drive. None. It had punch cards in and punch cards out. Then you could print the punch card result using unit record equipment (like maybe an IBM 407 or 409, if I recall correctly).

    So you wrote your program, keypunched it, ran it through the computer behind the Fortran II preprocessor, took the intermediate output and ran that through the computer with the Fortran II compiler, and then took that output (the compiled program) and ran that through the computer with the Fortran processor deck and subroutines.

    Thanks for reminding me. Here’s a link about the IBM 1620 computer in case you think I”m making this up.

    www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/mainframe/mainframe_PP1620.html

  72. 72.

    I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet

    @BillinGlendaleCA: Maybe it’s too early in the morning, but am I reading this right?

    … you’d actually have to run them though a reader to get a listing to get the cards back in the proper order.

    You guys and gals didn’t know the “trick” of drawing a diagonal line across the top of the c a r d stack so that you could visually put them back into o r d e r quickly?!?

    I used a c a r d punch in college to “program” a shared plotter at the main computer facility to make graphs of GDP data trends, “index of leading economic indicator” trends, etc., for a prof in the business school. That was fun – work for an hour or two, submit the job, come back a few hours later to find the job had bombed (usually due to the x-axis being 50 feet long due to a scaling offset error or something…) “We had to abort the job because the plotter was going nuts spitting out paper from the roll…”

    Ah, good times. :-/

    Cheers,
    Scott.
    (Who has tried half a dozen times to post this, but it always disappeared…)

  73. 73.

    I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet

    @BillinGlendaleCA: You guys and gals didn’t know about the “trick” of drawing a diagonal line across the top of the stack so that you could quickly put them back in the correct order?!?

    ;-)

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  74. 74.

    dnfree

    @I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:

    Or you could have a keypunch drum (program) card that would automatically put a sequence number in columns 72-80 (usually) of the card, and run the deck through a sorter. (All the specialized machines that handled cards were collectively referred to as unit record equipment.)

  75. 75.

    I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet

    @dnfree: Ah, but if the ribbon was dry, then you’d have the same problem Bill mentioned – not being able to read the text. The pros could read the rectangular holes like a second language, but the diagonal line was pretty quick and easy.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  76. 76.

    Matt McIrvin

    @efgoldman: I still have a LiveJournal, which is where I put long blog posts when I have some hankering to write them. (I’m more publicly active on Google+, which is sort of a rump platform itself now, but G+ and Facebook aren’t good for writing at length.)

  77. 77.

    different-church-lady

    Punchcards! Luxury! Every day we got up half an hour before we went to bed, cut down our own trees and beat them into pulp for our punch TAPE!

    I think I still have some BASIC programs coiled up in the attic somewhere.

  79. 79.

    dnfree

    @I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:

    The sequence number was punched into those columns and the sorter read the actual holes and sorted the cards accordingly. When you first wrote your program you’d set it to number for instance by 100’s, so then if you had to add cards you could use the tens and ones positions so they’d sort correctly. This probably wasn’t done for one-time programs but it was certainly the case for critical card decks like the Fortran compiler. Your diagonal-line method would be great for large decks!

  80. 80.

    dnfree

    @different-church-lady:

    Wow! I remember writing a program in 1966 (summer job, that’s why I remember the year) to read a kind of punch tape we received that had seven holes across and convert it into a different code that had five holes across. And then I think someone actually had to cut the blank columns off the seven-hole tape so that five-hole reader could process it. Never had to make my own tape, though.

  81. 81.

    I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet

    @dnfree: Ah, of course there would be an actual card sorting machine. D’oh! I don’t recall ever using one of those in college or grad school (if they had one). I just used card decks to program plotters – not actually do any real programming.

    In grad school the department had a huge Calcomp flatbed plotter (about the 10x the size of an air-hockey table). Impressive technology. It was run by an ancient IBM machine. Along the back wall of the computer facility there was a huge old analog computer. Nobody used it when I was there, but apparently it had some capabilities that would have been hard to duplicate in digital machines at the time (before the mid-80s).

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  82. 82.

