I have always been fascinated by weather.
One of my earliest favorite gifts was from my maternal uncle, who for no particular reason gave his 7-year-old niece a barometer…plastic body, barometer, thermometer.
I was early on aware of the weather. I was a kid in years of serious drought in Oklahoma, in which they were hiring cloud-seeders, and begging the local fort to shoot artillery toward the heavens. But you have to have a cloud to seed, and there was nothing. The appearance of one tiny lost cloud a month would send people running for their houses to tell people inside to come out and look, and people would stand watching the transit of that one cloud, scanning the horizon for others…which didn’t come. Occasionally you’d see one rain—virga, meaning the water would evaporate in mid-air.
Water was important to us. And it was general lean times. We fished on weekends, because a fishing license was a lot cheaper than a trip to the grocery. So we caught fish. And for me the most wonderful thing was being where there was the sound of water, and the most wonderful of all was going to the old boathouse, and just sitting in one of the wooden rowboats housed there and feeling the water move.
When we finally did get storms again, we got tornadoes. So indeed, I grew up pretty weatherwise. And that barometer still hangs on my bedroom wall, chipped on one edge, during a move. But intact and working. I have a ‘weather glass’, one of those swan-necked bulbs that uses colored water to predict a change in the weather.
I’ve seen a ‘storm glass’, but never had one, and saw one offered by Hammacher Schlemmer this year: so I looked them up. They were provided to Charles Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle, but they’re not really reliable—an odd mix of camphor, alcohol, and some minerals…that are supposed to respond to barometric shifts. Exaggerated claims are made for them, such as predicting wind, etc. I don’t think I will get one: they’re a bit pricey, and a curiosity, more than an instrument.
But that led me toward one of the absolutely weirdest weather contraptions ever invented. When the British government came to doubt the accuracy of the storm glass, and before barometers, they investigated the Tempest Prognosticator, which defies credulity—but apparently was a real deal, involving leeches kept in vials. I offer it for your amusement. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_prognosticator
Animals have often demonstrated a sensitivity to meteorological & geological effects we cannot detect, but their reliability & effectiveness may be debatable.
We’re getting pretty good (arguably better?) with thermodynamic calculations at NCAR.
When I worked at UCLA’s Campus Computing Network we used to clear it and run weather simulations from midnight to 6AM on our 4MB (600ns magnetic core memory!) System 360 Model 91, at the time one of the four dozen or so biggest, baddest supercomputers in the world. (Not counting the government’s “black systems”–the Model 91 was designed for the AEC to do nuclear simulations.) I got my first 486 with 4MB 60ns DRAM. 😉
Out here in the Pacific, barometers are pretty stable, even with the approach of a hurricane. Ours barely budged, either for Iselle or Ana. They are far more reliable indicators of stormy weather in the Atlantic.
OTOH, the much discussed sensitivity of animals to impending earthquakes seems to be fairly hit or miss. Our old cat Snow failed to do anything notable prior to the one notable earthquake we have had recently; in fact, she was plopped on the carpet until it started shaking.
Gaahh. Too many ‘notable’s.
I’d question the scientific basis that animals have a sensitivity to meteorological or geological events, as most of the evidence seems to be anecdotal, rather than actually scientifically observed. That may or may not be factual, but so far, I’m not sure I agree with those people who say that their cat (or dog) detected the earthquake X number of hours/minutes before it occurred. How fast do S-waves travel? How fast do P-waves travel?
Being that I am a SKYWARN weather spotter, as well as the Assistant Emergency Coordinator for SKYWARN for my county (amateur radio emergency services), it’s in my best interest to have a weather station at my house. I bought a Peet Brothers Ultimeter 2100 set, which is wired. There are wireless versions out on the market, manufactured by Davis Instruments, or LaCrosse, but I prefer the wired system, because it’s not subject to RFI as much as the wireless systems, and if I have to change batteries, I do it at a central station, not up on the roof fumbling with a mast and a bunch of separate instrument sensors. My station measures wind speed, direction, temperature, wind chill, humidity, rainfall, and it’s all stored on a laptop computer running Windows 2000, and then sent out to the internet over an application called UI-32, which relays it to the Automatic Position Reporting System (APRS) for amateur radio. If you’re curious as to what information I send, here’s the link to my page on findu.com: http://www.findu.com/cgi-bin/wxpage.cgi?call=KC6NLX-1
Isn’t a demonstration nearly synonymous with an observation? That’s how I meant it. Observations may be anecdotal, usually are before enough of them attract enough attention for a careful scientific study.
