What I Learned Today

Emoticons, by their nature, always seemed language-independent to me. Sure, you might debate whether :) or :-) is a better representation, but a smile is a smile, no matter what language the surrounding text might be, right?

Guess not!

Thanks to Ravenous Rob, today I learned that Japanese emailers and webmasters and bloggers have their own Japanese-style emoticons. They are differentiated from the “Western style” emoticons (as Wikipedia’s entry on emoticons calls them) by their orientation. Where we Westerners are used to rotating our heads 90 degrees to the left to puzzle out :) or :P or even >:-O, Japanese people look their emoticons straight on: (^_^) or (0_<) or (~.~). See, you even get cheek lines! The effect is very anime-esque, with the enlarged eyes and round head. While I had actually encountered ;_; before (to indicate "crying in pain because your joke was so bad"), I had not picked up on its Asian overtones. Or undertones. In fact, it still looks like semicolon-underscore-semicolon to me, but perhaps with some practice (>_<) I can learn (O_O) to see the faces, not the trees (@_@). One last fun tidbit from the Wikipedia entry:

The creator of the original ASCII emoticons :-) and :-(, with a specific suggestion that they be used to express emotion, was Scott Fahlman; the text of his original proposal, posted to the Carnegie Mellon University computer science general board on 19 September 1982 (11:44), was considered lost for a long time. It was however recovered twenty years later by Jeff Baird, from old backup tapes.[6]

19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman :-)
From: Scott E Fahlman (Fahlman at Cmu-20c)

I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:

:-)

Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark
things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use

:-(

Yes, this Scott Fahlman, who even devotes a page to the story of the smiley.

A word to the wise: WordPress (the software that manages all of the content you see herein) comes with a plugin (wp-cache) that’s activated by default. What this means is that the system does server-side caching of the site content, only giving you the latest version if you edit a post or if 3600 seconds (one hour!) elapse since the last time that page was refreshed. This probably works fine for individual posts, but it doesn’t work at all if you edit the theme/framework files… which aren’t tracked in the same way. (I spent a good deal of time this evening tweaking the site to add the sidebar content (at left) that shows the last few books I read, and I was mystified as to why my changes weren’t showing up.)

So here’s my solution:

Deactivate the caching while I’m editing, then turn it back on when I’m done. Because caching is good, since it helps the pages load faster for visitors like you, gentle reader. When it’s on, I have it set down to 5 minutes before the cache expires and it will reload the latest version. If you experience any problems with this, let me know in a comment.

This is basic stuff. Really basic stuff. Something I’ve probably heard a hundred times, phrased in different ways. But today, in my weekly Intermediate Foxtrot class at Caltech, I think I finally learned something about correct posture and connection, in the sense of converting the words into body stance and body memory. Here’s the idea:

When dancing a Standard dance like foxtrot (or waltz or quickstep), you have connection through your arms (frame), but more importantly, you connect with your torsos, slightly offset so that the right sides of the fronts of your torsos are touching. Because it is difficult (at first) to try to move with another person that close to you, it is common for the follower to arch her back, trying to maintain the ribcage-to-ribcage connection while still getting her legs out of the way as the leader moves forward. I’d been told by one dance instructor to imagine that my body hinged at the breastbone, and that my legs were long extensions behind me — I think this just encouraged me to arch my back more, to maintain that rib-high connection. But in my current class, the instructor showed me that a better connection point is a bit lower, which permits you to keep your pelvis straight (not rolled forward as you arch your back) and permits your upper body to achieve that gorgeous lean-out — ironically, by arching the back less, you create the illusion of it arching more. This also takes a lot of pressure off of your back. She also emphasizes a lot of extension upwards, maintaining a strong straight line up through your spine.

The picture at right (from www.dancesport.uk.com) was the best example I could find by googling (too bad it’s low-res). But looking at it now, it seems obvious; her pelvis is totally straight, and it’s just her shoulders and her head that are titled back. Not that this is easy to do (the head is heavier than you expect!), but at least it doesn’t hurt your back!

I have been working on this for the past few classes, and today it actually seemed to be working. I left class in the usual overwhelmingly positive mood it gives me, and with the added bonus that my lower back didn’t ache at all. I’ve gotten used to it being a little achey after a good bit of Standard dancing, mainly because I couldn’t figure out how to dance without arching my back. But today I must have finally done it!

Today I finished the chapter on vegetables in “What Einstein Told His Cook 2”. One of the tidbits that stuck with me was the fact that (red) roses and violets both have the same pigment; it’s an anthocyanin that, like litmus paper, responds to pH with a color indicator. Rose petals are slightly acidic, so the pigment shows up as red, while violets are slightly alkaline and therefore appear blue. (Gosh, I shouldn’t have bothered buying that 100-pack of pH indicator paper; I’ve got 11 rose bushes outside!)

Apparently, the presence of anthocyanin also explains why the new growth on a rosebush is tinted red, but the older leaves are green; new growth that hasn’t yet begun producing chlorophyll is vulnerable to radiation from the sun, so extra anthocyanin is produced in the meantime, which protects it from UV.

Now I’m wondering: if I take a violet petal and drop it in some vinegar, will it turn red? Can I dye my roses with household chemicals? My roses are actually white, so no telling what would happen in different pH conditions (maybe nothing; the white could mean that they lack anthocyanin). I hear an experiment begging to be performed this weekend…

Edit: I may have to wait on this; I forgot that I’d just pruned all of my rose bushes down into skeletal stumps of themselves, with no blooms to be had.

Courtesy of lifehacker, today I learned how to reopen the last tab I closed in Firefox. Perfect for those overly zealous command-W moments! And how do you do it? Why, command-shift-T! Nicely cognitively adjacent to command-T, which opens a new (blank) tab. (Bonus: their article also mentions command-L, which moves focus to the address bar — I didn’t know that one either. Hurray, yet another click I don’t have to make any more!)