|
This meme has provided me with much amusing reading on my friends list, and I'm curious to hear what y'all would warn people about for me. So, if I came with a warning label, what would it be?
Here's one to start you off:
Warning: attempting to scare ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) zylch by sneaking up from behind and yelling may cause bruising to the face or thorax. (As Yeti learned on Tuesday.) |
|
It still exists, but I've eye-locked it. I will rewrite it a bit and repost it, I swear. |
|
I was curious about this Correllian Nativist Tradition that I've been bumping into lately. I'm still exploring their website, but I read through 3 of their books and, though they claim some sort of descent from a Scottish Traditional Witch, everything I've read so far is pretty NeoWiccan.
One thing that I've found myself feeling pretty disturbed by is how they claim all these titles, such as the one for a former leader of their group. The website said that they don't use it very often, but here is what they posted for her:
Her Eminence the Most Reverend Krystel Neuman Highcorrell, First Priestess and Paramount High Priestess of the Correllian Tradition, Witch Queen, Elder and Arch Priestess, High Priestess and former Head of the Correll Mother Temple and the Temple of the Dancers of Shakti, Grand Deemstress and Grand Mistress of the Order of World Walkers, former Grand Mistress of the Order of Deemsters and the Order of Web Weavers, Retired
I don't feel that is being humble in the eyes of the Gods. So far as I'm concerned, the only titles I care for are pretty simple ones and represent the role that the person is taking on, their responsibilities. Priest, Priestess, Master, Mistress, Magister and so on...
I mean, heck...my friends would give me the biggest smack down in the world if I started claiming I was "Grand Mistress of the Order of World Walkers."
They may be doing some good work (I hope), but how do people here feel about titles and the usage thereof? Like I said, I feel that they are emblems of responsibility and, geesh, how could a single person take on so many and be able to fulfill all that to the best of their ability. Or is it just a matter, at that point, of trying to make a big name for yourself? Or of trying to compare yourself to royalty, who usually have loads of titles.Current Mood:  curious |
|
|
Dec. 9th, 2009 @ 01:26 pm
|
|---|
|
|
Dec. 9th, 2009 @ 02:05 pm
|
|---|
|
OH FOR FFS
The Manage Comments page only tells you about replies posted in your own journal. it WILL NOT list comments posted in reply to your comments on other people's journals or in communities. If you have replied to one of my comments in your journal, and it requires a response, please alert me either via e-mail or here. I am trying to keep up on this, but...
Hopefully this will get fixed soon. LJ is well and truly broken right now. I hates them all. |
|
Admittedly, they are already bespoke for various purposes (gifts/donations). And I still need to make sheaths. But I have three shiny knives finished, and the technology to make more.
I don't know why it is that I get on a knifemaking kick in the winter when it's godsawful cold in the garage (well, it's not too bad when I'm working on the grinder, but the buffer creates bloody wind chill on my fingers). Perhaps it has something to do with wanting to spend the nicer seasons doing something outside.
Next, I fix the shower drain so I can take a shower without standing in water! The world will appreciate this, I'm sure (as, I presume, will the other denizens of der Fractalhaus.)
Also and, the dogs are mostly indoors and minimally supervised today and being pretty well-behaved so far ::knocks on wood::. Let's hope this trend continues. |
|
NIPS is so broad overwhelming that I need some way to stay sane.
I could have spent Monday's poster session (from 7:30pm to midnight!) just looking at papers about two-sample tests (But that would be a bit extreme).
So as a matter of policy, I've been avoiding papers about:
* reinforcement learning
* vision
... which essentially means that I care about the same problems as statisticians.
It's a blacklist policy, because a whitelist policy would necessarily be more narrow-minded.
I am distinctly noticing a lack of papers about biology. |
|
|
Dec. 9th, 2009 @ 09:52 am
|
|---|
|
Here in the Twin Cities...winter storm. It took me 2 hours to get home last night, when it normally takes 15-20 minutes. This morning, the wind was blowing so hard with snow that sometimes you couldn't even see the road.
Down in Iowa, the area my family lives in is under a blizzard warning and the roads/travel is so bad that the police are saying that no one should be on the streets in Dubuque. They listed some towns hit the hardest and my family lives in several of them. I think I'll call tonight and make sure they're all okay.Current Mood:  tired |
|
Of all the millions of love songs in the world, this is the only one I've heard that I can think of that really captures what actual love is, as opposed to neediness, attraction, lust, idolatry, etc.
|
|
|
Dec. 8th, 2009 @ 03:19 pm
|
|---|
|
Who ordered snow? C'mon, fess up...