P-waves are faster than S-waves and are the basis of the current earthquake sensors/alarms. It’s good because the S-waves are the high-amplitude shakers that cause most of the damage. A time or two I’ve been awakened just before I felt an earthquake, no doubt by the P-waves.
But beyond that, put pressure on a quartz crystal and you get piezoelectric charge. Faults produce pressure, so it’s not far fetched that could be sensed by animals. Pigeons and some worms sense the geomagnetic field, probably most migratory birds.
You probably have Adobe’s Flash Player installed on your browser, whatever it is. There’s another exploit, so you should update ASAP.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2836732/one-week-after-patch-flash-vulnerability-already-exploited-in-largescale-attacks.html#tk.rss_all
THank you for that advisement: was getting some bugginess. Download and install complete.
Not quite Darwin-era tech, but as a fan of Word Perfect, you might appreciate this little essay in the New York Review of Books about Word Perfect vs. MS Word and Isocrates vs. Plato:
Escape From Microsoft Word
I’ve always thought that MSWord was invented by computer people and WordPerfect was invented by typists. WP just automated all the stuff I wished my old solid steel Underwood would do. With its ability to go into the codes and edit the formatting it’s still vastly superior to Word. The city did a sweetheart deal with Microsoft some years ago and at work we all had to switch. When they sent us for retraining I was the evil soul that kept asking, “How do you do [insert perfectly easy WP activity here] in Word?” To which the answer was frequently, “Well you can’t”
THey’re 100% right. Word is the worst processor ever invented, from a writer’s viewpoint, and of course computer folk made it the standard. It’s utterly illogical, clunky, and maneuvers like a tank instead of a sports car.
as a systems analyst, it was our understanding that we were the go-betweens for the programmers and the users…..in other words, we interview the users, find out what they want, then tell the programmers how it should look. I wouldn’t leave it to them to design anything but a programming language and compiler.
When I first came into using word processor software, it was a package called “Enable”, which was the Navy’s standard word processor. Then they shifted to WordPerfect, and found it was much more robust, and did things that Enable couldn’t possibly do.
Now, the de facto standard is MS Word, and no, I really don’t particularly find it to be user-friendly, especially when I used to be able to press “Alt-R” and automatically fill in my return address on a letter. Try doing that with Word, and you have to practically be a programmer to make your own macro to do that. I don’t even know if you CAN do that.
It just seems like another arrogant move by programmers (and their employers) to tell you what is best for you….after all, it’s probably easier to program than some of the stuff we came to like, and we don’t want to inconvenience the programmers, even if it means giving up some of our treasured features we would rather keep.
Maybe someone will find a way to resurrect WordPerfect and make it compatible with modern operating systems…..although I don’t really care if they make it compatible with Windows 8, since I refuse to go to that system. I’ll go back to MS-DOS before I’ll go to Windows 8.
Joe, Corel does keep WordPerfect up to date. I run the WordPerfect package X6 (I forget the precise name) on both Windows 7.1 and 8 (Operating systems which I also hate, hate, hate, though not enough to go back to MS-DOS as I finally pitched out the manuals) When your hard drive fries and a new computer is an emergency purchase, you accept whatever system it comes with. But if somebody offered to put a new hard drive in my old machine and load XP on it, I would be pathetically grateful. Are we sounding like old fogies?
To quote a line from “Colossus, The Forbin Project”: “There is another system.” 😉
Though I’ll grant you, it’s much better for security than word processing. EMACS? Euuuuwwww.
Could be worse. I have both Word 2007 and LibreOffice. LibreOffice, as handy as it is (I can edit an 18MB file in it), won’t do some of the really basic stuff, like setting tabs for the entire document at once. No, tabs are paragraph level for it, which means you have to do every paragraph separately. (It doesn’t let you find-and-replace tabs and breaks, either – Word will.)
And there was the dear old VW, Volkswriter, which back in the days of dos could manage a whole novel file with incredibly little memory—maybe 300. It did it by spooling. And you could Alt- any given key to macro, with under 10 keystrokes. I macroed every proper noun and recurring expression and could make speed like a bandit. ELEGANT program, back before black-box programming became the way to go.
