Thinking Out Loud

by Mark T. Shirey

Nokia is pronounced NOkya (vs. noKEYuh).  It's Finnish, not Japanese,
and all Finnish words are accented on the first syllable.

Those slashes in URLs like http://uwt/~mts/ are "slashes" or "virgules", not
"backslashes".  Backslashes are what DOS used to separate directory names,
like C:\mydir\.

JoePa used to be pronounced "JOEpuh", short for JoePaterno.  Nowadays, 
media people and some PennStaters are saying "joePAW" as if it means
"father figure", which I guess he is.

The two big lion's paws in front of Penn State's Palmer Museum of Art have 
names.  Someone wrote to the local newspaper to say that the names came to 
them in a dream:  JoePaw and FauxPaw.

People should leave a notepad on their desk to facilitate leaving notes.
I used to call my stack of hand-ripped sheets "idea-sized paper" until
someone pointed out how small they were.

I like E-Prime, the idea that English should drop the verb "to be" 
because it leads to sloppy thought and imprecise communication.  
American Sign Language (ASL) has no verb "to be".

Maybe we should avoid idea words like "freedom" and "happiness" 
because they don't really exist; they are just short-hand for 
feelings and specific actions taken by specific people.

"Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.  He exists as certainly as love, 
generosity, and devotion exist.  - Francis P. Church.  
(But, of course, they don't exist in the same way that things do.)

"He is free" can mean any one or more of 10 different things, such as, 
"The judge who sent him to jail said that he could leave and the jailer 
let him go home."

Corporations and nations are not intelligent, sentient entities - 
they are collections of specific people at specific times and places.  
The US doesn't "say" anything or "do" anything - specific people say and 
do things and follow specific rules (or break the rules) that were 
created by other specific people.

Why do some people eat breakfast at work?  I thought it was silly,
until I remembered that I eat lunch at work.

Why do people loudly clip their nails at work?  At first I was distracted
and grossed out by this until I... well, ok, I'm still distracted and 
grossed out by this.

There's a great User Interface Hall of Fame and Hall of Shame at
http://www.iarchitect.com/.

A Germany-native told me she thought State College seemed "sober".
I laughed and asked if she meant "serious" or "not inebriated".
She replied, "Functional, built to serve the University."

Advertisements pervert market capitalism.  Why do people watch, read, or 
listen to an ad about coffee when they could be looking at a chart showing
all retail coffee brands, corporate owners, retailers, prices, taste test
results, etc.?  And why are we willing to PAY ad costs in the item price?

The best way to help each other is to tell each other what we think.

Million is mega and trillion is tera (e.g., megabyte and terabyte).
Billion should be biga (bigabyte instead of gigabyte).

It's amazing that the US and Great Britian (or all of Europe?) have the
opposite meanings for "million" and "billion".  Seems like it would cause
havoc; maybe it has.

Americans (people in the US, anyway) put a comma between every 3 decimal 
places to the left of the decimal point (e.g., "3,141,592").  Europeans 
put dots (e.g., 3.141.592).  Seems like it would cause havoc.  Maybe it has.

Brits (I mean citizens of Great Britian) don't say "Maybe it has"; they 
say "Maybe it has done".  They don't say, "Maybe I will"; they say, 
"Maybe I will do".

Only people from one small part of "The Americas" call themselves 
"Americans" (and only if the government of North America between Canada's 
southern border and Mexico's northern border says they are "citizens").

Amerigo Vespuci "discovered" America in 1499 (Columbus didn't know where 
he was, but Vespuci did).  We could be called Amerigons or Vespucians, 
or Columbians for that matter.  Firesign Theater sings a song called
"God Bless Vespuciland" in a skit about American Indians.

Americans write their 1's like lower-case L's (in some computer fonts you 
can't tell the difference).  Germans (or all Europeans?) write their 1's 
like 7's (with the little serif on top) and write their 7's like an upside-
down V or a backwards capital F (with a cross bar in the middle of the 7).

Dimes should be bigger than nickels.  

Apparently dimes are small because they used to be silver.  Now they're
Cupro-Nickel - 8.33% Ni, rest Cu.  Nickels are 25% Ni, rest Cu.

The US "Golden Dollar" is Manganese-Brass (88.5% Cu, 6% Zn, 3.5% Mn,
2% Ni) according to:
http://www.usmint.gov/about_the_mint/index.cfm?action=coin_specifications

Pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters should be called 1, 5, 10, and 25
cent pieces.  They should at least have those numbers on them, but 
they don't!  This is part of a plot to confuse children and foreigners.

A www.google.com search for "periodic table nickel" got 12,600 hits
and "periodic table nickle" got 105 hits.

http://www.anochrome-group.co.uk/p5.html says "nickle" in the title bar 
and "nickel" on the page.  Apparently the former spelling is Britlish 
and the latter is Amlish.

British English should be called Britlish and American English, Amlish.

I think it's rude of a corporation to talk about financial goals and 
stock dividends and not talk about salaries and job satisfaction.  
Why are stockholders more important than employees?

I remember hearing that public stock trading was outlawed, 
so they formed a "club" to do it, now called the NY Stock Exchange.

Two common spelling mistakes seen in internet chat:  
"noone" for "no one" and "looser" for "loser".

Nice online encyclopedia for kids: www.letsfindout.com
Fun facts about US Mints: http://www.usmint.gov/facts/fun_facts.cfm
Cool quiz about "The separation of church and state":
   http://gemini.berkshire.net/~ifas/fw/9509/quiz.html

The work/slack ratio is hard to measure.  Less talk and more e-mail 
can lower it, if people make the effort to write "professional" e-mail.  
Standing around talking about work often devolves into non-work.

A truly great computer/folklore/language book is "The Jargon File" at
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/index.html 
(e.g., http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/blinkenlights.html).

As part of the first generation on the internet and the web, I remember
being told "Please don't connect to our site during business hours...".