Winter Storm Warning here and Blizzard Warnings south of here. I guess Ol' Man Winter (or the Blue Hag of Winter) has finally noticed it should be cold around these parts. We're headed for those minus 10 and 20 below wind chills this week.
BrrrrCurrent Mood:  cold |
|
Tonight, Percy Liang presented an interesting poster on asymptotically optimal regularization: for a certain class of regularizers, they show how to minimize risk asymptotically.
I was somewhat surprised to learn that this optimal estimation can be interpreted as MAP estimation with a two-level hierarchical prior.
But perhaps my surprise is surprising. I seem to be behaving as if there are no procedures with good frequentist properties that can't be interpreted as Bayesian inference for some prior!
[I wish to leave it ambiguous whether this is sarcastic... as I in fact do not know what to think] |
|
**FINAL EDIT Thu Dec 10 02:15:47 UTC 2009**
So there is the final update... Over the past day we have processed around 11 million jobs out of the 12 million that were in queue at that time. Please bear in mind that over this past day, more jobs for notifications are also created. So while the queue has been dropping, we are still not fully caught up at this point, due to backlog and new jobs. We have roughly 3 million jobs still pending that involve the notification system in some manner. We had hoped we could have fully cleared the queue in a day, but unfortunately we can't clear it too quickly, since we need the rest of the site to operate normally. From our current perspective on the amount of jobs that are left in queue, and how many it has processed thus far, we believe it will take around another 8 - 12 hours to process everything.
And finally some answers to some questions:
( Read More and Get Some Answers... )Current Mood:  grumpy |
|
I just don't seem to have wordsmithing to spare at the moment, other than the previous ode to my electric viola in the previous post, which grew out of this one. So this is going to be a summary post.
Life has been very fulfilling recently, but it's been incredibly domestic. I guess this shouldn't surprise me much. We were anything but domestic for a year. The shine is not off rearranging furniture and cleaning the garage. We live in a place that is OURS again, and we can make it into what we want it to be. Sitting around the living room, when it's OUR living room, is just special.
So, without further ado, boring domestic bliss.
This weekend, we did the last of the garage cleaning and parked the cars in it. Jesus H. Christ on a pogo stick, that was awesome. There are a couple of boxes still stacked away from the cars, but they're empty dish and glass storage boxes that we're reluctant to throw out. They'll go up on shelves soon. Oh, and not to forget that we had to reinstall one of the garage door opening mechanisms, which was over 20 years old and decided to fail about the time we returned home.
As part of the cascading dependent task problem, cleaning out the garage required us to finally move the guest bed's headboard out of the garage, which required us to finally rearrange the furniture in the guest bedroom to better suit our vision of it. The tenants had arranged it in a fairly reasonable way for the teenage girl who was sleeping there, e.g. with the bed shoved into a corner. But sometimes we have actual couples sleeping in that room, and I say from personal experience that being the person who has to sleep against the wall and climb over your mate to get to the bathroom is not an enviable situation. The guest bedroom is furnished with my old, cheap, previously rental bedroom suite furniture, and we finally had to face the fact that the room is just too small to hold a bed placed for two sleepers AND the huge chest of drawers without blocking the door or the closet. So the chest of drawers is now staged in the blue room, but we're probably going to dispose of it.
Anyone local need a huge, quite serviceable chest of drawers with a mirror hutch, done in vinyl wood veneer that's not fooling anyone?
Oh, yeah, and when we were getting the room ready for wkiri's recent visit, we discovered another tenant gem: one of the sets of window blinds had been pulled down and reaffixed upside down. At first we figured that the teenager had done it, but no, it had been screwed in with an electric screwdriver so tightly that SB almost couldn't get the screws out. These are the fabric window treatments that came with the house, not the faux wood ones we recently installed in the public areas. But still.
I found two more remotes for the tankless water heater on eBay for a song. This has been the Autumn of eBay for me. I had to tutor the seller on how to send me a fresh invoice with combined shipping, but they in theory went out yesterday. Now we'll be able to set the water temperature exactly from the master bath, the guest bath, and the kitchen sink. Woot!
I got a whole bunch of knitting and crochet done. I'm working on a Kepler sweater (http://www.yarnagogo.com/blog/2005/08/kepler.html), done in a gray violet heathered yarn. I'm using it as an introduction to cabled sweaters. This one is pretty, but it doesn't involve *constant* cabling. Though there's nothing that makes one self conscious like crocheting one long strip intended to fit around your hips and seeing how long that actually is.