And “Electric Pencil” waaaaay back. 😉
Di’ja every read the story way back when John W Campbell was at Analog in its hey-day about the editor who received a submission that was typed out with even margins, and he figured out she (IIRC) must have been a timetraveler with ’80’s era technology we take as commonplace today?
For those of you who like macros, the good news is that you can easily have as many macros as you like in any program.
AutoHotkey is a free, open-source, long established application, which works on any version of Windows, and allows you to quickly create your own macros.
You can do some very sophisticated programming in AutoHotkey, but it’s also very simple to set up macros. All you need to do is create a plain-text script file and load it into AutoHotkey.
Some examples:
Every time I type ‘bc1’ I want it to expand to ‘Bren Cameron’:
::bc1::Bren CameronWhen I type Windows Key + I, I want to get ‘Ilisidi’ (The WinKey is the one with the four-wavy-squares Windows logo)
When I type WinKey + C, I want to get ‘Cajeiri’:
#i::Ilisidi#c::Cajeiri
I often mistype ‘teh’ instead of ‘the’. I want to auto-correct it:
::teh::theWhen I type Ctrl+Alt+R, I want a signature:
^!r::send {Enter}Best regards,{Enter}{Enter}John{Enter}Email: johnsmith@gmail.com
return
When I type Winkey+N I want to run the Notepad++ program:
#n::run C:\Portable\Notepad++Portable\Notepad++Portable.exeBest thing: These macros will work across ALL applications. So it doesn’t matter whether you are working in a word processor, or typing an email, or writing a comment on the internet – whatever you are doing anywhere on your computer, the same macros will work.
I’ve been using AutoHotkey for years. See
http://www.autohotkey.com/
CJ, I just typed a long comment about macros (comment #38228), but it seems to have been caught in the spam filter – it’s not showing.
THank you! Noted!
Yep, spam filter. I wish I could calm that thing down—
Isn’t it interesting how “programmers’ unfitness to be human beings are the reason why computers don’t do what I want” has become a core article of our universal faith?
I guess my comment was a little over-inflammatory. Sorry.
Temple Grandin, herself with ASD, says Silicon Valley, for one place, is full of workers with ASD. Guess “it takes one to know one.”
Oh, it’s just a question of looking at building a telescope, vs the experience of looking through it. A programmer, designing a word processing program, is looking at how to create packets within the program that can tie things together in a way efficient for working changes, while a writer, the end user, is looking at paragraphs as containers for things that may have to be moved into other paragraphs or turned inside out. The one is trying to design something to look like a row of containers that can be labeled and dealt with as sets within sets within sets—while the end user wants mobility of contents between the cannisters and the ability to make some changes that don’t affect more than one item inside a few…and if you’re a programmer, your ‘efficiency’ is one aspect—for the program to be able to work well mechanically. But end users come like lawyers, who want to insert loads of boilerplate and want to be able to insert and format like mad; or creative writers who don’t insert boilerplate, but who would really like to create name-macros on the fly and instantly locate certain paragraphs that contain any combination of the words “Mary,” and “party” and “January” but not paragraphs that don’t have all three. Different purposes. [Yep, they say Boolean Search works, but it never does.] Then you’ve got the journal-keeper, who wants organization by dates. ETc. Somehow we all get along, but griping about what you wish you had is endemic in the human race.
One exercise, in one of my CS classes, back in the early 80s, was writing a very basic word processing program, mostly justification. It’s actually fairly difficult to do and have it work well.
There’re a lot more parties involved than just programmers and users. As you mentioned, different users with different purposes. Software is in a way the ultimate mass-produced good: Once developed, you can make one or a billion copies, and the total cost/time/labor isn’t much different. And on the production side, testers, managers, marketing, and UI designers (if there are any) all get their say. (And testers’ say often comes down to “it doesn’t work,” which can mean anything from “it crashes and burns (under circumstances you’d never guess & I’m not eager to tell you)” to “I disagree about whether ‘partier’ is close enough to ‘party’ to match.”)
Sometimes it seems the question is not of building vs looking through a telescope, but of talking about vs actually having a telescope. And I’m kept too busy wallpapering the gap between the two, to fiddle with lenses and handgrips and such.
I think if they could get a functional Boolean Search into a word processing program I’d be very happy. As for party vs partier, they both have the same grammatical stem, so a searcher could ask for just Mary plus part plus January. Practically speaking, the search could turn up a very few paragraphs, easy to scan for the one wanted. Turn the computer loose to do changes automatically—oh, no, no, no, no. Any writer who has ever loosed a mistaken ‘global’ command in a novel-length work will readily agree.
