"You were doing it wrong"

That's the title of a thread at AskMetafilter that has been keeping me entertained for days. The initial question:

What in life did it take you a surprisingly long time to realize you've been doing wrong all along?

"Crap, I've been doing it wrong." We've all had those sudden epiphanies where we realize we've been doing something incorrectly, ineffectively or just suboptimally our whole lives, in domains from handicraft to human relations to technical stuff to personal grooming. What have you spent large portions of your life doing wrong?

The first answer: "Tying my shoes." Many people have problems with words such as segue and epitome. Another answer up near the top is "It took me until adulthood to realize that courage, tenacity, and hard work get you a lot farther than plain old smartness." So there are all kinds of things posted here. I was pleased to discover howjsay dot com, an English dictionary of pronunciations. Just pronunciations, no definitions, and it is English, so "balmy" is pronounced as "barmy," and so forth. Another discovery would be this video, demonstrating how to tell when the pan is hot enough.



That video is extracted from a post at Houseboat Eats which explains the whole thing much more fully.

Then there's this mirror trick:

Mirrors are a recurring theme in the thread.

I learned of this from Prof. Althouse, who learned of it from her son John Althouse Cohen.

Metafilter mods are not pleased with the thread and might have killed it, if they had not been distracted, as is revealed in another thread called Doing it right.

Lynn has a few odd links

Right here. Don't miss the Three Redneck Tenors.

Don't get comfortable in your own home, in Virginia

You never know who might be looking in the window.

Coffee-making naked guy rebuffed by exposure charge

It happened at 5:30 a.m. Monday.

Channel 5 reports the woman and 7-year-old boy who saw him naked apparently had cut through Williamson's front yard from a nearby path.

Williamson, 29, says he didn't know anyone could see him.

"If I stood and seemed comfortable in my kitchen, it's natural. It's my kitchen," Williamson tells Channel 5.

Williamson says his roommates were not home when he came into the kitchen and made his coffee.

Fairfax County Police say they believed Williamson wanted to be seen naked by the public.

Williamson, a father of a 5-year old girl, said he plans to fight the charge.

Maybe a countercharge of trespassing or unlawful entry would be in order.

Thanks to Glenn Reynolds.

Update. Another update.

And the verdict: Convicted! Wrongly, IMHO, FWIW.

I hope the final update, April 7, 2010: Not guilty! Story, via Althouse. Looks like it cost him plenty, though: his lawyer "said Williamson's legal bills would probably wind up being between $10,000 and $15,000."

Gleanings

More on the Antikythera Mechanism, including a working model. The 76-year cycle sounds like Halley's Comet. Or can you think of something else with that periodicity?

The Modern Drunkard interview with Gary Shteyngart. Lotsa vodka, a little caviar, some reflections on the condition of Russia, literature and the writing life (via).

Frozen bubbles. Via Althouse, who calls it a "cool photography stunt." Cool? Below freezing, I'd say!

Self-handicapping excuse artisans. "I coulda been a contenda." If all the if-only's were laid end to end … (via)

Wreck of the bark Trajan discovered in Newport harbor.

Faggots in the raw. (SFW!)

UFO sighting in Cumbria, UK. Turns out to be Chinese lantern balloons, released at a wedding at this hotel. Nice hotel!

Morris dancing in danger of extinction? Probably not just yet.

Speaking of dancing, in Finland they spell YMCA with a NMKY (via Althouse commenter jdeeripper).

That there Google can be quick

I did not expect to see this:


at all, certainly not so quick.

What a kick!
Top o' the Google to you, Rachel Lucas. I couldn't have done it without you.

The link is to the post right before this one. I won't name it here; the screenshot shows quite enough wackiness for one day!

My "Links to this post" has not worked for a year, though. Oh, what do I want, caviar? Sorry. Room service sent all the caviar up to the Obama suite.

Update: There might be some caviar left after all. It seems that story was fake. Don't believe everything you read in the papers! Only on the Internet are all facts guaranteed!

The Rather Difficult Font Game

That's the name of it: The Rather Difficult Font Game. It's a game, with fonts. Faces, actually, but even the pros don't insist on the distinction much any more. At the end you get a score. Mine was 28. If I try it again, it will probably be something different. By way of Making Light.

Rolling down a hill in a giant inflatable ball

That ball had better be inflated, not just inflatable. "Zorb is the sport of rolling down a hill inside a giant inflatable ball and where New Zealand, once again leads the world in stupid things to do while you're on a vacation." Now available in the USA near Dollywood, Pigeon Forge, TN. Mentioned because of the question that arose while watching the current Toyota Sequoia commercial, "What in the world are those people doing?"