I'm also making an afghan based on dragon curves for Studentbane (http://www.woollythoughts.com/dsubook.jpg done in autumn colors). He wants a supremely geeky and somewhat warm afghan for his office, and I seldom get to make him anything. Unfortunately, following the imprecise directions is going to leave us with something we consider too small to be a proper afghan, so we're pondering adding smaller dragon curve squares to the bottom and top as a sort of trim.
Weekend was socially awesome. Saturday was our best gaming session yet, IMHO, followed by a fabulous bull session that ran until almost bedtime. I swear, I haven't had a spontaneous bulls session in years! Years, I tell you. On Sunday, I got to spend a couple of hours dissecting popular books, movies, feminism, and computer science careers with my knitting group.
Oh, and though I *still* haven't been able to beat Zeromus in my retro-gaming trip through Final Fantasy IV, I decided to download the new nostalgia gaming sequel from the Wii Store. Final Fantasy IV the After Years is being trashed in the reviews I've been able to find online, but so far I've found it so witty and charming that I wasted 3 hours on it last night without noticing. Most of the gripes seem to be that the plot is convoluted and the graphics and music are recycled. But what they call lack of originality, I call brilliant nostalgia. And it has almost as many obscure callouts to the original as the new Star Trek movie, which I'm catching b/c I just played it.
Oh, yeah, and I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the not-so-blissful part. On Friday, we had someone in to clean our ducts, something that hasn't been done since we moved in and probably was never done by our predecessors. Plus, I had some concerns that there might be mice in the ducts b/c I'm pretty sure I heard one last month. But, no, it couldn't be that simple. It appears that there was a squirrel nest in the heating ducts under our bedroom that completely filled the ducts with dirt. Out of three vents, one in the master bedroom is usable, which would explain why it gets colder in there than we'd expect. We're not sure how the animals were getting into the house, but I'm sure they're still doing it. And, worse, we have no idea how many digits this might take to repair. We live in one of the worst ideas in modern housing -- a concrete slab foundation home where the concrete is poured over the air ducts. So you can't repair them without a jackhammer. Depending on what we're looking at, we may settle for blocking the animals' routes into the ductwork, putting another blanket on the bed, sticking our fingers in our ears, and singing "tra-la-la!"Current Mood:  content |
|
I talked myself into buying a Yamaha electric viola on eBay a few weeks ago. After I got back from OVFF, I got a hankerin' for one. I did a bunch of research in my usual fashion and discovered to nobody's surprise that there are plenty of electric violin options but not so much for viola. The cheapest model that sounded like it would be worth my time was way out of my price range. But then a Google search turned up a listing on eBay for an electric viola, a case, and a pernambucco bow. Intrigued, I signed up for a free trial of an eBay sniping service and plugged in the maximum amount I was willing to pay for it -- which was a pretty pathetic amount for the musical instrument, much less the bow. And to my shock, I won it. Sigh. This is really a testament to how few violists there appear to be trolling eBay for deals.
It then took a couple of weeks for the thing to arrive. There was confusion over payment and shipping. The seller quite reasonably added insurance to the package (which he charged me for) and shipped it signature required. UPS quite astutely ignored this and left it at my door when I was at work anyway. But we have an alcove to hide packages that is invisible from the street, so it wasn't in much danger.
He also remove the bridge for better shipping, which makes a lot of sense but makes it a screaming pain in the ass to reassemble. I spent the evening after it arrived trying to get the damn bridge placed properly and replacing the old Dominant strings whose end nobs were literally rusty. I didn't know any part of a musical string was made out of a rustable substance. So I learn.
I don't know what I was expecting, but the sound straight out of the preamp through my headphones is just lovely. I don't have am amp for it yet, and I don't have a lot of opportunities to play an electric instrument, but I'm instantly in love with it. I have plans to make this my traveling instrument.
The bow is also a score. It's lighter and better balanced than the carbon fiber bow I've been using for years. The finish is damaged in a couple of places, and that's a shame. I need to see if there's anything I can do about that.
The case is old, well loved, and barely usable. But that's where I'd've chosen to take the hit.
All in all, I got at least a $2k value for, well, a fraction of that.
Studentbane's dedication to learning the flute has guilted me into better practicing behavior, though not as good as HIS. I generally hate playing by myself, and I have only one book of Bach solos to play from alone. When I start back up with the Albuquerque Philharmonic in January (going to happen this time I swear), I'll have my part to rehearse. I'm toying with taking lessons, though I don't know with what time. I'm a solidly mediocre amateur player, and I don't generally have the dedication to be more than that, but sometimes I get the self-improvement bug.Current Mood:  artistic |
|
Best dieting tip ever: wait up to 20 minutes for the satiation to arrive. It's working for me.