The real pie in the sky is a computer fast enough to parse a thesaurus for party: celebrate, fete, etc. But it would also turn up person, individual. Language is a creation of ancient tribal interactions and accumulated history, and its exceptions and double meanings depending on circumstance make it very difficult for current computers to learn.
What you want is a proximity search, but I don’t know of any word processors that have one. Some specialized legal software and document handling programs have it.
I once wrote a program to do proximity searching of text, but that was many years ago, and it was only for plain text, not formatted word processor documents.
English is an exceptional language. In English, the exceptions to the exceptions to the exceptions have exceptions. Except when they don’t.
I have to comment, here. I’m a systems consultant for a pretty big and very old company and I’ve been coding since the 70’s. Won’t be doing too much more as that is, for the most part, outsourced these days. I think what happened to WordPerfect, which I also miss, is corporate America buying into Microsoft, which, I tell you has the buggiest software ever. And is Excel better than Lotus 123? No. And don’t get me started on Mac vs Windows.
A story – I’m a gamester and I heard about this lovely RPG game – Fable II – that was for the XBOX 360. I promptly went out and bought the game and the consol which I hadn’t had before (I buy for the gameplay, not the graphics). And it was a good game, quite creative and I was having fun with it. Towards the end of the game, when I was doing all the quests, I came upon one that I couldn’t, just couldn’t beat, very unlike me. So I went to GAMEFAQS to look up the game. And there I see, the first 2 -over 500 posts each- topics were BUGS IN THE GAME THAT DIDN’T LET YOU FINISH. THEN I find out that Microsoft did both the consol and the game. Had I known, I never would have bought either. So at work, we have a Technical Symposium kind of thing that Microsoft attended that year. Where I expressed my considerable displeasure with their creative, but buggy software. I got a ‘help card’ out of it. But I still couldn’t finish the game! So Microsoft, Oracle and SAP have pretty much taken over corporate America and the thing is, if you are a member of that kind of company, you don’t have a choice. My company just sicced Office 2013 on me. Which promptly ATE all my email that was in folders. That can’t be retrieved. That I spent hours on the phone with the helpdesk trying to fix.
But as for programming – you’ll only get what you ask for – and it’s an oxymoron that the users REALLY don’t know what they want and have a pretty tough time telling you even that. A program can be designed to do, really, anything. If it can be communicated. And the design is the thing, anyhow. Ain’t nothing to coding these days!
and this was the gist of my reply above. Our systems analysis courses weren’t taught in Computer Science, they were taught in Information Systems. Computer Science was part of the College of Engineering and Sciences and Information Systems was taught at the College of Business. The SA’s are expected to do the interview with the users, to see how the system works now, how they want it to work, which interfaces to use, etc. Say you have a company that uses a mainframe programmed in COBOL, and the users all have workstations that run Windows (for example). Now, the SA is supposed to have enough business savvy (how many CS people have that????) and experience on how businesses operate and interact internally and externally. We have to know how Finance works, how Accounting works, how the people who make the decisions work, how virtually every department in the business operates. Then, after getting the necessary information from the user, the SA goes back to his/her office, and develops pseudo-code, in a format that the CS (programmer) can understand. Programmers look to see how it can be most easily coded and upgraded, users don’t care, they want it to have an easy-to-use interface. Otherwise, they’re not going to use it, or they’ll find other ways to get around that interface, such as going back to their old way of doing it. The company spends lots of money for a product it can’t use if the users aren’t consulted. Sorry, maybe businesses think they know what’s best when they order directly from a programmer, but we’ve found that they also end up paying for something that their employees hate.
Major agreement, Vagmztp and Joe. Couple of things to add though. Many people don’t think systematically what they are doing; I could write a procedures manual for any job I’ve ever held, but some people just get that “deer in the headlights” look and freeze up. We also tend to be pretty ignorant of the possibilities. It’s damn hard to explain your wish list to somebody who doesn’t speak your jargon when 1) you can’t articulate what you’re doing and 2)you don’t know what can be done.
And then there’s the sales force layer to come between managers that don’t know what you do and programmers who don’t know what needs to be done. To flog the new wonder-product they’ll promise you cold fusion and perpetual motion.