Much more, of course, at Wikipedia. Here's a video from National Geographic.

Whipped ocean, or "Cappucino coast"

In email, an environmental oddity in Australia. This seems to be making the rounds. I'll link to what seems to be the original in the Daily Mail because the pictures are nice and big.

Cappuccino Coast: The day the Pacific was whipped up into an ocean of froth
By RICHARD SHEARS - Last updated at 08:27am on 28th August 2007

It was as if someone had poured tons of coffee and milk into the ocean, then switched on a giant blender.

Suddenly the shoreline north of Sydney were transformed into the Cappuccino Coast.

Foam swallowed an entire beach and half the nearby buildings, including the local lifeguards' centre, in a freak display of nature at Yamba in New South Wales.

Anybody who spends time near water has seen small amounts of this stuff, often lying on the beach at low tide. This much of it at once, crikey! Must be some kind of a record!

Update: Some searchers seem to think this story is a fake. I was not there, so I can't testify, but there is some discussion here, which leads indirectly to this. So, not only was it real, it happened again in January '08!

Is music encoded in da Vinci's Last Supper?

From CNN:

Italian musician uncovers hidden music in Da Vinci's 'Last Supper'

ROME, Italy (AP) -- It's a new Da Vinci code, but this time it could be for real.

A laptop screen shows musical notes encoded in Leonardo Da Vinci's "Last Supper."

An Italian musician and computer technician claims to have uncovered musical notes encoded in Leonardo Da Vinci's "Last Supper," raising the possibility that the Renaissance genius might have left behind a somber composition to accompany the scene depicted in the 15th-century wall painting.

"It sounds like a requiem," Giovanni Maria Pala said. "It's like a soundtrack that emphasizes the passion of Jesus."

Painted from 1494 to 1498 in Milan's Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, the "Last Supper" vividly depicts a key moment in the Gospel narrative: Jesus' last meal with the 12 Apostles before his arrest and crucifixion, and the shock of Christ's followers as they learn that one of them is about to betray him.

Pala, a 45-year-old musician who lives near the southern Italian city of Lecce, began studying Leonardo's painting in 2003, after hearing on a news program that researchers believed the artist and inventor had hidden a musical composition in the work.

"Afterward, I didn't hear anything more about it," he said in an interview with The Associated Press. "As a musician, I wanted to dig deeper."

In a book released Friday in Italy, Pala explains how he took elements of the painting that have symbolic value in Christian theology and interpreted them as musical clues.

Pala first saw that by drawing the five lines of a musical staff across the painting, the loaves of bread on the table as well as the hands of Jesus and the Apostles could each represent a musical note.

This fit the relation in Christian symbolism between the bread, representing the body of Christ, and the hands, which are used to bless the food, he said. But the notes made no sense musically until Pala realized that the score had to be read from right to left, following Leonardo's particular writing style.

In his book -- "La Musica Celata" ("The Hidden Music") -- Pala also describes how he found what he says are other clues in the painting that reveal the slow rhythm of the composition and the duration of each note.

The result is a 40-second "hymn to God" that Pala said sounds best on a pipe organ, the instrument most commonly used in Leonardo's time for spiritual music. A short segment taken from a CD of the piece contained a Bach-like passage played on the organ. The tempo was almost painfully slow but musical.

You'd have to play it slow, to make it last 40 seconds. I suspect we have a case of the Law of Fives here, but maybe I've just seen too many conspiracy theories.

From Glenn Reynolds.

Identifying the unidentified

And while I'm linking to Jim Macdonald at Making Light, I must link his post about Alien Abduction: Betty & Barney Hill.

Today, this very day, forty-six years ago, Betty and Barney Hill drove down U.S. 3, right past my house and into history. They were about to become Patient Zero for Alien Abductions with Weird Medical Experiments, Missing Time, and Big-Eyed Extraterrestrials. The first and (we are told) best documented case of Alien Abduction Evah. There was a book. There was a made-for-TV movie. Magazine articles. Mentions in other books. Close Encounters of the Third Kind. X-Files.

So what happened out on Route 3?

Jim, who lives in the area, retraces the route, and reveals all.

Clear vision and chain reactions, and a sip of wine

From P.J. Doland, a NY Times Magazine article on highway signage and how a typeface evolves; and a pleasant timewaster, Boomshine. Also: how having more advice makes it worse, not better: How to Ruin a Web Design. Aaand furthermore, something significant about wine, and the making thereof: Two Buck Chuck takes a bite out of Napa.