This is from "Sugar: The Bitter Truth", by UCSF professor Robert Lustig who said "High Fructose Corn Syrup is Poison", with convincing evidence that it causes metabolic syndrome and the obesity epidemic. http://www.sweetsurprise.com/
"There is something wrong with our biochemical energy feedback system."
"fructose goes way beyond empty calories. It is a poison."
"AFAIAC, this stuff was Japan's revenge for World War II"
HFCS is so cheap that it has found its way into everything: hamburger buns, sauce, ketchup, most loaves of bread.
The Coca-Cola conspiracy: coke has lots of salt, the sodium makes you thirsty; the sugar hides the salt!
Some schools performed the intervention of cutting out coke machines, and it had a significant effect on obesity and type II diabetes.
On a minor point, he made this statistician (and former logician) cringe once or twice (by assuming Gaussianity, interpreting a defeasible argument as a deductive one and declaring "only the contrapositive is transitive") but his central message seems to be sound, and of course very important.
* - ("lustig" means "funny" in German) |
|
toasted pita bread
olive oil
chickpea hummous w/ garlic & lemon
fat olives
parsley w/ lemon
feta cheese cubes
|
|
|
Dec. 6th, 2009 @ 04:11 pm
|
|---|
|
Next Saturday is the Sabbatic-Shamanic Journey class at Eye of Horus. I dropped down there yesterday and got a rune reading from Kari Tauring (she had a beautiful set of runes and a big flat basket to hold them, very keen!) and set up some scheduling for 2010:
We're now planning on doing a Sorgitzak Spring Equinox ritual.
Also, in February, we'll be doing an Intro to Sorgitzak class at Eye of Horus. Details to be posted soon.
Lastly, a Charms Workshop in April is in the works.
Veronica is a busy girl? Now, why would you say that... ;)Current Mood:  creative |
|
|
Dec. 5th, 2009 @ 11:27 pm
|
|---|
|
I'd normally put stuff like this under the Wizard's Scrapbook filter, but I don't think those of you who aren't on it will have a problem with where I'm going with this.
Since 1959, the British military ("mili-tree"), has been running a hotline for people to report UFO sightings. I'm surprised they didn't start this a whole lot earlier, given their experience with V-2 rockets back in 1944, but now they've shut it down altogether to save the Ministry of Defense a whopping $73,000. No, we're not missing any zeros there. Nobody even lost a job.
This AP story I saw on Yahoo: Epic fail. Almost everyone they quoted, both for and against the closing, was talking about it in terms of little green men.
( Full story behind the cut, because links don't live forever. )
Why is this a dumb idea? Folks, UFO doesn't mean "extraterrestrial spacecraft." It means, "I just saw something fly by and I don't know what it was!" If you see something that you positively identify as a star cruiser from the planet Zebulon, it's not a UFO. If, on the other hand, you see a military drone, and you're unaware of the existence of UAVs, and you know this thing is too small to be a regular airplane, so you don't know what the blasted thing might be, you've just spotted a UFO.
This guy, writing for The Guardian UK, gets it. Not surprising, given that he worked on the project from 1991-1994. ( article behind the cut ) |
|
|
Dec. 5th, 2009 @ 10:52 am
|
|---|
|
Happy Birthday, duriyah! |
|
|
Dec. 4th, 2026 @ 05:10 pm
|
|---|
|
Hey, I don't normally pimp out Amazon, preferring to promote indy businesses--or myself, since I make a good bit more on selling directly (though it's still nothing to write home about, all told). However, I also know that some folks are on a budget. There are some third-party sellers on Amazon doing low-price wars on used and new copies of my books, and they've pushed the prices down REALLY low on some of them:
A Field Guide to Otherkin, $12.80 (one copy)
DIY Totemism, 2 copies about $12, a few other under $20
Talking About the Elephant, several between $6 and $8 (which is a really good deal!)
Like I said, I won't make anything but royalties on these (and actually not even that on the anthology, since the royalties I would make go into paying the contributors instead), and if you want to maximize the benefit to the author you can always buy direct. However, I also don't blame folks for wanting to save money, so I thought I'd point these out. |
|
Today just made up for the last two weeks of hell!
|
|
Yesterday was so, so fired, in a take-it-out-back-and-shoot-it kind of way, a take-the-custies-out-back-and-shoot-them kind of way, yea verily, even unto a Countess of Crankypantsylvania kind of way. Luckily for you, Gentle Readers, you have all been spared the venting post that I was going to make (behind a cut tag, at least). One reason for this was the application of gumbo. Mmmmmmmmmm, gumbo. The other reason was that I decided to read my flist before writing a post, and discovered that a young friend of mine is in a zombie video remake, and that cracked me up sufficiently to restore a good mood.