Of course the other problem is institutional and financial stupidities, yes a “program can be designed to do really anything” but… Not too long the City (major user, hundreds of workstations) went to an SAP system. I overheard coworkers from a distant department complaining about learning the German commands for their new financial module. Now in the course of my work I had seen stuff on SAP systems and knew how customizable they are. When I asked why they didn’t get somebody to re-write the commands to match their old system and make it easy to learn, they said the system was purchased turnkey and anything else would cost money, so they had to take it just as it came out of the box! Had nobody costed out the training time? Obviously not.
I worked for most of a year at a nursery, which was converting its manual inventory system to computer. They’d been talked into buying an off-the-shelf system designed for manufacturing companies, and having it modified to fit. This was complicated by the owner (and possibly the more senior managers) wanting it to work just like the paper system, instead of looking at the paper system and seeing where it could be changed to work better with the computer. So you had stuff that was easy on paper (take a plant in one location, and when it gets bigger move it to a different one for the customer to collect) and was very hard to do in the computer. [I suggested splitting into the two logical (and already existing) operations of grow for the customer and move to a different location at a given size, but that didn’t get any attention.] They had programmers onsite fixing stuff for a full year. (It was also a major pain, on the computer, dealing with discarded plants. I don’t know if that ever got fixed to be easier. Plus the stuff they were trying hard to sell, that was a list that had to be built and sent every week.)
I switched back to a Mac, after much frustration with Windows and anti-virus suites that kept…bogging…down…to…a…crawl.
I had already switched to OpenOffice, then to LibreOffice, because I couldn’t stand the new MS Office. — It took quite a while to find that NeoOffice is the suite to go with for the Mac. (Both OO and LO mishandle Mac fonts. Kinda basic to a word processor….)
I used to use MS Word back in the MS-DOS days. I also used WordPerfect some. (I was an early Mac person, before the Mac went to Unix underneath, but I used PC’s some too, and later went Windows-only for a while.)
I would love to see Corel do WordPerfect for the Mac again, but so far, no-go.
And…don’t get me started on how Adobe killed and ate (or ate and killed?) Macromedia, and thus, Freehand was killed instead of Illustrator.
Or Adobe’s pricey subscription-based software, where I would have to keep paying monthly to access and use their software, and therefore, my data files, what I create with their software, are useless if I then cancel or can’t afford that monthly expense. (But then, my Freehand files are also unusable now, since Illustrator won’t import them even halfway.) Sigh….
I’d be grateful for a ~working~ Inkscape, or a good vector graphisc program I could get comfy-cozy with. So far, I have a real love-hate relationship with ones I’ve tried.
These days, I’m more on the Mac side of the fence, but really, I just want something I can use that works really well and does what I want, instead of making me jump through hoops, or worse, actively preventing me from doing things. (Looking at Microsoft and Adobe, there.)
I miss the old AppleWorks suite, back in the days of the humble but great Apple IIe. That was a pretty basic, simple suite, but it worked, by gosh.
And yes, I’d be happy if WordPerfect were available for the Mac. I’d (buy) and try it. Likewise, Corel Draw.
For that matter, I’d welcome something new and useful!
Grumble, growl….
(Ick, current Windows and MS Office, yuck, ew….)
Adobe is one of the major pains of every user’s life. You have Flash as a plug-in, and never see it separately, but does it update easily and automatically? Nooooo.
Often enough, I fear, what the heads of dept think they want is not always in touch with the way things work down in the trenches. So has it ever been.
boy, i couldn’t agree more re word vs.word perfect. i am a lawyer and i have to use the word processing system my employers impose, so it has been word for a very long time, during all of which i feel i have been struggling with styles. I think that word and styles work well for corporate lawyers who work on deal documents, all of which have the same general format, but i am a litigator and i spend more time mucking around with styles – moving from caption, to memorandum style paragraphs, to numbered paragraphs, to footnotes, to block quotes, and back again, and the default “normal” is always in the wrong type face and font — than i do actually composing substance. I hate it. I miss wp even after all these years.
At work of course I have to use Word, because the higherups are fierce about unauthorized software on the hard drives. But at home I do all the work in WordPerfect and do “save as” copies into a Word folder. Modern WP recognizes that the world is Word and its conversion is generally pretty good. The Word document is then the one that gets attached to emails bound for slaves to Microsoft.