    Ruckus

    @different-church-lady:
    Ahh punch tape. Brings back memories. Not good ones mind you. Our machines ran on punch tape in the early days. Sit at the teletype and punch the tape, read it to make sure you got it right so you didn’t crash the machine, each machining cycle the tape had to be read so you hoped it didn’t break and…. crash the machine. All of this was after building the program with a slide rule and maths and without any way to see if it was right before putting it in the machine to hopefully not crash it. Early computer controlled machining had everything but the computer.

  85. 85.

    dnfree

    @Matt McIrvin:

    I wish I could remember what the two kinds of code were called! I only remember that one was overnighted in to our location from a production facility elsewhere, and our machine didn’t read either that code or that size of paper tape.

    Here’s another fun memory–this was an NCR computer, which I don’t think lasted long. Instead of having a disk, it had racks of magnetic cards hanging from numerous metal pins. When a particular bit of data was needed, the computer would identify which magnetic card to fetch, and would retract the pins required to drop that card and only that card, which would then wrap around a quickly revolving drum to be read, and then sucked back up to hang with the other cards. Many flaws with this process can no doubt be identified, the worst of which was the dreaded “double drop”, in which two cards wrapped around the drum and were both destroyed in the process, with no way to really identify what data you had lost.

  86. 86.

    J R in WV

    @jl:

    No, no, no not Mr. Silverman, Dr. Silverman… or, as he requested, informally, Adam.

    /snark ;-)

  87. 87.

    J R in WV

    @Anne Laurie:

    Had a friend/coworker who’s first IT job was a summer internship as an operator for a big chemical company’s mainframe, with punchcards. There was one guy, he told me, who every day brought them a bigger card deck, as his program slowly expanded and got more complex.

    Each day there would be added routines at the back of the card deck, and randomly inserted new cards with corrections and changes to existing routines. It was a card deck with its own drawer to hold all the hundreds (or even thousands) of cards. Then one day, when the programmer brought his now very large program / card deck up to the window where the operators would receive it to load and run the program for him, he dropped it.

    Huge pile of cards, randomly scattered across the floor!!! He knelt and began to pick up the mess.

    Steve would pause in the telling of this tale, and then said “We never saw him again!”

    In this new age, not having numbered the cards every day would be the equivalent of never having checked a program file(s) into the library system, or not having copied the program file(s) onto an external HD for safe backup, etc. I suspect this poor guy gave up his career for lack of having anticipated the potential jumbling of his card deck.

    The machinery in the computer room could have restored order to the card deck almost automatically IF the programmer had had them number the cards with punched numbers after every run.

  88. 88.

    nutella

    @I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:

    Punch card programming was more sophisticated than the way you had to program analog computers:

    1. Get one of the big square panels with rows of holes in it at and handles on either side.
    2. Get the box full of components (integrators, adders, etc.)
    3. Plug in components in the appropriate order so you end up with a series of gizmos attached to the big board with wires connecting them.
    4. Schedule time on the computer.
    5. Plug your board onto the front of it.
    6. Switch computer on and see the result of your program drawn in a very thick green line on the small screen. This shows what your program did to the input signal. That’s all you’ve got: You know what the standard input signal is and now you can see what your program did to it in the output signal.
    7. Except for one exciting option! You’ve got a potentiometer, which is a little crank that can change the input signal strength. Turn it up and see what happens to your output signal! Crank it back down to see what happens with other input levels!

    Fun and interesting but time consuming.

  89. 89.

    nutella

    @I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:

    Speaking of easier and harder programming techniques, as someone who has programmed a Calcomp flatbed plotter in FORTRAN, I am still thrilled when I see modern graphing programs. Remember when spreadsheet programs came out and everybody got excited by their calculating abilities? I was, and still am, thrilled by the plotting function. You can just select a list of numbers and press the plot button and it just plots it for you and you don’t even have to write any scaling functions!!!

  90. 90.

    Tehanu

    @BillinGlendaleCA:

    I’m familiar with the one in La Crescenta (we used to live in Montrose).

    Hubby Dearest grew up there, went to CV High and attended the First Baptist Church; his mom still lived in the family home on Ocean View until a few months before she died in 2007. We haven’t been up there for a while though. It’s become very gentrified and the people who bought her house tore it down and put up a McMansion.

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