( No, really. ) |
|
|
Dec. 4th, 2009 @ 06:34 am
|
|---|
|
Mexican flu, swine flu, H1N1, hiney, the 2009 flu pandemic, the "A" flu (romance languages)
What does it about something say if people can't settle on a name?
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic
|
|
LiveJournal: The First Decade
Just in time for holiday shopping, we're thrilled to announce the release of our ten-year anniversary anthology. Published by Blurb.com, the book showcases a decade of extraordinary talent drawn from LiveJournal users around the world. This must-read compilation features stories, memes, photos, comics, editorials, graphic content, and more, including: -
Excerpts from Oh No They Didn't (a/k/a
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) ohnotheydidnt), the largest community on LiveJournal, covering celebrity gossip, entertainment news, and pop culture
- A look at post-Katrina New Orleans from the journal of Poppy Z. Brite
- Gripping narratives, including a poignant reverie on a blind date
- Photography that spans the globe, ranging from old-fashioned Polaroids to underwater photography
- Mouthwatering dishes from food_porn
What began as a late-night inspiration back in Brad Fitzpatrick's college dorm in 1999 has grown to encompass nearly 25 million users worldwide, with journals and communities covering every conceivable hobby, passion, and topic. To get your copy, please visit the Blurb Bookstore. For updates and entries from book contributors, please join lj_turns10.
Tweaks and enhancements- You can now ban a user from all of your communities and journals at once. To access this feature, hover over the person's userpic and choose Ban user everywhere from the drop-down menu.
- Follow LiveJournal on Twitter!
Give a little to help a lot!
In honor of National AIDS Awareness month, we've added a new charitable vgift. For each red ribbon you purchase for $2.99, we'll donate 100 percent of gross proceeds to IAVI.org (the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative) to support the development and global distribution of an affordable HIV vaccine (we'll cover credit card fees). You can read more about IAVI at lj_cares. While we're on the subject, we raised $740 from our November fundraiser for Love Without Boundaries, which supports emergency healthcare and adoption of Chinese orphans. We thank you for helping us help others.
Photos of the weekWe're back with more incredible pictures from our super-talented LiveJournal photographers. Congratulations to ilya_gorokhov, who is the winner of our very first lj_photophile poll.
We hope you'll continue to post, vote, and comment! A gentle request: Please post only one photo at a time and limit size to 350x350 (so images display properly on friends pages). And now, without further ado, get ready to cast your ballot and view more awesome user content after the jump!
( Read more... )
Curtains
Thanks, again, for joining us. Stay safe and snug out there!
|
|
First off, that wood and bone ankh necklace that I listed for auction over at rescue_rowan is currently sitting at seven bucks, and the auction's not ending til 11:59 PM December 5 (the cusp between Sat. and Sun.) So there's one option that'll help a good person get through a really tough time.
Second, you should go check out how many artists on my f-list have stuff for sale! Really nice variety so far--and I know for a fact that there's more of you out there, so feel free to add your info! |
|
|
Dec. 3rd, 2009 @ 03:01 pm
|
|---|
|
Please copy the topics below, erase my answers and put yours in their place, and then post it in your journal! Please elaborate on the questions that would benefit from elaboration. One-Word-Answers seldom help anyone out.
NAME: Veronica Cummer (writing name)
AGE: Not telling, but old enough to know better (though I don't always go with it!)
LOCATION: Twin Cities, Minnesota
OCCUPATION: Quality Assurance during the day and writing at night. Guess which one I'd prefer was my full time job?
PARTNER: None at the moment.
KIDS: Nope. I like em, but have none of my own.
SIBLINGS: Two brothers.
PARENTS: Both my parents are alive at present. I also have one grandma left who is 94.
PETS: None at the moment. My beta fish died about a month ago and I haven't picked out another one yet. I do have plants.
LIST THE 3-5 BIGGEST THINGS GOING ON IN YOUR LIFE:
1. teaching classes
2. writing more books
3. buying Yule gifts for friends and familyCurrent Mood:  accomplished |
|
My weekends are booking up fast. It's that old holiday season. My favorite holiday besides Halloween.
Which is why I'm planning on a mix-and-match party sometime in January: "Nightmare After Christmas." I can use both my Halloween and Xmas decorations, napkins, etc.
I should get a copy of the soundtrack from "Nightmare Before Christmas."
Does anyone have any good munchie and/or drink recipes? Something with a Xmas or Halloween theme would be nifty keen.
|
|
sick![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/newsinfo.gif){kind=small}