Little Toot, mighty cute

In case you should see this tiny tugboat in the harbor at Greenport, NY, and wonder about it, here's the story.

Captain Nemo, your ship is here

Instapundit links to this, which led me to Google around a bit and find this: Wow, it's the Nautilus! (That's a very large jpg.) Or close enough. More streamlined, with more viewports. Only $80 million or so. I suppose one could install a pipe organ.

Rubber duckies sailing around the world

This is amazing:

Thousands of rubber ducks to land on British shores after 15 year journey

They were toys destined only to bob up and down in nothing bigger than a child's bath - but so far they have floated halfway around the world.

The armada of 29,000 plastic yellow ducks, blue turtles and green frogs broke free from a cargo ship 15 years ago.

Since then they have travelled 17,000 miles, floating over the site where the Titanic sank, landing in Hawaii and even spending years frozen in an Arctic ice pack.

And now they are heading straight for Britain. At some point this summer they are expected to be spotted on beaches in South-West England.

Found in Jerry Pournelle's mail.

That post a while back about John Kessel's musical, Faustfeathers, led me to an anthology called Feeling Very Strange. I'm about half-way through it now. I don't feel any different …

.ubɐʇɥ,ɟ ɐı ǝǝɟɟoɔ ǝ1ʇʇı1 ɐ ǝqʎɐɯ 'ɥbnoɥʇ ʇsɐɟʞɐǝɹq ɹoɟ ʞɐǝɹq oʇ ǝʌɐɥ ı

*

When LOLCats don't quite satisfy

Then u can has something a little deeper. Philolsophers!


One more, to carry on with the critters theme:


Lest this get completely out of hand, I'll just link to a couple more that I think are highlights, and, y'know, relatively comprehensible: the gestalt-shifting lolduckrabbit, and the Athenian philosophers with their invisible basketballs.

Thanks to Ann Althouse, who has interesting comments, Jeremy Bentham in the cupboard (or Auto-Icon, if you must), and links to "No soap, radio." Definitely worthwhile if you enjoy jokes like

"How many surrealists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?"
"Fish."

LOL!

The terrible secret of wi-fi

is revealed! OMG! Andrea, thank you for alerting the world to this grave danger. I shall pass the message along by fwd-ing it to everyone in my address book.

No, I won't. But the other thing I saw in the email yesterday, about cell phones and ear cancer, or was it brain cancer, that's getting passed on, for sure!

Snakes almost on a plane

They just barely missed their flight. Well, now, life is funny that way; having just posted that link to one of Steven den Beste's old posts, I thought I would see what he was currently writing about, and found that he had linked to this:

Cairo Airport Customs Seize Egyptian Trying to Smuggle 700 Live Snakes on Plane

CAIRO, Egypt — Customs officers at Cairo's airport on Thursday detained a man bound for Saudi Arabia who was trying to smuggle 700 live snakes on a plane, airport authorities said.

The officers were stunned when a passenger, identified as Yahia Rahim Tulba, after being asked to open his carry-on bag, told them it contained live snakes.

Tulba opened his bag to show the snakes to the police and asked the officers, who held a safe distance, not to come close. Among the various snakes, hidden in small cloth sacks, were two poisonous cobras.

The Egyptian said he had hoped to sell the snakes in Saudi Arabia. Police confiscated the snakes and turned Tulba over to the prosecutor's office, accusing him of violating export laws and endangering the lives of other passengers.

According to the customs officials, Tulba claimed the snakes are wanted by Saudis who display them in glass jars in shops, keep them as pets or sell them to research centers.

The value of the snakes was not immediately known.

Oh my sweet Synchronicity L. Jackson!

World's oldest family business sold

1428 years is a pretty good run.

The world's oldest continuously operating family business ended its impressive run last year. Japanese temple builder Kongo Gumi, in operation under the founders' descendants since 578, succumbed to excess debt and an unfavorable business climate in 2006.… Two factors were primarily responsible. First, during the 1980s bubble economy in Japan, the company borrowed heavily to invest in real estate. After the bubble burst in the 1992-93 recession, the assets secured by Kongo Gumi's debt shrank in value. Second, social changes in Japan brought about declining contributions to temples. As a result, demand for Kongo Gumi's temple-building services dropped sharply beginning in 1998.

Just another real estate bubble victim.
From Jerry Pournelle's mail.

Coney Island of the mind

Not Ferlinghetti. Though he is mentioned.



Why does this make me think of Joni Mitchell? "The painted ponies go up and down." Is that it?